Thoughts of going back to school after the summer holidays do not bother the Connor children – because they are home educated. Jim Entwistle hears how the family’s bold move brought them closer together.

THE Connor family’s Darlington home is a busy place. Businessman Dave Connor, father-of-five, lovingly describes it as frantic. “No one dares to put the kettle on because there are seven cups to make,” he says.

Dave speaks calmly, with an aura of serenity that you can imagine would come in handy when having to combine the role of teacher and parent, while at the same time managing the family furniture restoration business.

Their house is not only a home, but a school and a workshop as well, and it has been for the past 19 years.

There are a variety of reasons why parents opt to home educate. Some 20,000 children are known by UK local authorities as being taught at home.

Some are home educated because of bullying or trouble adapting to mainstream schools, others because of their parents’ religious or philosophical beliefs.

But the Connors are keen to point out their route was not plotted through some ideological crusade; it was done to keep the family together.

The “journey”, as Dave calls it with great fondness, began while the family was living in the hamlet of Angram, four miles west of York, in the early Nineties.

They had retreated into self-sufficiency long before it had become fashionable, but the only sticking point was having to wave off the children to school every day.

So, Dave and his wife Denise decided to teach them at home.

“It wouldn’t work for everyone, but we felt this is what family is all about,” says Denise, a qualified teacher who gave up her job to work at home.

Their curriculum stays loyal to what you would expect at a conventional school, but there is a greater emphasis on learning through real-life experience.

With a little imagination, trips to the supermarket have become lessons in mathematics, seaside days out geology field trips and tending to the hens a study in biology.

The Connor children have emerged with formal qualifications, but perhaps it was these informal lessons that will benefit them most. Dave thinks the experience of learning in a mixed-aged group has been one of the major advantages.

“Home-educated children get more chance to mix with people of other ages,” he says.

“We’ve have noticed our children are very comfortable around older people as well as people their own age.

“In school, there is a confinement to a peer group for 15 years, so they don’t have that experience and I think that is a fault of the system.”

Denise believes the main attraction of home education is that it can easily accommodate a child’s interests.

“If they have an interest, and ours have been into dancing and sport, then quite a few hours can be given over to that,” she adds.

Of the five children, the three girls are now making their own way.

Helen, 26, is a primary school teacher in York; Kate, 24, is raising a young family; and Elisabeth, 22, is a dancer and choreographer with the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds.

“The first thing people ask about is what the social impact is on the kids, but that just isn’t the case,” says Dave.

“Our kids have been involved in all sorts of groups and clubs.”

Denise adds: “Their friends joke with them, they think we are either posh or hillbillies.

“This is just because it is a different way of life.”

Later on, I meet Joseph, 16, and Ben, 14, the last two through the Connor educational system.

“We’re living with our teachers,” says Joseph, taking over his father’s seat at the dining room table.

The school holidays have begun and though they remain polite and courteous, the pair are itching to get outside to see friends.

Joseph goes on: “We have done it from an early age so we’ve got nothing to compare it to, but it’s been fine. It’s just normal for us.”

That idea that home-schooling is a hurdle for a child’s social development is a common misconception, says Ben.

“We do other things as well, we don’t just sit at home all day with our parents, we socialise as much as possible,” he adds.

“As well as being keen sportsmen, the lads are members of Darlington Operatic Society and are preparing for the forthcoming production of Beauty and the Beast.

The Connors have stumbled on a much simpler life, a life where the family unit comes first, where the academic exams are not the culmination of the childhood, where work is not a choking bind but a labour of love.

In this house the commute is nothing but a distant rumble of frustrated traffic. Peerpressure doesn’t exist within these walls.

They’ve grafted for it, and it wouldn’t work for everyone, but the Connors’ own solution to these frantic times seems to be working out just fine for them.