HOME FOR SCHOOL

Once seen as eccentric, homeschooling has surged since the pandemic – driven by anxiety, ideology and parents' desire to reclaim control of children's education

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Homeschooling got its highest cultural exposure in the 2004 film Mean Girls, when Lindsay Lohan's Cady Heron gets pulled out of her idyllic homeschooled life in Africa (though we never learn which country) and plonked into the ferocious Darwinism of high school in America.

The film reinforced some of the perception that homeschooled kids and families aren't normal, either being weird geniuses that a normal school can't cater for or hyper-religious types unwilling to countenance concepts taught at school like evolution and homosexuality.

In the 20 years that have passed since Mean Girls, homeschooling hasn't gone mainstream exactly, but it has become exponentially more common in the UK, US and Europe. At the last count in autumn 2024, according to the Department for Education, 111,700 children were being homeschooled in the UK, a significant increase from the 92,000 in October 2023. Going back even further, in 2015, the number was just 37,000.

The UK has the highest number of homeschooled children in Europe, though there have also been sharp rises in Belgium and France. But this is dwarfed by the estimated 3.6 million students being homeschooled in the US, which has also seen a sharp rise in the last half-decade - up from 2.5 million in 2019.

There is no doubt that the record numbers are connected to the long tail of the pandemic when the world's children were kept home from school for months at a time. This week's Covid inquiry and grilling of Boris Johnson, the former prime minister, has revived debates over the price young people paid to protect the elderly and vulnerable. Johnson admitted children paid “a huge price for others” in their loss of schooling and social and cultural experiences - something many of them continue to pay, with thousands never settling back into a school routine.