Home school or Home education?

So you live in the UK and are thinking about taking your child out of school, or don't want to send them there in the first place. When people ask, you say that you are considering "home schooling" instead. As time passes, you realise that there are two problems with this description - the word "home" and the word "school!" Let's have a look at each, beginning with the latter.

• When we speak of a school of fish, we are referring to a large group of identical cod who look the same, move around together and have an identical experience of life.
• To school someone is to direct them towards a pre-determined outcome, removing their ability to do it differently.
• A school is a building that supports a well-established way of working, just like a home supports a certain way of living. - The word school sits alongside words like uniform, class and lesson.
• Once you have removed your child from school, you remove them from pretty much all of the above.

Free of the school setting, and following a period of adjustment as you shake off conventions and self-imposed expectations about how to manage the learning process, most children end up following a highly personalised, somewhat self-directed learning process in which conventions applying to age-related learning, method of learning, time of day and location cease to apply.

Your child might might learn to spell by playing Minecraft and then composing searches on YouTube to find out how to do something. Later, he or she may decide to learn a language that isn't taught locally, and do so earlier or later than might be the case in schools, or at times when schools are arbitrarily closed. They will mix with children who are older and younger that they are, learning and teaching peers from the middle and breaking down the sense that they are horizontally segregated. They will see you as a facilitator and an equal who happens to be older than them, rather than a boss who brooks no dissent.

By contrast, home education describes a process of learning in a family environment. If anything, the problem word is 'home' as it leads people to imagine that the child never goes out. If you add in 'school' they imagine a poor kid sitting on their own at a desk in the kitchen, having a miserable time. There are indeed some children who do have this experience - sometimes with a succession of tutors coming to help them cram for exams. However, in all probability, your child will spend some time at home and the rest of the time going to pony club, or gymnastics, or dance troupe, or an art group, or a climbing centre, or a museum, or a library, or a park - usually in the company of other families who are interested in the same thing. The phrase "anywhere but school education" is probably a better description of what tends to happen.

Nevertheless, the huge surge in numbers home educating has prompted increased discussion of it in Parliament and the national media. Here, the term "home school" tends to dominate. In part, this is because it is a phrase that comes to mind when people seek a label for something they have never done. It is also true that the term is very popular in countries like the United States, where it is often the case that families must nominally register their home as a school.

However, there is a more worrying context for use of the term. Sometimes, when parents divorce, one (often the father) will allege that his children have been missing out by being "home schooled." This immediately creates that impression of a parent replicating school in a home environment, for one lonely kid. When it turns out that the father went round to the house and the child was playing Minecraft, it begins to look like the system of school at home isn't working very well. By using the term "home school" the father (in this case) is able to constrain and control our view of how things should be.

Local authority figures appointed to support home educators often have a teaching background and this can also lead them to make inappropriate comparisons between home education and their concept of home school: they may ask for evidence of workbooks, of a timetable, or of structured teaching of literacy and numeracy at the same age-stage as school-based students. None of this is required by the government's guidelines on home education: they recognise that collective education away from the parent and based on age-segregation, linear progression, fixed timetables and workbooks is most likely not the ideal form of education for every child in the country. For the rest, something else must be created and it is generally called home education.

Recently, some politicians have been calling for annual assessment of the educational provision provided by parents for their own children. For them, the term "home school" is important - it implies that tests and assessments used in a school setting could be extended to cover non-school settings. However, the standardised tests designed for assessment of schools do not work for people whose children learn best in non-school settings. The only way to make it work is to force those people to adopt the very teaching and learning systems that led them to withdraw their child from school in the first place.

There is no evidence to support claims that home educated children do less well than their peers in school settings. If anything, the evidence shows them to do significantly better, with children in the poorest economic settings doing best of all. Introducing standardised assessment, with a gravitational pull towards school-based methods, will only disadvantage them.

So, if you are thinking of taking your child out of school, or don't want to send them in the first place, you may find it easier in the long run to use the term "education" rather than "school" - the latter is already defined as the very thing you probably don't want to do.