The 2025 Cambridgeshire Home Educating Families (CHEF) survey was conducted between 1st February and 1st March 2025. It was NOT carried out on behalf of the Local Authority (LA) and is a follow up to the one conducted by an experienced local home educator in 2023. The aim is to build up anonymous comparison data over time, solely for the purposes of serving our community's interests. The survey was shared in the CHEF email group and in a wide variety of WhatsApp and Facebook groups used by local home educators. It asked about families’ home education experiences, and their views on the LA and the local home education community.
The survey was open to:
Notes:
No one except the volunteer survey coordinator (a local home educating parent) has access to the raw data, which is being collected solely for the purposes of holding our own anonymised data to serve our community's interests over time. It has been collated in this document to share with local home educators, so that it may assist us as we all work together to continue to see our community thrive.
The survey was open to:
- current home educators who live in Cambridgeshire;
- people who lived in Cambridgeshire while home educating at any point from 1st January 2023, but who don't home educate now;
- current or past home educators as above who do not live in Cambridgeshire, but who consider themselves part of the Cambridgeshire home-educating community (e.g. travelling in)
Notes:
- In this survey, all references to the LA refer to the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough LA.
- Charts and graphs are not as tidy as we know they could be due to time constraints and were auto-generated from the Google form. They display main trends only; blue arrows indicate there were further responses e.g. from free text boxes, which are too long to fully display in this report. If you would like clarification on anything, please get in touch and a volunteer parent will do their best to respond time-permitting.
- This is an entirely voluntary endeavour for the purposes of supporting our community so we're well aware it's far from perfect but is what's possible with zero resources and goodwill. Hopefully though we can use it to help plan activities and help everyone feel part of the community. It's useful for any of us to use to see things like where other home educators are geographically, what styles of home ed we're using, how we arrived at home ed, what interest there might be in particular activities we might like to set up, what our experiences with the LA have been like etc.
No one except the volunteer survey coordinator (a local home educating parent) has access to the raw data, which is being collected solely for the purposes of holding our own anonymised data to serve our community's interests over time. It has been collated in this document to share with local home educators, so that it may assist us as we all work together to continue to see our community thrive.
