Is this a realistic plan? Looking for tips and experiences…

[OneDayIWillLearn]

I am considering taking my son (who is finishing year 3 now) out of school either at the end of the calendar year or end of year 4. I have a work project/ commitment which ends in November which is why I couldn’t really earlier I don’t think.

My plan would be to offer him HE for a limited time e.g. two years out but go back for the start of year 7. Or would one year out be better (mid year 4- mid or end year 5?) so he ends primary school back in school to ease the transition to secondary? We might not want him to go back in year 7 I suppose but I would want to start out with it as a time limited thing.

The things I’m nervous/ unsure about are:

• how much work I could realistically carry on doing. I work for myself so can be quite flexible about when and how much I work, but for money and my own sanity/ enjoyment/ future career prospects I’d like to be able to work 15-20 hours a week still ideally. But is that unrealistic? How do people make work alongside HE work for them?
• How to handle it with my daughter. She’s finishing year 1 (recently turned 6) but she’s a very different character and getting on well at school. I feel she’s in the best place for her for now and the HE experience for my son would not be what I think he needs if she’s around at home all the time too. But she - perhaps reasonably! - will be very jealous if she knows my son is at home with me every day!! Is it ok to tell her she can have the same opportunity when she gets to the same age, if she wants it, but leave her in school for now?
• How to make sure I stay close enough to the curriculum to make sure he could go back into mainstream school if or when he needs to. Maths is my particular concern - do people use certain resources or books?
• how to discuss it with him as an idea and how to manage expectations. Is it best to say we’ll try it for a term first rather than a year or two?
• I’m a bit embarrassed to admit I’m worried about it feeling overwhelming too and worried about a sense of losing some of my own freedom….is this a common worry at the start or is this a sign I might not be the right person to HE?

For background….my son doesn’t have any SEN diagnosed and has always been ‘ok’ at school, nursery etc but has never really loved it. We moved house and he started a new school in January. In some ways he’s settled fine and he’s doing well with the work, but he says he doesn’t have any friends and because he doesn’t like football or playing tag, he finds it hard at playtimes. He’s never really liked going to school and though he did have friends at his old school, it took him a long time to make them. But he gets on well adults and older cousins and can be very chatty and funny. So part of me is thinking ‘just give it more time’ but part of me is thinking ‘he’s young for such a short time and this could be really fun and enjoyable for us both’. And I just hate to see him being unhappy and getting called ‘weird and annoying’ by other kids ☹️

I am a trained secondary English teacher with ten years experience, though I haven’t taught for 6 years. So I feel pretty confident I could handle the education side of things - probably up to GCSE if needed, and higher in certain subjects.

Anyway, sorry for the long and rambling post, but any thoughts or experiences would be greatly appreciated!

I think taking a kid who is struggling with friends out of school for a year or 2 and then throwing them back ready for secondary is really unfair to them and home ed would make that 100% worse. Your kid is struggling because you moved their school and that's what you need to help them with. There is no way you can home ed your ds unless you are prepared to home ed your dd too, that would be very unfair for her to not have the choice.

Ah ok thanks for replying @HarryVanderspeigle
im in the same profession as Naomi Fisher, and often wonder how she managed to keep working and home educate - as the profession isnt particularly flexible (well not the field I’m in anyway)- so there’s my answer I guess - she didn’t work when her children were school aged? But then she’s done amazingly to get back into the profession after a long gap…

@Saracen

I understand that you see the school system as some sort or oppressive institution where kids are not allowed to just do what they feel like doing /- play Minecraft, or cuddle soft toys…
I agree - school’s main purpose (beyond reception) is not playing and leisure - but learning. And social interactions are based around it - where kids learn to work together on projects, etc. There are, of course breaks and playgrounds - where kids also interact.

And - crucially - by 3-3:30 - kids leave school
and are free to socialise in an unstructured way - play Minecraft, blow up balloons, and cuddle their toys.

Kids that go to schools have both - structured parts of the day where they learn; and prepare tor being grown ups - (school os their ‘work’ in a way) - as well as free play time after school.

I do not know how HE kids that are used to complete freedom and doing what they feel like on a day - (which is what you post seems to suggest is so great) - how they later adjust
to doing exams; studying at uni( getting a job that isn’t endlessly flexible.

