The former teachers who homeschool their neurodivergent kids
With an insight into how it works in mainstream state schools, some former teachers are opting to home-educate their neurodivergent children. Here's what they say about it.
Since my son came out of school in May, I’ve had hundreds of private online conversations with other parents who’ve decided to home-educate their neurodivergent child, or children.
Perhaps their child has burnt out. Developed mental health issues. They might have spent months or years trying to encourage them into school only to then ask themselves: what are we doing this for? Or, rather, who?
Homeschooling is not the easy path. Far from it. It requires a huge amount of planning, logistics, creativity, innovation and patience. Especially if you have other children still attending school. It can also be expensive.
But for some of us, it feels like the only option. There comes a point when the child’s mental and physical wellbeing is deteriorating and it feels cruel to send them into an environment that exacerbates this.
So, there are those of us whose children have given school a good go but, for various reasons, it hasn’t worked out. And then, there are the parents who are choosing to home-educate their children from the get-go.
I was chatting with one woman whose child has never been to school and I asked her what helped her to make this decision. It felt so brave to shun the system in this way, rather than assuming school is the best place for children.
She told me she’d worked in education for years and what she saw was mostly behavioural management, box-ticking, stress and testing. She said she worked alongside many burnt-out and disillusioned teachers.
So, when she had her own children, she decided to educate them at home. She wanted her children to stay curious and to trust that they could learn in their own unique ways. Decision made: no nursery; no school.
As I spoke to more home-educating parents, mostly those with neurodivergent children, I started to see a pattern: many of them had worked in education. In fact, more of them had worked in education than not.
This felt interesting. Why are so many teachers opting to take their neurodivergent kids out of school?
I asked if some of them would share their reasons for pulling their neurodivergent children out of school or never sending them in the first place. Here’s what they said…
The former teachers who home-educate their children
Martha (@audhdacious.humans)
‘I became a mainstream school teacher in 2003 and taught at a junior school for 16 years before moving to a progressive start-up school, where I continued to teach for another three years.
I finally left the ‘teaching’ profession in 2022. However, I’m still the unschooling home educator of my child and a learning facilitator at our weekly home education group ‘Make and Create Club’.
During my 16 years of teaching in mainstream, I fell out of love with the education system and felt incredibly institutionalised and stifled by its reforms.
Having a child of my own and observing the way he naturally learnt from his environment made me follow a call to action and take the leap to a more progressive model of schooling.
I knew the mainstream model was broken and I wanted to be part of a positive change for future generations.
My son attended the school I taught at and during the two years that he was there, we realised - through the help of his key teacher at the time, who is my lovely friend and now business partner, Jenni - that he had undiagnosed neurodivergent needs that the school structure was unable to support.
We both ended up in burnout and needed to step away to support our mental health and explore other ways to live and learn.
We have been home educating for nearly two and a half years now and through necessity, we have embraced an unschooling approach that fits our child’s needs and our family philosophy.
This has taken a lot of deschooling on my part and we now all feel much more able to comfortably lean into the different seasons and how they affect our moods and movements.
Stepping away from formal schooling has been a roller-coaster of a ride, on one hand embracing the freedom that it brings, while feeling like you’re leaving society as a whole, especially when dealing with burnout and supporting your child’s ever-changing needs.
Running Make and Create Club has been a lifeline for us, to find our authentic community, make new friends and continue my passion for supporting children’s individual needs.
At this point, it’s looking like we will home-educate indefinitely. I was there to witness my child’s struggles as I was a teacher at his school.
I have yet to stumble upon any school provision that suits my son’s individual needs and he has no current interest in going back to school.
If he changes his mind at any point then we will support him and look for suitable provision but we won’t be pushing this agenda.’
Janey*
‘I became a teacher in 2012. I then left in 2018, after I had my first child, as I got funding to do a PhD (in Education Policy and Inequality).
I absolutely loved teaching in schools. I love working with teenagers (I was a secondary school teacher).
I loved planning the lessons, teaching the lessons and marking students' work.
