Home education and affording exams

[CadburySpot]

I am wanting to home educate my children. I have done some research about all the years of schooling and am confident I can provide them with a decent education, and a better learning environment than the school. However looking at the price of gcse/igcse exams, I know that we are not in a position that we would be able to afford to put the children through exams.
So I was wondering if anyone can help me with what options are available.
Would I have to enroll my children in year 7 so they can do exams at school, or is enrolling them at year 10 for exam years an option?
Or does anyone know of any other options there might be available?
Thank you

How much are exams where you live? Exam boards charge about £35-40 per exam, but some exam centres/schools charge a lot more . Have you tried to find a centre/school that charges less?
I am not sure if a school would be happy for you to enrol your children for year 10, but you could ask.
This is an exam centre run by home educators:en-gb.facebook.com/FaregosHEExamCentre/
More info here: edyourself.org/articles/exams.php

We only have access to public transport so can only travel so far. The schools that we would be able to get to at the moment don't offer places to external candidates, and the exam centres the we have access to are all asking for around £100 per exam. The local colleges only offer exam resits. I am aware however that things may change by the time my children are at exam age.

some people enrol their children in school in year 10. Some people use 14-16 FE college programmes. Some people save up and pay for the exams as private candidates.

Honestly, do what's right for your children now - no need to borrow trouble :)

Ommward's right. If your children aren't yet yr7 then it is far to early to worry about GCSEs, if home ed is right for now then go for it and cross the GCSE bridge when you need to. Things are constantly changing.

Save up

Ignoring my own advice to not worry about them yet I thought I'd mention that since the recent syllabus changes many schools now do GCSEs over 3 years so start studying in yr 9.

Oops my message above got cut off and that save up looks rather rude
I was going to write a paragraph about diff options; saving up, staggering exams, sitting only 5 or 6 as needed for college, UTC, 14-16 college provision, standard secondary but then read rest of posts and obviously missed deleting a bit. SORRY!!