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Home Education vs State School Outcomes (UK)

Home Education vs State School Outcomes (UK)

Last updated: 2026-08-25

Semantic Summary

The honest headline: the UK does not collect the data needed to say, nationally, whether home-educated children or state-school children "have better outcomes." Home-educated children sit outside the National Pupil Database (which tracks every state-school pupil's attainment at every key stage), UCAS does not report university entry by home-education status, and exam regulators do not publish private-candidate results separately from school-sitting candidates.[5] What evidence does exist is mostly small, volunteer-sampled and skewed towards engaged, confident home-educating families — which pushes results in a positive direction.[3]

What can be said with confidence: home education in England has grown sharply (175,900 children were home-educated at some point in 2024/25, up 15% in a year),[2] the most common reasons are mental health and dissatisfaction with school rather than a positive first choice,[1][3] and the children most likely to be home-educated are disproportionately older, SEND, or previously struggling in school — which makes any like-for-like comparison with the school population unfair from the start.[1][2] The strongest research finding is that home education is a workable alternative when a specific school placement has broken down, and that home-educated children with additional needs show no worse mental-health outcomes than school-registered peers.[3]

Basic Information

  • Type: Education policy / outcomes comparison (England, with UK context)
  • Status: Evidence base thin; policy changing (Children Not in School registers)
  • Key data source: DfE Elective Home Education (EHE) statistics, mandatory collection from autumn 2024
  • Known for: A structural data gap that makes direct comparison impossible

The short answer

There is no national UK dataset comparing the outcomes of home-educated and state-school children.[1][5] Claims online that home-educated children "outperform" or "underperform" national averages are typically drawing on US research, small qualitative UK studies, or overstating what the evidence shows.[5] The Education Committee concluded in 2021 that "without large-scale, objective data, our understanding of the educational attainment and outcomes achieved by EHE children remains largely anecdotal."[4]

Background

How many children are we talking about?

  • Census day autumn 2024: 111,700 children in elective home education (EHE) in England — 1.4% of the compulsory-school-age population.[1]
  • At any point in 2023/24: 153,300 children were EHE at some stage, up from an estimated 126,100 in 2022/23 and 116,300 in 2021/22.[1]
  • At any point in 2024/25: 175,900 — up 15% year on year.[2]
  • Autumn 2025 census day: 126,000 children were being home-educated, out of roughly nine million school-eligible children.[2]

The DfE notes the collection only became mandatory in autumn 2024 (100% of local authorities reporting), so part of the increase reflects better data quality rather than pure growth.[1]

Who home educates, and why

The "why" matters enormously for outcomes, because home education is not a random sample of families:

  • Reasons (autumn 2024): 'mental health' 14%, 'philosophical or preferential' 14%, 'lifestyle choice' 9%; more than 4 in 10 recorded as unknown/other/parent did not provide a reason.[1] By autumn 2025, 16% cited mental health and 12% philosophical or preferential reasons.[2]
  • Age: numbers rise with year group — 3% in year 1 up to 19% in year 11; over a third of EHE children were in years 10 or 11.[1]
  • SEND: 16% of EHE children had SEN support and 6% an EHCP, versus 14% and 5% in the school population.[1] The Children's Commissioner estimated in 2024 that a quarter of children leaving school for home education required SEND support.[2]
  • Movement: in 2023/24, 71,500 children started EHE while 21,500 returned to school.[1] Most children who start EHE previously attended an academy (49%) or LA-maintained school (25%).[1]
  • Pressure rather than choice: Ofsted's 2019 qualitative research found most families moving from mainstream secondary school to home education did so for SEN, medical, behavioural or wellbeing reasons, often as a last resort rather than a positive first choice.[3] Michelle Zaher of Educational Freedom: "Most of the families we support didn't set out to home educate. They were forced into it because their child was struggling, unsupported, or traumatised by their experience at school."[2]

This selection effect is the crux: comparing home-educated children against all state-school children compares a group that disproportionately includes struggling, older, SEND pupils with the general population — not a fair contest.[1][2][3]

Academic attainment

Primary age. The most-cited UK study is Paula Rothermel's 2002 Durham doctoral thesis (419 home-educating families, 196 child assessments): 64% of home-educated Reception-aged children scored above 75% on PIPS Baseline Assessments versus 5.1% nationally, and 80.4% scored in the top 16% band on the National Literacy Project assessment.[3] This is real but volunteer-sampled — families who agreed to formal assessment are the engaged end of the home-ed population — so the fairer read is that home-educated children at primary age are not academically behind, and many are ahead in the samples we have.[3]

Secondary / GCSE and A-level. There is no equivalent UK dataset. Home-educated students sit GCSEs and A-levels as private candidates at registered exam centres, taking the identical exams marked to the same standard.[5] But Ofqual and JCQ do not publish private-candidate results separately — they are absorbed into the centre type where the exam was sat — and JCQ publishes no private-candidate outcome data at all.[5] For national context, in 2025 21.8% of all GCSE grades were 7+, and 67.1% were grade 4+.[5]

