Some people choose to Home educate from right at the very beginning, some people even make the decision to Home Educate before their child is even born.

Why would they do this? I think to some degree it starts with knowing that Home Education is an option. If you don't know that it is a option then you don't think about choosing it. Maybe these people had reasons for looking for other options, other than school?

- Some people might belief that Home Educating their children is part of their whole philosophy of how they want to live their life.

- Others may have strong beliefs which are not compatible with the state education system. (Not necessarily religious beliefs, but that would be one example).

- Some people may have had such a bad experience of school themselves, that they don't want their child to have a similar experience.

- Others may believe that a child should be allowed more autonomy in their lives than is allowed for in a school-based education.

- The parents might want to try a different educational approach than that offered in schools.

- Some parents may choose to Home Educate after having enjoyed educating their baby and toddler, and seeing how naturally children learn in a relaxed infomal environment. Home Education seeming like the natural extension of that way of learning.

There are many different reasons. Each family is unique and probably has their own mix of reasons, I have just given some examples.

The important thing is that, if you hadn't realised before that Home Education was an option, or maybe you are researching Home Education because of your child's problems at school, or you could even have been pushed into Home Education by being pushed out of the school system. It helps if you know that people just *do* this - they just Home Educate because it is what they want to do.

Whatever your reasons may be for considering Home Education, you don't need some kind of 'valid excuse' before it's OK to take the decision to Home Educate your child.

I know this doesn't look pretty, but I am trying it out to see whether it is useable. If you would rather access the book shop in its own web page: click here.

Taking this further, I think this is a wider issue: some of our schools are just not very nice places to be. Break and Lunch times are unsupervised, the toilets are no-go areas, it is considered normal for children to be disruptive in class... and there is worse. It can be a very aggressive environment and some children just don't know how to cope there. If you don't live in a good area, your local school could be an even worse place to be.

Yes there is bullying in our schools but, for some children, the school environment itself can be the problem.

So back to bullying, children should not have to put up with bullying and it should be taken more seriously. I've seen bullying in adult life, it can still be part of how we interact as adults, particularly in the workplace, and I think it is so sad. We are educating our children that a bullying culture is OK.

Schools in the UK are supposed to have a bullying policy. This hasn't helped. Now, because the school has a bullying policy, they believe that bullying no longer happens in their school. Quite often the school's reaction to being told about an incidence of bullying, isn't helpful, and can even do more harm.

Some children become afraid of school, because of the bullying, or because of the awful environment. This tends to be called "School Phobia", even though you could argue that this trivialises the problem - most of these children have good reason to be afraid. The official line is that these children should be forced back into school. I believe that children deserve to be understood better than that.

Parents take their children our of school and Home Educate because school has become a place where the child is not happy, where they don't feel safe, and where they are the target of bullies. Children will learn better when they aren't afraid.

There is a quote from John Holt...
" ...most children in school are scared most of the time, many of them very scared. Like good soldiers they control their fears, live with them, and adjust themselves to them. But the trouble is, and here is a vital difference between school and war, that the adjustments children make to their fears are almost always wholly bad, destructive of their intelligence and capacity. The scared fighter may be the best fighter, but the scared learner is always a poor learner."

There are a large number of families who begin Home Educating children with Special Educational Needs because the child's needs are not being met in school. More soon...

Or visit www.he-special.org.uk