Education starts – and finishes – in the home for a growing number of youngsters. Reporter Alastair Beach talks to one family about their reasons for opting out of the classroom.

When Jane Guttridge’s son started getting bullied at his primary school, she knew it was time to get him out.

Up until then she had been racked with doubts about whether Ciaran, now 12, was in the right place – the large class sizes, the lacklustre teachers and the piles of homework were a pressing concern – but it was the bullying which convinced her something had to give.

And according to the 45-year-old, from Highway Road in Maidenhead, it was the best thing she could ever have done. “Safety was my main concern,” said Jane. “Also, I think he got too much homework. It was all geared to exams.

“Some schools are quite brutal I think. Especially as a boy, you’ve got to be quite tough and I was not prepared to risk Ciaran being brutalised. I need my children’s safety guaranteed and it cannot be at school. I don’t think children are physically safe at most schools. As a child, you are not protected the same way you are as an adult.”

After taking Ciaran out of his primary school, Jane and her financial analyst husband Tim, 43, moved down to Brighton and enrolled him with a Buddhist teaching organisation.

At the age of 11 it was time for him to move on again – but once more, Jane was not happy with the options. “We went to look at the local secondary school, but I was horrified. There were pupils smoking and blowing it in our faces as we went in. I thought, ‘I don’t want my child going here’.”

So instead of sending Ciaran to a school he did not feel happy with, Jane and Tim decided to move to Maidenhead and join the swelling ranks of Britain’s so-called ‘home educators’.

Along with his eight-year-old sister Georgia, who has been educated from home since the age of five, Ciaran now spends three days a week at the Heroes centre in Wargrave – a pay-as-you-go initiative where home educating parents fork out for individual lessons which are cherry-picked from a monthly schedule.

For the rest of the time they take their lessons at home. Jane said: “With home education, it’s up to the individual. They are in charge of their own learning. When we go to the library on Mondays, I don’t say, ‘right, we’re doing biology’. I let them decide what they are interested in.”

As if to vindicate his mother’s cast-iron convictions about home education, Ciaran is now studying GCSE maths, history and biology at Heroes and will be in a position to take his exams next year.

According to Ann Newstead, spokesman for the learning charity Education Otherwise, Jane’s sentiments are shared by an estimated 55,000 other families across the UK who chose to home educate.

She said: “There were families pioneering home education back in the 1970s in the days when it was seen as something extreme and for which you had to be a hippy. It tends to be more mainstream now.

“There has been a steady rise in the numbers of people doing it year on year. There are a variety of reasons. There is increasing dissatisfaction with the current school system where children are not having their needs met.

“There is also a perception that children aren’t safe, and some parents are unhappy with over testing.”

Dawn Dingwall, a mother-of-two from Holyport who runs the Heroes initiative, said that contrary to what a lot of critics would assume, she had always found that home-educated children were more socially adept than those who attended state school.

She added: “I think it is better in the way youngsters can learn what they are interested in, rather than having to take 12 GCSEs they do not like and being told how to pass them. Home education is a lot broader.”

And according to Jane, she would never dream of sending her two children back to state schools. “With all the horror stories you hear from people, they really do not want to go. If they annoy me then I’ll even threaten to send them there.”