There are things Caro Giles will never be able to forget. The moment when Emmie, her “shiny bookworm” of a daughter, crouched “wide-eyed with terror” in the footwell of the car to avoid going to school. Or when another daughter ripped out her eyelashes in distress. Or when she had to carry her eldest, Matilda, then 11, out of the house because she was so scared to go outside.
These behaviours, Giles believes, were predominantly caused by the experience and prospect of school. Giles, a single mother of four daughters, watched as Matilda endured a miserable two years in primary school before withdrawing her – making her “electively home-educated” in official jargon. Ada, her second eldest, was mostly home-schooled until 2018, when Giles’s marriage ended and her children had to return to school so she could work more. Emmie, her third daughter, struggled on in primary until 2022 when she became “very ill”. At 10, she had stopped speaking because she found it so challenging to attend lessons. “I feel horrid about my learning,” she once typed into Giles’ phone. When her youngest, Tess, who started primary in 2019, showed similar distress around school, Giles acted quickly to remove her in early 2023.
It left Giles, somehow, having to run their household, try to earn a living and educate three of her four daughters – Emmie, Tess and Matilda (not their real names) – at home. Unschooled, Giles’ memoir of the last three years, is a barnstorming critique of today’s school system. She writes as a mother but also as a teacher who has worked in primary, secondary and special schools.
“The schools system isn’t working for a lot of children,” says Giles when we meet in Glasgow, her family’s new home. She trained as an actor, retrained as a teacher in her 20s and taught at an inner London state primary. Later, when she and her family moved to Northumberland, she worked in a social, emotional and mental health school for eight years, around having children. She began blogging about her family life in 2013; her first memoir, Twelve Moons, was published a decade later, combining nature writing about her family’s coastal adventures with “an attempt to write myself back on to the page, having got lost among all the mothering and inside my marriage,” she says. Giles writes personally on Instagram and Substack but guards her children’s privacy and gives them pseudonyms.
Giles’ own education in Devon and Yorkshire state schools in the 1980s and 90s was straightforward, and she expected the same for her kids. Instead, she found school’s impact on her daughters led to hundreds of appointments with support workers, school nurses, speech and language therapists, psychologists, physiotherapists and psychiatrists. These occasionally helped, but “often harmed”, she says.
She argues she had no choice but for three of her daughters to join the 111,700 children in England who are home-educated; according to the NSPCC, the number of families home-educating their children has more than doubled over the past five years. “It’s been in no way a lifestyle choice. It has been me trying my best to listen to the individual needs of each child,” Giles says. Matilda was diagnosed as autistic in 2019; by then, she was so unwell that she required psychiatric help. Emmie obtained a diagnosis a few years later. As every parent of an autistic child knows, getting a diagnosis – the first step towards finding appropriate help – is slow and fraught.
When they were younger, a typical day of home-educating Matilda, Emmie and Tess involved board games, jigsaws, dressing up and role-playing, as well as creative project-based working, where Giles could meet the requirements of different ages and abilities in a single activity. There were online worksheets for those who thrived on more formal learning, too. Often, her children’s needs clashed: Tess benefited from letting off energy outdoors, whereas Emmie didn’t feel safe outside the house. “I’ve tried to not sugar-coat it,” says Giles. “Often there was a joyful chaos.”
After nearly three years of struggle, she scored a small success when she was granted a personal budget from the local authority to fund Matilda’s and then Emmie’s learning at home. In 2023, just 2,305 children in England were awarded such budgets – which are available for children with special educational needs who have an education, health and care plan.
However, she found that the price of getting that support was high. “You have to demonstrate such distress within a school environment in order to get the money, which puts off many people from applying for anything.” Her biggest regret is trying to put Matilda back into high school, and keeping her and Emmie inside the school system for so long. “I wish I hadn’t, but that’s with the benefit of hindsight. I was on my own and I really needed some support.”
Unschooled, says Giles, “is not a school-bashing exercise”. Instead, it is a “plea for conversation and for listening”. To understand how and why almost 20% of pupils in England were “persistently absent” from school in 2023-24, missing more than 10% of lessons, perhaps it’s better to think more broadly about the system itself. “Schools can be great but they’re just not great for everyone,” says Giles. In her own family, the “appalling failure of the system” has led to “chronically unwell children and me struggling to hold on to my own health and identity”.
