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.

Teachers, like anyone in a full on job, need/want a vent session. That doesn't mean it's a bad place, or that your child would be better off not there.

School is also about the social aspect and learning to get along with others. In the real world, work and life won't revolve around him and his specific interests.

Oh, op. You really missed my point!
All kids are into dinosaurs. If you let your child "take the lead on what they're interested in", it'll be dinosaurs and Minecraft or whatever.

But if I'd home schooled my child, she'd get to the age of 18 without having even heard of the Crimean War.

What 5yo spontaneously says "Mummy I'm interested in how hygiene evolved during the Crimean War"?! Lol. "I can follow my child's interests", ah right then.

And yet all her class have really loved learning about Florence Nightingale. Did you know they used to reuse bandages until then? Me neither.

Op I’m really sorry but as a mum of 2 older children I think your expectations regarding child development are way off here, and that’s sounding red flags to me about your views of your ‘home educating journey’.

Firstly you seem to be expecting your 5 year old will show natural flair and affinity for niche or interesting subjects. Most kids at that age don’t. They may find passing facts interesting, or say ‘wow’ when they see a dinosaur skeleton, but they don’t develop proper interests in the way you describe until at least age 7 or 8. It will very much be on you to make things interesting and without little buddies there to fan the flames of excitement and mutual interest, that will be a tall order for you.

Secondly, only allowing your child to socialise under heavy supervision and as part of a directed activity is no good either, and the opposite of the ‘free play’ that is held up as being ideal. A classroom environment is great for this as while the kids are supervised to an extent, a lot relies on them developing their own social skills. Assigning a leader is never going to be as beneficial as the kids assigning their own leader.

Thirdly it’s not really child lead as they haven’t tried school. If you’re not giving them the option then in effect you’re trying to decide their personality and needs for them. My kids are both highly social and love a classroom setting. If I took them out of school, they would be angry, bored and stifled. Put simply I am not enough for them. If I had never sent them to school they wouldn’t realise they enjoy it.

I am both a primary school parent and a governor and I simply don’t recognise the description of the education system as ‘broken’. My daughter’s primary is a wonderful, warm, nurturing place which we will miss hugely when she moves on to secondary this year. There is plenty of time and space for free/outdoor play, including forest school for years R-4. It’s clearly your choice as to how you educate your child, but I would be very wary of making assumptions about what schools are like that aren’t based on first-hand experience.

So you haven’t visited any schools but you’ve decided they’re stifling and restrictive and ‘sit kids at desks all day’? (As soon as I heard the latter I thought ‘yeah she’s got all this from Insta’ but you don’t actually see this as a school parent in real life - it’s the preserve of homeschooling fear mongers).

At least visit a few and then decide. All this intense planning around homeschool when you haven’t even investigated other options shows me this isn’t a well thought through decision made for your child, it’s you buying into the homeschool trend and moulding your family to fit it rather than vice versa.

Op, the world and its mother would tell you that the years of home development that count most are under 3. After that, socialisation actually becomes very important. There are so many schools out there that offer forest schooling etc. The school I teach in has a plot for every class.
If you're worried your child's education won't be diverse enough, you have evenings and weekends to make that happen. It doesn't all have to happen during the school day.

Absolutley agree - my 9 year-old has discovered a huge interest in South America due to a topic at school.

But also what primary school often does so cleverly is incorporate all the subjects into one topic. So with the South America topic there were cross links to previous topics on local history and slavery. Literacy development through reading and writing poetry connected to the wildlife there, alongside creating artworks. They cooked some food from different countries and had to work out the cost of food. They learned about sports they'd never heard of an tried to replicate them. Much of which was team work in pairs, groups or the whole class.

The teamwork side was what brings all the learning to life.

I’m surprised this has come up as a topic of discussion now.

Is it possible you might have come across as a bit smug and holier than thou? Remember most people do put their children into the school system so if you expound upon your intention to protect your child from “falling between the cracks” it is hard to do so without implying your listeners are failing their own children by not doing the same. Rather like proselytising about the benefits of EBF to friends who bottle feed or fed.

People will also be eye rolling because your child is still a baby of one and there is a bit of a precious firstborn trope whereby parents earnestly declare their baby will have no screens, never eat simple sugars or UPF with the earnest rapture of new missionary. At one year old you can’t really spin it as not being right for your particular child, you are advocating for it over school as being better, not just better for Sebastian as he presents at 5/9/13 because of X,Y & Z.

In your shoes I’d have kept this line of thought between me and the baby’s father until much closer to school age.

I agree with this. How do you know what’s going to be the right thing when they’re only one ?

I think it’s naive to think you’ll be guided by their interests. You’ll instinctively take them places you enjoyed as a child or have interest in.
Also have you visited the HE group? There’s a group that meets weekly at in wooded area near where I walk the dog and it’s not the type of set up my dd would have enjoyed, pretty much kids running feral and parents standing by. Not saying all groups are like that but it isn’t a great advert for HE. My dd wouldn’t have thrived in that environment.
They are only in school 9-3, 39 weeks a year. Lots of time together outside school.

I'm glad to finally hear of someone for whom it's an actual choice and not a result of relentless battles for a child with SEND when the family has had enough and pulls them out for the sake of everyone s mental health.