Education Otherwise (EO) is a registered charity[1] operating UK wide, which aims to provide support and information for families whose children are being educated outside school. Education Otherwise is the foremost Charity across the UK that promotes and supports the right of a parent or guardian to home educate their child should they wish to do so. EO is in fact the largest home education charity in the United Kingdom.[2] The organisation derived its name from section 36 of the (then current) Education Act 1944, which stated that parents are responsible for the education of their children, "either by regular attendance at school or otherwise."[3] This clause has been retained in subsequent Education Acts, and remains a clear acceptance of the parity and validity afforded an education otherwise than by schooling.
In 1972, Royston Lambert, head of Dartington Hall School, asked Dick Kitto, who had been working there since 1955, to set up a project in conjunction with Northcliffe School to provide education for a group of non-academic students who would have to take another year in school due to the pending raising of the school leaving age.[4] Kitto established a free school or democratic school model for the running of the project and was impressed by the qualities of the students even though they had effectively unschooled themselves within the school system, where they were perceived as trouble makers.[5]
Original EO logo
Kitto's school caught the attention of Stan Windass, who had been working for a children's rights centre in London, through which he had become aware of several families who were educating their own children.
The updated and current logo, as of 2020.
Kitto was familiar with ideas about unschooled education through reading John Holt and Joy Baker's Children in Chancery (Hutchinson, 1964. now out of print), together with his experiences at the Northcliffe School project. He and Windass were able to contact several families who were educating otherwise and arranged an informal network and occasional meetings, in 1975 - 1976 which is when Education Otherwise began.[6]
On February 3rd 1977, Granada Television broadcast a programme called "Opting Out" in their lunchtime series Parents Day which featured three Education Otherwise families. This resulted in around 200 enquiries and expanded the membership to over 50. In September 1976 the group was established on a more formal basis. In 1977, Kitto presented a BBC TVOpen Door programme about the ideas behind the organisation. This resulted in over 2,000 enquiries and increased the membership to around 250.[7][8]
Kitto's ethos could be summarised as: "...we have to ensure that education is not monolithic, centralized and directed from above but allows all sorts of different things to happen and all sorts of initiatives to be taken by pupils, children, parents and education authorities."[9]
The original logo (based on a UK traffic sign) was intended to represent a child breaking out of the confines of school, and pointing toward a different way. In recent years the logo has been the subject of criticism, as it is viewed as divisive and the meaning misconstrued as a child "goose stepping". A modernisation and rebranding in 2020 has resulted in a new logo being designed through a design competition, which has a more modern and acceptable appearance.[10]
Parent's Charter
In 1991, the government introduced a Parent's Charter (subtitled: "You and Your Child's Education"), which promised parents reports about their children and their schools. In 1994, a revised version of the Parent's Charter (subtitled: Our Children's Education) was issued. Page 9 included the sentence: "You have a duty to make sure that your child goes to school until he or she is 16." Education Otherwise members were concerned that this misinformation should be corrected as it was being delivered to every household.[11]
Education Otherwise appointed solicitor Peter Liell, who sent "Letters Before Action" notices to the Department for Education and to the Welsh Office. A reply by Eric Forth (9 July 1994) for the DfE claimed that the Parent's Charter could not be taken as a definitive guide to the law - the Charter "cannot take in every exception or reflect all points of detail". The department stated that there were no plans to issue a corrigendum. The Welsh Office response was a confirmation that the Charter for Parents in Wales had been revised and would reflect the fact that not all children were educated in schools.
As English and Welsh education law are identical, there were no grounds for the variation in the responses of the two bodies. The solicitor notified the DfE that he had been instructed to prepare an application for leave to apply for judicial review of the decision as stated in Forth's letter. This threat caused an immediate response from the department that they "would want to find a different - in your eyes more satisfactory - wording for any further editions". The solicitor responded seeking confirmation, by 31 August 1994, that a future edition would include reference to the fact that children do not have to go to school. Forth once again responded accepting the need for a revised text: "I am, however, happy to confirm, in the light of your client's concerns, our intention that any future edition of the Parent's Charter in England will include a reference, be it explicit or implicit, to a parent's lawful right to ensure that his child is suitably educated otherwise than at school."
