The purpose of this study into home education was to explore the aims and practices of home-educators across the United Kingdom, using a combination of methods. These included the dissemination of a questionnaire survey, interviews with home-educating families and assessments of home-educated children. The results were interesting, surprising and, at times, counterintuitive.

It might be expected that most of those who take on the task of home-educating their child are trained teachers or tend to be well-educated, middle class professionals. In fact the Durham study has shown that while one home-educating parent in four was a trained school teacher, three out of four were not trained to teach; preliminary results also revealed that just one parent in ten were professionals whilst one in six parents worked in semi-and non-skilled occupations. Just under half of the parent sample had not continued in formal education beyond school.

Comparing assessment results from the home-educated four year-olds with the classifications of parental social class, it was found that the average score of children from professional families was considerably inferior to that attained by children at the lower end of the social class scale.

It is possible that the parents at the lower end of the social scale, conscious of possible LEA intervention, were eager for their children to perform on a par with expected norms, or maybe parents simply wanted their children to have a 'better' education than they did. In contrast, professional parents may have felt secure in the belief that their children would learn at their own pace.

Whatever reasons fueled the initial step into home-education, families often, after starting to home-educate and becoming acquainted with other home-educators and related literature, adopted a more philosophical approach to education generally, often believing that the present education system needed reform.

Within families, age-norm related reading skills were not necessarily a priority At the extremes, some children read exceptionally early, while others were late readers. The data indicated that more home-educated children fell within these brackets than the norm. Non-reading seven to 11-year-olds tended to be literary minded, enjoying literature despite not yet reading for themselves. By comparing the reading attainment scores with preliminary data from the social and psychological assessments, it was observed that such children were not unduly affected by their late reading.

Notably, children from religious backgrounds often read the earliest: perhaps the result of exposure to texts containing minimal illustration.

Preliminary analysis of the reading assessments for the six, eight and ten-year-olds indicated that when contrasted with national attainment levels, the home-educated children demonstrated a high standard of literacy.

A cohort of four-year-olds were assessed using a simple maths and English based appraisal at the start and end of a ten month period. The results of the initial assessment indicated that two out of three of the home-educated children scored over 75% on the tests. Nationally the figure for four-year-old children attending school and achieving in excess of 75% was just one in 20. At the end of the period the home-educated youngsters had retained the advantage over their school counterparts. However, the amount by which their learning had increased was minimal in relation to that of their school peers.

One possible reason for this may be that the home-educated four-year-olds sample may have been accumulating knowledge on a gentle incline since birth with no foreseen alteration to that pattern of learning. With the knowledge that their children would soon be in school, it is possible that the 'school' parents may have chosen to leave aspects of their children's learning until then. Therefore, when those children began school they made a considerable leap in learning during those same ten months.

Overall, home-educated children demonstrated high levels of ability and good social skills, apparently benefiting from a curriculum tailored to their individual needs and from the attention given to them by their families. It is possible that the self-motivation so evident in many of the children stemmed from greater parental participation in their learning process, a more flexible curriculum and an individualised educational programme that reflected their own interests.

What has come to light during the research is that many parents home-educate because they perceive it as the only accessible alternative to school. This was not to say however, that home was the best option any more than school was. Often it appeared to be a compromise. The preference, it appeared, would be for a third alternative, the 'Third Way in Education', whereby each child could adopt a flexible curriculum suited to his or her individual needs.