please help, i have an 8 month old male gsd who is great at everything with me except recall with other dogs around as he has this real need to play with them continuosly. also i sprained my ankle really badly just before xmas so my husband has been taking freddie out for his walks and on two occasions freddie has ran home and left my husband standing in a field. please can someone give advise as to why he has started doing this and why?

He is a teenager, and like hunman teens has discovered that he can.  He is pushing boundaries and assering independance.

You need to go back to the drawing board with training.  Never give him the opportunity to disobey a command.  So start with making his recall on the lead 100%.  Then proceeed to do same in the house, in the garden, then on lead with distractions and so on.

GSD's can be very one person dogs, and running home to find hi MUm is probably him worrrying about where you are, and again because he can.

thanks for your advise will go back to the begining with him. he is abit of a mummys boy, although he is in no way dominant, but until i hurt my ankle i did all his walking feeding, groamming etc so running home to me makes sense. am so worried that he is going to get himself run over or in botter now dreading letting him off the lead so will try hard to make him totally responsive to recall. by the way we usually go to training classes once a week and there he is usually star student.