What we can't know. No UCAS breakdown by home-education status; the DfE's Longitudinal Education Outcomes dataset does not tag home-educated cohorts; no solid UK data on how home-educated children fare at university or in work.[3]

Social and wellbeing outcomes

  • Socialisation: the "isolated and awkward" stereotype is not supported by the research. de Carvalho and Skipper's 2019 study of UK home-educated adolescents (small — three adolescents and their mothers) found participants describing themselves as happy, confident and socially capable ("We're not just sat at home in our pyjamas!"). International studies (Medlin & Butler 2018; Burton & Slater 2019) find home-educated children report high social engagement and larger cross-age networks. Caveat: self-report and volunteer-sampled.[3]
  • Mental health: Paulauskaite et al. (2022, Frontiers in Psychology) compared 158 UK home-educated children with neurodevelopmental conditions against 1,076 school-registered children. 77.9% of families cited their child's additional needs not being met at school as the primary reason for home educating; 76.5% cited mental health deterioration at school. On outcome measures, there were no significant differences in anxiety, internalising or externalising problems between the two groups.[3] That does not mean home education fixes mental-health problems — but it is not associated with worse outcomes for this cohort either.[3]

University and adult outcomes

Not established in UK data either way.[3] The international evidence is weak and context-specific: the US Cardus Education Survey found long-term homeschoolers had lower bachelor's degree attainment than non-homeschoolers (27% vs 46%) — but the US context does not translate cleanly to the UK.[3]

What the evidence doesn't support

  • "Home-educated children are more independent" — no rigorous UK evidence.[3]
  • "Home-educated children do better at university" — no UK data at all.[3]
  • "Home education is always better for children with SEN" — it can be, but EOTAS under Section 61 of the Children and Families Act 2014 leaves the LA legally responsible for arranging provision, whereas elective home education transfers that responsibility to the parent — a funding trade-off, not a pure benefit.[3]
  • Advocacy sources claim home-educated children consistently outperform schooled peers internationally — treat with caution; the underlying studies are volunteer-sampled and often small.[7]

Oversight and policy

  • The Centre for Social Justice's 2022 report Out of Sight and Out of Mind argued England is an international outlier in having no registration or assessment of home-educated children's progress — oversight that is commonplace across Europe.[5][6]
  • The Commons Education Committee's 2021 report Strengthening Home Education (HC 84) recommended a statutory register and called on the Department to "urgently commission and publish longitudinal research on the life chances and social outcomes of EHE children in England," measuring hard outcomes (literacy, numeracy) and soft outcomes alike.[4]
  • The government's Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill introduces Children Not in School registers to help local authorities identify children not receiving suitable education.[2] A DfE spokesperson's line — "In the vast majority of cases, children achieve and thrive best in schools" — is a policy position, not an evidence finding.[2]
  • In 2023/24, local authorities issued an estimated 7,000 section 437(1) notices (a pre-attendance-order warning where education is deemed unsuitable) — an increase of almost 80% on the previous year.[1]

Bottom line

  • If the question is "which group scores better on national measures?" — unanswerable. State-school attainment is measured (National Pupil Database, Progress 8, KS2/KS4 statistics); home-educated attainment is largely unmeasured, and where it is measured (private-candidate GCSEs) results are not published separately.[5]
  • If the question is "does the evidence show home education harms children?" — no. The published UK evidence does not support the assumption that home-educated children fall behind academically, and it shows no worse mental-health outcomes for children with additional needs.[3]
  • If the question is "does the evidence show home education is better?" — no, not as a blanket claim. The consistent, well-evidenced finding is narrower: home education can be better than the particular school placement that stopped working (SEN, bullying, mental health).[3]
  • The fairest summary: outcomes depend on why the child left school, the family's resources and structure, and how deliberately the child's social and academic needs are met — and the UK currently has no data infrastructure to measure any of this at national level.[1][3][4]

Tags

  • home-education
  • education
  • UK-politics
  • outcomes
  • SEND
  • mental-health
  • data-gap
  • policy

Sources

[1] https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/elective-home-education/2024-25-autumn-term — DfE: Elective home education statistics (autumn 2024/25) [2] https://news.sky.com/story/number-of-children-being-taught-at-home-increases-by-15-in-a-year-report-finds-13494608 — Sky News: Home-educated numbers up 15% (Jan 2026) [3] https://cognito.org/blog/benefits-of-homeschooling-research — Cognito: Benefits of homeschooling — what the research shows [4] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmeduc/84/8403.htm — Education Committee: Strengthening Home Education summary (HC 84, 2021) [5] https://myedspace.co.uk/blog/post/home-educated-students-exam-results — MyEdSpace: How do home educated students' exam results compare? [6] https://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/CSJ-Home-education-report.pdf — CSJ: Out of Sight and Out of Mind (2022) [7] https://www.home-education.org.uk/articles/wc/wc-he-outcomes.pdf — Home-education.org.uk: Outcomes for EHE children (advocacy)

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