Does empirical evidence or ideology most influence homeschooling policy? It depends. Where empirical research and social experience abound, regulations seem less restrictive but where there is less data or experience policies seem more restrictive and ideologically driven. By comparing Europe and the United States with a look at South Africa,…

This article theorizes how crises and markets shape the responses of consumers and producer organizations. We advance four propositions: 1) if a crisis requires major revisions in operational rules, less-exit sensitive (i.e., monopoly-like) organizations shall revise to aggregate preferences of organized producers; and more-exit sensitive…

The theory and the practice of home-schooling has adherents and opponents, but the research data shows that this phenomenon has increased significantly over the past years in many countries and in different regions around the world. A growing interest from families willing to home-school their children is also observed in Bulgaria. This paper aims…

Home education is becoming an important issue for education policy in almost every country across Europe. It should also be of potential interest to the geography of education which, however, has remained the domain of research to educational studies. Consequently, no studies currently compare the individual aspects of home education by looking…

This paper examines the recent noticeable rise in parents and carers in England, deciding to home school their children. This rise has been attributed to schools advising parents with 'difficult' children, those with special educational needs or behavioural problems, that they have a choice; home educate or their child will be permanently…

This short report provides information on home education polices for primary and lower secondary level of education. It is structured in two parts: a comparative overview followed by national descriptions. The analysis shows that home education at the request of families is possible in a majority of educational systems. In many cases, parents have…

Schooling has been a site of harm for Indigenous people in settler colonial contexts, as a tool of dispossession, assimilation and separation from country and kin. However, schools have simultaneously been sites to work against this and build alternatives to settler colonial systems that nourish Indigenous futures. This article centers the…

Homeschooling is an alternative method of teaching where parents take the responsibility of education and teach their children at home. This method of education is increasing worldwide. Various authorities around the world have taken note of this trend and recognized homeschooling as an alternative method of education in their legislation. The…

Across OECD countries, education choice is proliferating as parents seek and governments permit choice both inside and outside public education systems. The movement of students out of the common public school, however, varies significantly across jurisdictions and sociodemographic characteristics such as race and class. This variation in…

Not all parents across England are happy about sending their children back to school, following the lifting of lockdown measures in March 2021. Our qualitative research, listening to accounts from eighty-five such families, finds that these concerns stem from COVID-related anxiety, most commonly linked to protecting members of the household at…

The number of children in poverty looks set to rise and the gap in outcomes between the most disadvantaged children and their peers is likely to widen. Many families will face challenges of poverty, ill health, bereavement and unemployment, with knock-on effects for children's health and wellbeing. There are fears that children will miss out on…

Research about home educators is often limited by a reliance on convenience-based samples. This paper explores an alternative source of information: written reports from inquiries held by the French public administration on every registered home-educated child. First, I depict how these inquiries are legally designed and how our research team has…

Educational policies have increasingly promoted parental involvement as a mechanism for improving student outcomes. Few jurisdictions have provided funding for this priority. In Ontario, Canada, the province's Parents Reaching Out Grants program allows parents to apply for funding for a parental involvement initiative that addresses a local…

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…

Homeschooling is legal and growing in many countries but is virtually forbidden by law in Germany and a few others. The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has reviewed and upheld this ban. Is home education a human right? How do these courts employ their jurisprudence of proportionality to find banning home education does not violate relevant…