‘I felt absolutely lost’: the crisis behind the rising number of UK children being homeschooled

Steve Bladon has been a headteacher for a decade. Yet when he found himself temporarily home educating his 11-year-old daughter, who had such severe anxiety that she couldn’t leave the house, he admits he felt “absolutely lost”.

“Initially we had no idea what to do,” he said. “All we knew was that she needed time and space, so we weren’t compounding her anxiety.”

Bladon is far from alone. New government data has revealed a sharp rise in children being home educated, with more than 126,000 children being taught at home in 2022-23, an increase of 60% since 2018-19.

Experts say we have moved a long way from the days when home educating was an ideological lifestyle choice. A report earlier this month by the Institute for Public Policy Research and charity The Difference found that the most common reason listed for deregistering a child in the new government data – for 40% of children – was “unknown”. One council home education adviser told the report’s researchers: “I am meeting families whose child’s anxiety is sky-high, and they can’t manage attending any more.

“It is forced home education really. These are families trying to avoid getting fined, many living in poverty, desperate for more help.”

The Covid pandemic caused an increase in children being home educated. The BBC reported earlier this year that there were at least 49,851 notifications to councils from families deciding to home school children in the year 2020-21. More than four years after the first lockdown, however, numbers have continued to rise.

The Centre for Young Lives estimates that about three-quarters of families who home educate pull their children out of mainstream school because they feel they aren’t getting the support they need. Often a child has special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) or serious mental health issues, and typically they are refusing to go to school. It mostly happens part-way through the school year. Far from a choice, for most of these families this is a point of crisis.

Bladon said many of these parents feel the entire education system is broken and is working against them. “Really complex situations – people’s lives – are reduced to conversations about absence. But absence is seldom the core issue,” he said.

Bladon’s daughter thrived at primary school. She attended happily, had good friends and strong grades. But the transition from a rural primary school with one class in a year group to a much bigger secondary school changed everything.

“Within three months she was a shadow of herself. She was simply overwhelmed,” he said. She was masking her difficulties while at school, but stopped eating and sleeping. Her anxiety was driven by being at school, yet the family were being told repeatedly, in accordance with strict government guidance, that she must attend.

Parents in England and Wales must ensure their child gets a full-time education that meets their needs from the ages of 5 to 16. Separate, similar, guidance applies in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Local authorities decide whether to fine parents if their child misses school, but they are required to consider a fine of up to £160 if a child has five days of unauthorised absence. Pressure to get back into school can also include court action, with fines of up to £2,500, and home visits from the police.

Bladon belongs to a Facebook group called Not Fine in School, which has 63,000 members, and this is a story he hears again and again from other desperate parents – many of whom say they have had enough and have deregistered their child from school.

Bladon believes that when a child is anxious about school, forcing them to attend is like forcing them “to go back into a burning building”.

“What we are saying is, you must come into school when you are suffering, that your illness doesn’t warrant being absent, you must push through or face your fears,” he said. “To me that is dangerous and counterproductive.”

Bladon was able to negotiate reduced hours for his daughter, then home education while the family sought professional help, with the school agreeing to keep her enrolled. Now, two years since her anxiety started, his daughter is managing four days a week back at school as part of a “meticulously planned” reintegration, with support from the school’s pastoral staff and the local council’s school-avoidance team.

But Bladon is aware his experience is the exception, not the norm. Although Ofsted has cracked down on schools in England “off-rolling” pupils, there are claims that some schools are still indirectly pushing out more challenging pupils. Other parents, faced with increasing scrutiny and a lack of help, will choose to deregister.

Oliver Conway, a child protection solicitor, said one of his clients was called into a child protection meeting with police present to discuss her child’s unauthorised school absence. Her young daughter is non-verbal, autistic and has ADHD but doesn’t have a formal diagnosis, and she felt the school had no one equipped to help her. Her daughter had been experiencing such serious panic on the way to school that she could no longer get her to attend. “In the end she pulled her child out of school because she was so terrified that she would be served with a child protection order and lose her,” Conway said.

Conway fears that many families who are already struggling with poverty, some of whom may have their own mental health issues, feel pushed into deregistering but can’t really cope. “Often they are using one iPhone and a bad [internet] connection to run a virtual school for their child,” he said. “A lot of parents didn’t really have an education themselves. How is this OK?”

There is no regulation in place for home schooling. Local council education welfare officers may contact parents if they think a child is not getting a suitable education at home, but in reality many councils are too over-stretched to even collect information on why children have been deregistered, and there is no requirement to offer them extra support at home.

Related: Vulnerable children in England ‘safer at school’ than being educated at home

Conway said he is concerned that many of these children will simply fall through the cracks. “One woman told me that when they were on the school register, they were called every morning at 7.30am and told their child must come in,” he said. “She deregistered [her child] and no one called her for 18 months.”

Anne Longfield, founder of the Centre for Young Lives, said it was vital to establish a national register of children not in school. The UK government agreed to this when Longfield first recommended it in 2019, but the plan fell apart with the 2022 Education Act. The new government has committed to council-run mandatory registers as part of its Children’s Wellbeing bill.

Nottingham city council is one of the few that has been able to commit to investing in additional mental health support staff to help schools.

The council has said it will increase funding for its hospital education centre, which offers a space for children with mental health issues to learn outside mainstream schooling, without resorting to pulling them out of the system. It currently cannot meet demand.

Nick Lee, director of education services at the council, said new digital remote learning units for schools, will also mean children at home can join in some of what they are missing in the classroom. “It’s a way of making them less isolated,” he said. “And we hope it could be a bridge back.”

He added: “The level of crisis is such that if we don’t act, many of these children will just be missing.”