Flexi-schooling...

[ButterPieify]

I'm considering flexi schooling my two...we love HE, but have found that part time nursery for them, part time work for me and full time work for DH is the best combination for us all.

(I find it too intense being with the kids all day every day, plus money is an issue, and DD1 likes the class environment in moderation)

Now DD1 is due to start school, every time I think about sending her there full time I am :s, and I am reassuring her about school but she always becomes unhappy if she does more hours at nursery, will she be like that at school? She likes to have what she calls "a quiet room" every now and again, especially if she has had a long day at nursery, I think she gets overwhelmed- she is only 3. She likes running and shouting etc, but her favourite things are things like board games and drawing, and doing puzzles.

She has already started talking about what girls don't do and saying she isn't smart, she is pretty. :(

My ideal, dream situation would be to find a school used to flexi schooling that would take her for two or three days a week and we could HE the rest of the time. That way we would have time to indulge her interests and let her have one to one time (or one to two, as she has a baby sister) but we would still have that time apart and time for me to work and rest. Plus she could mix with the class and so on at school, and the school's consent would mean I could keep people quiet who suggest that I couldn't educate her properly.

This is all a pipe dream, isn't it?

I'm under Sunderland lea, if that helps, but closer to Newcastle physically (and in spirit :) ) and the school she would go to is in a very deprived area. There isn't even a pta, so not sure what they would think of a parent wanting to get that involved. There are two other schools she could go to, one is catholic (we aren't religious) and the other has a special unit that is like a school within the school for Deaf kids, but doesn't have as good a reputation, if any of that is relevant. None of them are oversubscribed, all are state and in walking distance.

Apparently it's written into the law that schools receive full-time funding for children who are educated off-site. On his website, Mike Fortune-Wood (home ed guru extraordinaire) cites s444(3)(a) of the 1996 Education Act.

So there would need to be a change to the law for the funding to be cut.

It's entertaining to see how the DfE handles this issue in the guidance notes for the pupil census for the Dedicated Schools Grant. They say that there is no such thing as a part-time pupil who is of compulsory school age: by definition all pupils of compulsory school age are full-time. On a particular day a pupil can be absent for some reason (illness, educated off-site, unauthorised absence etc) but he is still a full-time pupil!

So you see they aren't part-time at all, they are full-time pupils who don't attend school every day. Only foolish innocents like you and me would call such an arrangement "part-time"