Unschooled by Caro Giles: The children who just can’t cope with school
Unschooled by Caro Giles (Little Toller £20, 242pp)
For some parents, getting a child to school turns into an exhausting, emotionally draining battle.
An increasing number of British children don’t attend school, and the figures have been climbing steadily since Covid.
Almost 112,000 children are now registered as being home educated, although the true number is much higher.
Like most parents, Caro Giles, a former teacher, assumed her children would have a straightforward path through education.
The reality, however, was very different and three of her four daughters are being totally or partially home educated. ‘I sometimes wondered if an aversion to school was catching, like a cold,’ Giles sighs.
Her oldest, Matilda, 17, started school aged six and was removed after two years because she stopped speaking in class and became ‘a shadow child’. An attempt to get her back when she was older resulted in a complete breakdown. She was eventually diagnosed as autistic.
Third daughter, Emmie, 12, who is also autistic and has selective mutism, was so frightened of school that when Giles tried to take her she would crouch in the footwell of the car, ‘wide-eyed with terror, like a wounded animal’. Nine-year-old Tess can cope with three days a week but no more. Only second daughter Ada, 15, is at school full-time.
Giles, who is divorced from the girls’ father, is fully aware that many people think she must be responsible for her daughters’ issues. ‘I’ve been told frequently over the years that my children’s behaviour is a result of the way I parent, and that they should be able to function as most children do at school and in social situations.’ Parents like her, she says, are often labelled as anxious and over-controlling.
Unsuitable: Heavy emphasis on exams, doesn’t work for a significant number of children
Yet being a home educator is not a life she has chosen; this is something she has been forced into. Although there are many happy moments with her children, who do online classes as well as lessons with their mother, she finds her life exhausting and lonely.
She believes that our education system, with its heavy emphasis on exams, is simply unsuitable for a significant number of children, and that ‘a political obsession with inclusion has led to a narrow interpretation of the word that means all children have to fit into a similar model’.
She would also like to see schools offer a curriculum that isn’t always broken up into 45-minute chunks, as autistic and very sensitive children like hers struggle with constant change.
The real answer, says Giles, is better funding for children with special needs, and a recognition of the inconvenient truth that, for some children, conventional school just doesn’t work.