Homeschooling

[Debz89]

Hi my name is Miss Deborah Robins
My daughter is 15 years old she will be 16 years old in July.
She has been bullied from P5 in primary school she is now year 11 in high school and the bullying has continued, my daughter has really bad anxiety and she’s afraid to go into school.
she has told me that she wants to be home school and now I’m agreeing with her.
can anyone help and give me advice please!!

report your post and ask for your name to be removed. If your DD is in year 11, then I don't think this is a good time to disrupt her - she is months away from completing! Is the school able to support her at all?

at this age with GCSEs around the corner?

very risky unless you can pay for a private tutor

how do you feel about suddenly tutoring a mid term about to take some important exams?

If she is being bullied & is becoming highly anxious about going to school I would definitely explore home educating as there are so many resources available now. Are the school doing anything about the bullying? If it’s been going on this long it sounds as though they have failed in their duty of care to her. Your poor daughter. I home Ed my 6 year old daughter but she’s autistic & we currently don’t follow a specific curriculum. I imagine it’s quite different at secondary level. Hopefully other posters will know about this.

If homeschooling, it's important that your daughter has the discipline to do the required studying and also an understanding of effective learning methods. What's your opinion of the situation of this?

You should also consider any ways that her progress can be measured on a regular basis. A good way to do this could be through online apps.

I'd look into asking the GP to sign her off sick with anxiety and have her just go into school for her exams. If you deregister her, almost certainly she wouldn't be able to do any exams this year, as the deadline to register for them will have passed and you may be unable to find an exam centre so late on. Doing them next year could be an option, but she'd have to do a lot of extra work (some GCSEs aren't accessible to private candidates and she'd have to switch to IGCSEs with a different syllabus) and you'll have to pay.

However, if her mental health is at rock bottom and you think she isn't on track to pass her exams anyway, then home education could be a lifeline for her.

Have you home educated for long? That really isn't how it works, not at all!

Home education can be done in a huge variety of ways. It doesn't necessarily require any more discipline than going to school, possibly less.

And tracking progress using apps is vanishingly rare; that is something that people who are new to home ed sometimes think they have to do, and which ill-informed Local Authority staff with no training tend to advise. Tracking progress is more relevant in a classroom setting, because the teacher doesn't know each individual child well enough to observe whether they are learning, and teachers are under pressure to prove that the school is adding value. It's true that a home educated child revising for GCSEs will want to know whether she's on track to get the result she wants and how to pick up extra marks, but she'd do that using a tutor or an online exam-marking service.

I do think the OP should hesitate to remove her child at this late stage, with GCSEs around the corner, but absolutely not for any of the reasons you suggest!

@Saracen I don't homeschool, but I've provided tuition for over 10 years and have seen the characteristics that lead to success and failure.

Turning up is half the battle, as they say. This is both in physical and mental form, as a student who isn't in the right frame of mind (or willing) to concentrate and pay attention achieves the same result as not being in the lesson.

Discipline isn't just about attending the lessons though. The biggest problem I see with students who hire me for tuition is not doing the required practise between lessons. Their perception of learning is that the learning takes place inside the lessons, whereas the reality is that lessons only provide direction - the real learning comes from practise between lessons. When students don't do the required practise, it means that they have to repeat explanations and exercises the forgot from the previous lessons, which will eventually be forgotten again without the practise to maintain and reinforce what they learn.

Discipline doesn't need to be extreme, like you say, but it does need to be there to get results. The more there is to learn and the shorter the timeframe, the higher the level of discipline required to achieve results. If a person is struggling at GCSE level in their final year, they need to be practising maths every day from Monday to Friday outside of school lessons. When students don't have enough discipline to stick to this, they end up putting off their studying until the next day until before they know it, a whole week has passed by without doing enough (if any) of the required practise.

There's a huge difference between the students I help who clearly don't do the practise they need to and those who do. I can only give them guidance.

In terms of tracking progress, apps are an effective way to do this for anyone who doesn't have the subject knowledge like a tutor. Of course, you can use other methods of tracking progress like a third party service or tutor - keeping in mind that you pay extra for this. Not tracking progress means that you don't know how effective the studying has been and what steps are needed next. This can cause problems in subjects like maths when rushing ahead to the next topic causes problems when there are knowledge gaps in what was covered previously. In these situations, it's better to focus on building a solid understanding of the foundation concepts, which will make learning the latter concepts significantly easier to understand.

@Leonab I can certainly see that it won't go well if someone is using a tutor and essentially expecting the tutor to do all the work for them, not taking the tutor's advice on what to do between lessons, and imagining they will emerge with a nice set of GCSE results.

However, not everyone learns that way. Some don't choose to do GCSEs at all, or not when they are young, instead going straight into work. Others approach exam preparation in a manner which I'm sure you would consider slapdash, but which is effective for them. For example, here's how my eldest child tackled maths.

They did no formal maths as a child, instead learning through whatever interested them. Money is an introduction to decimals. If you like science or wonder about converting fractions to decimals, you'll encounter more. Probability is important to kids who like to play D&D or poker. Converting American recipes gives experience of different units of measurement. We never have the right size and shape baking tins, so you need to know how to calculate the area of a round tin and see whether it's close enough to the area of the rectangular tin specified in the recipe. And so on. They had achieved basic numeracy by their mid-teens, though their knowledge didn't map perfectly onto the school maths curriculum.

