When Josh reached "school age" it was an difficult time for us as parents. I'd been bullied at secondary school and as such had a deep fear of the damage that school could do, and an awareness that the influence that a negative school experience could have on the rest of someone's life. Roarke had had no problems with the social side of school but as a bright child in a small village school, soon switched off. Years later he has realised that he probably has Aspergers, but at the time he was a child it was something that was unheard of and he just got labelled "naughty". Between us therefore we had little faith in the school system to provide either a suitable education or a enhancing life experience for our child.

However, like many parents, we had no real idea that there was an alternative to school. We believed that school was compulsory; in fact the law states that it is education that is compulsory, not attendance at school. We dutifully packed Josh off to school, and prayed it would be ok...

Josh had a black and white sense of right and wrong and quickly found that the school playground - and the whole school system - did not fit into that. He saw injustice both in the way children were treated by adults, and the way that children treated each other. On top of this, whilst being very bright, he struggled to keep up with the written work and showed signs of becoming bored and switching off - as his father had.

By the time Samuel started school we were already quite concerned about the effect school seemed to be having on Josh. We still didn't realise there was another way. Samuel loved having lots of people around him at school but it quickly became obvious that he just didn't fit. Big for his age, and seemingly clumsy, he started coming home with his clothes torn. It emerged that he was being teased and ending up in fights. Though far from stupid, he found was finding it hard to mix in.

As parents, we did what we thought was best; when Samuel said his "friends" hurt him, we'd say that they couldn't be friends if that was what they were doing. Trips into the school became more frequent. The school did all they could to address the bullying but still it continued.

At Christmas 2004 the whole family reached a turning point. Roarke had been unwell and became a house husband whilst I'd gone back to work as a compliance officer with a financial services company after having William. By the middle July 2005, Roarke had returned to breadwinning, and I returned to being at home full-time. We thought that this would help settle the boys who had been becoming increasingly badly behaved.

One evening it all came out. Samuel was being very badly bullied and Josh, with his strong in-built sense of justice, was embroiled with protecting him. The boys had decided not to tell us how bad things were because they thought we had "enough on our plate". That night we found Samuel in his bedroom punching himself in the face and biting his own arm saying 'I hate myself.' He was only seven.

We decided instantly that this had to stop. We sat up late talking things over and searching the internet. We were so relieved when we found the Education Otherwise website and finally realised that there WAS another way - home education.

It was a huge load off our minds. We told Samuel "you don't have to ever go back if you don't want to" and he said "cool" and ran off upstairs. That was that! We gave Josh the option to stay at school which he took. He lasted one more day before coming home and saying that having thought it through there was nothing he would miss about school and a lot it sounded like he could gain by being home educated.

We have never looked back. The following weeks after deregistering them were somewhat of an epiphany. As Roarke has said "We probably taught our children more in that space of time than the state system would ever be able to teach them. We taught them that they have value. They weren't happy, their situations weren't right, they spoke to us, we listened and we acted." We realised that home education fitted our family like a glove. It suited our faith, our family/child based style of parenting - treating our kids as individuals with equal standing as us - and our somewhat chaotic, full on, life style.

Through meeting other home educating parents we came to realise that Samuel had Aspergers, which was later confirmed by a formal diagnosis. It was obviously this that made him just "different" enough to stand out at school and be the target for the bullying. It took more than a year to get Samuel to stop calling himself dumb and stupid, and to feel so negatively about himself. Four years after taking him out of school, he had come to terms with who he is to such an extent that he was able to go away from home for the first time ever, for five whole days, on a group camp. That was an amazing acheivement and the sort of thing I once feared could never happen.

Josh turns out to be dysgraphic, which explained the troubles he had with keeping up with the written work despite being so bright. As William approached school age, we felt that home education was such a success for us that we questionned whether or not we should even try him in school (as some well meaning friends and family were suggesting). We believed that he also had issues so that reassured us that the right thing was to not send him to school at all. This year, aged 7, he was diagnosed as having Autistic Spectrum Disorder and - if we needed it - that was all the justification we need for our decision.

Jonathan is proving to be such an awesome, larger than life character, who is obviously benefiting hugely from having all his brothers around him all the time, that I can never envisage sending him into school either.

Home education is now our way of life and we will defend our right to home educate in the way that we have chosen against any government policy.