Home education does not inherently harm social cohesion. Choosing to educate a child outside school does not mean rejecting schools, communities or wider society. Both school and home education can provide valuable learning experiences, and what matters most is whether a child’s education meets their needs.
Is home education against schools?
Not at all.
One common misunderstanding about home education is that supporting it means believing traditional schools are bad.
But these are two different things.
Schools provide education, friendships, routines and community connections for millions of children. For many families, they work well.
Other families choose home education because they believe a different approach better suits their child.
Recognising the benefits of one approach doesn’t mean dismissing the other.
The conversation becomes less helpful when education turns into an argument about which side is right, rather than what works for individual children.
What about social cohesion?
Social cohesion is about people feeling connected to their communities, building relationships and participating in society.
Schools can contribute to this through shared experiences, friendships and exposure to different people and perspectives.
But school is not the only place where these connections can develop.
Home-educated children may participate in community activities, sports clubs, group learning sessions, volunteering, local events and friendships with children from different backgrounds.
Of course, these opportunities are not automatic. Parents need to consider how their children will build relationships and participate in wider society.
The important distinction is that being educated outside school doesn’t necessarily mean being isolated from society.
Home education doesn’t have to look like school
Another misconception is that meaningful learning must involve classrooms, worksheets and formal lessons.
Consider a child spending an hour baking.
During that activity, they might practise:
- Measuring ingredients and understanding quantities
- Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division
- Working with three-digit numbers
- Fractions and proportions
- Reading and following instructions
- Problem-solving when something doesn’t go to plan
The child may be learning several things without completing a single worksheet.
That doesn’t mean they’ll automatically understand or remember every concept. But parents can revisit the activity, ask questions and observe whether the child can apply what they’ve practised.
This flexibility is recognised in official guidance.
In England, Department for Education guidance acknowledges that home education can be structured or informal, and that neither approach is necessarily more effective.
Welsh Government guidance similarly recognises that home education can involve practical experiences, informal learning and approaches that differ significantly from school.
Sources: Department for Education guidance and Welsh Government home education guidance.
Different approaches, the same priority
Home education and school education do not have to compete.
Neither approach is automatically right for every child, and both come with responsibilities and challenges.
What matters is providing a suitable education, supporting a child’s development and helping them become capable of participating in the wider world.
Rather than creating divisions between families who make different educational choices, perhaps the more useful question is:
Is this child learning, developing and receiving the support they need?
Using Strew
Practical learning doesn’t always leave behind a worksheet. Strew helps home-educating parents record everyday activities, add observations and photos, and revisit what their child has been learning.
That might mean recording an afternoon of baking and the maths involved, without needing to turn the experience into a formal classroom lesson.
Video transcript
“This is a cult. Work at any school and you’ll see the good that they do. Parents like you are breaking social cohesion.”
Firstly, I’ll take your point and raise my own.
At no point during that video have we said that school doesn’t work for some children, or that school is bad.
We’ve simply addressed some of the negative comments that get made towards home-educated children.
To break social cohesion, you have to have a divide. You have to break something. You have to pull apart two sides of society.
However, during that video, at no point did I say school is bad.
Absolutely not. School works perfectly for some children.
What I was doing was addressing the negative comments that get made about home education and counter-arguing why that’s not always correct.
Breaking social cohesion and creating a divide would look more like saying something and commenting on it negatively without perhaps having the knowledge or experience to do so.
Where Strew comes in, we’re not trying to get more people to home educate.
What Strew is trying to achieve is to give home-educating parents a really useful, helpful tool to record their child’s learning.
Because learning in home education doesn’t look like school.
Home education could be spending one hour in the kitchen baking. You’ve been learning about three-digit numbers, adding, subtracting, multiplying, dividing and measurements.
And you haven’t done all of that on a worksheet.
However, the child, because they’ve been engaged in that learning, has remembered it.
So what you can do is record the activity they’ve done, and then later, if you want to test that child’s knowledge and go back to it, you can discuss what they’ve been doing to see how much they’ve retained.
None of that’s on a worksheet, but it is on the Strew app.
Again, we’re not saying that you shouldn’t go to school.
School works for some children.
It should always be about the child, and it should never be about my side or your side.
Have a nice day.
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