How hard can Home Ed be? Really?

[shagmundfreud]

Have three dc's and I'm in such a stew about their schooling. Have been thinking about home ed for YEARS but dh is not keen and so we've just bumbled along being unhappy about our children's education and feeling powerless to change it.

Some history: dd at massive, rough (though well run and 'Outstanding' Ofsted) inner city comp in year 8. She's happy there and would rather have her eyes poked out than be home schooled. Her academic performance is crap and her behaviour is worse, but she's popular, has friends, and (bizarrely given the bad behaviour) seemingly much liked by her teachers.

But I feel very strongly that two younger dc's are not having their needs met at their primary, and am shitting myself about where they'll go when they finish. DS1 (year 3) will go to rough comp over my dead body. He's very creative, musical and a bit... ahem..... emotionally 'flighty' (read: quite camp). He'll be crushed at this school. DS2 (year2) is on the road to a diagnosis of ASD (long time coming - primary has been utterly rubbish at supporting him and us).

I want to home school so I can put ds's music at the heart of his education, and encourage him to develop his creativity. Maybe try him for a selective school at 11. His piano teacher feels he is exhausted when he comes to her at the end of the day and yesterday said he is not where she would have expected him to be a year ago, given that he is talented and is putting work in. I think he's knackered from spending the day in class of 31 children, in a small room, with a albeit well meaning and bright, inexperienced teacher who shouts and punishes all day. He looks so tired after school sometimes - really distracted and stressed.

DS2 is even more problematic. You couldn't find a worse learning environment for ds than a busy classroom. His ASD means he struggles to conform and he's simply not making the progress he ought to be making given how bright he is, and actually how much he WANTS to learn. He gets crap support from a very dim classroom assistant who he dislikes and doesn't want to work with.

Anyway, to cut to the chase, I want to home school the boys, but dh doubts my ability to do it. Because I'm disorganised and a bit stressy.

The thing is - I'm a qualified secondary school teacher and until I gave up work to 8 years ago managed to hold down a salaried post teaching A level and GCSE English at an FE college. I just don't think teaching two children of primary age at home can be THAT hard surely?

I know DS2 has special needs, but I can't imagine that what I give him at home could possibly be worse than what he's getting at school at the moment. And I think he'd be so much happier. I'm sick of him being told off all day at school. He comes out like a wild animal at the end of the day - he's had to work so hard at fitting in and doing what he's told. I can't do anything with him after school to help him academically - he needs three hours just to let off the head of steam which has accumulated during the day.

Gahhh! So frustrated. DH also worried that if we take boys out of school we'll never get them back in if HE doesn't work out (their current school is very over subscribed).

Anyway - those of you who're doing it, how hard is it? What could I say to DH to convince him that you don't need to be superwoman to successfully home school two little boys?

sending unhappy children to school is hard. Coping with a child with unmet SEN is difficult.

Home education for us has been the easiest of things, really. Such a relief!

We didn't do any sort of formal work, we were totally informal/following child's interests and running with them. Their SEN became much much much less of an issue, each child's learning style was just that, their individual way of learning. And we've had such fun along the way! I haven't had a single regret. Not one. I'd happily go back and do it all over again. And all three intend to home educate their children, which says it all I think.
They are all in University level education, and doing very well-which is a world beyond the bottom sets and remedial classes they were in at school because of their SEN!!

There's a book Free Range Education: How Home Education Works with chapters written by 20 different families, who explain how HE works for them.
that may be of some help to your DH.
I'd also suggest finding home educators in your local area, and going along to a meeting and chatting to them, so he can see for himself how it could work.
There's a thread here about finding home educators local to you.

Have ordered the book. Thanks for the recommendation!

I think the hard thing is facing up to dh's lack of belief in me.

well as a teacher, you know schools and as a mother, you know your dc. I could imagine that whilst ds1 practises his piano, you could be working 1-1 with ds 2. Some subjects you could teach together, depending on what you plan to cover. I am sure you could educate them through primary if you feel able to cope with ds2's learning style. I don't know much about ASD and what kind of teaching environment you will need to create to further him best.

So the idea is ds1 sits 11+ and you will prepare him for that. Where do you see ds2 going for secondary or do you think you will educate him right through?

Well, everyone knows my views. I'd much much much rather HE a square peg than spend my life trying to console them about the school hole being round.

We really don't teach our children ANYTHING. Totally child led, autonomous, free range. We answer their questions, we take them to interesting places. The end. They learn all kinds of stuff - almost certainly at the same level as, or above, their schooled peers. Because school work is mostly make work, time filling stuff. Life can be more fun than that!

Don't think of it as Dh's lack of belief....remember how as a society we have been brainwashed all of our lives into believing that school is the only way to get educated. That children HAVE to sit and be quiet at a desk in front of a teacher to learn.

and so often the parent who is not doing the day to day coping with the fall out of school, for an unhappy child, really doesn't realise just how bad it can be.

plus the number of successfully home ed youngsters is not documented (mostly in my opinion because they go on to FE college and the colleges don't ever say "formerly home educated x, has done astonishingly well and is now off to Uni"-instead they claim all of the glory!)

I know literally hundreds of home educated teens and young people now, in real life. And every single one of them is doing really well at FE college/Uni/employment/self employment. There is not a NEET amongst them!

Your Dh may need time to come to terms with going against the grain this way. Very many parents do.

He'll worry that the children will be socially isolated-newbies always do! That's why I am suggesting going to a local HE group.

..and unless he is a teacher, he won't have your professional experience in knowing how badly schools can work out for children, especially those with SEN.

Nor will he realise that school is the loneliest place on earth for a child who doesn't fit in.

Ommmward, I wish mumsnet had a 'like button' !

Julie and ommmward.

