Looking for feedback from home ed parents.

[Toto531]

Hello!
I'm a qualified primary teacher with 17 years of classroom experience. I have decided to leave the classroom (for various reasons) and start up my own online home learning group for home educated families. I'd really love some input on the sort of thing you would like to see for your children. Sessions would be on zoom and approx 40mins long. I was thinking of doing a pay as you go booking system with sessions being £2.50, no more than 12/15 in a group. Would this be something that, as parents, you would want for your children? What sort of content would you want? Curriculum based sessions or more creative, fun sessions? I'd love to know your thoughts. What would be fun and engaging for your children? With regards to follow up work, would you want tasks for your child to do independently afterwards? Would you like it marked? I was also contemplating putting together a post session document for parents to use as evidence of the child's learning. Is that something that would be useful?
Any feedback and advice would be fantastic as I'd like to get it right for families. Obviously, I appreciate everyone's situations and needs are different but I'd like to offer something that could appeal to as many people as possible.
Thank you in advance ☺️

What age group are you thinking of?

For IGCSE prep there seems to be a reasonable demand for this kind of thing, but much less at primary level.

A lot of home educators specifically don't want - or have children who are unable to access - a 40 minute taught school-type lesson, so I'd think about making series of recorded sessions that people can watch in their own time in their pajamas/pause after 20 minutes to finish another day, as well (you also then get repeat sales without having to do new meetings).
Most parents feel that they are capable of covering most of the primary curriculum themselves if their family chooses that path, so you might do well to specialise in things such as MFL (native speaker), music tuition or possibly learning a named coding language if you can do them, as these might be areas where parents may feel less confident.

Look at the £2 tuition hub and Twinkl Live lessons for some examples that do work (Twinkl notably being free on YouTube). Outschool is also reasonably well-known.

A report that can be sent off as evidence of learning wouldn't add a lot of value as most home ed parents are only required to submit a report of a couple of sides of A4 every year (so your class would be one line at best), and the general recommendation is that there is no need to send off any "proof" or give specific details of tutors or classes etc.

You might do better in terms of finding a niche by getting an ASDAN Qualifications membership and offering the CoPE and EPQ, as currently these aren't available to home educators by 100% distance learning (they seem to appear and disappear as providers move in and out of the marketplace).

Oh, also, if you want to enter the face-to-face home ed marketplace it would be good for your business to be able to demonstrate a deeper level of SEN awareness/accommodation and child-led/autonomous learning than you would show simply from having teaching experience in a school.
I would recommend in particular reading up on low demand parenting for pressure-sensitive/demand avoidant children (Fisher and Frick are good authors, they have a new book out together) and adapting your language style in that much more collaborative direction, which will suit the more autonomous children of the home ed community overall as well as helping children specifically with those needs (as tbf children with PDA aren't so likely to be your main audience for formal lessons anyway).

My kids are at Uni/college now but we were home ed and they did use this type of class. I think you could maybe charge a bit more say up to £4-5 but perhaps reduce the numbers - 10-12 so that it’s easier for people to contribute. We liked topic based classes for the 9-12 age group - so maybe the Romans or Egypt over a period of perhaps 6 weeks. I think online science classes for children this age are not that well represented. Again you could do them as topics - covering geography/history/science/religion-philosophy. Optional homework would be good - you could maybe even charge a bit extra to mark it. Classes that build the foundations for pre GCSE/GCSE knowledge but are more topic based and fun work well. I liked live classes because it was time when I didn’t need to directly supervise. For English you could do it as book groups - where they read chapters in between and do a class discussion. There’s quite a few different maths classes out there so I wouldn’t worry about trying to offer these.
Yes - general evidence as to what you cover would be good. You really need at least a basic website.