to tell teacher friends to stop with the negativity over our decision to home educate?

[teaandaflorentineplease]

We’ve made the decision to home educate our child. Fulltime school isn’t right for our family, and I genuinely believe that play based, informal learning suits early childhood far better than sitting at desks from age five. I’d have been open to flexi-schooling if our local school allowed it, but they don’t so we’ve chosen home education.

What’s surprised me is the strength of the negative reaction from our teacher friends. These are people who regularly describe the state of education as dire. Dreadful behaviour, no funding, days spent on crowd control rather than actual teaching, children falling through the cracks, classrooms falling apart, pressure to hit their academies’ targets rather than do what’s best for the kids, they can’t even afford gluesticks. This insight into education from a teacher’s perspective has also informed my decision to home ed.

However when I said I was going to home educate, suddenly schools are wonderful and I’m making a terrible mistake. It started a few weeks ago when a teacher friend mentioned our children will be in the same class and since then the comments about how awful home ed is have kept coming. I’ve been shrugging it off to avoid an argument, but I’m getting increasingly frustrated. I’ve spent years validating how broken the system is, for both teachers and children, and yet the moment I choose to opt out of it, it becomes the only way to educate a child.

For context, my husband and I are both well-educated and take our child’s learning seriously. I feel comfortable teaching the early foundations like reading, writing and maths, and we plan to build projects around history, geography, science and whatever else our child shows an interest in. Beyond that, we haven’t planned anything because our child is still one. As we go through it, we’ll learn about what works for our family, and we’ll have seen how other home ed families approach things as children get older. We haven’t ruled out school further down the line either; it might turn out to be the right fit at some stage.

I’m not looking to convince anyone or get into a debate about home ed vs school. We’ve made our decision and we’re comfortable with it. I just find the contradiction so confusing and a bit hurtful. These are people who in some cases we’ve know for years, know how seriously we take our child’s wellbeing, and have spent years telling us the system is broken. I want to say firmly we’ve made a decision and we don’t want to hear anything else about it, but I also don’t want to lose long standing friends over it.

Of course you can make a decision 3 years in advance, it's called planning. Many people move house to be near good schools, or put their children's name down for a private school at this age, or plan their own careers around their children's education. Of course, nobody can plan for major life changing unexpected events, but the chances are nothing major is going to happen.

It seems odd to me to decide this for a baby.
School is not just about learning the curriculum, but about learning to socialise with others, tolerate difference, make relationships outside the family, have access to other points of view etc. I understand home schooling where a child has not managed or has suffered from being in school, but otherwise I think it selfish to impose the choice on a child just because you believe you can teach them well at home. Most kids go to school and cope perfectly well. One day they may bitterly resent your decision. Plus there are many practical considerations, of course. I expect that's how your friends feel.

I think it is going to difficult for your child to go from nursery 4 or 5 daus a week to being at home. I don't understand why you think this is a sensible plan. I thinl home ed can work well bit not with DCs who love nursery ! Anecdata but DD was absolutely desperate to go to school and in the year before she went to school would beg to go to nirsery on my days off !

It isn't really about the academics though, is it? We can all teach our kids what they need to know from books but we can't teach how to navigate friendships and the independence they need.

As an aside if you are wanting your dc to go to rainbows (girlguiding) or squirrels (scouting) at age 4 for socialising get their name down now.

Huge amounts of outdoor time, experience in nature, risky play, they have an allotment they tend to. I’m not naturally outdoorsy, kill every plant I meet so having the opportunity to get soaking and filthy, and engage in play outdoors for so long is great for my child.

Thanks, we did that after meeting the scout leader at our library’s nursery rhyme group. I hadn’t realised it was competitive.

There’s a strong HE network so we’ll meet up with other families, go to clubs and team sports, and others as their interests develop.

My daughter does all of that at school. She’s in year 3. They have dedicated forest school area where they’ve learned to build fires and use knives. They have school allotments and pets which they all help to care for. They have a lot of outdoor space and they make good use of it, having some lessons outside in summer. The children have weekly swimming lessons.

Have you actually visited any primary schools?

Do you say that to everyone whose plan is for
their child to go to
school? I suspect not.

I’m sorry OP I’m pretty pro home schooling, I have many times considered homeschooling my dyslexic, summer born primary school child and generally think ‘fair play’ to families who’ve decided to do it.

But you lost me when you said DC is 1. You have no idea what it will be like to parent/educate a child, which is very different to parenting a baby or a toddler. More over you also have no idea what life will look like if you have more DC. I’m not saying that any of these things will be terrible or hard or that you won’t be able to do it it will just be really very different to how your life is now, which is already really very different to how I assume your life was 2 years ago before you had any DC.

I wouldn’t burn your bridges, keep an open mind. I’d probably keep it more wishy washy with friends. See how it goes, you don’t really know who your DC will be yet.

P.S. we have the lovevery reading kit and it was no where near as good as the phonics system for learning to read.

I didn't say you did? I'm going by my personal experience. But that said, deciding to HE at a year old smacks of first time mum naivety where they will never use screens, only snack on carrot sticks and instead of school we will spend blissful days skipping through meadows and my child will listen with wonder at everything I show them and won't all the inferior parents who lock their children away in dark prisons with evil teachers wish they were as perfect as me and my home educated little angel 😇

What would your annual education budget be? To cover resources, classes and clubs, tutoring etc.

Are there sufficient clubs and classes locally to e.g. do woodwork, science, sports etc that are hard to manage fully at home? It's one thing doing some science kits at home, but a whole other thing managing high school subjects needing bunsen burners, lathes etc.

I’ve not visited but I’m aware of our local primary school’s provision and they are not an outdoorsy forest school. Where I am that’s not the norm. If it were I would feel differently and I will probably apply and investigate more thoroughly closer to the time your daughter’s school sounds great and I wish that were the standard.