A SOMERSET teenager has receiving rousing support after publishing an open letter in support of home education.

Angelica Hodgson, 15, was inspired to take to social media after reading a new report from the Children’s Commissioner Anne Longfield titled ‘Skipping School: Invisible Children’.

The report was published after the Schools Adjudicator highlighted a growing number of children and young people being home schooled every year.

Angelica said she was left “perturbed and alarmed” after reading Mrs Longfield’s proposals for the problem.

Addressing the children’s commissioner, the South Petherton teenager said: “In your introduction, you acknowledge that schools are becoming a place that is no longer a good environment for kids to learn.

“If this is what schools have become, then why, further into your report, do you insist on the idea that the school system and curriculum is the only right way to educate children?”

Angelica has never been to school, and is instead home educated by her mum Zena.

Angelica added: “The method of support seems questionable.

“A welfare officer will be knocking on families doors three days after the removal from school, when these people are at their most vulnerable, and will be giving them options and guidance toward different schools, the very thing that made them vulnerable, and asking how they are going to follow the curriculum properly.

“This could be a very damaging and unhelpful process for those desperately needing space from the mental stresses of what they have gone through already.”

The 15-year-old added that education is treated as one-size-fits-all, and compared it to giving the same medication for all illnesses, or the same tools for every job.

Another part of the report also highlighted the issues of children falling off the grid if they are outside the school system.

“I also find it very hard to believe that you truly feel all home educators are invisible, when you are able to give well-informed, estimated figures on the number of us,” said Angelica.

“There has to be a base for these figures, meaning you do in fact know where many home educators are.

“I myself, as a young person who has never been in the school system, still receive letters from my local hospital, dentist and others, thus proving I am not invisible at all.”

Angelica’s post on Facebook has received more than 100 comments and 250 shares.

She received countless messages of support, including ‘wonderful words’ and ‘beautifully articulated’.

She added: “For me, and many of those around me, home education has been and continues to be such a positive, incredible and unique journey.

“Our children’s commissioner’s proposal of registration and home visits, has the high potential to strip the individuality, the very principal of home education, away from us, with standardised visits and ideas of what is acceptable during home learning and what isn’t.

“I want the generations after me to have the same options and choices in education as myself, without any limits.”