‘All we ever wanted was for our girls to feel confident’
Lockdown turned many parents into reluctant home educators, but for Nadia Sawalha and Mark Adderley, it was a choice they made several years ago. They tell Jessica Salter why they did it, and what the experience has taught them
I‘Our child was so, so unhappy. It was a shadow over the whole family; our lives were on pause’
f you had said the words “homeschooling” before the pandemic, most of us would have conjured up images of feral, hippy children building forts in the woods. Post-lockdown, those same words can bring parents out in hives at recent memories of trying to recreate a classroom at their kitchen table while often simultaneously juggling their own jobs.
Neither situation is exactly the reality, say Nadia Sawalha, the Loose Women presenter and actress, and television producer Mark Adderley, who have been home-educating ( to use the preferred term) daughters Kiki, 14, and Maddie, 17, for seven years.
It was not what either Sawalha or Adderley expected to be doing – especially him. Like all parents, they wanted “the best” for their girls, and for them that meant enrolling the girls in a “good” private prep school. And all seemed to be fine. Until it wasn’t.
When Kiki was six, she began to “fall behind”, according to her teachers (tests later revealed she was dyslexic) and became overwhelmed with an increasingly intense homework schedule prescribed to help her catch up. Her normally sunny personality vanished, and she grew anxious, unable to sleep. “Our child was so, so unhappy,” Sawalha says, sadly. “It was a shadow over the whole family; our lives were on pause. We felt trapped.”
Their little girl was disappearing. So, they decided to take radical action: they would take her out of school and educate her at home.
Sawalha and Adderley are about to release a book, Honey, I Homeschooled the Kids, detailing their experiences of home-educating their children. It is not, they insist, a how-to manual, more a memoir of their experience, warts and all: “It’s the book we wanted to read,” Sawalha says. It is persuasive and timely reading, not least because the whole nation of parents has just emerged from a period of homeschooling, but also because it’s a rising trend: as of March 2019, the number of children educated at home in England was up 15 per cent on 2018 to more than 60,500, according to research by the Children’s Commissioner. That might yet rise again: homeschooling colleges have seen enquiries rise by up to 50 per cent as parents worry about sending their children back to school with the backdrop of coronavirus.
“When I first met homeschoolers, they said we had come at the right time,” Sawalha says. “It used to be only maniacs and teachers who did it – but now it’s every kind of person from every walk of life.”
But most of all, despite the woowoo connotations, the couple make their decision seem so fundamentally logical. Not all parents want to homeeducate (although who knows what we may be forced to do with future lockdowns), but all can empathise with the feeling that when their child is suffering, they will move heaven and earth to make it right.
The couple are, they say, absolutely not against the education establishment. “We love schools and teachers,” says Adderley, who has put his older two daughters from a previous relationship through mainstream schooling. “But Nadia and I chose the wrong schools for our girls and we couldn’t see another option. But secondly, I think the problem is also that the strict curriculum has meant that teachers can’t teach in the creative ways that they used to be able to. Children learn in different ways and teachers know that, but the curriculum has taken a lot of fun out of learning.”
While they speak from a place of authority now, seven years down the line, their experience is compelling because they freely admit the mistakes and worries that made them stumble along the way. Starting with the moment that they took Kiki out of the school system – something that sounds almost comically easy compared with getting a few days off during term time. Once they had pressed the nuclear button (in practical terms, just contacting the council and deregistering her) the first step on their home-educating journey was to “deschool” Kiki.
While Sawalha, who left school at 15, embraced the idea of releasing Kiki from formal learning and helping her find her own passions, Adderley, who himself took a degree and started a PhD, struggled with the concept, covertly ordering textbooks from Amazon. “I was very much in a place that a lot of parents found themselves during lockdown – trying to keep rules, systems and structures in place,” he says.
But he – and, crucially, Kiki – adapted. After six months of decompressing her from formal education, she started learning at home – discussing fractions while baking with her mother; visiting comic stores with her father to discuss storytelling and filmmaking. “It’s just about freeing up the formality of learning,” Adderley explains. “There are so many ways to enjoy a subject that don’t require sitting at a table.”
They also, crucially, set up group sessions with other homeschoolers, employing professional teachers and tutors. “The biggest myth is that you are the only teacher,” Sawalha says. “But that would be impossible. We see ourselves as education facilitators.” Outside of the lessons, which follow the curriculum in a looser, more creative way than school, they could then go to museums and galleries, or home to read and chat. “Sometimes it’s hard to articulate homeschooling,” Sawalha says. “People ask, ‘how many hours do you do a day?’ But we don’t think about
‘To be a responsible parent is to have wobbles all the time’
‘The biggest myth is that you are the only teacher, but that would be impossible’
it in terms of set hours, because a couple of hours with a tutor is so much more efficient than sitting all day in a big classroom. Plus, you can teach your kids at random times, like a Sunday afternoon or over dinner.”
After a few months, Kiki was flourishing, and back to her happy former self. Meanwhile, they realised that Maddie, by now in secondary school, was being bullied. One of the couple’s big regrets is that they didn’t pull her out sooner; they tried, unsuccessfully, to get the school to stamp it out.
Another regret is that when they did deregister her, they didn’t follow the same successful “deschooling” formula they had with Kiki. As Maddie was “hurtling towards GCSEs”, Adderley especially wanted her to keep studying for them at home.
It was, he freely admits, another wobble on his home-educating journey. “To be a responsible parent is to have wobbles all the time,” he laughs. But he came to believe – as many other parents do – that “GCSEs measure the system, not the person. You can see that with the shifting grades across generations. I feel children are taught to pass an exam, rather than be moved by the work.”
Maddie, who didn’t sit her GCSEs in the end, has read every book on the syllabus. “She says lots of her friends who are at schools hate reading, because of the way it’s taught. But she has written a series of songs in response to the books she’s read: she learns in a different way and crucially, enjoys it.”
But he admits that his fear of abandoning exams was a worry for her future – something he says he saw in microcosm with other parents attempting to homeschool over lockdown.
“One of our friends, who is a teacher, said that parents were frantically emailing asking for more homework, and she suggested that they just let them play or be creative. There is this myth that your child’s education will be ruined, but really you can afford to take a little bit of heat and stress out of the situation and they will still thrive.”
As a marker, perhaps, of how the school system can be counterproductive for many children, a survey by the University of Bristol published this week found that of 1,000 secondary schoolchildren they surveyed, teenagers were measurably less anxious during lockdown than they had been at the same time last year, leading Dr Judi Kidger, senior author and lecturer in Public Health at the University of Bristol, to question “the role of the school environment in explaining rises in mental health difficulties among teenagers in recent years”.
It’s exactly what Sawalha and Adderley found in their children. While there have been drawbacks, including a lack of free time, Sawalha says, “I wouldn’t swap what we had before – an exhausted child and miserable family life – for any amount of time off.
“All we ever really wanted for our girls was for them to be self-confident and able to find their own way.”
Their decision has done just that. In an amusing teenage twist, Kiki has decided to go back to a (state) school. It is, Adderley says, a “manifestation of the success of homeschooling”.
Meanwhile, Maddie, whose experience of bullying left her nervous and anxious, now wants to be a performer; she is engaged with politics and loves debating with her parents. In a recent birthday card to her father, she wrote, “Thanks for helping me find my passions and making me love learning.”
“That was special,” Adderley says. “I felt we’d definitely made the right call.”