On a separate note - having watched my child go through secondary - I am not sure how you can any one parent replicate in their kitchen the level of teaching and resources requited to study A-levels across a variety of subjects. It is simply not possible.
And if instead kids go to organised groups, to, say, covet A-level Physics and Maths, then essentially they are in school - just a different type of school - with smaller building, less regulation and less controls and/or transparency of results

Yes, schoolchildren can play after school, that's true. It just doesn't feel like enough to me. It sure doesn't feel like enough to them, judging by their enthusiasm for weekends and school holidays. I guess I just see the quantitative difference - the sheer number of extra hours home educated kids have available to them - as making a qualitative difference. By my reckoning it is over 1000 hours a year. What couldn't you do with a thousand extra hours? There's no shortage of time for finding common ground with friends, at any rate.

How do HE kids adjust to exams, uni, and jobs? I heard an interesting response to that from a young adult who had been home educated. He said people expressed surprise that he'd gone from the freedom of HE to college without school as an intermediate step. And it WAS a big adjustment for him. But, he asked, why would he be unable to make a big adjustment? He observed there are other areas of life where we expect people to make huge adjustments quickly with no transition. Most young adults move from full-time education (school/college/uni) into full-time jobs overnight. That's big. But they do it. People become parents, and overnight become responsible for a helpless little human being 24/7. If that isn't a big change, I don't know what is! But we expect new parents to step up, and nearly all of them do. They won't have spent the previous 12 years explicitly training for parenthood.

Teens have a drive to grow up and take on adult responsibilities. They want to, and so they do. There may well be hiccups along the way. They make mistakes. They aren't always perfectly equipped for every situation they are in. But they figure it out. They get there.

You're right that A levels are extremely difficult to do at home. That is why home educated kids very rarely do so. Nearly all HE teens who want to continue their education beyond GCSE go to college.

I have only known a very few kids to do A levels independently. All of them were terrifically bright and found the pace of college or sixth form teaching too slow.

I appreciate my posts have been quite long but as I think I’ve said, I don’t think it is a straightforward case of him struggling because he’s moved schools. He’s actually managed the transition pretty well in many ways and I’ve given him a lot of support with it. And he did make a good friend almost straight after we moved but that boy moved away at Easter.

But he has never really liked going to school and that goes back as far as nursery. He went to a lovely small community nursery, then an excellent local primary and now another really nice small, local primary. He has really good attendance and doesn’t put up resistance to going. Sometimes he talks about things he is enjoying at school, his teachers aren’t worried.

The trigger for my seriously thinking about HE right now is a discussion we had last week about him not having made good friends at the new school and reports of teasing, but honestly stepping back from that it’s more about me feeling that he could be enjoying his learning and life so much more and thriving more if he was doing it outside the school environment.

Re fairness, I am worried about fairness with my daughter but as my mum always says, fair and equal are not the same. If I took them both out at the same time then in a sense it would be ‘unfair’ on my son who has been in regular school longer. I do think it would be a fair offer to say she could do the same when she reached the same age albeit I can see not without practical issues and potentially perceived unfairness. So that does worry me and might be enough for me to decide not to try HE unless I’m ready to take them both out at the same time. But I don’t think it’s a cut and dried ‘it’s not fair on her if he comes out first and she has to wait a bit’.

I also think it’s a bit much to suggest I would just ‘throw him back’ into secondary. Clearly his happiness really matters to me and if it didn’t seem like the right thing to do, or if we tried and he was hating it, I would think again!

Hi! I HE my kids 🙂

Especially with one, I think you can do mornings of one to one education with some work on his own in the afternoon.

No1 is are you confident with the material? I remember many parents struggling with the maths even at primary level. UK curriculum is very intense (personally hate it 😡 but I'm like you and want to keep it open for them to go back to school).

In terms of resources, I love Twinkl (it even has a "plan it" lessons with PP presentations and exercises, great especially for maths) and CGP books. That's what I use 🙂

If you had told me a few years ago that I would HE I would have laughed at you! But my first really struggled with school. Now I have learned from other people and personal experience that kids are different from each other and sometimes need something different.

Good luck!!