Reading: Education

Home is where the school is:

A) At 8am, when other children have to catch trains or buses to school, 14-year-old Rhiannon Cassell walks into the family living room in Huntly, Aberdeenshire, and checks on the day's assignments with her teacher – her father Matthew. Then Rhiannon, like her older sisters Tess, 16, and Abigail, 15, heads back to her own room, while their father works with the two youngest children, James, ten, and Alicia, eight, who need more individual attention. Rhiannon spends an hour and a half studying science (today's subject: static electricity), then switches to maths. If she is having difficulties, she seeks her father's help. 'He doesn't do the work for us, just helps us reason it out'. After lunch Rhiannon is back at work for a practical follow-up on the morning's science lesson: an experiment with balloons and dust. She then reads her current literary classic Little Women until 2.30pm. Although, that's the official end of the school day, Rhiannon may carry on with a subject she enjoys or is having problems with.

B) Matthew Cassell, 37, has been supervising his children's education since he retired on health grounds 4 years ago. He is not anti-school or critical of teachers. 'It's just that I can give the children more time than they'd get in a large class.' Regular tests and careful record keeping ensure Matthew keeps a check on their progress. The Cassells are in good company. Once only possible for the wealthy, home schooling is increasingly popular among parents fed up with bullying, narrow curriculums, rigid timetables, or the lack of proper religious teaching. Matthew's daughter, Rhiannon, echoes another common reason for parents opting for home education: 'At school I always felt they were holding me back. Now I can learn at my own pace'.

C) Alarm bells rang for Beverly Young after her four-year-old daughter Cassandra's teacher suggested the girl's numerical skills were weak because she had failed a simple sorting activity. Beverly asked Cassie why she had not put coloured balls in the correct holes. 'But, Mummy, I'm a big girl,' she replied. 'We do that sort of thing with my baby brother.' Cassie was also much better than her classmates at reading, but the teacher still made her sound out the individual letters of words. Although she rapidly became bored with everything, the school would not let her go up to a higher class. Then Cassie contracted an infectious skin disease and had to stay at home for a fortnight, with a package of homework to keep her going. 'She completed it in an hour,' recalls Beverly. Soon afterwards, she and her husband removed Cassie from school, and Beverly began supervising her work at home. Now ten, Cassie reads voraciously over a wide range of subjects. She and her brother Alexander, seven, don't follow a fixed timetable and there's no bell to bring studies to an abrupt end. Cassie approves of this flexible regime. 'If it's a nice day, I can go for a bike ride with my dad,' she says.

D) As well as being more fun, home education can be positively beneficial. 'On average, home-schoolers are two years ahead of their schooled counterparts,' says Roland Meighan, professor of special education at Nottingham University. A parent need not be a qualified teacher to be a home educator and children do not have to follow the national curriculum or sit formal tests. It is perfectly legal to keep a child away from school, as long as he or she is being educated. Parents do not even need to tell the local authority, although it it necessary for the head teacher to be informed if a child is withdrawn from a state school. In that case, responsibility for ensuring that alternative arrangements are satisfactory does lie with local authorities, which can take parents to court if children's needs are not being met. Laurence Purcell, head of school services for Kensington and Chelsea, claims there is no official hostility to the idea. 'We don't wish to discourage parents,' he says. 'But we do warn them of the heavy workload they are taking on'. At first his inspectors visit parents once a term, and then once a year if everything is fine.