If primary schools were like this...

We home educate because we're smart-arsed, up-ourselves smug bastards.

Yeah. We provide our kids with more challenging experiences of the world than any school can match. We offer the little grits more autonomy and greater creativity than institutions allow, and we dump our juniors in a wider range of contexts with a wider society of people than they're likely to encounter huddled in a corner of the school playground.

So there. I never did aim to please.

But we chose this life not only because we are smug bastards. We looked around at the educational service offered by the state and thought Nah. Then we assessed the costs of private, rolled our eyes, and said, Let's have an adventure.

The state made the choice easier for us. Look at the last few years. Governments approached primary education by steadily taking away the person and replacing it with the performance. They took control over teachers, encouraged rote learning, linked child performance to school income, and hammered parents about the importance of exams. For 7-year olds.

That didn't seem a great service. Especially for the ages 5-11, when kids want to run about getting mucky and messy, and especially when we considered the alternative we could offer: skipping off into the countryside with a pack of other home ed kids, learning about wool by grabbing hold of a sheep.

Well, that's what we do today. With the Warriner School Farm Trust in Oxfordshire.

This is a place which starts to look like Grit's vision for primary schools. In that vision, kids don't wear uniform, we choose our topics, the classes are mixed-age and small, the rooms are cosy, the parents can join in, the leader's called Bev, and the premises are open but the day's sessions don't start until 10am.

The activities today are wool watching, sheep stroking, farm walking; then dyeing, spinning, and felt making. Practical, hands-on activities led by someone who never mentions key stages or worksheets. They simply have experience of their craft, know what they're talking about, and are communicating their ideas with passion, energy, and involvement.

We parents can bring into this day's theme anything from our strange and wide assortments of knowledges: science, maths, art, chemistry, the history of Anglo-Saxon sheep farming.

Wouldn't kids be happier, their learning more enjoyable, their experience of the world more satisfying, if all primary schools could offer more of this?
















If all primary schools came closer to Grit's vision - and let's imagine that next week we signed up for the day of butterfly art, led jointly by a butterfly expert and local artist - then we might never have home educated, and that's the truth.

We'd still be smart-arsed, up-ourselves smug bastards though.