Advice please - considering home educating a young child

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I am considering home educating my DD for one school year. She will be 6 years old and going into year two (next Sept). We plan to move house which is part of the reason as we are uncertain when exactly we will move. She is currently in private school with a term's notice to be given to terminate the contract so if we kept her in school next year and then moved quickly we would likely forfeit two term's fees which is quite a lot.

In normal circumstances we would have done this just to allow her to keep the continuity of her school going until we were moving. However, there has been so much disruption in her school life owing to the two lockdowns that I don't feel it is worth paying the fees and losing two term's fees just to keep her going to the school until we have to move. I am also disappointed in how little she has learned at school and we have been making better progress at home.

What worries me most is the social side of things. She settled in well in her school and loves it, loves her friends. She will lose all this, although she will lose it when we move anyway. However, I am worried she will be lonely if we home school for a year.

How easy is it to form friendship groups with other home schoolers and is it unusual to home school a young child (age 6)? She is very social, with know behavioural issues and fitted in well in school. I am hoping there are other people like us home schooling but I don't know how unusual we are?

I am also planning to work quite hard on the basic academic subjects with my daughter (reading, writing, maths etc) as I want her to do well academically in the long term and I think this has really suffered in her current school situation. Do other home educators have these aspirations or am I likely to be different to most home educators?

My DD will of course get to do the other subjects too but it takes very little effort to get her to do arts and crafts as she loves them! It's the core academic subjects of maths and english that will be the bigger challenge!

*no behavioural issues, not 'know behavioural issues'!

Ordinarily it is very easy to make friends in the home ed community - there are loads of events and activities going on everywhere - but this is not the case currently. HE activities have been massively curtailed by the lockdowns as even when they are allowed the venues may not be open. e.g. from 8th March HE events can restart but swimming pools will not be open for a while longer so HE swimming meet ups cannot happen.

However if people find out you are only planning to HE for a year and move away anyway you may find some people reluctant to encourage friendships with their children - why would they if it is only temporary. You would still be welcomed at activities and it is highly unlikely anyone would be rude or exclude your child but you may find it harder to make deeper friendships. This may sound harsh but it would not be fair to prepare you for this. There may well be a lot of people HE'ing for a short period of time post covid.

By the sounds of it you are an extremely typical HE'r - I'm not sure why you think you may be unusual?

Thanks Basecamp. I don't know any home educators at present so don't know their motivations for choosing this. I am considering trying to form connections with a group or groups near where we are planning to move so it would be a longer term plan. I get the one year thing might be a problem in forming friendships although if we make connections with people near where we will be living I hope they will remain friends.

In normal times, home educated children can make friends when they meet in groups, but at the moment we're restricted because of COVID. Hopefully, our groups will be able to run normally soon - I really hope so, as I'm getting bored at home more than the kids! - and I would certainly hope so by September.

I agree with Basecamp65 that longterm home edders can get a bit fed up with repeatedly offering support to families who say they are planning to home ed who then soon after disappear from groups as they'd only intended HE to be a stop gap - I realise that this might not be what you'd want to hear, but please also try to see it from the point of view of longer term home edders - my son has met lots and lots of kids his age and would be happy to keep in contact with all of them, but one by one, as they settled in to a new school, they stopped making any effort to be friends with him. It's wearing on adults, too, but it's particularly upsetting for kids to be dumped when no longer convenient.

I note your hope that your daughter would still be friends with these children even after going to school - presumably you mean you'd find things for them to do together at weekends and after school times. So, you could look at finding groups that all kids can go to, both schooled and home educated, that would be happening from September in the new area you are moving to. E.g Rainbows, gym classes, Woodcraft folk. That way you'd know it would be more likely your daughter would continue seeing the children she makes friends with.

Best of luck with the move.

I too agree completely with everything Basecamp65 said.

Home educators are a diverse bunch and there will be some who go about educating their children like you do and others who don't. On the whole, when the kids are all running around together in the park, nobody knows or cares much whether their time at home is spent learning through playing with Lego or through practicing handwriting.

Yes, it's very normal to home educate a six year old. People do it for all sorts of different reasons, some for a short time and some in the long term.

Your daughter won't need to be lonely and I'm sure there will be lots of kids ready to play with her, though it's true their parents are less likely to go the extra mile in arranging playdates with a child who is probably going to disappear from their social circle within a year and be too busy with school to play as often as they want to. There's such a big difference between a friend who can have midweek sleepovers or all-day playdates at the drop of a hat and one with whom time has to be carefully scheduled. A couple of hours here and there after school was never enough for my daughter. It's one of the main reasons she chose to resume home ed after trying school: she felt school was robbing her of the time she could have spent playing with friends. I have no doubt people will be friendly enough and will include you, but they may not go the extra mile to promote friendships.