Interestingly, the planning and marking are the parts that currently seem to be being streamlined, via standardised curriculums (i.e., lesson plans).
I'm not sure how I would find it now, because I think things have changed a lot over the time that I have been away, particularly in the more subordinated/ challenging schools, which is where I worked.
I decided to home-educate at the start of this year because my child was starting to refuse to go into school and I had the capacity to do so, while being on maternity leave with my youngest child.
The school (read: school leaders) seemed much more concerned with making sure they had covered their backs and done everything that they would be checked up on than actually doing to things that needed to be done.
I was concerned that being in school seemed to be causing her so much stress and it was having a huge effect on the family dynamic outside of the school day. I was also concerned about the influence of her peers on her.
I can honestly say that this is one of the best decisions we have made. It's been life changing. The stress of our family unit has been reduced so dramatically. My child is coming back to life again.
I feel filled with relief and vindicated, knowing that it is the schooling system that is the problem, not my child. She is ready to learn things again and is starting to be confident to have new experiences.
I'm excited to see where it goes and how the home education path develops.
I don't know if I will home educate indefinitely. It depends on what schools are available and what she wants to do. And how things pan out financially.
Another point to add, on why we decided to home educate: we were concerned that we would ultimately be fined as a result of her non-attendance. There didn't seem to be any sort of middle ground, like flexi-schooling or reduced hours.’
Kate (@nurturedneurokids on Instagram)
‘I taught for 15 years in primary schools across London and I loved it, when I started. There was so much more time to spend with the children. I’d hear them read every week and teachers had more freedom to teach how they wanted to.
There were no phonics checks, planning was done on paper and marking was minimal - and actually, we didn't do too much to correct the work of emerging learners. They had lots of time outside, cookery every week.
It was hard work but I loved the time with the children and found it fun.
Over time, it all changed. Hours spent on planning. Set books we had to use for lessons - even though the plot/language in them was shockingly bad. Schemes for maths, even English by the end. Zero creativity.
I spent every spare minute marking, filling in paper work, writing reports, planning for all the needs in my classroom, meetings with parents, observations, INSETs, management responsibilities, which I was given no time for.
Other teachers were as drained and unhappy as I was. Morale was at an all-time low, with colleagues often in tears, talking about what other jobs they could do, how they had no work-life balance.
The worst thing was that I couldn't support the children in my class in the way I wanted to.
So, I left when I was pregnant with my son. I was miserable, stressed and disillusioned by the system at that point.
I decided to home-educate my son because I knew that a mainstream school environment in this country would not be right for him. Even if he wasn't autistic, I like to think I would have made the same decision.
Before committing to home-educating, I did speak to two local schools about accommodations - including flexi-schooling - but I was met with lots of ‘no’s early on.
I come to parenting and education with a different perspective, having studied Psychology and Education at University (with the view to becoming an Educational Psychologist) and I coached autistic children from when I was 19.
As a teacher, I used to tutor neurodivergent children, too, including those who were autistic and dyslexic, and I could see what school was doing to their self-esteem. I saw it in the classroom as well.
I knew that my son's way of thinking and learning would never fit into the very narrow view of learning that schools deliver and that there would be no support for him.
And because of his profile, I knew that he wouldn't qualify for an EHCP and that specialist provision schools would not be right either. He is, like many other children, an ‘in-between’ child.
Home education is great for meeting the needs of an individual child, in so many respects. We don't follow the curriculum and learning is led by my son's interests and passions. So it’s a self-directed, low-demands approach to education.
I have no idea whether I will be home-educating indefinitely, and like I say to the families I coach: no decision is forever. Make the decision that is right for your child now.
If, in a year or two, things change, you can reassess and decide what the right learning environment for your child will be moving forwards.
My son may well continue to learn best through home education, but that is a total unknown.
Neurodivergent brains - autism especially - are so dynamic and evolve in ways we cannot predict and so I think the best we can do is get clear on what is right for our child/children now.
For us, home education is brilliant and totally allowing my son to thrive.’
