Are there any benefits of Primary school that HE can't usually provide?

[carolinecordery]

Hello all, I haven't registered my DD for Reception, which she would be eligible to start in September.
I was just wondering if you thought there were any benefits of primary school that HE can't provide. What things are good about primary school that are only available through attending?
I'm planning to HE and am convinced of the benefits of doing so, but want a rounded picture. It's easy to think of loads of things that would be, relatively, a bit crap about primary school, but is there ANY really good reason to go? DD's non-resident dad would rather she went.
Thanks, Caroline

Patsys- yes my DP is happy to home ed, and no I wasn't citing not getting to see my DD as a good reason to home ed- that was just incidental. I planned to HE right from before I had kids. It is one MORE reason not to send her school but it's by no means high on the list of reasons.

I H.E and looking at it from all angles I think that school can offer a variety of things that H.E doesnt/cant and some of these aspects are really valid in 'real life', a home educated child does socialise and its quite ignorant to infer that they dont however they perhaps dont mix with children they find difficult to get along with they dont 'idolise' other older children and aspire to be like them,they dont have to sit up straight and wait in vain to be answered,they dont have to colour in squares simply to pass time (i know lots of schools where this is done) they dont have to conform,they dont have to fit in.

I think if you do H.E its v important not to be the 'be all and end all' of your childs life,home education is a fantastic experience that can benefit your whole family but its very consuming.

In the interests of balance - I home ed 3 children of primary and soon to be primary age. They are very social and so we go out a lot and it's unusual for us to have a day where they don't see their friends. We go to several home ed groups and home ed sports groups and music groups. They see some of the same friends at different activities. My eldest will usually have a sleepover with a home ed friend at least once a week (you can do them mid-week if you home ed). So some of their friends they probably see at least four times a week. They see lots of children from different cultures and backgrounds at groups. I don't vet who they mix with at groups. I often hardly see my older children for the four hours of a group, they are busy playing with and learning from other children or parents, or other grown-ups who come in to lead various sessions.
We don't have special gym apparatus at home, but they can go to the climbing wall and they have a lot of time to climb trees and go to different playgrounds. The groups they go to have specialised sports equipment.
My eldest goes to the Royal Institute quite a bit for special science lectures and has also does workshops there - this gives him exposure to science way above what most schools would give for their 8 year olds.
I suppose I sometimes do worry that maybe they are missing out on things, but reading the lists that people have provided here I feel that home ed can match or exceed what's been mentioned. Except free childcare and that is a big deal. I think that's the biggest drawback for me. I do work, but would like to be able to work more.

To be absolutely honest and I think most home edders would agree if your dc is happy and thriving in a school you like and feel comfortable with its absolutely priceless.

At the end of the day all we want is whats best for our dc.

Thanks Lilyfire that's reassuring!

"I think most home edders would agree if your dc is happy and thriving in a school you like and feel comfortable with its absolutely priceless."

I don't think most home edders would agree with that, only the 'happy and thriving' bit. So many Home edders are not doing it just because they can't find a good school that their children are happy in. HE is a positive choice in its own right.

It sounds to me like you definitely know you want to home ed. Why don't you just start (could even start now, surely?) and if you have any concerns your daughter is missing out you can reconsider. You do not have a place for September anyway, so there is not a huge dilemma.

Only home edders whose children have attended school can really answer this question.

Mine have.

My answer is 'school provides childcare that is useful when I am going to the dentist.'

There are a lot of weird assumptions about home ed on this thread though. For example, Exotic on school:

'It has the advantage that parents of friends have different parenting philosophies to your own parents.'

Home ed is ridiculously diverse. In fact I'd say that's an initial disadvantage if you are expecting to find that mythical group of parents with whom you mostly agree.

CarolineCordery - we will have to agree to disagree as my comment was made after speaking to other home edders.

School if it works well is a fantastic place for most children.

Thing is, if people have started out at school and then switched to HE, it's fair to assume that they haven't had a great experience of school, but those of us who have stuck with the school system may have had very different experiences.

Occasionally I love the idea of HE, can definitely see the benefits. But I know for sure that I personally could not possibly hope to give my dd the same range and quality of experiences that she has at school, and so I wouldn't do it. Others may have fewer personal limitations, and their confidence may be well-founded. :)

For some kids, HE is clearly a better option, but it's absurd for some posters to suggest that the only people qualified to comment on this are those who HE themselves. That's nonsense.

It's also nonsense to suggest that HE can recreate everything that a child might experience in a classroom - unless your child is HE'd in a class of 30 kids every day, it is a different experience with different pros and cons!

Very true Jinsei.

