Twenty-seven years ago, I was being called into school regularly to answer for my eight-year-old stepson’s behaviour in class. “He won’t pay attention,” his teacher complained. “He just will not knuckle down and do the work. He’s such a bright boy but he’s always either daydreaming or disrupting the rest of the class.”

As the parent in this situation, it’s difficult to know what to do. I spent a few months trying various approaches: trying to ensure he got to sleep early, spending extra time with him, encouraging healthy hobbies, feeding even healthier food, staying engaged with the teacher myself and trying to develop a working partnership, which seemed to be what she wanted - although I got the feeling she wearied of the sight of me quite quickly.

None of this made any difference. If anything, the situation worsened and I started to feel quite desperate. As this sharp, intelligent little boy’s step-parent, I felt I’d been entrusted with his care and upbringing, and that there was extra pressure on me to make sure his education was ultimately successful. This was in 1992, and before the internet, but I had a book called Enquire Within Upon Everything, which included a section on teaching at home, giving practical and legal advice on how to bypass school.

I didn’t want to withdraw him from the school system completely, just to temporarily remove him from the disruptive situation and provide some focused one-to-one tuition to help him to pass his 11-plus exam, so he could go to the local grammar school. There, he would hopefully be given more tailored provision and the guidance he needed. The plan worked, though the coercion involved put too much strain on our relationship. When he was 12 and attending the grammar school, my stepson opted to go to live with his dad.

Just two years later, my own eldest son, then also aged eight, started to struggle in a different school. Again, I was called in to answer for his behaviour in class but, this time, the complaints were slightly different: “He refuses to do his spellings and any written work at all, really. We know he’s intelligent because he joins in with all the discussions, so it must be obstinacy or mischievousness that makes him refuse to copy work down from the board and learn his spellings.”

This was a puzzle for me because, by then, I had three of my own children very close in age, one of whom could be described as obstinate and mischievous. But the eldest was more of a people-pleaser, and would ordinarily try very hard not to upset anyone.

Again, I began a cycle of negotiation and a variety of strategies. I spent focused time with him at home, becoming increasingly worried that there was something awry with his learning process when it came to words and spellings. At school, he was undergoing a series of punishments and inducements, including being made to sit in the classroom with his work at breaktimes, watching his friends playing outside.

His behaviour at school worsened as he acquired the labels “challenging” and “disruptive”. And then, one day, I pulled up after school to see a crowd gathered on the pavement around an obvious event.

Looking more closely, I was horrified to see my own son rolling his sleeves up for a fight with another boy. I guess it sounds like a typical doting mother’s reaction but, to me, this was completely out of character for my usually conflict-avoiding eldest son. (If it had been his younger brother, I would not have been surprised.)

Chatting to a friend who was a special educational needs teacher, we agreed that he was probably dyslexic and acting out aggressively because of frustration, and as a reaction to being labelled “disruptive” in class and being given the discipline measures that come with such a label.

Diagnosis

I suggested to the school this might be the case but was told categorically not, because my son could read. If he was dyslexic, their reasoning went, he wouldn’t be able to read. On this basis, they refused to fund a diagnosis, so my parents funded it privately, through which we learned that Tom had a high IQ, which had enabled him to learn to read despite also having severe dyslexia.

I took the education psychologist’s report into the school but they refused to read it. “If you pay someone to find something wrong with your child, they will find it,” said one teacher memorably at the time, thereby dismissing the entire educational psychology profession in one fell swoop.

The routine of punishment at school continued unabated, as did the deterioration in Tom’s behaviour, sleep, self-esteem and attention span. In one jail study, 48 per cent of male prisoners were found to be dyslexic, and I can see why, if it goes unaddressed like this. I could see the slippery downward slope for Tom stretching out before my eyes, starting with the nearly-fight on the pavement outside school.

