by Jo Symes
I’d never questioned the education system before my own children started school. I was looking forward to it – making new friends, returning to work and maybe even joining the PTA! But it soon became clear that my sons were not thriving.
We endured distress and heartache for over two years before deregistering from school at the end of 2018, when we began an unexpected journey into the world of alternatives.
One of the first things I did was set up the Progressive Education Group on Facebook, to connect with others in the same boat, and its rapid growth reassured me that my family was not alone. Through this community, I have connected with thousands of parents, carers, educators, changemakers and education innovators from around the world, and discovered a wealth of research. I realised that my concerns were part of a much wider conversation: What are we actually educating young people for?
We often feel we need to encourage our children to live up to societal expectations of getting ‘good grades’ in order to get to university or get a ‘good job’, but with escalating referrals to mental health services (not to mention the cost of university tuition fees), many families are questioning if the high-stakes pressure is worth it. Referrals to Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services in England have risen by around 50% in recent years (NHS England, 2025).
It’s not only parents and carers who are concerned. Employers and economists are also questioning whether schools are preparing young people for life beyond the classroom.
For example, The Times Education Commission (2022) found approximately 89% of employers believe students should be assessed on more than academic attainment, while the National Foundation for Educational Research, in its Skills Imperative 2035 research, projects that many future job candidates may lack essential employment skills by 2035 (National Foundation for Educational Research, 2025).
According to the World Economic Forum ‘Future of Jobs Report’ (2023), the top skills required by workers today include analytical thinking; creative thinking; resilience, flexibility and agility; motivation and self-awareness; curiosity and lifelong learning; technological literacy; dependability and attention to detail; empathy and active listening.
Against this backdrop, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the number of families opting to home educate is on the rise. 126,000 children and young people are estimated to be home educated according to 2025/26 autumn term census data. Of the reasons reported by local authorities, mental health was the most common (16%), followed by philosophical or preferential reasons (12%).
Transitioning to Home Education
For us, the decision to home educate was primarily for mental health reasons, and it was only after leaving the school system that I really appreciated the bigger picture, and the philosophical reasons. It was like a blindfold coming off. Because school is so normalised in our society, it’s hard to imagine that children can learn without it. Sometimes you have to see it to believe it!
I’ve seen first-hand how young people can flourish once they step outside of the one-size-fits-all model, because their learning journey can be personalised, purposeful and therefore joyful. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t like waving a magic wand with an overnight transformation. It took time to ‘deschool’ and slowly build a new sense of normality and community.
Since leaving mainstream, my children and I have explored home education, flexischooling, online schooling, democratic, consent-based, self-directed education, forest school, home education co-op groups and Montessori schooling.
I have been amazed and awestruck by the world of alternatives outside of mainstream education that previously I didn’t even know existed. There are so many exciting innovative learning communities popping up all over the world and through my social enterprise, Progressive Education, it’s my mission and passion to raise awareness so that others can find suitable pathways for their children too.
Aligning Education with Human Rights and Flourishing
While the statistics shared above paint a rather pessimistic picture, I believe there is hope for the future of education. Taking an unconventional path is often regarded as “alternative”, or “for others”. However, many of the principles that alternative approaches have long championed – learner agency, creativity, wellbeing, inclusion, meaningful participation, personalised learning – are increasingly reflected in international thinking about what a high-quality education should be.
For example, in 2025, the OECD called for education systems to place human flourishing at the heart of their purpose. Here’s an encouraging excerpt from their Education for Human Flourishing: A Conceptual Framework report:
“In the future, education systems should nurture a broader range of capabilities, help restore meaning to young people’s lives and equip them with the skills and ambition to remake our societies, economies and organisations. To flourish over a lifetime, people will need to be adaptive problem solvers, ethically competent and able to understand, appreciate and act in the world. In the age of AI, education must strengthen human agency, human meaning and human security.
The Human Capital model, which has shaped what students learn for many decades, prepares young people for yesterday’s jobs, through cognitive examinations. Education for Human Flourishing will equip young people for lives of purpose and fulfilment.”
Similarly, the 2026 United Nations’ report, Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment: Elements of the Right to Education argues that the following principles should be used as a checklist to regulate curricula, pedagogy and assessment in a holistic way:
A quote from the UN report that stood out for me was “assessment determines what society values, rewards or sanctions”, and it makes the distinction between formative assessment, designed to support learning through feedback and adaptation, and summative assessment, used for certification or selection:
“While policy and research emphasize assessment for learning, summative and high‑stakes examinations prevail. These regimes narrow curriculum implementation, discourage pedagogical innovation and teacher agency and prioritize that which can be easily measured over meaningful learning.”
The report urges for a more holistic approach, with reduced academic pressure for students and teachers, that favours well-rounded education encompassing artistic and scientific creativity, empathy, climate awareness, critical thinking, problem-solving and social and emotional learning. Such aspects are harder to measure but will remain essential for the twenty-first century, in which artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming a dominant factor.
So having read these reports, perhaps there is hope that the conversation around education is moving beyond ‘What should children know?’ towards more important questions around the kind of people, communities and world we are hoping education will help to create.
If you are considering home education for the first time or you’re returning to home ed this academic year, I hope this has given you some encouragement. While many mainstream schools are constrained by structures that make these progressive ideas difficult to put into practice, maybe the education that international human-rights experts are saying children have a right to is precisely the kind of education that many home-educating families are already creating.
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Jo Symes is the founder of Progressive Education, which raises awareness of alternatives to conventional schooling and campaigns for change within mainstream education.
In 2019 Jo created the Progressive Education Group on Facebook, now a thriving community of over 11,500 parents/carers, educators, academics, researchers, psychologists, education innovators and changemakers.
The growth of the group inspired her to create the website and organisation, Progressive Education, so that resources could be shared more widely. There’s an online course on alternatives to conventional schooling, a growing global directory of progressive schools/learning communities, jobs, events and changemaker initiatives, and a membership for start-up schools and home ed learning communities.