how many children you have?
Two, aged 11.5 and 4.5. The older one went to school for one term at the age of nine: schooltourist.blogspot.com/
how you manage to juggle housework with learning
As everyone else says, same as when they were small. Only as they get older it gets easier because they require less entertaning, make less mess (usually!), and can help with the housework properly. My older daughter does nearly all of the supermarket shopping, pays some of the bills online, and does most of the washing. She loves DIY because it's always a new challenge and she gets more gratitude and respect from tiling the bathroom than from tidying up! If she were at school all day I'd hesitate to ask that of her, and in fact when she was at school most of her housework duties were suspended. But as it stands, she has very large amounts of leisure time and I see no reason why she shouldn't spend an hour or two a day helping out.
How do you ensure that your children are learning enough, the necessary thing and in enough depth?
"Falling behind" is a worry at school, where everyone else carries on relentlessly, regardless of whether a particular child is ready to progress. Certain things must be covered in order to prepare the child for the standard curriculum next year, or at the next school. Without one-to-one attention, the child may not grasp a key idea. And anyway, he may not be interested, which makes it all harder.
It's a different story outside of school, where none of that applies. Because HE is so much more efficient than school-based learning, there's lots and lots and lots of time. And there are no deadlines. Suppose you (or your child) suddenly realise when she's ten that she doesn't understand the bar chart printed in the newspaper and that that would be a useful skill for her to have. You just teach her then. Or she decides she wants to be a vet, and has never done any biology. She just starts learning biology. It really doesn't matter that she does it intensively at the age of ten rather than a bit at a time starting at seven.
And what if they reach the age of sixteen without having learned something important? People who are accustomed to thinking that learning always happens at school worry about this. Everyone else knows that if you reach adulthood lacking some vital skill or knowledge, you learn it as an adult.
I'll trot out an example I've given before. My dh, a roofing carpenter, decided at the age of 32 that trigonometry would help him in his job. He sat with a book and very little help from me and mastered everything he needed to know in just a few weeks. Now, I'd spent an entire year on trig at school. Most of my classmates didn't like it, and I'm sure that a few years later they'd forgotten everything they'd learned. My dh was interested and actually used what he'd learned every week, so he still knows it twenty years later. I think he's unusual, in that he survived the school system without losing confidence in his ability to learn elsewhere. The other guys on the building site admire his ability to work out the angles, but very few of them take him up on his offer to show them how to do it. "No thanks. I never was any good at maths," they say. From being left behind at school they have absorbed the crippling idea that you only get one chance to learn.
Also do HE children go on to take GCSEs usually?
I don't know about "usually." Many of our friends do but many don't, and it doesn't seem to hold them back. I'm not bothered whether my daughter does them or not. I think she'd probably prefer Open University.