Self teaching A levels?

[WhenI]

I have a degree and had a career before the kids. My degree was career specific and I've now lost my professional registration due to time out of the field. It's fine, I didn't want to go back anyway.
I'm considering teaching as a future career goal. I have good GCSEs but took a vocational route for a level and have a bTec National is health and social care. As great as that was for my degree and career goals at the time I recognise it's not a widely taken subject and available roles (locally) might be limited.
I was considering trying to self teach English literature, English language and religious studies at A level. Is this possible? I have a three year time frame to achieve this with the intention of beginning a teacher training course in the not too distant future.

Any advice or signposting to relevant pages would be greatly appreciated.

I think it would be very difficult to achieve the right level of critical thinking without a tutor or group to discuss with. English language is not as often available at A level as literature.

I've never done English at A-level so it may be different. However, I remember doing sociology and not being impressed with the teacher so I just used the books to teach a lot of it myself. Also my brother who loves languages has regularly done A-levels in different languages having taught himself.

Yes, you can; there are home-educated teenagers who do this. I agree that specialist tuition would be a big asset for humanities subjects, to get the essay approach right. There are various distance learning courses for these subjects ; have a look at NEC, Wolsey Hall, and Oxford Home Learning.

I had to mark the A Level coursework of several external candidates who had done an English A Level by some sort of distant learning/online tutoring course. I felt very sorry for them as they were clearly quite able but had been badly advised re the title, texts, critical reading, everything. They did not achieve good grades. It showed me how teaching is actually because you really do need someone with in depth understanding of the particular specification and its exam and coursework requirements which is only developed with time, commitment and experience. With the best will in the world an online tutor/ self teaching can only get you so far if they haven't got the day to day experience of talking about their subject/ interaction with the exam board/ meetings/ sharing resources/ standardisation etc. I imagine those students would have been very disappointed and probably surprised about their grades and wished I could have contacted them to have explained what they needed to put their work right.

What's the barrier to going to an FE college and doing the A Levels as an evening course? Or scrap A Levels and do a foundation course. You would then benefit from the support of peers and tutors.

Work backwards. Start by finding out the requirements for your preferred teacher training route to establish if you need a foundation course, Open University course or A levels. Then take it from there.

What subject would you want to teach? You may not need to do any of this - find out what you would need to get onto a teacher training course and then decide.