Has anyone mentioned access to certain events and inter-school events that HE people can't seem to get to hear about? School trips too....though you can certainly organise HE trips!

Feeling mainstream rather than unusual would be the main advantage for a child. Whether that is a good or a bad thing is of course open to debate.

My DD is 6 in November and she talks to however she likes, children, teenagers, oap's any body, i never stop her.
DD goes to rainbows and will soon be going to beavers, i have no idea who will be there and it is of no concern to me.
DD meet a boy at swimming lessons and he comes over from time to time, he is a year older, the first time he came over he did not know what a tarantula was and had never baked anything ever, he goes to school.
DD counts several shop keepers in town as her friends.
DD friends span 5 towns and 2 county's.
If DD did attend school she would only see the ones that live in the same catchment area and only those in her school year.
DD is better mannered than any of her schooled friends, is less needy/sulky, more honest, more respectful, more helpful.

so some schooled children see there best friend all day every day, how realistic is that, how can that continue after school, they still get left on there own at some point, but have no way of coping, they have always relied on that best friend.

i also take exception to the argument that "the children get to choose there own friends" look at the lengths many parents go to get there children in there chosen school so that they mix with the "better" kids from the "better" estate. non religious family's start going to church to get there children into a catholic school, to keep them away from the fifraf- what a bunch of Hippocrates.

Hi OP. We have three grown-up children who have all gone through school and one DD (8) who is HE. The only part of school we miss is the free child-care. All the nice bits about school mentioned in this thread can be covered by HE, you just have to put the time in.

Completely agree with dearth. We attend a very busy HE group. There are families who attend that vary wildly from us in their parenting and educational philosophies.....the only thing we have in common is that we have a child that is HE! We all get along(mostly) :)

Really gets my goat when people assume HE kids dont get to choose their own friends?? I often leave DD at her HE group. She chooses who she plays with, the children have disputes like most kids do and they learn to get along with each other. We go to the park, swimming, drama, brownies, DD chooses her friends there too.
BoffinMum, We are fortunate, there are so many HE children in our area that DD doesn't feel different, just lucky!

I do think that some posters have listed benefits of school which reflect their imaginings of what home education is like, and which don't ring true for me.

My older dd, now 12, was home educated except for spending a term at school in Year Five to see what it was like. These were the things she liked best about school:

School dinners!! Top of the list. At home she usually has to make her own lunch, or if I make it then it's a sandwich and a piece of fruit, which can get dull. She loved the school dinners. I liked not having to bother my head about what to feed her, and being eligible for free school meals made it even more attractive.

PE and games at breaktime. She did loads of sports when HE, but the informal nature of the school playground games and the fact there were always so many people on hand appealed to her. She started playing football with the boys at school, because it was a good way to escape the nasty gossip and social jockeying of many of the girls. Soon some other girls had decided to join in the football games for the same reason. Unlike her extracurricular sports, at school it wasn't expected that everyone would be good at sport or take it very seriously, which was good for a girl who loves sport but isn't very talented at it!

Not having to make choices. Mostly, she does like to make choices and she did sometimes complain about school being too restrictive. But she said that sometimes it was relaxing to be told exactly what to do all day. To my great surprise, she liked repetitive maths worksheets. Switch off, plod along, get a tick, feel a sense of completion. She said it was like colouring in. Whether this would have lost its appeal eventually, I don't know.

Uniforms. See above. She could stop thinking about what was fashionable and which jumper went best with her favourite top, and instead just throw on her uniform each day. I liked this too - no more cries of "Mum have you seen my yellow belt? I REALLY want to wear it today!"

Being able to see how she "measured up". She was reassured to know that while she had previously feared she might not have learned as much by being HE as her peers had learned at school, this wasn't the case. She left school feeling better about her educational achievements than she had before. Of course, this would only work for average and above-average children. If she actually had been far below average, then I'm sure being at school would have undermined her self-esteem.

School residential trip. She loved it so much that I have been sending her on similar subsidised adventure holidays with the YHA ever since, but school gave her her first experience of one.

That's all I can think of at the moment - I'll ask her in the morning if there was anything else.

I think that far and away the most useful post is Saracen's - the DCs are the ones to know.
It is all to do with personality - as a DC I would have said that the worst thing about school was the dinners!

Okay
I can see a lot of threads here from people who have no experience of HE, and therefore have made the same assumptions that I made before I began to mix with the HE community when my children were taken out of school.

It does depend on where you live and how much of an active HE scene there is.
It may also depend on how easily you can get to places, either by your own transport or by bus/train.

I've been part of the HE community for 11 years now, and I have seen it all.
There is nothing the HE can't do-from Sports day with rosettes for the winners, to Christmas shows, with Santa visiting. We've done it all.

