Using the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey to Examine the Prevalence and Characteristics of Families Who Home Educate in the UK

This paper has two aims, first to examine the feasibility of using an omnibus survey to estimate the prevalence and characteristics of families who home educate and secondly to provide an empirical contribution to recent research on home education in the UK. Because there is no statutory requirement for families who home educate to register with the Local Authority, there are no nationally representative data on the prevalence and characteristics of the home educating population in this country. Therefore gathering data from a fully randomised sample of home educating families would be prohibitively expensive. In this study we used a national omnibus survey to collect data on the homeschooling experiences of over 6000 households from across the UK, of whom 52 were found to have engaged in homeschooling. Our findings estimate that around 1% of families with dependent children have home educated either on a full or part-time basis. Provision of home education was often episodic and reflects the diversity of the home educating population. While the findings presented here largely confirm previous work on home education in the UK, other work tends to be based largely in the home educating community and often lacks a comparison with the general population. Using an omnibus survey like the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey enables researchers to gather data from a nationally representative sample of a small and diverse social group.