How did we get here?

We were sort of skeptical about institutional education from the outset (before we even had a child); we worried about things that concerned John Taylor Gatto but somehow I felt I just didn't have it in me to home school.

So we set about investigating alternative schools. We looked at a Steiner school (liked lots of things about it, but decided it wasn't for our child, who was already mathematically precocious at 3, when they were quite clear that children didn't do maths until they were a bit older), and considered Summerhill as we found the idea of democratic education quite intriguing. Finally, we found a school on the Human Scale Education website that was not far from us, and decided to give it a go.

We took our son in, and we saw the Montessori nursery, which didn't appeal to us because there seemed to be a rigidity about the way they only allowed the children to play with toys in a particular, "proper" way, and we had always encouraged lateral thinking, and were pleased that our child could use things for all sorts of purposes.

But the rest of the school (the junior school) seemed interesting. We looked around and were impressed with the way everything seemed so individualised. The classes were small.

A teacher showed us some essays recently written by students. One was written by a student who wanted to be a writer. The paper itself was about 8 feet long, constructed of sheet after sheet of paper, attached together to form a long story, somewhat like an epic.

The next essay we saw was by a child we were told wanted to go to into the theatre; it was significantly shorter than the previous one, perhaps two pages long. We very much liked the idea that different children have different aims, desires, needs. The school seemed very much to embody these principles and to deal with the children as individuals, rather than trying to get the to conform to some ideal.

We went away happy after they had confirmed that they would consider our child for early entry to K Group (their nomenclature for Reception Class) after we had him spend part of the day in with the current class. Our child's birthday was on the cusp of the cut-off date for school years, so we were looking at entering school a year early, but given the near birthday, and the previous boredom he suffered at playgroup and other activities, we wanted to give it a go.

Finally he spent the day in K Group and the teacher and the registar told us that he would be absolutely fine to start in the autumn. We were pleased as everything we had seen at the school we liked. We were all set for the autumn then, and our little one would be starting school in just four months' time.