Y6 child - support at home

[MissEDashwood]

I'm sure I'm not the only one, but both DC's are able, when they put their mind to it.

I wondered what Home Ed thought of SATs? Do you have benchmarks you work towards? Are these benchmarks annually, by age, overall ability come 16.

In a dream world I would Home Ed, I just don't have the resources that secondary schools have. Plus getting either DC to concentrate is a challenge. I really admire those of you that do Home Ed. When DS was born I ordered all the info, subscribed to the UK Home Ed companies. Both went to Montessori which was going to be the plan till 12, but the fees doubled one year and that was that.

I'm torn in how I should approach SATs with DD. School starts soon so I really need to get off the fence. One idea is setting an amount of money from Level 4 (which I believe is the benchmark) upwards. I've also considered home tutoring by myself outside of school, possibly mock tests to assess strengths and weaknesses.

My worry is, with the latter, it's exerting a lot of pressure she's not used to, so how will she tolerate it. I'm hoping for good results as they're used at Secondary School to pigeon hole the children, all having similar abilities.

I was hoping we'd get a session at the end of Year 5 to discuss all this, I'm not sure if they even advise parents in Y6.

I'd be interested in knowing how you monitor attainment and whether it's annually, at certain stages or 14/15/16 so I can assist both DC in the best possible way.

Do you have any suggestions on how you would deal with additional education support. What kind of impact you feel it has on your DC. I don't want to do anything detrimental, causing stress when not needed.

Thank you in advance for your support

I've said before if I can assist with resources FOC, the offer is there.

For SATS you're not really asking in the right place. One of the glories of home education is that we can treat that whole SATS thing with the contempt it deserves.

Off the cuff: your child only has one childhood. There's a huge amount of external pressure and stress through childhood nowadays, particularly in families where the parents are anxious to ensure that their child gets the best possible attainment in their education, in order to get the best possible university place and therefore the best possible quality of adult life. I have a different approach, personally. People learn most effectively when they are happy, not stressed. They are most likely to be happy in adult life if they are doing something they genuinely enjoy, and they aren't likely to be able to identify what that might be unless they have leisure time and are given freedom to follow their passions in their childhood and teen years. Honestly, if you are using school for your child's education, then I'd make the time out of school be as much on the child's agenda as humanly possible. no extra tuition, no extra-curricular activities unless the child genuinely wants to do them - give them time to think and read and binge watch crap TV and learn what parts of being an independent adult human are going to feed their soul.

I agree completely with ommmward.

SATs are primarily used to assess schools' performance. They are not for the children's benefit. If you are worried that the tests, and the preparation for them, will stress your child, then tutoring seems to be barking up the wrong tree. Let your daughter see that there are more important things for a ten year old to do than get high marks on an exam to please the teachers.

Do ask on one of the main boards about the extent to which SATs are used to place children in sets in secondary schools. Better yet, contact your local secondaries and ask them about their policies. I understand that many secondary schools disregard the results as they recognise that results are skewed by the primaries which hothouse children, and are not an accurate reflection of the child's abilities. They are likely to do their own assessments at the beginning of Y7, use teacher observations, and move children around later as required. It isn't the end of the world if your daughter starts off in the wrong set.

If you do decide at any point this year that your daughter's primary school is putting too much pressure on her to perform, might you consider taking her out and HEing for the rest of Y6? That option is becoming more popular as some primary schools are squeezing the joy out of kids with endless SATs drill. I've known a few kids in my area who were being home educated just for Y6. It doesn't have to be forever; your daughter could just go into Y7 alongside all the other kids next autumn.

To answer some of your other questions: monitoring attainment is fairly irrrelevant in a home ed setting. This is because there is no danger of an HE kid getting "left behind" and floundering as the rest of the class moves on while she doesn't understand the material. Her parents simply work with her at whatever level she is. It does not actually matter whether she is at a higher or lower level than the average child of her age, so long as she is engaged and learning. (A popular mantra among HE parents is, "Education is a journey, not a race.")

For example, I have a child who is now very interested in working out how much money she has, how many weeks it would take her to save x amount, and how much she will have left in her piggy bank if she spends 50p at the car boot sale. Because this is her level and her interest, this is what we now work on. There's no need for benchmarks.

This is also why we don't have challenges with getting kids to concentrate - because they are learning what is relevant to them rather than what the class is meant to be doing, their interest in it is automatic.

Where assessment does come into play for home educated children is when/if they are going to be (re)joining a school environment and we need to establish whether it will be a good fit for them and whether they are likely to find the work too easy or difficult. For instance, I didn't encourage my older child to go to school at the age of seven because she couldn't yet read, and that is a skill which is important at school. A few years later she was reading fluently and did go to school.

Similarly, home educated children who are thinking of doing GCSEs or other standard exams need to know whether they are ready to start working towards them or whether they'd be better off doing them a year or two later, how many subjects they should aim to do concurrently, how much support they will need, whether a different qualification would suit them better etc. And actually these considerations are perhaps more prominent in a home ed environment than at school, because we have so much more flexibility in levels and timing and so on. I think HE teens tend to use past exam papers and experienced tutors to help them decide. And of course if they get a few months in and think, "no, I'm not going to manage GCSE maths this year after all" then they just change their plans.

Hope that makes sense! I know it is a very different mindset compared with having a child at school.

I totally agree with the above, my dcs have ASD and I've deregistered them at year 4.
They are so much more engaged, talking, common interests, reading, even eye contact. They are so much happier, no self harming, less anxious.
It's a big step to take, I'm so glad I've done it. As for SATS its only for the Government.