HOME SCHOOLS IN UK

Education is compulsory in the UK for children between the ages of five and sixteen, but school is not. Many families prefer to educate their children at home and it's perfectly legal. You don't have to be a qualified teacher to do so. Home educated children receive all their education from their parents, or carers, sometimes with the help of outside tutors. They don't have to follow formal rules about how to learn or when to learn. Over 50.000 children are home educated in the UK and the figure is rising by 80 % per year.

Some home schooling students become “unschoolers”. Instead of going to their local school, the students learn at home, in their local libraries and in their community. They follow a plan that they design with the help of a parent or an educator. Or they learn without following any plan at all!

Erin and Jessica are two sisters and they are home educated by their father, Scott. Every year before school starts, they choose books or subjects that they want to learn about. Of course there are the basics: English, maths, and science, but everything else is their choice. There are topics that they just get books and information about at their local library. They set their own goals and achieve them.

Erin and her sister Jessica do lots of their studying at their kitchen table, but that isn't ideal. They have to keep moving their books whenever it's time for a meal. Their father is planning to build a tree house in their backyard so they can go to school in a tree house. The name of their school will be Grand Oaks Academy and the tree house will have heat and electricity so the girls can have a computer in it.