The receptionist looked at me with disdain when I walked into Suffolk College asking to enrol. Their access course for mature students didn't have any entry requirements as such, but the receptionist warned me it was an advanced, intensive course, and there seemed to be a blank space under "educational history" on my application form. When I explained that I wasn't a dropout, I just hadn't gone to school, she looked even more scornful.

I was 22 and had never spent a day in a classroom in my life; an alien concept for many people but common in Gypsy and Traveller families. There are more than 100,000 nomadic Travellers and Gypsies in the UK, and 200,000 who live in permanent housing. Many, like me, never attend school, while others are illiterate because formal education is not a priority in our culture.

My upbringing was unusual, but not unique. Until I was eight my family lived on the road, travelling around Ireland by horsedrawn wagon. I was one of six children, with three more half-sisters, and our family was considered small. Having 12 or 13 children was common among Travellers in Ireland.

Marrying first cousins is also common among Gypsies (and a potential genetic timebomb), my parents come from very different backgrounds. My mother was born into an upper-class American family. On her gap year she literally ran away with a Gypsy – my father, who bred horses. Both are extremely intelligent and open-minded people who wanted to bring us up in a stimulating, free and fulfilling environment.

Instead of going to school, my siblings and I, like many children from travelling families, were taught about the arts, music and dance. Our education was learning about wildlife and nature, how to cook and how to survive. I didn't know my times tables but I could milk a goat and ride a horse. I could identify ink caps, puff balls and field mushrooms and knew where to find wild watercress and sorrel. By the age of eight or nine I could light a fire, cook dinner for a family of 10 and knew how to bake bread on an open fire.

Not that it was always idyllic: life on the road could be harsh. As a child with younger siblings I had to work hard: my daily routine included fetching water, cooking and changing nappies. We also struggled financially; my dad's passion has always been breeding Gypsy cobs. Sometimes he would get a good sale, but a lot of the time we were penniless. Then we worked as a family, fruit picking. One summer, I remember practically living off mushrooms as we worked on a mushroom farm. We also picked daffodils; after about five seasons I developed an allergy to the liquid in the stems and my skin would blister on contact with it. Any money we earned went straight to my mother and father.

Our life was always lived outside; working, playing and socialising was all done around the fire or in the woods and fields. Wet weather was a curse and we would huddle up around a wood burner in one of the caravans. For many years we had no electricity, no television, no radio; nothing electrical. We had china dolls but no other toys. And we played cards – thank God for playing cards! If it wasn't for them, I would have no mathematical ability whatsoever.

Unlike some of my siblings, I learned to read when I was quite young. My mother and grandparents bought me books and, with mum's help, I could read by the time I was about nine. By the age of 12 or 13 I had devoured all of F Scott Fitzgerald, EM Forster, Louisa May Alcott and Emily Brontë. I bought them in charity shops or asked for them as birthday presents; together, books and cards gave me an understanding of words and numbers in the absence of any formal education.

I was, though, completely unaware of the outrageous way the media portrays the Gypsy population. As children, we had very little contact with people living in houses and because we didn't go to school or watch television, I was oblivious. My mother didn't take us shopping, as there were so many of us. I remember once when we were camped on a lane close to a council housing estate, children would walk across the field towards where we were playing in the trees to hurl abuse and throw stones at us. But when I asked my brother why they were angry, he didn't seem particularly bothered, saying perhaps it was "because they didn't understand and thought we were dangerous".

If it hadn't been for literature, maybe I would have remained unaware of the way we were described. But a love of books evolved into an interest in magazines and newspapers, and that exposed a world of prejudice and ignorance to me. In my early teens, I realised for the first time that there's a widely held view that everyone who lives in a caravan or on the road is a dirty, thieving Gypsy, never contributing to society while living for free on land that doesn't belong to them.

Gypsies and Travellers are the only social group that it is still acceptable to insult. In part, I think this stems from our levels of illiteracy and lack of social involvement; if people are unaware of what is being written about them, they're not going to dispute it. And if they don't dispute it, it will carry on.

In England, Gypsies were ruled as a distinct ethnic group under the 1976 Race Relations Act. Irish Travellers were granted this status in 2000. But it has made very little difference to popular opinion or attitude, and even less difference to the lives of the Travellers themselves. Gypsy and Traveller people still have the lowest life expectancy, the highest child mortality rate and are the most "at risk" health group in the UK, as well as being excluded from many of the basic social and legal structures.

Although I didn't go to school, some of my siblings did. And like so many other Gypsy children, they faced bullying. Often I would turn up at the high-school gates to find them in floods of tears because children had been picking on them.

