sorry, that was a bit cryptic. The school your child goes to for whatever proportion of the time will have to inflict the NC on the nipper (unless it's a private school - and don't get me started on the iniquities of enforcing the NC in state schools, and letting the paying punters off). I don't think you can be required to do the same in the rest of the time - BUT if your child is going to make any sense of what they're doing in their school sessions, you will probably have to trail along in a similar direction. Hence 'follow'.
The key point is that once you start tangling with state-regulated education at all, it becomes very difficult to do a really autonomous, child-led kind of home ed, because the school encounter will have an impact on the rest of what you do.
I thought very seriously about flexi-schooling for my dd, but this was one of the things that put me off. it might work out OK if you felt you could confine the school sessions to ones where you would not be getting your agenda indirectly set for you by the NC.
In the end, I sent my dd to what turns out to be a lovely school, which I'm very happy with. In a different life, I might have gone for HE, though, and I do still have the odd pang. There is not much of an HE community where we live though, and my dd is massively sociable - I think I would find it really hard to provide her with enough interaction with other children on weekdays, given that most of her potential playmates would be at school...
Hope whatever you do works out well for you and nipper.