I home educate - AMA

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I home educate DD1 who would be in y1 if she was in school. She's never been to school but attended preschool part time and hated it. I also have DD2 age 2 at home with me full time. I am a SAHM and have been since DD1 was born, while DH works full time to support us.

AMA!

I'm not an expert, but I'm also pretty knowledgeable about HE as a whole so if you have any questions about home ed more generally, please go wild!

(I'm starting this thread after having seen quite a few threads lately suggesting HE is tantamount to neglect so I'm braced for judgement! I'm hoping some people might read this and see it's valid and the right choice for some families. It's right for my family but that doesn't mean I think you're wrong if you have chosen to send your children to school.)

Do you get lonely?or do you have good friends in your home ed community?

I think you have a lovely attitude btw and really lovely honest and measured responses

I’m seriously considering home educating my almost 8 year old. He’s the middle child and the other two are perfectly happy in mainstream school.
He is autistic and is struggling more and more with the demands of school life everyday. He has sensory issues and the noise/smell/strictness of the classroom just doesn’t work for him.
I am not teacher trained at all and I have no idea where I’d even go to know what to teach him. He’s year 3 so do you follow the NC or make up your own stuff. I just worry he’d get to GCSEs and still be doing 3x tables!

So we are a very unsporty family of uncoordinated people and therefore sport isn't high on my agenda (we are active though! Lots of walking, hiking, running, swimming etc). As my girls get older there are various home ed groups for sports we might try but they're quite far afield. However there are plenty of general sports groups after school and at weekends we could try (she has friends who attend ballet, football and cricket amongst others, any of which she could try). I have my eye on a gymnastics class for children with SEN in the next town across but it would be quite a lot to juggle at the moment with DD2 so I'm banking that for next year! At the moment DD1 is very happy to bounce on her trampoline, scoot to the park and play catch in the garden.

As far as I'm aware there is no way to claim benefits to be a SAHM/home educator... Home ed is something you have to fund for yourself. I often wish there was an allowance for buying educational resources (particularly pertinent in the GCSE years as schooled children get exam entry for free, but home educating families spend thousands on exam entries alone).

This is a good point. I know a family locally whose child has similar SEN to mine who is likely to be offered a place at a specialist school a 45 minute drive away as nowhere closer can meet her needs. The taxpayer will be paying for her transport which will likely be via taxi, twice a day for every day she attends the school.

ETA I in no way object to this use of public money!

Just to clarify, the government does not in any way fund home education! Parents need to self fund and there are no available pots of money as a home educator that I'm aware of.

I certainly didn't mean to imply school has no benefit for anyone except as a form of childcare! It is a fantastic way for many children to learn, and I agree that the values you listed can certainly play a part in the value of school.

I actually have a lot of experience of schools - aside from my placements during PGCE I then went on to work in a range of roles across primary and secondary, including but not limited to working as a class TA, a 1:1, a private tutor working in schools, and delivering GCSE revision classes for students receiving pupil premium. School has benefits (and many flaws) and is certainly not 'just' childcare.

I'm not 'avoiding school' for my daughter - I have made a positive choice for home education. The fact she's very unlikely to be bullied is one pro in a very long list. Yes, I was bullied at school, as was my best friend, my husband, and pretty much everyone I am close to. I also think my DD would be at particularly high risk of bullying due to her vulnerabilities.

I agree that boredom has its place in life and am careful to give my DDs opportunities to be bored (I'm sure they'd say far too many opportunities!). But given my DD could read fluently before starting preschool and write all of her letters clearly, as well as understanding maths at a level around 2 years higher than her age, I think she'd have been very bored academically as well as very stressed by the social and emotional aspects of school.

I think unschooling is excellent in theory for the bulk of a child's education, but not all. Every child needs a solid grounding in numeracy and literacy, but aside from this, I suspect proper unschooling would be hugely beneficial for most children.

In practice, it's a lot more complicated than that, as a lot of the theory behind it is that kids will learn by following their interests. I know from my own laziness and inertia how very easy it is to fall into bad habits and scroll for a few hours in the evening rather than doing something like read or draw, which I'd enjoy a lot more. I imagine most children are the same, so if given endless access to tech and little contact with the real world, I think a lot of kids will want to learn solely about Minecraft or Fortnight or whatever! Modern technology is hugely addictive and children aren't immune to this.

Yes I'm fascinated that this forms the backbone of some people's objections to home ed! I had no idea! I didn't imagine I'd learn so much from starting an AMA. Thank you for the data and for posting.

High achieving, arguably (both Oxbridge grads), but DH isn't particularly high earning. As stated up thread, no benefits are available for home educating! I'd be trying to claim them if there were as it'd be nice to throw more money at the girls' education as I try and save money where I can.

Yes, I'm not actually sure you can FORCE a child to cope... The amount of times we were called to collect her from preschool when she was inconsolable feels like evidence for this!

