Ian Fisher, like three-quarters of a millon other 16-year-olds, is waiting to get his GCSE results in two days’ time.

But, education-wise, that is where the similarity between him and the vast majority of his peers ends, because Ian has never set foot in a school.

In a lifetime of home education, the only formal lessons he has experienced were evening classes at his local college in Reading to help him prepare for the English and physics GCSEs he sat this summer. He studied for a maths GCSE last year and was awarded an A.

Learning at home, when he feels like it and without the restrictions of a curriculum, is "much more efficient” than studying at college, purple-haired Ian says confidently.

"The main difference between my informal education at home and my formal education at college has been that at home I can focus on what I want to learn, when I want to learn it.”

Ian’s mother, Jill, took her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, out of school at the age of five in 1992. She decided her child just wasn’t ready for a day that finished at 3.30pm, and saw that she was losing the ability to occupy herself.

Fisher gave up her job as an archaeologist and opted to educate her three children at home. The family lived on the salary of her husband, Peter, a university professor.

Elizabeth has just graduated with a fine arts degree, and Ian’s other sister, Katherine, is about to start her second year of an environmental science degree.

Katherine and Elizabeth were awarded As for most of their GCSEs and A-levels. When they were young, Jill read to her children and took them to museums and to play with others their age. They amused themselves, to a large extent.

"There were never any lessons at home, or anything structured for more than a couple of weeks,” she says.

The Brookes parents, from Gloucestershire, have also home-educated their three children: Joe, 18, Freya, 16, and Lindsey, 13.

Joe is about to study for a diploma in interactive games design at college and Freya starts her A-levels at college in September. Their parents, Fiona and Peter, earn enough as foster parents to stay at home to educate them.

"The school system is so geared to competition,” says Fiona.

"It produces robots.” Her decision to home-educate was met with a mixed reaction from her family, many of whom are teachers.

"Days go by in the same way that they would in the summer holidays for other children,” she says.

"One of my children might be outdoors with the chickens, another may be looking after the pets, and the third may be on the computer.”

Surprisingly, the exact number of children learning at home is unknown. Local authorities are not required to find out. But experts say as many as 50,000 children are learning at home in the UK - a figure that has trebled since 1999.

The methods employed by parents vary enormously. Some imitate schools to such an extent that they ring a bell in the morning; others allow their children to do exactly as they please all the time.

Many have kept their sons and daughters out of school because they believe formal education starts too early in this country, and that it is restrictive, with a misplaced emphasis on testing. Some worry their children may be bullied.

Critics of home education dismiss it as a hippy option that disadvantages children socially and educationally for the rest of their lives. So a book just published by academics at the Institute of Education, University of London, is highly controversial. It argues that home education is a viable alternative to school up to the age of 14.

Alan Thomas, a visiting fellow in the institute’s department of psychology and human development, and Harriet Pattison, a research associate, conclude that informal learning at home is an "astonishingly efficient way to learn”, as good if not better than school for many children.

"The ease, naturalness and immense intellectual potential of informal learning up to the age of middle secondary school means they can learn certainly as much if not more,” they say in How Children Learn at Home.

Thomas and Pattison interviewed and observed 26 families who home-educated, between them, more than 70 children. Some had been out of school for a couple of years, others had never been inside a school.

Most were British, but a handful were Irish, Australian and Canadian. The authors discovered that these children absorbed information mainly by "doing nothing, observing, having conversations, exploring, and through self-directed learning”.

They liken the "chaotic nature” of informal learning to the process that leads to scientific breakthroughs, the early stages of crafting a novel, coming up with a solution to a technical problem, or the act of composing music.

"Its products are often intangible, its processes obscure, its progress piecemeal,” they say.

"There are false starts, unrelated bits and pieces picked up, interests followed and discarded, sometimes to be taken up again, sometimes not... Yet the chaotic nature of the informal curriculum does not appear to be a barrier to children organising it into a coherent body of knowledge.”

Thomas and Pattison acknowledge that critics will say home-educated children are likely to pick up information peppered with misunderstandings or inaccuracies, and parents may unwittingly pass on their own misconceptions.

"Yet the lack of information quality-control does not appear to lead to muddled, confused children,” they say.

"In some ways, it may be an advantage because, rather than presenting knowledge in neat packages, the informal curriculum forces learners to become actively engaged with their information - to work with it, move it around, juggle ideas and resolve contradictions... It is not a static thing contained in a series of educational folders. It is alive and dynamic.”

Hurly-burly

This comes across in their interviews with families, who say learning occurs in the "simple hurly-burly of everyday life”.

One mother said: "I provide materials, resources, help with research, discuss what they are reading and what I am reading, watch documentaries with them, have stimulating conversations, listen a lot and answer questions.”

Most teachers and parents would balk at one parent’s remarks that all her son did until he was 12 was "watch Star Wars and play on the trampoline” and that he "didn’t even know when his birthday was”.

Another said: "Sometimes days go by without anything special happening.”

But Thomas and Pattison marvel at the way one girl learned maths by "helping with the cooking and shopping, and collecting supermarket-trolley money”.

"She came to appreciate the value of material goods, but she did not see it like that,” they say.

"She saw only the concrete activity. If she did sometimes count money or do sums in her head, it was her decision, sparked by her emerging understanding, or simple curiosity about numbers.

"The point is that maths, certainly most of what is acquired at the primary level, can be learned as an integral part of everyday concrete activities. In school, maths has to be divorced from the dynamic realities of everyday life.” Home education is just an extension of good parenting, Thomas and Pattison argue.

"School itself necessarily curtails such parental contribution.”

Why, they ask, do we as a society assume that formal learning needs to take over beyond the age of five?

"There is no developmental or educational logic behind the radical change in pedagogy from informal to formal when children start school,” they say. Contrary to expectations, the home-educated children had no difficulty entering formal education, the authors found.

The informal curriculum is "as good a preparation as any” for college, university or academic correspondence courses, they say.

"The young people had the personal skills to make the transition with apparent ease.” That will always be the conundrum for home education.

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