The day Harry rang his mum from school on his mobile to say he hadn’t gone to class but was hiding in the assembly hall underneath some chairs, she knew something was seriously wrong. “I rang the school and they assured me he was in class,” says his mother, Julie. “So I said ‘no, he isn’t, and you’d better go and look for him’.”

The Year 7 pupil, whose autism hadn’t yet been diagnosed, couldn’t cope with the noise of the bells and other pupils. He was also worried about catching germs from chairs, desks and pencils that other pupils had used, among other concerns. Harry eventually refused to go to school and would stay at home under his bed all day. He wouldn’t sleep for 48 hours at a time because he was afraid of waking up and having to face school.

“He told me he wanted to die,” says Julie, who was eventually banned from the school premises after constantly bombarding the school with letters and calls asking for help.

“When you go in and speak to teachers and special educational needs coordinators, they might have read a book and been on a course but they just don’t get it that every child is different. There’s not only a lack of understanding but a lack of resources. They just want the numbers and they just want the money. They just want kids to sit down and do as they’re told and learn, and some kids can’t cope with that.”

Lack of provision

Julie, a single parent, says the lack of provision meant she had no choice but to take Harry out of school, give up her job as a cook and home educate him.

Harry, now in Year 11, is working towards GCSEs through an online distance learning programme from the charity Red Balloon, yet the family (he has a younger sister) must now live on benefits and the battle over Harry’s education has “torn them apart”, says Julie.

Red Balloon founder Dr Carrie Herbert says families like Harry’s are effectively victims of “off-rolling”. “What happens is that it gets to the point where the child can’t go to school anymore and the school threatens prosecution. The headteacher suggests home education and the parents agree but then, three weeks later, they can’t cope.

“The kid has mental ill-health, no friends and is still, say, being bullied online while the parents have given up work trying to organise education for a 15-year-old who is out of control. There are working-class parents who take their kids out of school in the middle of term and are completely abandoned and can’t teach their child.”

The number of children being home educated has risen by 27 per cent in the past year, to around 57,800, according to a survey by the Association of Directors of Children’s Services. It’s a growth that has been described as “concerning” by Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman, who says that, in some cases, schools are “shovelling” pupils back to their parents because they can’t cope. She says parents are often home educating their children “under duress, to prevent exclusion” and that they “lack the capacity to provide a good standard of education”.

Some say the situation will be even more difficult for parents who home educate if local authorities are given powers to carry out mandatory monitoring and registration of their children. Registration is backed by Spielman, who is also concerned that home-educated children are more at risk of joining gangs and that some parents are using home education as a front to allow them to attend illegal schools (of which Ofsted has identified 420 within the past three years). Meanwhile, the Department for Education (DfE) consultation on monitoring and registration has ended and its response is expected “in due course”.

One question the DfE is asking is whether parents should be penalised if they fail to put their child on a register. But Julie says she objects to the idea of education officials coming into her home as it would cause more stress for Harry, and that any form of monitoring would “defeat the point of home education” as it should involve the “parents’ and child’s choice on how they learn”.

There’s even greater concern among the community of parents whose children have never been to school and who never believed schools would work for their children in the first place. Some estimate that there could be 20,000 children in this category (see graphic, above), who are not known about by their local education authorities because they have never been required to register in the system.

They tend to be from middle-class families, who are often better equipped to home educate and where neighbours sometimes “share the burden”, says Herbert. She gives the example of a parent teaching a language to a group of children on one afternoon a week while another neighbour or parent will teach, say, music or sport on a different day.

Father-of-four Mike Wood, who chose to educate all of his children at home, says mandatory monitoring would be “an infringement of human rights”. “If there is no safeguarding issue in a home, then why are they forcing their way in?” he asks. “The state doesn’t have a right to go into a home and check kids are OK just on the off-chance there could be a problem. It would cause further damage to children who have already been damaged by the school.”

Wood, whose children are now adults who all have degrees (including one with a PhD), runs the Home Education UK website. He also gives legal advice to parents and uses a Facebook forum with 8,000 members from the home education community.

He says that local authorities wouldn’t be able to cope with the 70,000 home visits a year that would be necessary, if such monitoring were introduced. Not only does Wood think monitoring would “raise anxieties” for SEND children, he also fears it would involve visits by teachers who would assess against national curriculum standards, which would be “intolerable” for parents and might even result in them ending up in court.

For example, Mark, from Oldham (who preferred not give his full name), home educates his two children, aged four and seven. But like many such parents, he doesn’t want to follow the national curriculum.

“We place academic progress very close to the bottom of our list of priorities,” he says. “At the top, we place things like time spent outdoors, music, dance, art, playing with friends, playing alone, confidence dealing with staff in a café, confidence asking for help in the library, and ability to approach a homeless person and ask what they need today.

