This book offers a comparative analysis of alternative education in the UK, focusing on learning spaces that cater for children and young people. It constitutes one of the first book-length explorations of alternative learning spaces outside mainstream education – including Steiner, Human-Scale and Forest Schools, Care Farms and Homeschooling. Based on original research with teachers, parents and young people at over fifty learning spaces, it demonstrates the importance of a geographical lens for understanding alternative education. The book argues that the geographies of alternative education ... More

This book offers a comparative analysis of alternative education in the UK, focusing on learning spaces that cater for children and young people. It constitutes one of the first book-length explorations of alternative learning spaces outside mainstream education – including Steiner, Human-Scale and Forest Schools, Care Farms and Homeschooling. Based on original research with teachers, parents and young people at over fifty learning spaces, it demonstrates the importance of a geographical lens for understanding alternative education. The book argues that the geographies of alternative education are diverse: from the variegated ways in which alternative learning spaces connect and disconnect with the ‘mainstream’, to the significance of material ‘mess’ in children's learning, to the broader role that some alternative learning spaces play in challenging the increasingly neoliberal mainstream. The book will be of direct interest to academics and postgraduates in the fields of geography, sociology, education and youth studies, in particular those concerned with education. It will have broader appeal to readers from various disciplines, interested in contemporary theorisations of autonomy, emotion/affect, intergenerational relations, habit and life-itself. Given ongoing concerns about the State's role in providing children's education, and an increase during the early 21st century of the number of alternative education providers in the UK and elsewhere, the book also highlights a series of critical questions for policy-makers and practitioners.