Any advice welcome!! Home ed for year 8 ds

[daydreamnation]

I'm spending the Christmas holiday doing a lot of thinking/research and would appreciate any advice from people more experienced than me!
Ds is 12 and has never liked school. He has no sen, no issues with bullying (he's always had plenty of nice friends) and doesn't struggle academically in anyway.
But he still hates it He goes to a small, rural secondary, we put a lot of thought into where to send him and on paper it's a lovely school. It has a reputation for being a very caring and fun environment and has great results too. He goes (reluctantly) everyday but there are times it's a struggle to get him out of the door and as a new term progresses, his mood gets increasingly darker and he just totally loses all his personality and 'shine'
It was particularly noticeable when we broke up for Christmas, it had been a long almost 9 week term and by the end of it, he was literally a shadow of his former self, yet within days it's like he 'returned' and he was chatty, bright and happy again.
My two main questions are, is the above reason enough to take him out of school? I've read so much about isolated children, being bullied and understandably desperately sad at school and also much about schools not meeting the needs of certain children. My ds doesn't seem to 'fit' the normal criteria but then is there one?!
My other concern is can I do it? He's a bright boy, top set for all subjects and marked as gifted & talented for art & design. Am I capable of getting him through his gcses?!
Thank you if you've got this far, my mind is in a spin at the moment

[ommmward]

is the above reason enough to take him out of school?
You are legally responsible for ensuring that your child receives an education, at school or otherwise. You don't have to have any strong societally-accepted reason for choosing the "or otherwise" option, any more than you have to have a fabulous justification for choosing state school over private, or day over boarding, or general secondary over specialist academy, or anything else. It's your choice (and your child's!).

It's fair to say that a lot of home educated teenagers have SEN or have ended up horribly bullied or otherwise so non-school shaped that they are under CAMHS, or the school environment is genuinely unsafe for them etc. Isn't it wonderful that you're in a position to listen to your child's needs without him needing to get suicidal first? There are plenty of families who home educate because school was a bit meh, as well :)

My other concern is can I do it? He's a bright boy, top set for all subjects and marked as gifted & talented for art & design. Am I capable of getting him through his gcses?!

He's 12!!!!!! You don't even need to be thinking about this for a year or 18 months yet. If he's fabulous at art and design, and loves it, then get yourself hooked up with local craftspeople (wood working etc), and join an art class (evening class, or a home ed class with an art teacher) . That'll feed that part of his development.

Apart from that, take some time to work out how you want to do it (some people definitely follow a curriculum to move the child towards 11 GCSEs; some people use interhigh, some people use tutors for particular subjects; some people are much more child-led and responsive, and then sign them up for 14-16 college courses when the time comes; some people aim at 5-8 GCSEs that the child actually genuinely wants to do... there are all sorts of ways of navigating it. And those of us in the home ed community all know lots of young adults who have ended up with decidedly strange (or no!) qualifications, and have got accepted for the next stages of their life based on portfolio and previous experience. It's worth having maths and english GCSE, just as one of those useful-in-life bits of paper, though.

[daydreamnation]

Thank you for such a lengthy and informative reply!
It is daunting for me and you're absolutely right, he is only 12!!
I actually work in primary education and often feel part of a system that is wrong in so many ways. As parents, we have the idea of preparing them for gcses forced on us by school as soon as they hit secondary and it is so wrong.
Unfortunately I can see it becoming a cahms style problem, he is very open with me and does become increasingly dark and anxious as term progresses

[semideponent]

Daydream, we did home ed for Y8 with our DS. Our circs were a bit different and our DS did turn out to have SEN. Like your DS, he was bright - top set. He is now back at school and goes through much the same cycle as your DS every term.

I'm just going to set down some observations below: make of them what you will - I hope they'll help with decision making.

Losing shine and vivacity as the autumn term wears on is totally normal, particularly when DCs are growing.

DS missed the competition and camaraderie of school more than we expected: it definitely diminished his motivation to do well. He was lonely.

We (DPs) were not as good at teaching our subjects as we were at doing our subjects, nor were we diligent enough at testing DS's understanding (linked to the motivation problem).

If we did it again, I would definitely enrol DS with a home ed org offering courses and qualified teachers (there are quite a few out there). Being accountable to people 'out there' really helps.

That all sounds very negative: I think that what you need to consider is whether your DS's educational outcomes are suffering BECAUSE he is at school (ie. bullying, mismanaged SEN etc.). Home ed can work really well for DCs who - for one reason or another - can't begin to function intellectually at school; it can also work well for DCs who are in situations that just don't fit the school schedule at all. Overall, though, school has a lot to offer and providing education for a DC at this age is increasingly hard, even for well-educated parents, and involves a lot of emotional/social/psychological factors.

