ROADSCHOOLING

World-schooling, adventuring, life-learning, whatever you call it, more parents are doing it. Driven by a desire to spend a greater amount of time with their children, escape the pressures of work and discover new cultures and lifestyles, a growing number of parents are quitting, taking their kids out of school and setting off on an adventure.

Take Jo and Jamie Robins, who are two weeks into a four-month South America trip with their daughters, aged 10 and seven. “We want to take some time to step back from life, the treadmill of working hard to pay a mortgage, not having enough time for family or to follow our interests,” says Jo. The Robins have only just begun their adventure and are planning to come back home later this year maybe.
However, many parents find that once they are on the road, they can’t imagine going back to their old life. David and Debs Hurst’s three-month mission to visit their Facebook friends, with their sons,
aged six and four, turned into an extended campervan trip across 13 countries, which they called “education by astonishment”, visiting people and places with a “wow factor”.

“To our minds, they are learning in a more interesting way. We don’t know if we’re right, but it’s our gut instinct. We don’t have a TV in the van and the boys only have one small box of toys each.
We encourage them to spend as much time as possible outside,” says David. They were so inspired by their journey that they are setting off again, this time to Spain where they hope to buy some land, and set up a family campsite with a focus on learning through outdoor play.

Overall, homeschooling is on the rise. Local authority figures released at the end of last year show a 65% increase in children recorded as home educated in the UK over six years. A US website profiles over 100 nomadic families, has a series of posts on the benefits of “roadschooling”, while Daniel Prince, who has been travelling for nearly two years, talks about the inspiration for homeschooling, as well as some of the resources he and his wife use to educate their four children.

One thing these families have in common is that their children are very young.
Single parent Theodora Sutcliffe travelled the world for four years with her son but settled in Bali when he turned 13. Sutcliffe has no regrets about their travels and says her son benefited “hugely”,
but their journey came to an end when he decided he wanted to go to a conventional school.