For someone else I have been recently looking back on the last report we sent in to the LA. The list of activities dd2 took part in that year included:

Swimming, Ice-skating, bowling, GoKidzGo, rugby, Canadian canoeing, kayaaking Bell boating, rock climbing, abseiling, Zip Wires, assault courses, orienteering, grass sledging, bike riding, Treasure hunt, Camping- during several home educating camps and festivals.

Workshops, activities and Theatre/Gallery trips included:
Rug making, Jewellery making, Painting, Felt making, Garden maintenance, Copper bowl making, Woodworking- with traditional tools, Growing food,
River craft.
Festival of history day-covering British history, from 4AD to 1945, Roman Britain
Ragley Hall, Avoncroft Museum, Nail making, Needle Scouring and the lives of child apprentices.
Shakespeare for Kidz, Royal Ballet,Other theatre trips.
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery-various exhibitions throughout the year.

and that was with the HE community alone, when you add in things she did in after school clubs we also get:
Singing lessons, Dancing Lessons-is now part of a dance company that performs publicly, Drama lessons and performances, Performing- dance shows and solo singing performances.

if I answer the OP honestly, I would say that there are things that Primary School gave my children that HE did not.

but none of them are positive.

For me there was a positive about school.

Free child care.

That's it.

I am not saying that school doesn't suit some children, it does. There are some parents who need their children to be in school, for a variety of reasons. That too is valid.

My wish is that all families are given the knowledge that HE is a legal viable choice, so that parents can make an informed choice about what is right for their families at any given time.

But having done both my only regret is I didn't know about HE sooner. My children would have missed years of absolute misery. All three of my children who are all in Higher Education at the moment, intend to autonomously HE their own children. They like me, have loved it, we've had a ball, a relaxed happy life.
TBH I have never met a HE parent who says "I wish I had left them in school for longer" or "I wish I had never started HE"

All the nice bits about school mentioned in this thread can be covered by HE, you just have to put the time in.

I sometimes think the same could be said about all the nice bits of HE. Just because a child goes to school, doesn't mean that his/her education starts and stops right there. Why does one poster above suggest that kids who go to school will only have friends of the dame age from the same class?

Also, I know that lots of HE families do loads to ensure sufficient social interaction for their DCs, and I'm sure that they succeed in this, but when I see people saying that their kids make friends through rainbows/beavers, swimming lessons and stuff like that, I sometimes feel a bit sorry for the kids. My dd has made friends through these activities too, plays at their houses sometimes, goes to parties etc, but there is no way on earth that this sort of friendship is comparable to the ones that she has made at school, where she is with them all day every day.

I don't think there is anything wrong with saying that HE is different from school and has different advantages and disadvantages. For me, the biggest advantage of HE would be the freedom from a fixed routine and the time/potential to explore the things that dd is most excited/interested by. The biggest advantage of school, in my view, is the opportunity to mix and learn alongside other children on a daily basis, and the daily input and insights from another interested adult. Yes, it's possible to make time for a schooled child to pursue other interests, and yes, it's possible for HE'd kids to mix regularly with other kids and build strong relationships with other adults, but it isn't possible to recreate either scenario exactly, and why bother? Presumably, people choose school or HE because they have a preference for one over the other!

Thank you.
I am convinced I'm going to HE, yes. There isn't a dilemma, it's just that when people (eg DD's dad) say 'well what about x,y and z good things about school?', I will have already thought about them.
I feel now that HE is not aiming to re-create the school experience, so there's no need to worry unduly even if school does provide some good things that my DC would miss out on- they will be having a great experience doing education otherwise than at school anyway.It's like the way they will be missing out on great experiences because we don't live in central London or because we don't live in a chocolate box village or on a farm. What we can provide where w do live is fine. I don't think there's anything essential to a child's life that can only be accessed through school.

OP, you sound like you've thought it through carefully, so best of luck to you! :)

Can we now have an alternative thread entitled Are there any benefits of HE that a primary school can't usually provide?

Does anyone really have experience of learning to get along with people they didn't like through being at school with them? I only have experience of being bullied or ignored by people I didn't like but was forced to spend my days with, luckily I never had to repeat this out of school and I'm not sure what I learnt from it...

Jinsei, I am considering HE and dd has been happy in school and it has been a positive experience. I am reading about the philosophy and theory around autonomous learning and feel this is a better approach to learning. I am hoping to deschool after summer holidays.

I would disagree with music, and other activites being lost to those in HE in fact dd will keep all her classes activities lessons and social life she has now. She has friends here who obviously share her interests and older ones to look up to. She has to get on well with all of them and they have to resolve conflict etc. There are no children in her class who share her interests, although this hasn't been a problem