Home‐based Education Effectiveness Research and Some of its Implications

In the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, a quiet revolution has been taking place. More and more families are taking the option of home‐based education in preference to school attendance. The evidence supports only two generalisations about this development. The first is that families display considerable diversity in motives, methods and aims. The second is that they are usually very successful in achieving their chosen aims. In the UK there have been several changes since a handful of families first began to co‐operate to form the organisation Education Otherwise in 1977. These include changes in motivation, in acceptance by Local Education Authorities, in the growth to a take‐up of about 10,000 families and in the questions posed by the home‐based education phenomenon. The basic question of ‘will the families cope?’ has given way to ‘why do they usually cope so easily and so well?’ Home‐based education effectiveness research demonstrates that children are usually superior to their school‐attending peers in social skills, social maturity, emotional stability, academic achievement, personal confidence, communication skills and other aspects. The lessons of this research, as to how the schooling system could be regenerated, are only just beginning to be appreciated. It questions all the fundamental assumptions underpinning schooling, as well as pointing to ways of regenerating and reconstructing education systems in general and schools in particular, in the direction of more flexibility, suitable for the post‐modernist scene. It gives us clues as to how we can de‐school schools by developing the Invitational School to replace the Custodial School.

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