This is lovely to hear ❤

I probably should devise a better system but I just have a word document where I note down what we've been doing. Some of it has a clear progression (for example, we are working our way through a maths book which aligns with the y2 maths curriculum - she completes three pages a day, and if she's understood it confidently, we move on, and if she's not yet totally confident, I find a way to approach the skill from a slightly different perspective the next day until she's cracked it). I don't have a particular yearly aim - I imagine she'll complete the y2 maths content this academic year, but it might take slightly longer or less time.

There is a lovely home ed community local to us! We have solid home ed friendships and will do things together. For example, this morning we teamed up with another home ed family and spent 3h together, at the local museum and then lunch. It's nice for my DDs to have the chance to socialise with children in the same boat educationally and it's nice for me to talk to another home ed mum!

I'm a classic introvert and definitely don't get lonely - the opposite is closer to the truth! By the time the girls are in bed all I want to do is sit in a dark room in absolute silence and solitude 😂 I do have good friends, both in the home ed community and outside of it. I've been really pleasantly surprised at how supportive of home ed nearly everyone has been.

Thank you so much - I don't want to give a false impression of home ed as it's certainly not perfect and neither am I a perfect home educator (very far from it) but there are so many advantages that it's a shame many people still find it so controversial. We have our bad days like everyone else, particularly if DD2 is teething and has kept me up all night and DD1 wakes up on the wrong side of bed. I sometimes think about how nice it would be if somebody else like a teacher could take charge and I wouldn't have to be the grown up any more 😂 but again that mostly feels like a part of parenting rather than specifically home ed. I guess that home ed is just another facet of parenting for me.

Please feel free to PM me if you want to talk privately. I'll reply to this message here though in case it gives anyone else any food for thought!

I'm sorry your DS is struggling. Sensory issues are a big part of my DD's life (and therefore my life too!) and I can't imagine how difficult she'd have found a classroom.

You don't need any specific teaching knowledge to home educate well (in fact, the home educators I know who used to be teachers say that they have to disregard everything they did in schools when educating their own children!).

In terms of what to teach, the law is clear about home ed. Every child must learn numeracy and literacy and have opportunities for socialising and physical activity, but how you do this is up to you. The beauty of home ed for autistic children in my experience is following their special interests. For example my DD was absolutely obsessed with the Vikings for ages so we made it a huge topic where she learned history but also geography, science, handicrafts and art, and we themed a lot of her literacy and a little of her maths around it.

You can follow the NC if you want to, and the info is all online and also in many workbooks you could buy. We only use the NC for maths, but it's very easy to do as I can buy workbooks that take us through every step of the content.

You don't say whether your DS is working at a y3 level but another beautiful thing about home ed is that it doesn't matter. If he's actually working at y3 level in most things, but his spelling and handwriting are y1 but his maths is y5 for example, that's fine! You can meet him where he is and that's a much easier place to make meaningful progress from.

I strongly recommend the website Twinkl (your son's school probably gets a lot of their work from it!). A couple of years ago they used to give you a free resource every week for signing up to their newsletter but they might have stopped it now. They have quite a few free resources and samples you can download and they have everything you could possibly need to home educate at primary level.

I also recommend the Facebook group called PopArt Home Education for anyone who is home educating - they run fantastic discounts for educational resources. We use PopArt to get a big discount on the White Rose maths online platform, which is used by most primary schools. It costs me about £15 a year to have access to all the same maths a school would have access to.

If you have any questions about home ed, I'm very happy to talk via PM or in this thread. Good luck to you and your DS whatever you decide - parenting an autistic child isn't easy and watching them struggle is so heartbreaking and I wish you all the best.

Good for you OP. No questions but keep going!

Ahh lovely OP,
I am a little bit jealous of you being at the start of home educating, I would do it all again in a heartbeat.

Two comments-
those saying the OP are saving the state, or actually schools money is only partially true. A school gets money per pupil. Assuming a school is not oversubscribed there is then a gap where OPs daughter would have attended. The school saves on school meals and some resources. However it still needs to pay the teacher and overheads to heat the school with less money.

Benefits universal credit
depending on joint or single income both parents would be expected to be have meetings when youngest is one, preparing to take up work when they are 2 year old and working or looking for work from 3.

This would not apply if the parents has been assessed or as too ill to work. in a lot of cases when parents HE a child with a disability the home educator is a Carer. However to get this child must get middle or high rate DLA (until they are 16 when PIP begins) As a carer they may get Carer’s Allowance.

From Disability Rights UKFor children to get middle rate care needs (remember this is in addition to what a non disabled child that age needs)

For the middle rate of the care component, your child must meet one of the following conditions. They need:
during the day:

• frequent attention throughout the day in connection with their bodily functions; or
• continual supervision throughout the day to avoid substantial danger to themselves or others;

or at night:

• prolonged or repeated attention in connection with their bodily functions; or
• another person to be awake for a prolonged period or at frequent intervals to watch over them in order to avoid substantial danger to themselves or others.