“We also value very highly the opportunity for our children to spend quality time with grandparents, not just babysitting but in shared experiences at the theatre and enjoying sleepovers with midnight snacks.

“Our daughter was five when her great-grandma died two years ago, but she still has fond memories of regular spontaneous sleepovers followed by exciting bus and tram adventures to the best local markets.”

But what if there is a real need for monitoring and registering? The NSPCC’s head of policy, Almudena Lara, says children educated at home can, in some cases, be “invisible” and that it is “crucial” that local authorities are able to identify home-educated children in their area in order “to guarantee that any safeguarding concerns can be swiftly addressed”. “A compulsory register would help to ensure this is the case, along with mandatory monitoring of home education settings,” she says.

And what of the serious case reviews where children who have been educated at home have been abused and died? They include “child ST”, aged 16, who, in 2007, had reportedly been dead for five months before her body was found by bailiffs repossessing her home in north London. A year later, in 2008, seven-year-old Khyra Ishaq, from Birmingham, died from starvation six months after she was removed from school.

‘Draconian and oppressive’

The second reading takes place in February of Lord Clive Soley’s Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill, which proposes to “make provision for local authorities to assess the educational development of children receiving elective home education”.

The DfE has refused to say whether it is backing the bill until it has received the results of its consultation. But there are those who have qualms about it. “What Lord Soley’s bill does is offer a draconian and oppressive sledgehammer to crack a barely existent nut - it is simply not required,” says Wendy Charles-Warner, a former lawyer and government adviser on home education.

She points out that, in the case of child ST, local authority staff had visited her home months before her death and found education provision to be “satisfactory”. She also points to missed opportunities by the authorities to protect Khyra Ishaq.

Charles-Warner says she has carried out “very careful research”, which shows that home-educated children are less at risk than schooled children, and says there is a negative perception of home education based on “ignorance and fear of the unknown”.

“Those academic researchers who do take the time to properly investigate home education usually find it to be effective and even to achieve better results, on average, than school can or does,” she says. “If one wishes to find examples of things going wrong, one can do so in any cohort of people, because human beings are inherently varied. The point is that legislation already exists to deal with concerns about the tiny minority [of home educators], who are sufficiently poor as to require their provision addressing robustly.”

Back at Harry’s house, the closest he comes to joining a gang is playing the video game Fortnite online with other children. In fact, he was scared to go out of the house until Julie encouraged him to join the local rowing club.

Julie has turned their lounge into a pop-up gym after finding that exercise has a positive impact on her son. In the doorway, there is bar on which he starts his day with pull-ups, which are followed by push-ups and lunges, and weightlifting using tins of beans and kettle bells. That’s before he settles down to his GCSE work on his laptop. There’s time for around half an hour on Fortnite in between, “to keep his brain going”.

“Going from a weak little lad to someone who is so fit is unbelievable,” says Julie, who says she dreads the thought of monitoring.

Yet some home-educating parents would welcome more input from their local authority. They include Sharon, who says she had to take her daughter Rebecca out of school in Year 9 owing to lack of support for her chronic fatigue and anxiety (see box, right).

“There isn’t enough information for parents who are forced into home education, and they’re under added pressure because they’re not sure they’re doing the right thing,” she says. “With Rebecca, we just got a letter from the council with some frequently asked questions and a phone number to ring for further information, but there was nothing that said ‘can we come round and have a chat to make sure you’re doing the right thing?’

“When you have a baby, you get a big pile of information on everything to do, from dealing with sleep problems to postnatal depression, but with this, it’s completely different. If they said they wanted to come around, I’d say ‘come in and have a look!’

“But I don’t want it over-policed like the Stasi coming round or Ofsted inspectors or anything. The school letters about attendance were bad enough!”

For Julie, the starting point should be greater resources in schools’ SEND provision. She also believes that more money should be invested in pupil referral units, where Harry unsuccessfully spent some of his Year 8 and 9. And she is calling for investment in charities such as Red Balloon which, she says, would save pressure on the NHS, police and prisons in the long run.

Wood says families that home educate are already well supported through internet forums, including those that offer advice and support on exams, setting curriculums, and for single and working parents. He wants local authorities to put more time into finding out about “how home education works”.

“Home educating families are not child abusers, nor are they ‘hiding’ from anything but discriminatory and unwarranted oppression,” adds Charles-Warner. “They are decent mums and dads who know that the one-size-fits-all school regime is not right for their children.

“Children’s wellbeing would be better served if Lord Soley were to give his efforts to improving schools for the majority of children rather than proposing significant expenditure on policing home-educating families who simply do not merit such attentions.”

Dave Speck is a reporter at Tes

Names of pupils and some parents in this article have been changed to protect their identities