It was felt that this was as far as Education Otherwise could go with the matter and the application for judicial review was withdrawn. The whole process had cost Education Otherwise almost £4,000 but had generated a lot of publicity and raised awareness of the issue as many members had raised their concerns with their own MP.
↑ A tribute to Dick Kitto, Education Otherwise Newsletter (Number 130), October 1999 - citing obituaries from the Daily Telegraph and The Guardian newspapers.
Unschooling is a belief in self-driven informal learning characterized by Individualized curriculum.
The Foundling Hospital was a children's home in London, England, founded in 1739 by the philanthropic sea captain Thomas Coram. It was established for the "education and maintenance of exposed and deserted young children." The word "hospital" was used in a more general sense than it is in the 21st century, simply indicating the institution's "hospitality" to those less fortunate. Nevertheless, one of the top priorities of the committee at the Foundling Hospital was children's health, as they combated smallpox, fevers, consumption, dysentery and even infections from everyday activities like teething that drove up mortality rates and risked epidemics. With their energies focused on maintaining a disinfected environment, providing simple clothing and fare, the committee paid less attention to and spent less on developing children's education. As a result, financial problems would hound the institution for years to come, despite the growing "fashionableness" of charities like the hospital.
Home education in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is often termed "elective home education" ("EHE") to signify the independent nature of practice from state provisions such as education for children with ill-health provided by the local authority in the family home. EHE is a collective term used in the UK to describe education provided other than through the schooling system. Parents have a duty to ensure their children are educated but the education legislation in England and Wales does not differentiate between school attendance or education otherwise than at school. Scots education legislation on the other hand differentiates between public (state) school provision and education "by other means", which includes both private schooling and home education. The numbers of families retaining direct responsibility for the education of their children has steadily increased since the late 1970s. This increase has coincided with the formation of support groups such as Education Otherwise. Home education may involve an informal style of education described as unschooling, informal learning, natural or autonomous learning. Others prefer to retain a structured school at home approach sometimes referred to as homeschooling although the terms are often interchanged.
John Caldwell Holt was an American author and educator, a proponent of homeschooling, and a pioneer in youth rights theory.
This article provides an overview of education in Wales from early childhood to university and adult skills. Largely state-funded and freely accessible at a primary and secondary level, education is compulsory for children in Wales between ages 5-16 years old. It differs to some extent in structure and content to other parts of the United Kingdom, in the later case particularly in relation to the teaching of the Welsh language.
Alternative education encompasses educational philosophy differing from mainstream pedagogy and evidence-based education. Such alternative learning environments may be found within state, charter, and independent schools as well as home-based learning environments. Many educational alternatives emphasize small class sizes, close relationships between students and teachers and a sense of community.
The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) is a British child protection charity founded as the Liverpool Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (LSPCC) by Thomas Agnew on 19 April 1883. The NSPCC lobbies the government on issues relating to child welfare, and creates child abuse public awareness campaigns. Since the 1980s, the charity has had statutory powers allowing it to apply for help on behalf of children at risk. In the 1990s, the charity's publication, Satanic Indicators, fueled panic in social workers who went and accused parents and removed children from homes when they should not have. It operates a help line. The Paddington Bear character has partnered with the charity to raise funds for the charity. NSPCC operates telephone helplines.
The Save the Children Fund, commonly known as Save the Children, is an international non-governmental organization. It was founded in the UK in 1919, the goal being to improve the lives of children worldwide.
Deschooling is a term invented by Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich. Today, the word is mainly used by homeschoolers, especially unschoolers, to refer to the transition process that children and parents go through when they leave the school system in order to start homeschooling. The process is a crucial basis for homeschooling to work. It involves children gradually transitioning away from their schoolday routine and institutional mentality, redeveloping the ability to learn via self-determination, and discovering what they want to learn in their first homeschool days.
A foundling hospital was originally an institution for the reception of foundlings, i.e., children who had been abandoned or exposed, and left for the public to find and save. A foundling hospital was not necessarily a medical hospital, but more commonly a children's home, offering shelter and education to foundlings.
