I was home educated until I was 16, AMA

[Sardinesandmangochutney]

What the title says.... I’ve noticed previous AMAs from the point of view of the parent, I thought it might be interesting to have one from the other side, as it were 🙂

Did you have friends? For what reasons were you home educated?

What qualifications do you have? What career do you have now?

Do you think it was an advantage or disadvantage in terms of further education and career?

Would you do it for your children?

how good are you at socialising, striking up conversations with new people?

Did you go into education at , why?

@HennyPennyHorror
Yes I had friends, my childhood best friend attended school and I also had close friends in the various home ed groups we attended. I did struggle a bit locally when I was around 11 or 12, partly because all my peers suddenly went to the same school (only one high school in my town but many primary schools), and quite a few home edders decided on secondary school, but I still had friends outside the area and it got easier once the general friend drama between my friends in school died down.

I was home educated because my parents thought they could make it work; they tried it out with my older sibling who thrived, so they just carried on

Do you have kids? Would you/do you home ed your kids?

Interesting to see the questions about socialisation as mine was HE for a while when we moved with work and couldn't find a school with a place.
I found so many home education groups and classes that she probably had just the same social interaction as school just a bigger mix of ages.

My question would be did you take formal exams and if not did it hinder you at all if you did any further education post 16?

Did both your parents work? Or was one a SAHP?

Oh gosh I just refreshed the page, wow so many questions!
@Dauphinois (is that about potatoes? Yummy) I’m currently studying at university, I’d like to go into journalism but at the moment I just have a summer retail job 😂 At home I achieved nine IGCSEs with A, and at sixth form college I achieved three A levels with A.

@waltzingparrot that is the eternal question! Or rather, is it an advantage? I’m fairly sure it didn’t give me a disadvantage, in that I’m where I want to be in life now, but who knows if I would be in the same place if I’d attended school? I need a clone of myself as a control.

@fergusthefrog I’m not planning on having children anytime soon, but if I were to have them it would be a conversation to have with any potential partner. I would be worried about the loss of career opportunities for the main educator I think.

@OnlyFoolsnMothers I would say I’m pretty good at socialising, of course there are occasions when I say the wrong thing or think I have, but I think that happens to everyone. I quite like striking up conversations with new people, although if I’m on my own in a new place I’ll often seek out someone else looking lonely rather than try to break into an established group. I think my parents consciously worked on social opportunities for us, which probably helped. Home education actually worked quite well as an ice breaker when I was younger, less relevant now of course.

@inwood
I went into formal education aged 16 in order to study for my A levels as I felt I was ready for a new challenge, and because I turned out to be a languages nerd and the amount of private tuition required given my parents’ lack of foreign language skills would have been obscene. Also because there are not many people left studying at home for post-16 education so study groups for conversation practice etc would have been tricky.

@PoppinsandPartridge and @Shelvesoutofbooks I think I’ve just answered your questions above, sorry! And yes, the age range of friends in home ed groups does tend to be quite varied- aged 6, my siblings’ “best friends” were a couple of fellow 6 year olds, a 15 year old and a 3 year old!

@BlackCatSleeping both my parents worked, but one was part time and the other did compressed hours to cover that time

Hi really interesting
My questions are much of the time were you taught by your parents and how much in HE groups? Were the HE groups set up like a school room at all?

@indianbackground I was mostly taught by my parents, with a couple of group sessions a month. They were volunteer led sessions, so quite often my parents had organised them anyway. One was in a classroom-type room in an outdoor centre, although we were more often than not outside for part of the session, and the other was a book group that met in someone’s house. They weren’t really like a school room I don’t think, all the parents were there along with younger siblings etc. At the outdoor centre we did mostly science and nature based activities, with experiments, insect hunts, crafts and sometimes worksheets.

ps I’m glad it’s interesting 🙂

There were also social meet ups in parks, without any particular “educational” aim, and group trips to concerts and plays to make use of discounted school group tickets

HE parent here!

1. Where did you take your exams? ie school/college
2. On average how much did you pay per exam?
3. How did you study your IGCSE's, buy the books then do the work in them with your parents? Any tutor help at any stage (ie just before exams?)
4. What ages did you take your IGCSE's?
5. How much studying did you do before you started IGCSE's?

Thank you very much!

It sounds like your parents did a good job. Were you aware of other HE children who weren't so fortunate?

@PuzzlePiecesAllOver

1. I sat some of them at a private school and others at a tutoring centre which catered for adult learners as well as home ed children and after school learning (I didn’t have any tutoring there). You can pm me for details if you like, it’s still going afaik

1. I think they were around £100 per subject, the school was cheaper (£70 ish) and language exams were more expensive because of the speaking element.

1. Mostly we worked through the textbooks, made notes etc., but also used online resources such as TES and YouTube videos. Oh and some slightly hairy practicals for science! I had a tutor for French and Spanish for an hour a week each, shared with my older sibling.

1. I took some in year 9 and the rest in year 11, the split was partly to do with balancing the cost and partly because it allowed me to keep doing other activities alongside. And partly because my older sibling decided she ought to get on with some GCSEs aged twelve 😂 and well, anything she could do I could do too

1. I’m not sure what you mean by this exactly, but I spent two years studying for each set. Some of the subjects were mainly new material (e.g. I’d never learnt Spanish before), some were more familiar. (e.g. maths was more of a continuation of KS3 workbooks)

You’re welcome!

@JocastaJones not really, I suspect any parents doing it for nefarious purposes, or just ones that didn’t invest so much in their children’s education, wouldn’t have been at home ed meet-ups. I did meet one candidate doing exams who didn’t seem to have been educated in a way that would fit the real world - she breezed into exams late without a care and her parents did some strange homeopathy, she was the minority though

This is fascinating. I wish someone would do a fly on the wall doc of a home ed day

Thanks for answering my question. May I ask why your parents chose HE for you? And how did you find the transition into a college environment at 16? I've been pondering it myself for my DC. Congratulations on your results, you've done brilliantly

@Boscoismyspiritanimal that would be amazing! Bit late for me now though.

@fergusthefrog thank you! I’m not completely certain of my parents’ reasons, as the decision to try it out was made before I was born, but as I said above they trialled it with my older sibling and it worked, so they continued with me. I know a lot of parents end up doing it out of desperation, and others because they had a bad school experience themselves, but that wasn’t the case for me.
I found the transition ok tbh, it was something I was expecting so it wasn’t a massive shock iyswim. I did have to get used to putting my hand up in class to speak, and to waiting for the teacher to finish taking us through the task as a class before I just started doing it - some lessons felt quite slow at first because I was used to getting stuck in by myself when it came to exercises. The teachers didn’t mind though, I was a bit paranoid and apologetic if I made a mistake like that and they were very patient! It probably helped that it was a massive college with people from all different high schools, so easier to make friends than in a school sixth form if I was new.

@Boscoismyspiritanimal actually I’ve just remembered someone actually did do that with us once, it was a very long time ago. I think it was for a uni project or something though, it wasn’t publicly released. It was great because we got to do about a month’s worth of exciting science experiments and trips out in two days. Apparently mental arithmetic workbooks and spelling tests make poor tv 😂

Ugh too many actuallys in that