Introduction

There are viable alternatives to attending mainstream schooling which will allow education to happen. Some people are interested in these alternative options. They search for them. They need to discover them. But why would anyone bother?

This chapter looks at exit from schooling attendance as a phenomenon involving children intentionally deregistered from school rolls, but who once attended. It considers some of the reasons why leaving a school for home education might be a sane and important move. There are many factors that contribute to school exit. They interact and overlap to result in a deregistration. In the data in Chapter Five, some of the parents quoted there talked about difficulties they had had with their child's schools, resulting in a stand-off and lack of resolution. EHE was the resolution found. In connection to this I mentioned the harm articulated that was being done to such parents by schools.

What this chapter focuses on is why responding to such harms – for both children and parents – is part of a wider picture where schooling fails people. A theory is used here of ‘exit’. This helps us understand better the reasons for movement towards EHE that discovery causes and follows. It also clarifies the nature of the ‘gate’ to escape from the school which is opened by discovery.

What is school exit?

The term ‘school exit’ is not new. In various research documents in the US, usage refers to school leaving age or school drop-out (Lloyd and Mensch, 2006; Papay et al, 2008). Here ‘school exit’ signifies another phenomenon, perhaps new in its scope and in its accepted legality as exit. There has always been truancy and absenteeism in the context of compulsory seeming (see Lees, 2013b) schooling. Now there is a substantial level of exit of a different kind. Facilitated by a rise in global awareness – or discovery – of the legal possibility of education through a modality of educational practice that is an alternative to mainstream school attendance, parents and their children exit schools for another pathway; in particular towards EHE.

‘School exit’ is a deliberate turning away, or a desperate running away, from mainstream schooling as a source of educational development. It is in this sense possible to include in it the idea of truancy or even school refusal and phobia.