How Did Home Schooling Start In The UK?

Sometimes, to better appreciate a journey you’re on, it’s a good idea to think about those who came before you. What were their experiences like? Are they the same or different to yours? How did it all begin? There’s a long and storied history of home schooling in the UK. In 1977, there were twenty families in the UK being educated primarily at home. By 2009, that figure had risen to 80,000. Interestingly, 10,000 children entered the home schooling system in Autumn 2023 alone.

The main reasoning for the most recent upsurge in home schooling is to try and protect children’s mental well-being. Of course, when home schooling began (long before 1977), it was for different reasons via different means. Let’s explore how home schooling began in the UK.

Access To Education

To better understand the history of home schooling in the UK, we must briefly examine education as a whole. Put simply, there wasn’t much of it prior to the mid nineteenth century. Most families didn’t have access to a regular school in the late eighteenth century. The children of poor families were sometimes taught to read from nearby churches, but it would be rare for other skills to be taught in this setting.

Educated employers sometimes chose to teach children basic primary education skills. However, these instances were very occasional. It wasn’t until 1811 that the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor was formed to try and establish regular schooling in industrial areas. However, compulsory education wouldn’t be formed until the 1870s, with secondary education financed in 1902. France, Germany, and the USA all had faster rates of schooling provision compared to the UK. What were UK children left with before the immergence of public education, then? Well, answers vary from home schooling to almost no access to education at all, depending on wealth and status.

Home Schooling As Privilege

Home schooling is sometimes viewed as a ‘luxury’ or ‘privilege’ today. However, in prior centuries, the truth in these claims rang a little louder. Upper- and middle-class families had enormous dependency on home schooling in the late eighteenth century. At this time, governesses began to enter the homes of middle-class families, providing education on ‘the three r’s’: reading, writing, and arithmetic. They also went a step further, issuing instruction on social etiquette, too.

Children from working class backgrounds sought out ‘self-education’ at best, and didn’t do so in great numbers until the nineteenth century. Home schooling didn’t become a viable possibility for them until more modern times.

Home schooling became rarer with the emergence of public education, evolving into a greater sign of wealth and status. Fewer families were home schooled, yet most of the Royal Family were educated at home, a tradition lasting right up to Queen Elizabeth II’s time. Only in more modern times have children in the Royal Family been attending public school.

Stateside Influence

The US was ahead of the UK on the provision of public schooling. The growth of US home schooling soon surpassed that of other countries, too. Multiple states introduced legislation in the 1920s-1930s for Creationism to be taught in US schools. Creationism is the theory that the earth was made in seven days. However, the US constitution separates church and state as part of the First Amendment. In the 60s, Creationism was ruled a ‘belief of faith’ in the US by law, which meant that the decades-old state laws around teaching Creationism was suddenly rendered unconstitutional. Cue uproar. Conservative Christians expressed displeasure with the US school system, which began to teach different points of view from religious content. Therefore, it was in the 1960s that the call for alternative education in the US became louder. Even counterculture theorists boarded the bandwagon, highlighting more perceived failings in state education.

Advocacy for alternative schools rapidly grew. The appeal of personalised education developed alongside those calls. Home schooling started to amass marginal appeal through the 1980s, and by the 1990s, and the advent of the internet (its origins being the in the US), the genie was out of the bottle.

The UK didn’t gravitate toward home education due to any religious unrest. However, the UK did take notice of what the US was doing in the late 1970s with home schooling, beginning to draw on their models and frameworks for home education. The UK saw home education could be feasible for many, and not just an elite few.

The Coronavirus Pandemic

Home schooling as a concept didn’t start during the coronavirus pandemic. However, for many families, it was the first time home schooling felt like a realistic prospect for them. Despite many children having since gone back to public school, last June saw the number of children moving to home education at its highest level since the pandemic. People are now more aware of these opportunities, more technologically savvy, more in-tune with their child’s developmental needs and mental well-being, and more open-minded to explore different ways of learning. For many families, the home schooling journey is just beginning! And that’s great to see.

Conclusion

There’s been something of a ‘phased approach’ to home schooling’s start in the UK. While it may have begun centuries ago for the wealthy and elite, home schooling has taken on different forms, roles, and purposes through the years. Who knows how it may evolve further in the years ahead…

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