Home education, long dismissed as a hippy option, can be ‘astonishingly efficient’, says a new study. Jessica Shepherd meets the children who don’t go to school


Freewheeling… the Brookes family take to the road in search of inspiration. Photograph: Sam Frost

Ian Fisher, like three-quarters of a millon other 16-year-olds, is waiting to get his GCSE results in two days’ time. But, education-wise, that is where the similarity between him and the vast majority of his peers ends, because Ian has never set foot in a school.

In a lifetime of home education, the only formal lessons he has experienced were evening classes at his local college in Reading to help him prepare for the English and physics GCSEs he sat this summer. He studied for a maths GCSE last year and was awarded an A.

Learning at home, when he feels like it and without the restrictions of a curriculum, is "much more efficient" than studying at college, purple-haired Ian says confidently. "The main difference between my informal education at home and my formal education at college has been that at home I can focus on what I want to learn, when I want to learn it."

Ian’s mother, Jill, took her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, out of school at the age of five in 1992. She decided her child just wasn’t ready for a day that finished at 3.30pm, and saw that she was losing the ability to occupy herself.

Fisher gave up her job as an archaeologist and opted to educate her three children at home. The family lived on the salary of her husband, Peter, a university professor.

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