I need everything I need to know about home-educating a yr 8 who is VI

[KatyMac]

Please as currently this is a real possibility

I also read that you employ staff. Can you ensure that you have enough hands-on others to deal with the nine and you can be an extra, not having to work 7:30-18:00. For example, if only two minded kids are there from 7:30-8:30, you could cover that time with your DD there (having breakfast, getting dressed, etc.) and others could do the more full-on times. What have you done in all the time she has been off school sick?

Does your DD like being around the minded kids (I saw you had a thread in 2008 about a GCSE in childcare)? If so, she can help and therefore you will be working together.

You do not need to worry about academic work for her. She needs time to settle and to recover from what has been giving her problems. I'd de-register her tomorrow and concentrate on de-schooling, as described by NAB. Allow a month for at least every year she has had problems and probably for each year she has been at school - i.e., I would not expect her to be ready to do formal learning until next April. In that time, you do things that she is interested in (such as music, TV and reading) but without tryng to make it "fit" a school mould.

If she wants and needs qualifications for what she wants to do, she could do GCSEs at home, perhaps from 14-15; go to college at 16 and do 5 GCSEs in a year to get onto A-level courses; or enrol on Open University courses.

My DD has never been to school and is about to go off to university at 18 to study law. She has done five OU courses over the last 3.5 years - no GCSEs, no A-levels. Not covering the KS3 syllabus is not a disaster!

If you would like to talk about home ed on the phone, I'd be happy to discuss it with you. Email me at [email protected] and I'll send you a phone number.

I think of HE as being very free-form but maybe I need to reconsider the whole situation

Maybe the learning is freeform but the timetabling should be more structured - so she has me between 9 & 9:30, then works on her own for a bit,with more inputs later

She would have to learn a different way of learning

I think it needs lots of thought

We are completely autonomous HEers (and I am another professional educator, from a family of teachers. Like, my entire nuclear family and most of my inlaws and extended family...)

Learning to educate my children autonomously has had a tremendous impact on the way I interact with my own students. Much less top-down.

We are pretty rigidly timetabled. I go to work at set times, when my partner is in charge of the children. In that sense, there is ommmward time and ommmward'sOH time every day, with a rhythm to it, and certain types of activity are more likely to happen with one of us in charge than with the other. But that doesn't stop the children leading their own learning, it just means that the adult looking after them shifts at various times of day. And yes, there is plenty of time for one or more children to be occupying themself without adult input. The important thing is that adults should be available to the children - and with a 13 year old, I think it is absolutely fine for them to be expecting to entertain themselves for some of the time and to have the option of input from you at other times. But see what your daughter has to say about it

The biggest thing, I'd say, is to enter the next stage as the result of an imaginative negotiation with your daughter, so that both of you are completely comfortable with the plan. No good you figuring out how to make it "work" if she is not fully on board!

DD may be the problem - she wants to stay at school - but we will discuss it