Danielle*
‘I became a teacher 20 years ago and I loved my time in the classroom. What I loved most was the relationship I had with the children. The most important thing to me was that the children were happy to come into my class every day.
In Ireland, primary schools are quite good. I feel my child certainly thrived in the nurturing environment of primary school. But then secondary school was like bootcamp. It was very regimented and the school was too big.
My daughter’s mental health rapidly deteriorated when she started secondary school, almost three years ago, and it was just too difficult to manage working full time and trying to support her to try and attend school.
She had started out well. And then, when it got hard for her, we reduced the amount of subjects she was studying; she was allowed to choose five. But the pressure was still immense. She has OCD and it is very debilitating.
In time, it felt like we had no choice but to homeschool. The school environment caused her so much distress. Secondary schools are definitely not equipped to deal with SEN (special educational needs). We need alternative schools.
She misses the social side of it, as she loves her friends. And she is bright and capable, so there weren’t issues with the academic side of things. But the OCD had gotten so bad that just getting out of the house for a walk felt like a win.
I find myself in the vulnerable position of having no income and a partner who hasn’t been true to his word and resents me being at home and doesn’t respect me.
Yet, there is no other option when it comes to caring for my daughter and I will do everything in my power to make sure that her life is worth living.
I’m grieving for the life that she should have, the one I thought she should have, the one I want her to have and the one she so badly wants to have. We live one day at a time. Our world has become smaller. We live in hope.
We need more options for our neurodivergent teens and we need to stop referring to autism classes as ‘units’. My daughter won’t go to one, as she is very high functioning and the worst thing you can be seen as, as a teenager, is ‘different’.’
Jenni (@audhdacious.humans)
‘I qualified as a Montessori teacher in 2009, having worked with children in different capacities since the age of 15.
I left my last teaching role in December 2022 and now spend my days unschooling my two daughters and running a home-ed provision for ND (neurodivergent) children.
My experience is likely slightly different as I haven't ever taught in a mainstream classroom. I just knew that wasn't for me (likely due to my own experiences in school) which is why I've always been drawn to alternative pedagogies.
My first and sustained love is working with children, following their lead, being a trusted person, hopefully igniting some wonder and curiosity and always being a safe space for them. Sadly, even the independent alternative school I taught at struggled to find an acceptable balance between what the children needed and what the cultural expectations demanded.
I would advocate for the children, based on my knowledge and experience, but the OFSTED requirements, together with parental fear of academic comparison to other children in mainstream schools essentially undermined the ethos of what we were trying to do. Give children more time to play, because when they are given time to play, they learn.
I became frustrated with trying to fight a system that was clearly not interested in prioritising social and emotional wellbeing, so after entering burnout and with my two daughters not managing, we left. That was in December 2022.
We have always made mental health a priority. Children who are anxious and stressed can't learn. So, my children were masking their way through the day and melting down at home, my youngest daughter to the point where she would assume the personality of a dog to keep her safe and get through the day.
I taught at the school they attended, I loved their key teachers and I was on the staff team, so influenced the type of environment created for them. Unfortunately the social environment, sensory overwhelm, and their individual needs being unmet meant we had to go.
My children have needed time and space to recover from burnout, existing in systems and expectations that aren't designed for their neurotype. For a long time they watched screens, played games, learnt to regulate their bodies and chill out.
Then slowly they've become interested in doing things. They attend the home-ed group I run, see friends, pursue topics that light them up, get involved in projects they enjoy and none of it is because they've been told to.
My youngest helps me run a Minecraft education club once a week, as my technical expert. Her passion is Minecraft and she now shares this with other children who want to know more.
Learning happens in everyday moments and when children are given time and space to explore. It's not easy but it's working for us.
I'm not sure what the future holds, but I can't currently see any school that would meet the needs of one of my daughters. I'm also not sure whether I'm prepared to put myself through the fight of trying to get an EHCP/EOTAS package but that may be in my future at some point. We'll see.’
*Some names have been changed.