Parents decide to home-educate for a variety of reasons. For some, they worry about the standard of education in Irish schools.
“With more than 30 children in the majority of classes in Ireland, how much ‘learning’ can actually happen?” asks Paula, who has always home-educated her three children (aged 13, 10 and eight).
Other parents decide they don’t want to send their children to a school with a Catholic ethos – and have no other choices in their localities.
“We’re atheists,” Jenny, another homeschooling mother, tells me. “And I didn’t want them going to a school and being fed all this nonsense about a god that we believe doesn’t exist. Then, they’d have to come home and un-learn it. It didn’t seem fair on either them or the school.”
Her solution, when the local Educate Together school had no place for her eldest daughter, was to home-educate.
Some parents remove their children from school when things aren’t going well. That’s what Sophie did. Her girls are both in the top 5% of gifted learners and the school neither knew – nor wanted to learn – how to facilitate their intelligence.
“My daughters were not receiving an adequate education and the school was refusing to work with me. In fact, they were putting obstacles in my way. When my seven-year-old told me she wanted to die because of the stress at school, I knew it was time to act,” she told me.
For other families, a less-structured approach to learning suits their family style better than the strict rigours of the average Irish classroom.
All these reasons – and more – are valid and acceptable ones to homeschool.