School Days

Sophia Waugh

When I was a child, I thought being home-schooled was inexpressibly glamorous. My vision of it was that I would be lying all day on a bed reading 19th-century novels and occasionally being asked to write an essay. In the event, that was university life, and it was all the bliss I had imagined.

I don’t believe any child who hates school and dreams of being left alone at home has any idea of the reality of home-schooling. When the system works, tutors might visit occasionally, social services will check the child is safe, and some overseeing benevolent being will ensure there’s a rounded education.

Science and maths would definitely be involved; there would be no chance of just hanging out with Trollope all the time. So that would be the first disappointment. The second would, of course, be the lack of any form of social interaction with one’s peers.

At the moment, there is a big hoo-ha about home tuition. It is alleged that schools persuade parents to take their difficult children out of school and ‘home-school’ them, little caring if any schooling is done at all – after all, off-roll means they’re not affecting the school’s results. Are schools excluding children rather than managing them?

There is a temptation to do just that – but I have written about exclusions before, and am very much in favour of the few being excluded in honour of the many. A permanently excluded child legally has to enrol somewhere else, and I have known cases where the change has helped the child reinvent itself. One boy who joined my tutor group from another school, with a rap sheet as long as his arm, earned a decent clutch of GCSES and presented me with a huge bunch of flowers in recognition of his new self.

I have also worked with excluded children. I was sent by the school to the house of a girl who was too agoraphobic to leave the house and tutored her under the watchful eye of the Virgin Mary and an assortment of Sacred Hearts and martyred saints. This girl was genuinely terrified of the world, but also genuinely wanted to pass the few exams she could sit. She did pass both her English GCSES.

And then, the other day, she turned up at my new school which she was considering for her son. I did not recognise her, but her face lit up when she saw me and she filled me in on her life.

Let us just say that if ever there was an example of the strengths of homeschooling, this girl was it. Had she not had visiting tutors (provided by the state, not privately), she would have found it even harder to set out on adult life. She still has some problems, but she’s now out in the world and working. No 15-year-old can do that entirely on their own. She had parents who did everything they could to help her; she was not left alone to roam the streets, or to sit in her room watching television.

That is where the problem so often lies. Why always blame schools for failing children? If a child is unfed, unwashed and lice-ridden, the parents are rightly blamed for dereliction of duty. But parents who fill in forms to home-school children just because they can’t be bothered with another phone call from school, asking where their child is, are neglecting their children every bit as much.

For every frightened girl being home-educated to good effect, there are at least 20 who are ‘home-schooled’ to no effect at all.