A comparison of home education legislation in Europe from the perspective of geography of education

Abstract

Home education is becoming an important issue for education policy in almost every country across Europe. It should also be of potential interest to the geography of education which, however, has remained the domain of research to educational studies. Consequently, no studies currently compare the individual aspects of home education by looking for the geographical factors behind this phenomenon. This article sets out to present a current and comprehensive picture of the legislative frameworks regulating home education in all the countries of Europe and tries to identify their spatial context and conditions. It is based on a comparative content analysis of texts collected in an extensive literature review of more than 500 publications and documents. Promising areas for further, more in-depth geographical and educational research on this subject has been identified while various spatial patterns of country’s legislative framework on home education was discovered, like the unique position of Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, South-eastern and Central European countries, and factors like collapse of communist totalitarian regimes in the former Eastern bloc, spread of the individualising ideology of neoliberalism, the neolocalism reaction to the standardising effects of globalisation, the international immigration, and the success in the integration of immigrants.