Helen’s books present education in an alternative light, enabling people to take control of what, how, when and why they learn. Playing the University Game presents narratives and values inherent to navigating a university space for personal integrity, success and freedom of choice. The Palgrave International Handbook of Alternative Education collects research perspectives on education done differently from around the world, to collage together a new understanding of what is educationally possible. Education Without Schools is a critical look at the landscape of home education discovery in the UK, placing the idea of home educating within an existential context of personal discovery in a social and political context of repression of self. In Silence in Schools Helen highlights the educationally, and thus personally beneficial, cost-free nature of silence when chosen, not coerced.
Helen was founding Editor and then co-editor with Professor Gina Riley of the online, open access education journal Other Education, specializing in alternative education: www.othereducation.org. Other Education ceased publication in 2023 after over a decade of cutting-edge work.
With Professor Michael Reiss Helen co-edits the Palgrave Studies in Alternative Education book series.
See https://independent.academia.edu/HelenELees for various work, largely all to do with alternative perspectives on education.
Helen is a freelance journalist, having written for online magazines, The Times, Times Educational Supplement, Times Higher Education, The Big Issue, Research Fortnight, Artists and Illustrator magazine, Teach Secondary Magazine.
She is a published poet (Flarestack Press, 2003).
Helen’s three academic monographs are: Playing the University Game – the art of University-based self-education (Bloomsbury, August, 2022), Education Without Schools: Discovering alternatives (Policy Press, 2014) and Silence in Schools (Trentham Books, 2012 -available here: https://archive.org/details/silenceinschools0000lees).
These books and other publications, as well as her work as an editor for various forms of writing, aim to transform ideas about how we live best.