I luff you both a little bit.

Great posts !

Ooh and of course there is the sister book Home Educating our Autistic Spectrum Children; Paths are made by walking
sorry my brain obviously wasn't in gear earlier!

and there is a Home Education Special Needs website, with a link to an email support group, for help and support from the real experts in home educating these children-the parents actually doing it!
There's also a
Month in the Life of....blog on that same page, where parents have described HE working in their homes with children who have SEN. and if you were to think that 'Ann from Worcestershire' was me, I wouldn't disagree

I only home educated my DD for the last part of Year 6 (at her request) and after a few days she demanded to know why I hadn't told her how interesting HE was. She also found the peace and quiet to work wonderful! Looking back I wish I had home educated both her and DS. Every aspect of DD's work - writing, creativity, maths etc. really took off during HE as I was following things which interested her and she had the atmosphere she needed to be able to do it. She slotted perfectly into secondary education (having passed the 11+ - I prepared both her and DS for it).

If you want to continue with DS2 into secondary level then GCSEs (or whatever it is by that stage) can be taken even though he would not be at school.

As a qualified teacher I am sure you would make a great success of home educating your boys. If you, in your heart, feel that this is the best route for them then it's definitely worth giving it a try. Once your DH sees how the boys develop he'll be convinced!

I'm sure I read here that when the LA have to provide a home tutor for children who are at home because of long-term illness and so on, they only provide 10 hours per week, which is regarded as sufficient for the basics. If that's right, that's two hours of "formal" work per day, Mon-Fri, which you'll easily be able to cover, and maybe that would reassure your DH.

Also from what I've read here, I'd think that being a bit "disorganised" is probably a good thing, because one of the many good things about HE is getting away from rigid timetables.

I'm not really a HEer and all I know about HEing I've learned from reading posts here. But I am a HEer in the sense that I'm HEing me myself, and have been doing since I retired a few years back. One of the most valuable things I've picked up from here is the concept of de-schooling, e.g. getting out of the routine - in my case, it's getting out of the 9-5 Mon-Fri work mindset. I've got some lecture courses on DVD, but sometimes I still do experience a twinge of guilty conscience if I watch one of those DVDs in the daytime because that's when I Should Be Working ; but I don't have the same problem if, for instance, I spend hours during the day browsing the internet, because that's Using A Computer.

Incidentally, my son has just emailed me this link: www.cablemap.info, which shows all the undersea communication cables. That's a good starting point for learning about all manner of things.

Hi, My 12 year old son has been home tutored since september 2010 ....he has aspergers ......we got 5 hours tution a week .......they said thats all they can give ......we are now going to home educate ......

What a lovely post, huggly. I'm so glad you are enjoying your new life and haven't been denied this wonderful world of learning by believing that learning is what happened to you at school and you can't do it now elsewhere!

"I'm sure I read here that when the LA have to provide a home tutor for children who are at home because of long-term illness and so on, they only provide 10 hours per week, which is regarded as sufficient for the basics."

Five hours, actually! That is the legal minimum, provided that it is enough to keep the child caught up with the rest of the class, and five is what LAs provide to most children. Tutors say that it works very well because individual targeted instruction is so much more effective than whole-class teaching.

I'm scatty and disorganised but if I had to, I think that even I could manage an hour a day (on average - obviously some days it would be less and some days it would be more, according to whether the sun was shining and whether we were excited about what we were learning).

However, I don't have to do even an hour a day. Like some of the others, we do no formal work at all unless the kids ask for help with something; for example one of my children asked me to sit and help her practice reading every day, which I did. When she tried school for a term in Y5, she had no difficulty with the schoolwork despite having little experience of formal work.

Or maybe the ease with which she adapted was because she had little experience! Here's an article which suggests that in some cases formal instruction actually interferes with learning: www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/when-less-is-more-the-case-teaching-less-math-in-schools In his book "How Children Fail", former teacher John Holt gives numerous examples of children who had become so confused and frightened by their school experience that their strategies for dealing with schoolwork had become entirely disconnected from their natural common sense. Their mental energies were not directed toward learning, but instead toward surviving a painful situation, whether that meant lowering the teacher's expectations of them even further, playing the clown, or escaping into a world of imagination.

So I think my older daughter came to school without the baggage that some of her classmates had accumulated. She didn't know her multiplication tables, but she was sure this was just because she had never bothered to learn them and she didn't doubt she could pick it up if ever she needed to. She did not consider school to be an occasion where she "needed to" learn those tables, LOL. None of the other children had learned them perfectly yet, after five years of maths teaching, and my dd had no desire to be different from everybody else! By contrast, her classmates did not have the confidence that they could learn if they wanted to. They said things like "I'm rubbish at maths" and "I just can't remember that".

And that is a big part of the reason I am especially keen on HE for her little sister, who would be considered to have special needs if she went to school. Without school, she is just herself. She does what's right for her and it doesn't matter that she can't do what other children of her age can do. Her self-esteem is quite good because she isn't getting asked to do things which are far beyond her (like focusing on something for more than a few minutes).

I don't think you have to do anything for your boys, shagmundfreud. You just have to remove the existing barriers to their learning and they will fly.

I'm also disorganised and a bit stressy. I started HE last October and it has dramatically changed my life. I have a 7, 5, 2yr old and 3mnth old baby. My mum and DH were really supportive all along but while they knew it was right for the children, they were concerned about whether it was right for me. I can honestly say that it couldn't have been more right for me! I am still disorganised and yet I am better than I was and I am so much less stressed. I truly believe its because I'm not forcing unwilling exhausted children out of the door every day, I'm not having to remember lunches, food to put in the lunches, pe kits, uniforms, lost shoes etc etc. life is more relaxed and fluid now.