The study

The research investigated the moment of discovery of educational alternatives and in particular contemporary discovery of elective home education (EHE) by parents and other adults in England. The data was set within, and highlighted also, an empirical and theoretical context for this discovery. The study was a PhD project conducted between 2007–2010 with empirical research being done mainly in 2009, via interviews and a street survey.

Interviews

In total the semi-structured interviews numbered 29, with varying degrees of length and number of recorded comments. The duration of the interviews ranged from a few minutes to over three hours, dependent on the serendipitous and practical circumstances of the interaction. Most of the people interviewed were home educating parents or parents considering home educating pre-school age children. Four of the 29 participants were associated with university research, at various levels, concerning EHE and also thorough-going democratic education and were either not home educators or not parents. This category of 29 subjects interviewed were those who were already aware of the practice and philosophies of EHE and/or an educational alternatives from a theoretical point of view, or were parents already engaging their children in EHE, intending to do so or thinking about it. The subjects were asked to talk about how they discovered EHE (or other alternatives to mainstream schooling) as a possibility and what that did to them ‘internally’: to their lives and particularly their sense of self. Participants were asked to describe the effect of the discovery of alternative educational possibilities on their sense of being and self as a philosophical experience of the everyday and to focus in particular on the exact moment they made this discovery.

The street survey

The semi-structured interviews have been triangulated on several points by the street survey data, which has provided evidence that some of the comments made in the interviews are common experiences to be found also ‘on the average street’. These interactions usually lasted between (approximately) two minutes to ten minutes. Each interaction was unique to the background of the participant but common themes emerged. In total, 90 people in total were surveyed.