Home education vs school education

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My 6 year old is currently in year 1 and I constantly play with the idea of home schooling!

I’ve got a few friends who currently home school so would have friends to help me out with ideas, I also feel like I would enjoy having my son home and teaching him immensely. However I also have two other small children so maybe I’m thinking of it through rose tinted glasses and it would be too chaotic to teach at home yet?

I appreciate there’s lots of benefits to school and my son although does moan about going I get the impression he enjoys it when he is there and has friends in school.

Just wondering what others opinions are on home schooling vs normal school!

I can't imagine how hard it is having to go into work 8:30 - 5 everyday if you've been schooled at home your whole life. it's got to be hard to go from that amount of freedom to being in work all day 5 days a week.

It's not something i would ever do unless school was not working at all for DC.

Your post suggests you can see advantages in home schooling for you. You would like to have your son home more and could join in with activities organised by other home schooling parents.

But what advantages do you see for your son in this set up? You say he appears to enjoy school despite moaning. And you say it would be difficult to devote time to his education as you have other small children. How is that going to benefit him?

DS’s state primary does maths, English, history, geography, science, Spanish, IT, art, music (both musicianship and separate instrument lessons/orchestra/band), drama (class production every year, whole school production twice a year), obviously PE, which includes dance, various sports, swimming, etc, RE, and food tech. And yes, the social side of things, the sharing and taking turns and getting along with people you don’t actually like much. Trips and residentials. The breadth of experience on offer is why we chose this particular school.

I would not be able to offer all of that if DS was homeschooled, without spending an absolute fortune on tutors. And if I am paying multiple people to tutor him every day, why not just send him to school?

I've done both, with different timeframes to suit different needs of children.

It's not a matter or better or worse - it's about whether it meets the needs of your child at that particular time.

So one of mine was extremely shy, struggled socially - so didn't go to school until upper primary when they had developed into the world's most sociable human - they flew and stayed there until they left school.

Another had additional needs and coped well in a play based environment but struggled once it became more formal - they coped very well at home because they were very focused, internally motivated and knew what they wanted to do. They went back to school to do the exams they needed for university.

Home ed gives freedom in some ways but also pressure and especially with a child with additional needs means a very intense relationship, which can be hard. On the other hand dealing with endless problems in a school environment, unhappy teachers and a profoundly unhappy child who has internalised that there is something wrong with them - the decision becomes clearer.

It's important to remember that home ed doesn't have to be forever, although it's wise to at least mimic the curriculum if they're going back - it's quite quick to do that.

I home edded my 3 until 6th form. Two are now at uni and the other is planning to go next year.
The cons are the financial hit from at least one parent not being able to work full time. It’s pretty big - don’t underestimate it. Depending on your children, getting them through GCSEs can be tough as you may end up being parent and policing revision. I found that really tough. There were also times when my kids felt a bit ‘weird’ for being home ed and just wanted to be mainstream (although I don’t think this was huge for them as they had a lot of home ed friends). It’s a big responsibility to take on and you know you’ll feel very judged if seen to ‘fail’. It might not be simple to move them to school if you or they want to - although it could be fine.
Pros - we really had a lot of fun and flexibility- particularly up to age 13 or so. They met people from loads of different backgrounds and had quite a high degree of independence early on traveling to different places to see them. One of my sons told me that he used to think bullying was just in fiction books because he’d never experienced it. They were exposed to a lot of different sports and we had time to travel. There were pretty much no subjects that I couldn’t find a resource for them to study. They had a lot of time to follow their interests. They made solid friends and I think were less set in their ideas about who they could mix with. They all coped well with the move to 6th form.

Sounds amazing.

How do they afford it?

We current HE our youngest and will do until Y7 when she will join her brother at private school. She spent 5 years in mainstream (state) and the standard has dropped drastically and in the end the school were not able to guarantee her safety (SEN kids with behaviour issues) and her learning was very poor by then so we decided to remove her.

We have managed in a handful of hours to teach entire KS3 maths curriculum, spending quality time with her and enjoying this chapter.

@Fatiguedwithlife You have taught the whole ks3 maths curriculum in a few hours!? What a load of rubbish! Have you done extension work as well? She will be doing her GCSEs in the summer then?

Sorry I means finished it off, she’d obviously covered some in school. A couple of hours a day 1:1 though and you can smash through it

I was home schooled for most of my primary education. I have briefly home schooled my daughter when she was recovering from an operation. I'm a teacher and so was my mother. Unless your child has particular needs and would benefit from homeschooling, there is no way I would do it.

School teaches you so many things that home schooling just doesn't. Being homeschooled is very comfortable, unstimulating and quite easy for the child. You don't have to deal with other children unless you want to. You don't have to navigate the different personalities of adults. You don't have to make it on time to school. You don't have to head out in the rain or get up particularly early. You don't have to deal with anyone doing anything unfair or nasty to you. You don't learn to interact with people outside your family when you need something or don't know what to do. You don't gain the confidence that comes with being able to deal with all those things.

Academically it can be fine at primary level if the parent is a conscientious and competent teacher with plenty of time available, but as the school day is short and the holidays are quite long there is plenty of time for academic enrichment without going to the extreme of homeschooling.