Home education beckoned again. But I was, by this time, on a teacher-training course myself, which I didn’t want to give up. However, I increasingly found myself sitting in lectures worrying about Tom. The impossible irony of my training to teach others when my own child was struggling so much could not be avoided. I resigned from my course and deregistered Tom from school.

I knew that money was going to be tight because of restricted work opportunities, but I had to prioritise Tom’s needs.

Sure enough, his health, wellbeing and behaviour started to improve almost overnight. After a few months, he was writing and reading out loud more confidently and feeling generally so much better about himself. It was around this time that an officer from the local authority wanted to come and visit to check the provision. But it transpired that he hadn’t read Tom’s file in advance, because he demanded to be read to and then was harshly critical of Tom’s efforts, which almost set us back to the point of when he’d left school in terms of progress.

My younger son and eldest daughter wanted to leave school soon after Tom did, having seen how much he was enjoying himself at home. They stayed for the rest of the term. Even though I went on to have two subsequent children, that was the last time we made use of the school system. The more we home-educated, the more natural it became, until we couldn’t imagine using any other kind of education.

The school-leavers needed a lot of deschooling. This is the process in which the whole family learns to adapt to home-based learning, often in a much more natural style. Not being in a class of 30 means that each child’s interests can be catered for. Not being forced to follow the national curriculum means that learning can follow its own meandering way, and curiosity can be sparked and nurtured like a flame.

This time, I wasn’t schooling a child for the 11-plus exam, and didn’t feel under the same external pressure to achieve pre-set outcomes as I had with my stepson, so we could relax more and enjoy the process.

‘A more entwined process’

Home-educating my two younger daughters, who have never been to school, has been different again. They needed no deschooling; for them, learning has been a more entwined process of just living. One needed my structured help to learn to read; the other learned apparently by a process of osmosis, although being read to frequently probably helped. Both are now highly literate and largely autodidactic, like their older siblings.

Sometimes we’ve used tutors for occasional subjects. One daughter is focusing on learning Spanish at the moment, just because she likes the sound of the language. Another is studying maths quite intently, among other things, because she wants to keep up with her school-attending friends.

I haven’t insisted on any of them taking a full set of GCSEs, though if they wanted to, we would facilitate it. As for long-term outcomes, my stepson went through grammar school and eventually became a blacksmith. My older son, who had been so profoundly dyslexic, set up his own IT company, and my younger son translates Russian for a living: a language he mostly taught himself as a teenager because he liked the look of the different alphabet. My older daughter became a nanny, and the younger two don’t know yet what they might do or become as adults, just as the older ones didn’t at their age.

They’ve all got friends, home-educated and schooled. One of the changes I’ve seen in the 27 years since I first home-educated is the increasing numbers of families out of school, who network and pool resources to provide meetings and activities, so no home-educated child ever needs to be bored or lonely.

The increasing numbers have been a blessing in this way but also a curse, because it’s alarmed some people into campaigning for tighter government regulations. Like many home educators, I think the law strikes the right balance as it is: parents are left alone to continue as long as the authorities have no concerns about the child’s welfare or educational provision.

Where there are concerns, enough legislation exists for action to be taken to protect the child. Too much interference from very school-orientated officials can damage good provision made by parents who are carefully meeting their child’s individual needs. It might not look like school learning but, in that situation, the education will be efficient, full-time and suitable, as the law demands.

Most parents need to work full-time, so home education will always remain in the minority and never present a real threat to the school system. Some people want it banned, but I disagree, partly because it serves a useful purpose for the school-using majority.

If school attendance rather than education were compulsory, there would be nothing to stop funding and standards from plummeting because of the captive-market effect. If parents’ only choice is to take the provision on offer in schools, then funding might eventually become a lower priority for the government.

Most importantly, though, home education provides a vital escape route from school for the few who want or need it.

Gill Kilner is a mother-of-five from Halifax. She blogs at sometimesitspeaceful.blogspot.com

This article originally appeared in the 4 October 2019 issue under the headline “Home advantage”