“School is seen as the holy grail,” she says. “We always want children to demonstrate success, which we’ve decided in schools is a written exam or coursework. We’re obsessed with measuring everything. We don’t think that success can be an intrinsic thing – a child thriving. We need to change what success is.”
Her daughter Ada is finding success at school. She is “very focused, very ambitious, very academic”. However, Giles worries that Ada’s childhood is “racing by in a blur of revision and comparison. We’re not teaching our children to be independent thinkers,” she says. “We’re all just learning the same thing – and our brains are all different, so it seems mad.”
What would Giles’ ideal schooling look like? Teachers and local authority staff would be “properly trained” to understand autism. Schools would follow a skills-based approach rather than cramming knowledge, with less reliance on testing. There would be project-based learning throughout secondary school, allowing pupils to take “a deep dive into a project they’re passionate about”. And there would be provision for flexi-schooling, whereby children are permitted to attend school part-time and can attend an alternative setting (such as a forest school) or be home-schooled for part of the week. Some children can only tolerate the “very challenging sensory environment” of 30-plus pupils in a small classroom “for a period of time and then need time to regulate,” she says. “Flexi-schooling would be a good answer for so many children. It would keep them in school for longer and keep the community around the family for longer, rather than being forced to drop out completely.”
Instead of blaming children or parents for non-attendance, we could also ask: what are schools missing out on by failing to accommodate diverse young brains? One of the heroes in Unschooled is the primary school headteacher who tries very hard to help Giles’ autistic children. “She said: ‘These kind of children bring so much to other children’s lives. If you have a child who is autistic or a young carer who doesn’t conform completely, that difference is such an asset to a classroom, helping other children grow and be more accepting.’”
Giles is not, however, arguing that everyone should be accommodated in a mainstream school. “It’s not about saying that some are mainstream and some are special people. It’s about saying: we’re all people who need to do things differently. The othering has to stop. We could have more schools that meet different needs, but they must not be seen as something less than a mainstream school, or that you have to attend a mainstream school and break in order to access them.”
I find villains in Giles’ story, too: staff at the local authority who don’t reply to emails for weeks or who nitpick home-schooling plans in Zoom meetings. For instance, Giles’ request for funding for an iPad as well as a laptop for Emmie was refused, even though her psychologist had recommended that she use an iPad to help her communicate. (She was eventually given an iPad but not a laptop for her studies.)
“I hope that I didn’t unnecessarily paint any individuals as villains, but certainly the system feels very adversarial and very aggressive,” she says. “I found it hard to find humanity. They haven’t got the finances to give people what they obviously need. The system is the villain.”
For anyone suspicious of “life-writing” in the wake of the scandal over alleged omissions and untruths in Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path, Unschooled does not reach a neat, upbeat conclusion. “Even though our day-to-day life has always been sprinkled with joyful moments and as a family we’re very tight, it was important not to do the ‘happy ending’, because there hasn’t been a happy ending for us,” says Giles. “There’s just been a really thorny path that we’ve tried to find our way through.”
Perhaps they are through the thorniest section. She and her children have made a fresh start this summer, moving to a rented flat in Glasgow, closer to Giles’ new boyfriend and other friends. She hopes relocating from countryside to city will meet the children’s changing needs as they grow older. “I was reaching a point of burnout in terms of how long I could keep holding everything together on my own. I had to make a change in order to save myself and stay strong enough to be able to keep saving the kids.”
The new term has begun brightly. Ada, now 15, is settling well into a new school, while Tess, 10, who loves Star Wars and fashion design, has returned to full-time classes in school with enthusiasm. “The school run has been a delight so far up here, and that is exciting,” smiles Giles. “It’s lovely that they come out and have lots to talk about.”
At home, Matilda, 18, is finishing her online learning, a Level 3 qualification in art and textiles and an extended personal qualification that is the equivalent of two-and-a-half A-levels and will get her to uni if she chooses. Emmie, 13, is talking more, smiling “in a genuine way” and planning a project about trees. Just the fact that she wants to learn is heartening for Giles, who will restart her fight to fund Emmie’s home-education in Scotland. Emmie has also made a chart to record how far she swims in the local pool. She wants to clock up the length of the Clyde.
Each chapter title in Unschooled is a phrase from Emmie, who wants to be a writer, too. One particularly fits her family’s new and changing life: I will try to take it slowly.
Unschooled: The Story of a Family That Doesn’t Fit In, by Caro Giles, is published by Little Toller on 2 September (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.