My child wasn't originally planning to do maths GCSE. When they decided to sit the exam after all, they downloaded the syllabus, identified the topics which were new to them, and figured out which of those they actually wanted to learn which would bring in enough marks to get the result they wanted. They didn't bother to learn topics which scored minimal points and which didn't seem relevant to their life, reasoning they could learn that material in later years if needed. They obtained a textbook, learned the target topics, and sat some mock exams. Once they were comfortably on track for the result they wanted, they stopped working.

The overall picture here is not of a disciplined, hardworking student who would have pleased schoolteachers. That wasn't what my teen aspired to be. They wanted to know only the maths which was fun and interesting, plus the maths they perceived to be immediately useful to them. Having decided to sit the GCSE, they sought to do the bare minimum for the result they reckoned they would need in life. I didn't notice them experiencing any particular difficulty from the "knowledge gaps" in maths which you mentioned. They saw them; they fixed them, starting with 7x8 which had somehow never sunk in previously. It wasn't a big deal.

You don't have to be a model student if you aren't spending most of your time in a school-type environment. It's possible for learning to be fun and playful most of the time. In the home ed community, GCSEs are seen as a (usually) necessary evil, and some kids adopt an expedient approach to getting through them. Even for an arts-focused child like mine, there are plenty of opportunities to learn more maths throughout their life, provided you haven't absorbed the idea that maths is so unpleasant that people would only do it if forced, which is the message instilled by school.

A kid who isn't motivated by a school-type approach is, I think, a particularly good candidate for home education, which can give them the scope to engage with their learning on their own terms.

If you haven't read Lockhart's Lament, I recommend it to you: https://maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf

@Saracen I guess we will have to agree to disagree.

While I agree with your point that children will be more engaged if they have a degree of flexibility to choose what they want to learn, the absence of structure and discipline leaves them far too vulnerable to making bad choices they later regret.

Children are motivated by fun and not practicality. They don't want to eat health food and would choose to eat ice cream all day if they good. As adults, we have knowledge about nutrition and consequences that children don't understand. Leaving the children to eat what they want results in them not having the discipline to engage a healthy and balanced diet. Learning is the same.

The issue of discipline isn't just about learning the required topics, but also how to meet expectations. They won't get very far in a career if they're unable to cope with being held accountable to meeting expectations they are employed to deliver on. Developing discipline is all about building resilience to deliver exceptional results through hard work.

@Leonab, the thing is, in a home ed environment children are usually given far more autonomy over their learning than they would have at school. The result is that they have the opportunity to develop self-discipline. They make mistakes learn from their mistakes, and fix their mistakes.

In the example I gave, my child was not forced to learn 7x8 at the age of nine, and chose not to. Was that a mistake which they later regretted? Maybe. Did it destroy their life and leave them unable to cope? Clearly not. My DC is now competent at maths, has a good GCSE to show for it, and is at the top of their class at university.

Being made to learn specific things in a particular way at a certain age does not develop self-discipline. If anything, it impedes it. What happens when they are no longer being told what to do every day? Ask anyone who teaches first-year university students. It's a steep learning curve.

Long ago, I worked in a university admissions office in the US. We were extremely keen to recruit home educated applicants, because they were known to hit the ground running. This was in contrast to most of the school-educated students, who required about a year at uni to learn how to organise their own learning and take the initiative. At the time I knew nothing about home education and didn't really understand why this might be. Now I have seen it for myself, I can see how their early experiences of decision-making had given the HE kids a head start.

what grade did they get? Your description looks more like they just did some basic arithmetic, rather than actual maths

We have the exact opposite experience of home educated children.

I think if she’s being bullied and wants to leave and you’re able to afford online school / a tutor, then go for it.

Check out online schools like Kings Interhigh.

To those saying she should stay: she’s anxious and miserable. What possible good is staying? Children don’t learn well in an environment where they don’t feel safe.

Check out www.kingsinterhigh.co.uk

We nearly used it to homeschool ours - they do GCSEs and A Levels and have an international cohort. A couple of local kids (one an child actor, another with a tennis association scholarship who needed to practice and travel to tournaments) used it. It’s not perfect, but it might suit your child.

They would have been content with a 5, and happy with a 6. They actually got a low 7. Their unschooled friends have had similar outcomes, scoring mostly 5 or 6 after a year or two of study. Some kids have had tutor involvement. To my dismay, my child wouldn't let me help - they asked me maybe three questions in total during their nine months of preparation! 😂Bit frustrating when you've been waiting for years to be useful.

The purpose of the basic arithmetic example I gave was just to indicate that if your learning has been haphazard and not curriculum-driven, it isn't that hard to "fill in the gaps". If you've engaged in practical maths on a daily basis, you'll have a good conceptual understanding of it already. If you haven't spent years being made to do rote learning which may or may not make sense to you, you'll have the confidence to engage with the subject properly.

I don't accept that maths needs years and years of formal study. It's the school approach which makes it hard, often leaving damage which must be undone. I spent a couple of years as a maths teaching assistant in an American university, working with first-year arts students who had to complete a year of calculus after not passing the maths placement test on entry. The hardest part was persuading them to abandon the formulaic approach they'd learned at school in favour of actually reasoning it out, and convincing them they were capable of doing so.