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The school said they were difficult. I said they were drowning. We disagreed. So I took them home.

My children have special educational needs. That’s the official language. The language that gets you into meetings and onto waiting lists and into conversations with people who use words like “provision” and “reasonable adjustments” while providing nothing and adjusting less.

They were miserable. Not in the way that all children are sometimes miserable at school. In the way that makes a child stop eating. Stop talking. Stop being the person they are at home and replace themselves with a version that’s small enough to survive a system that wasn’t built for them.

I watched my child shrink. The same way I’d shrunk. In a different building. Under different strip lighting. But the same mechanism. Be smaller. Be quieter. Be less of yourself because the environment can’t handle the full version.

And I thought no. Not this one. Not again. Not another person I love learning to disappear because the room they’re in won’t make space for them.

So I took them home. And people had opinions about that. Friends. Family. Strangers on the internet. Everyone had an opinion about a decision they hadn’t lived inside and a system they hadn’t fought.

“They need socialisation.” They need to not want to die.
“They’ll fall behind.” Behind what. Behind a curriculum that was failing them.
“You’re not a teacher.” No. I’m their mother. And I know them better than any SENCo who met them for fifteen minutes and wrote a report full of limitations.

Home education is not what people think. It’s not sitting at the kitchen table doing worksheets in your pyjamas. It’s the park and the library and the museum and the conversation at the supermarket and the experiment on the kitchen floor and the question at bedtime that turns into an hour of talking about space.

My children are different now. They eat. They talk. They laugh at the table. They ask questions without checking first whether it’s safe to ask.

They flourished. That’s not a word I use lightly. They physically, emotionally, visibly flourished. Like plants that were in the wrong soil and just needed moving.

I moved them. And I’d do it again. Every time. Against every opinion. Because I spent my whole childhood being small in rooms that didn’t fit me and I will not let that happen to the only two people in the world who showed me what love actually looks like.