Would it help to teach parents too?

[robertspa1968]

I'm a full time teacher but I do a lot of tutoring, especially for home educated children. I'm thinking of setting up my own company not just offering standard tutoring but also seminars and ongoing support focused on teaching parents too. It seems to me that more parents would home ed (especially for gcse) if they had more idea how to go about it. What does anyone think?

A few home ed parents do that sort of thing locally, so yes I think that could be a good idea. Workshops on how to deliver a maths curriculum at home, that kind of thing. :)

I agree about more parents HEing if they were more confident. A lot of people I know who HE are nervous about secondary education, and stop after year 6, because they are worried about how to manage to teach secondary.

I have dc at junior and secondary and both schools offer education sessions for parents just to support DC with homework. I think HE parents would benefit even more from that sort of thing. Teaching is REALLY HARD.

Do you home educate your own kids too?

As a parent I would be interested in this sort of thing, but only from someone who had extensive personal experience of home educating (not just as a tutor). Home education can be approached in many ways, even at GCSE level, and this tends to take newcomers quite a long time to understand.

The types of seminars/workshops for HE parents which are popular in my area focus on such topics as how to identify an exam centre which will accept external candidates (especially ones who need special arrangements, as there is a large proportion of kids with various special needs in the HE community), how to make an exam entry as an external candidate, which exams are best for a particular child to undertake at a younger/older age, how to decide what workload a child can handle (i.e. how many exams to do at once), how to identify tutors who have the right expertise with a specific IGCSE curriculum and assess whether they are giving useful feedback (particularly for subjects where writing is required), and tips on how to prepare an anxious child for the exam setting especially if it is in a school and the child has traumatic memories of school. It's also good to have connections with local colleges and study groups to advise about what is on offer there for 14-16 year olds and older students and how to obtain flexibility in entry requirements.

This has some overlap with what the parents of school-educated kids need to know for GCSEs, but there is a lot of HE-specific understanding and knowledge required too. There are probably a number of tutors within the local HE community who know about these types of things - do you know what they are offering?