The prevalence of home education in the UK

I am always amused to see home educators either exaggerating or minimising their numbers; depending upon whom they are talking to and what they wish to prove. Sometimes, they want to be thought of as an unstoppable, mass movement. Then again, there are occasions when they would sooner be seen as a tiny and insignificant fraction of the  population.  I have noticed that this is the case lately  when I am talking about the concerns of local authorities; everybody is falling over themselves to tell me that there are so few home educators that they and their children are hardly worth worrying about! Home educated children who might not be up to scratch academically  were described here yesterday as being:

some negligible minority - a small fraction of home educators who are, themselves. a small fraction of the population

This is very interesting. The problem is that nobody really knows how many children in this country are not attending school. Most experts believe that universal literacy in this country was attained by making sure that almost every child was in school.  The fear is that if a significant proportion were, as was the case during the nineteenth century, to be out of school, then things like illiteracy would begin to rise.

So readers are right in one sense; if the numbers of children who are not at school are indeed tiny, then this will hardly affect the country's  literacy rate or academic achievement in general. However, some researchers who are widely respected in the world of home education are making increasingly extravagant claims about the scale of the phenomenon. Paula Rothermel, for instance, is currently saying that she believes that the number of children in this country  aged between five and sixteen who are not at school  now runs into the hundreds of thousands. She claims to have identified between 300,000 and 500,000 such children. Yes, you did read that correctly; that's half a million children who are not at school.  If this were to be true, then of course local authorities might well have cause for concern.