[daydreamnation]

It's such a daunting prospect! I would definitely use as many 'tools' as possible, I've already briefly looked at the resources you can subscribe to online and I live in area with a reasonably big home ed community with plenty of opportunity to find support etc
I do worry ds would be lonely, he has two extra curricular activities he does during the week and it would be vital I think that he continued with these. He has friends locally that I would encourage him to see every week but I'm aware he'd possibly become very out of the loop with his peers?
He is naturally a bit of a loner at times and very attached to me, so I worry being at home with me wouldn't exactly encourage him to spread his wings!

[Saracen]

Your son sounds like a great candidate for home education. There are bound to be reasons why he doesn't enjoy school. The fact that those reasons may be more subtle than the reasons which make bullied kids miserable at school - so subtle that perhaps he can't identify them himself - doesn't make them any less valid. You don't have to know what the reasons are in order to recognise that school is wrong for him.

Can you do justice to his education? I think you are probably overestimating the difficulty of it, but maybe you would feel more relaxed if you keep an eye on the fall-back options in case you personally can't give your son the academic help he needs. You could try home education for the next 18 months and if it doesn't work, he could go back to school in Y10 for GCSEs. You could see what will be on offer at local colleges for when he is a little older. Some colleges do courses specifically for 14-16 year olds. Those are often aimed at less academic kids, but I do know several very academic teens locally who found these courses okay for them. Some colleges have fairly modest entry requirements for their post-16 courses, and you may feel that your son will have no trouble meeting those requirements even if he doesn't excel at GCSEs. Can you afford a tutor or two in key subjects? Are there local tutor-led GCSE study groups for home educated kids?

Start talking to parents in your area who are HEing slightly older kids and you'll begin to get a feel for how it might look for your own child. Many parents who are home educating at this stage report that the challenge isn't reallly about sitting at their kids' elbows helping them study. It's about doing the research and networking to identify the right opportunities in each subject: the little local independent art school, the fabulous online history course, the engineering apprenticeship. It's a big job, but you have a few years to get to grips with it. The sooner you start exploring that landscape, the more comfortable you'll become.

"He is naturally a bit of a loner at times and very attached to me, so I worry being at home with me wouldn't exactly encourage him to spread his wings!"

The great thing to remember is that there's no hurry. Your son may not be champing at the bit to go solo across the country on the train to spend a weekend with his mates when he's 15. Some teens don't even want to leave the house alone at that age. That doesn't mean he'll never want to leave you. I've known some home educated kids who were real "home-bodies", who didn't want to be away from their parents. Every single one has grown up to be independent. In this as in everything else, young people follow their own timetable.

I do think you're sensible to keep an eye out for opportunities for your son to make and keep friends. In addition to the ones you've mentioned, there will be opportunities through home education, since you say you live in an area with a good-sized HE community. Now is the best time to take action. It gets a little more difficult once they are a few years older, when many kids get their heads down with exam study and sometimes tend to stick with existing friendships rather than joining new groups. I found that older teens (mine included) weren't deliberately unwelcoming to newcomers, and if someone happened to get into their social group they were all quite friendly. But they were unfortunately a bit self-centred and didn't exert themselves to include newcomers in the way adults or younger children do. For example,

Teen: I fancy taking up Magic The Gathering again. I think I'll ask around to see who wants to do it with me on a regular basis.
Me: Shall I post it on the home ed email list in case anyone new wants to get together with you? We could hire a room, or you could offer it as an activity at the monthly home ed group.
Teen: Nah, I'll just ask my friends on Facebook. I know a cafe we can use which is really empty in the afternoons, so they don't mind us hanging around without spending much.

So it's actually easier for parents to promote new friendships when they are younger, less independent, and more reliant on their parents ferrying them around!

Give it a go. Trying home education is the only way to find out whether it could be the way to bring back your son's shine. He deserves to be happy.

[NK346f2849X127d8bca260]

My dd would be Y9 but we removed her end of Y7, bullying was the main reason, but she also didn't fit into secondary as being academically several years ahead of her peers the school couldn't offer her what she needed.
Since being out she has actually become more confident, she attends a HE group and has made a couple of friends.
Do not worry about his GCSEs, if he is academic and motivated he will be fine, my dd has started a couple of IGCSE's and is aiming at doing several as she wants to go onto university.
This link is a good read he-exams.wikia.com/wiki/HE_Exams_Wiki