Up to 170,000 children in Britain are being educated at home, according to a feature in today's Guardian.

I admit that I have sometimes daydreamed about teaching my own children, but when I remember reducing at least two of them to tears as I tried to coach them for particular exams, I realise that I could not have done it.

The fact remains that many parents do. The Guardian piece suggests that there are three main reasons: bullying or general dissatisfaction with the school system; philosophical or ideological concerns; religious or cultural reasons. It seems that some want to get back to the standards and values they remember from their own childhood, and which they feel are forgotten or derided by today's schools, while others - a surprisingly large percentage - think that reading and writing standards are not necessary at any particular age. "Fortune-Wood's research supports this. Three-quarters of the parents who responded to his survey thought that literacy and numeracy ages were irrelevant in the home education context. And only 15% felt that planning what to learn was crucial."

Having myself been contacted through the ARLT website by one home teacher in the USA and one in Australia, both of whom were interested in teaching Latin, I see that there is a good number or people who want a 'Classical Education', in the broad sense, for their children. An umbrella organisation in the UK, Education Otherwise, lists resources that include The Well-Trained Mind, a guide to Classical Education at home. This book apparently sets out the virtues of Latin, among many other things.

The Cambridge Latin Course takes individual learning seriously. I hope that all involved in Home Education realise what a great resource is available to them.

A family footnote: My Mother was educated at home (in Co Wicklow, Ireland), mainly by governesses, until she spent one year in her later teens at a Quaker boarding school. Her command of language and of general knowledge was the admiration and envy of the family. One of her favourite rhymes was:

Some folks go to college
and some to public schools.
They gain a lot of knowledge,
But most of them are .....