I haven’t voted as nothing is this simple. I flirted with the idea of home education at a couple of stress points in ds’s upbringing, and Dh and I between us could have supported a good curriculum adequately. Ultimately I believed and still believe in school. Ds was incredibly’school-shaped’ and I saw the benefits of that long, intimate community experience, however much I disagreed with certain aspects ( I still flinch at the phrase ‘unhealthy food’).

Home education and home school are different things, although with some overlap.

Home schooling roughly follows a school curriculum, home education can be what you make it.

Have a think about what your DS needs to learn for his age. Can you provide that?

Homeschooling is only a good idea in extreme circumstances, when it is necessary for the child, IME. Your reasons sound selfish and not centered on any particular need for your child (or indeed any particular skill or rationale from yourself). So yes I would say you are definitely looking at it through rose tinted glasses.
i have taught about 10 children who have returned to school after being home Ed and they all shared certain traits - difficulties socially, struggled with group work (a lack of tolerance of others who found work harder, problems comprising), a lack of resilience. These issues caused real distress. They were all very good at communicating with adults though and were lovely children. Their mothers also shared certain traits (and of the people I have met it has always been the mothers doing the home Ed); rather intense, not working, totally absorbed in the minutiae of their dcs lives to a stifling extent. I have also known a home Ed child in a different capacity (a youth group) once she left school she gradually became more awkward with the others - she basically could no longer relate to them as they chatted about their days at school and all their funny stories. She was shy anyway and had nothing to share anymore, she withdrew from them, stopped laughing and eventually stopped coming. She only socialised with a small group of home Ed children who were basically her mother’s friends children. Her mother was lovely and doing it with the best of intentions but it was heartbreaking to watch.

All the ‘how will you afford it / what about work’ questions are a bit provocative. It’s an obvious answer, isn’t it? And plenty of parents with children in primary school don’t work full time. I’m not planning to be full time for the foreseeable and I’m not home edding!

A woman who runs an outdoor playgroup near where we live home educates her three children - I don’t quite honestly know how as I struggle just to read a book with mine when the other is around! Obviously the business she has means she can work a bit and HE. I don’t think it’s massively lucrative though.

Other than your personal enjoyment, what are your reasons for doing it?
What reasons, relating to your child’s benefit, do you want to do it?
He is in year 1 now so what is it about school so far that you want to do differently?

@dampmuddyandcold So her dc do what when she’s running the playgroup? Play too? Then do education in the afternoon when they are tired? I’d wonder what quality of education they get. Often these decisions are more about parents and not dc.

Well yes, they play too

It’s a forest playgroup so there’s a lot of similar stuff to what my own ds does in EYFS. Besides, she only runs it twice during the week so it leaves plenty of time for lessons, although it is worth remembering a lot of teacher time in school is taken up with behaviour. I don’t just mean the negative stuff but just the nature of dealing with other students.

Home schooling is 100% not for me but for some families it does seem to work well.

We home educate DD who is 11 (Y7). She's benefited massively from it. The schools around us are dire (I've taught in a couple of them) and wouldn't be the right environment for her, there are no grammar schools nearby and we can't afford private. They're all obsessed with mixed ability classes and use quiet, intelligent girls as buffers for badly-behaved boys in the classes; I refused to subject DD to that.

She takes her first GCSE in a couple of months and has worked through most of the KS3 Maths curriculum in 5 months. If you can devote time to it and do it properly, home ed is amazing.

These are all really interesting perspectives!

You’re all right in saying it sounds like I want to do it for selfish reasons, I think predominantly it is selfish! I want him with me as I love his company and wish the school day or week was shorter!

I do also think KS1 children benefit from more play based learning / being outside which is what I see him benefitting from if he was home schooled. But he does do well in school and no additional needs that we’re aware of so far so there wouldn’t be any need to take him out of school really.

In regards to ability I’d definitely be able to teach him his current curriculum, and I suppose if he was home schooled and wanted to learn something I couldn’t as he got older I would promote trying to teach himself or hire a tutor. (I definitely cannot teach him Latin lol)

It’s Interesting to see what others think and I actually didn’t think I would get so much more voting for mainstream school over home education!

@BumpLoading DC at school only get around 4 hours a day learning. Doing play based doesn’t help with reading or writing and if you want him to experiment more, have a go at weekends. You have a lot of time after school. If you think this is a fun way to learn, have a go! Not sure how it works with music and drama that my dc enjoyed. However we did a lot of “educational” games at home but in school it’s very time consuming for a class of 30 to go down this route.

I think if your kids has SEN or is being bullied then home ed is possibly in their best interests

otherwise school is the best option - they will miss out on so much by not going

One home ed family I know encourage their kids (they have a lot) to get weekly work experience from about 13 which they do on week days. For example one worked at a garage (and went on to do an apprenticeship there), another helped in a special school. They’ve got great work ethics, were used to working with adults and have been fine going to work as adults!

IME parents who can’t decide tend to be happier with school. I’ve loved home ed and have no regrets. I think my kids are happier and our family relationships are stronger because of it.

This is all valid anecdata but no more than that really. I also run a youth group where a girl has left school to be home ed. She’s really grown in confidence, she gets on well with everyone (previously she was dominated and controlled by one particular girl), she’s happier and she now sleeps at night! I also know a few home ed families with children branching out into adulthood. They all have friends and either jobs or are at uni.