The majority of those attending these illegal settings are technically home-schooled children, but the reality is that some are cut off from mainstream society with little or no safeguarding checks.
From the age of six, Alice Benskin was home-schooled in a rural part of the Midlands and taught using a fundamentalist Christian learning programme, which she claims still promotes misogyny today.
"It's like a cult. That's the only way I can describe it, you're very controlled." Ms Benskin claims she was groomed to be a "godly wife" from a very young age.
“We weren't really encouraged as women to have equal rights," she said. "It was very much that the man is the head of the home and that women, girls, were subservient to men.
"I was very scared," she added. "I think there was a lot of instillment of fear of the outside world."
While not illegal, the learning programme is controversial, and some parts of it are still used today across the country. Comic-like textbooks were Ms Benskin's main source of learning as a child.
Her learning was almost entirely bible-based, and the qualifications she did obtain held no weight in the outside world.
The textbooks taught students that the "probability of evolution is next to impossible", while lessons on gender described women's roles as "helper, cook, cleans house, washes and irons clothes", and that young girls should "obey and help".
One science textbook page seemingly confirms the existence of the Loch Ness Monster, and another teaches that the "probability of evolution is next to impossible".
ITV News has seen textbooks stating that homosexuality was a "learned behaviour" and that "extensive biological tests prove this".
Ms Benskin said: “It is really damaging, really, really damaging, to be indoctrinated with these beliefs to live under this level of control and isolation."
Extracts from a much longer report https://www.itv.com/news/2026-06-16/thousands-of-children-at-risk-in-dirty-and-dangerous-illegal-schools