Homeschooling – or elective home education (EHE), as it’s officially known in the UK – has been rising steadily since the 1970s. Before universal education, many children were educated at home, which has always been legal. In the 1970s and 1980s, small numbers of parents started rejecting schools as overly rigid or exam-driven.
More recently, in the 2010s, the number of EHE children more than doubled and has continued to grow since the Covid pandemic. There were 126,000 children in EHE in England during the 2025 autumn term, according to the Department for Education – a rise of nearly 13% on the year before. They’re a tiny fraction of their total cohort (about 1.5%), but critics worry that it’s a sign of a wider crisis in the education system, and that EHE is only very loosely regulated.
Who is allowed to homeschool?
Under the Education Act 1996, all children between the ages of 5 and 16 in England and Wales have to receive a “suitable” full-time education, “either by regular attendance at school or otherwise”. But there’s no legal obligation to enrol a child in school; and all it takes to “deregister” is a letter or email. Local authorities aren’t allowed to carry out inspections or monitor the education parents provide. (Northern Ireland’s authorities have greater oversight powers; in Scotland, parents need the local authority’s consent to deregister; across the UK, parents of children with special educational needs need the school’s consent.) Parents aren’t required to teach the national curriculum, assess progress, or make children sit exams. Local authorities have a legal duty to identify children who aren’t getting an education, but they have little practical ability to do so.
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Why are numbers rising?
The Institute for Public Policy Research think-tank believes rising EHE numbers are part of a more general “school engagement crisis”, with similarly rising numbers in absences, suspensions, permanent exclusions and “emotionally-based school avoidance” (also known as “school refusal”). The main reasons, one deputy headteacher told The Guardian, are “Covid, Covid, Covid”. Lockdown gave families a glimpse into the world of home education; as schools reopened, some children found the transition back to the classroom difficult. More than 170,000 children in England missed at least half their school sessions (half days) in 2023/24, which is a record high.
How about special needs provision?
It’s a big factor. “The system is broken and does not cater for a lot of children,” one EHE parent told the BBC. Special educational needs and disabilities (Send) provision is one of the biggest financial burdens on local authorities, costing more than £10 billion a year in England. Even so, it’s widely recognised that schools struggle to make good on their obligations to pupils with special needs, even if those have been officially recognised.
Why are parents doing this?
The modern EHE movement grew out of progressive education theories, and many proponents are interested in “child-centred learning”, “unschooling” and the like, although others take a more structured approach, often provided by specialised organisations. Religion is another motivator for some. There is, however, a worrying lack of data: the Department for Education didn’t start collecting figures until 2022. But, in a recent study of reasons given by parents, 21% said they homeschooled for “philosophical” or “lifestyle” reasons; 16% said they did it for the sake of their child’s mental health; 15% gave “school dissatisfaction” as their reason, including concerns over bullying and poor Send provision. But all of these were outranked by “other”, “unknown” and “no reason given”, which accounted for 40% of parents.
Why is more homeschooling a worry?
Primary schools, especially, are a key part of the social safety net: the wellbeing of EHE children is hard to assess. Sara Sharif, murdered by her father and stepmother in Woking in 2023, for example, had been deregistered. Because there are penalties for persistent absence but none for not going to school at all, there’s a parental incentive for deregistering repeat truants. Parents can avoid fines of up to £2,500, and schools – which are assessed on attendance and exclusion numbers – have been known to encourage this covertly (and illegally). It’s likely that many EHE parents do not have the intention or ability to provide an education at home – which makes it particularly alarming that some of the biggest rises have been seen in areas with high levels of deprivation.
Is it allowed in other countries?
Homeschooling is illegal in China, North Korea and Cuba, and also in less authoritarian countries such as Sweden and Germany. France has historically allowed it only in highly exceptional circumstances, and the rules were tightened still further in 2021 with legislation designed to combat “Islamist separatism”. In most countries it’s a tiny minority interest that the state either regulates or turns a blind eye to.
The main outliers are the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the UK, which recognise homeschooling as a parental right, and where social movements advocate it. The US is the world leader: 3.4% of children – around four million – are homeschooled. Religion plays an important part: 53% of parents cite the need for religious instruction (typically in evangelical Protestantism) as a key motivation, and the main advocacy group, the Home School Legal Defence Association, has close ties to the Christian Right.
Right-wing scepticism about “government schools” also plays a part, but so do worries about school shootings and racial inequality. US homeschoolers are still overwhelmingly white, although there was a marked increase of its incidence in Black, Latino and Asian-American households during the Covid pandemic.
Professionals agree that EHE can work well if parents have the time, resources and ability – but not all of them do. It's “like rolling dice”, an EHE officer told The Sunday Times. Reliable studies of educational outcomes are thin on the ground, since they’re mostly produced by advocacy groups. The Department for Education doesn’t collect data on the attainment of EHE children, and so hasn’t produced an assessment. However, it notes that a 2009 inquiry found that 22% of home-educated 16- to 18-year-olds in England weren’t in education, employment or training, compared with a national average of some 5%.
What is the government doing?
Successive inquiries have called for an official register of EHE children (none currently exists). The inquiry into the Sharif case called for safeguarding checks on the homes of deregistered children. Both these measures are included in the education bill that’s currently going through Parliament, along with a requirement that parents of children already deemed “at risk” will need the local authority’s consent to switch to EHE. However, EHE advocates are lobbying intensively for the bill to be watered down, arguing that it infringes their rights as parents.
