Bullied. What's the worst that happens next?

I'm listening to a lot of terrifying stories this week on the radio, so I guess we're designated a mental health / kids / bullying awareness week?

Anyway, I'm not hearing, as any part of a strategic approach, the words Home Education.

Maybe I'm listening to the wrong channels. Or maybe I'm deeply out of touch with humans on Planet Earth. No-one here speaks my language. My language is mostly, I'll follow my own impulse, thank you very much. And I thought lots of people spoke that.

Hmm. Home education, then.

Now I've never got the idea I hear repeated again and again - that if you send a child into a miserable place, day after grinding day - that the brutality and unhappiness they meet will equip a child for adult life. It's the idea that a brusied and damaged child will be able to handle anything, because they've already been beaten up.

It doesn't sound like a very convincing argument. Maybe we should try institutionalising a different approach? One where we don't harm kids and, um, we don't go after each other in the workplace either. We work together like reasonable and respectful people, beginning to end, kid to adulthood.

But I can only tell you this story. That one day in our home ed play group, a child from school came to visit everyone; his mother was considering withdrawing him from school, where he was being bullied to hell and back.

Maybe she'd already moved schools, or tried to fix the system, I don't know. But the child sat on the swings and nothing bad happened. Except maybe some feral home ed kids came up and asked whether he wanted to build a space rocket, that sort of thing.

Then he went home happy, and his mother sent in the deregistration letter and he became one of us - the ones people like to call the invisible children, unseen and unschooled - and maybe he gained a couple of IGCSEs, with a full circle of strange friends, and a place at university, or a job, or setting up his own business. Something terrible like that. Because it's probably the worst that can happen, right?

Well, I know you didn't ask for it, but you read this far, so my advice is, find your local group, meet them, and talk to them.

Yes, you will meet the feral, the bonkers and the strange. And the awkward and the shy and the warm and the funny and the erudite and the clever. You'll meet people you still call friends, 15 years on, and you'll meet people you never want to see again. A bit like life. But bullying? I've only ever met that in schools.