It can be hard to reach your full potential without schooling, but compared with traditional illiterate Gypsy or Traveller families, we had good opportunities and were not expected to marry young, have lots of children and follow in our parents' footsteps. As a child, my passion had been flamenco (the music of the Gypsy community in Spain). My mother took me to a dance class after we settled in Norfolk when I was about nine, and I was hooked.

We had rented a piece of land for our wagons and been granted special residency rights by the council. We moved into mobile homes and eventually built a wooden structure to house a bathroom, kitchen and communal area. This meant I could have regular lessons and I became a professional flamenco dancer. By the age of 17, I was filled with a desire to leave the chaotic comfort of the camp behind. After saving money doing care work I travelled around the world for years, dancing in flamenco bars in Australia, flamenco schools in Spain and on beaches in India.

But even when I was travelling, I never really told people about my upbringing or family, for fear of negative or ignorant responses. Without school it is hard to make lifelong friends, and I know that only my family understand my fears, emotions and background. My family was so large and close that I never felt I needed friends. But while I was away, a sense of discontentment grew inside me that I knew wasn't going to go away.

I had toyed with the idea of going to college in the past, but it had seemed unnecessary, difficult and somehow unobtainable. Now, aged 22, I was ready – but it wasn't going to be easy. Before I was accepted, I had to write 3,000 words on why I wanted to enter the education system so late – quite a challenge for someone who had never written more than a letter before. But I got my place and, for the next nine months of the course, spent my nights in our caravan home reading GCSE-level text books, desperately trying to gain the basic knowledge I was expected to have. I didn't know about the atrocious crimes Hitler was guilty of, nor when the Battle of Hastings took place. I had no idea what the respiratory system did and I couldn't punctuate a sentence. But I had a good vocabulary, a lot of determination and a hugely supportive family. Trying to study among them was another matter.

Finding peace and quiet had always been impossible. When I was a little girl I dreamed of living in a terraced house on a cobbled street, because in wagons and caravans you never get any peace. You live on top of each other, privacy is non-existent and the only place you find solitude is by hiding under a tree or walking across a field. As a child I would wander off alone whenever I got the chance, to find a patch of moss to sit on and spend the afternoon watching ladybirds and picking flowers to press.

Moving from one culture to another is incredibly difficult, and knocking down the barriers and misconceptions is even harder. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised – there has been a long history of persecuting Gypsies in Europe: the Egyptians Act of 1530 banned them from England, while later acts forced them to give up their nomadic existence or face death. The Nazis considered them "nonpersons", and some experts believe around 600,000 European Gypsies were eradicated, most gassed in Auschwitz.

There are several different groups within the travelling community. Roma Gypsies, who originated from the Indian subcontinent around 1,000 years ago and have now spread across Europe; Irish Travellers, who have a common language (Shelta) and are believed to have became nomadic in the 16th or 17th century; plus new age travellers, hippies and crusties. Some choose a nomadic life because they want to be more in touch with nature; others to live on the edge of society without a national insurance number or fixed address.

Yet when Gypsies and Travellers do want to settle down, there are extra complications. More than 90% of planning applications submitted by Gypsy families are refused, compared with 20% of non-traveller applications. Also, Gypsies may be buying pieces of land on green belts and have little or no knowledge of the administration system. A planning application by a Gypsy family is always met with an extreme number of objections by the local residents (I know this from experience). And it's a fact that having Gypsies in a neighbourhood lowers the price of property.

My siblings and I were born into this lifestyle, but we weren't taught to carve clothes pegs and sell lucky heather. We were brought up with strict morals, values and guidelines. We don't look or act particularly different to anybody else. We just had a different path, and weren't brought up living in a house.

After completing my access course (thanks to a wonderful tutor, I got distinctions in all the units), I did a degree with the Open University, and that meant completely changing my way of life. Last November, at the age of 30, I moved to Brighton to study at Brighton Journalist Works. I live here with my boyfriend in a flat, which is bizarre and alien to me. My family are, admittedly, no longer truly nomadic, and my parents support my decision to transform my life, but I have never lived within bricks and mortar before, and I feel completely out of touch with nature now.

I can't see or feel the change from one season to the next, I crave greenery, and I constantly wrestle with the emotion of feeling trapped. I spend half my life opening doors and windows, trying to get rid of the airless, claustrophobic feeling that comes with being inside. I get woken up by bin lorries, the rush-hour traffic and my neighbours shouting, instead of birdsong and the wind in the trees. I can't sense when it's going to rain because I can no longer smell it in the air, and when it does rain I can't hear it landing on the roof.

I live near the sea because it gives me some sense of openness and freedom, but I don't think I will ever feel truly settled here – or anywhere else. My instinct is to travel, and when you have grown up waking to different scenery every day, it's easy to feel trapped. But to reach my dream, I have to put down roots.