Guardian home-education-watch

It is a common concern that home-educated children will become less adept socially, but experience shows quite the reverse. (...) Most home educating parents make sure the school playground is replaced by richer social contact with a wider age group.

More in the Guardian about home education. The article is about a recent survey which found bullying to be the main reason parents are taking children out of school. Given that bullying has been leading to so many suicides, that's not surprising, but there are lots of other parents who home educate from scratch whose motivation for home educating may not be reflected in this survey as they never "removed" their child from school.

The Guardian article also mentions this study, which I remember from when it was first published:

A 2002 Durham University study, which surveyed 400 families and tested nearly 200 children, found extremely good standards of literacy in children up to the age of 10 and good maths results for seven year olds. This study by Paula Rothermel also concluded that home-educated children demonstrated good social skills.

Interesting that the liberal press should be so interested in private education. I think this is because, like some other kinds (Montessori, Steiner-Waldorf) home education is regarded as "alternative" in the UK. I suppose this shift is similar to the one in medicine, where the same people are spending money on non-traditional forms of healthcare rather than going to their NHS GP. I don't think labelling these trends "left-wing" works at all. Intriguing.