The Welsh Not was a token used by teachers at some schools in Wales in the 19th century and early 20th century to discourage children from speaking Welsh at school, by marking out those who were heard speaking the language. Accounts suggest that its form and the nature of its use could vary from place to place, but the most common form was a piece of wood suspended on a string that was put around the child's neck. Terms used historically include Welsh not, Welsh note, Welsh lump, Welsh stick, cwstom, Welsh Mark, and Welsh Ticket.
The Elementary Education Act 1870, commonly known as Forster's Education Act, set the framework for schooling of all children between the ages of 5 and 12 in England and Wales. It established local education authorities with defined powers, authorized public money to improve existing schools, and tried to frame conditions attached to this aid so as to earn the goodwill of managers. It has long been seen as a milestone in educational development, but recent commentators have stressed that it brought neither free nor compulsory education, and its importance has thus tended to be diminished rather than increased.
Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, sometimes termed Take Your Child to Work Day, is a national day that gives children in the United States a glimpse into the working world. Developed by the Take Our Daughters And Sons To Work Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization, the day revolves around parents taking their children to work to expose students to future job possibilities and the value of education. It is the successor to Take Our Daughters to Work Day, which was expanded to include boys in 2003. In the U.S., it occurs on the fourth Thursday in April every year.
Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) was a department of the UK government, between 2007 and 2010, responsible for issues affecting people in England up to the age of 19, including child protection and education. DCSF was replaced by the Department for Education after the change of government following the 2010 General Election.
The Citizens Foundation (TCF) is a non-profit organization, and one of the largest privately owned networks of low-cost formal schools in Pakistan. The foundation operates a network of 1,833 school units, educating 280,000 students through over 13,000 teachers and principals, and over 17,400 employees. Approximately 94% of the foundation's expenditure is allocated to the Education program. In addition, TCF also conducts a literacy and numeracy skill development program in communities linked to its schools which has taught reading and writing to over 160,000 adults.
Educate Together is an educational charity in Ireland which is the patron body to "equality-based, co-educational, child centred, and democratically run" schools. It was founded in 1984 to act as the patron body for the new multidenominational schools that opened after the establishment of the Dalkey School Project. As of 2024, Educate Together is the patron of 96 national schools in Ireland. In 2014 three Educate Together Second Level Schools opened in Dublin 15, Drogheda and Lucan along with the first Educate Together school outside Ireland, in Bristol in the United Kingdom. In joint patronage with Kildare and Wicklow ETB, Educate Together opened another second-level school, Celbridge Community School, in 2015.
Fairhaven School was founded in 1998 in Upper Marlboro, Maryland. It is one of over 30 schools based on the Sudbury Model. The model has two basic tenets: educational freedom and democratic governance. It is a private school, attended by children from the ages of 5 to 19. The school was founded by Mark and Kim McCaig after learning about Sudbury Valley School in Framingham, Massachusetts.
A charter school is a school that receives government funding but operates independently of the established state school system in which it is located. It is independent in the sense that it operates according to the basic principle of autonomy for accountability, that it is freed from the rules but accountable for results.
Endrew F. v. Douglas County School Dist. RE–1, 580 U.S. ___ (2017), was a United States Supreme Court case that held that the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act ("IDEA"), required schools to provide students an education that is "reasonably calculated to enable a child to make progress appropriate in light of the child’s circumstances." In a unanimous opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court vacated the judgment of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit.
The Reports on the Education of the Lower Orders were published between 1816 and 1819 by a select committee of the House of Commons under the chairmanship of Henry Brougham. The committee made only the second ever government inquiry into education, as it comprehensively investigated the provision of education for poor working class children in Great Britain during the early 19th century. The reports exposed the inadequate provision of schooling and the maladministration of charitable funds given for educating the poor. It was eventually used to justify the first state intervention into English and Welsh education in 1833 when the Treasury started to help fund the badly needed construction of new school-houses through an annual grant. It also started a parliamentary commission of inquiry into improving charitable foundations which eventually led to formation of present-day charities commission.
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