Should we go for it?

[Lauren1983]

Hi looking for any advice before we take the plunge and deregister!

My daughter is in Year 8. She enjoyed her first year at her school but this school year has began with a great deal of upset and she now would like to be home educated.

She has SEN (confirmed at Primary school but no formal diagnosis) and unfortunately has missed quite a lot of school due to illness. She gets stomach cramps due to period pain which causes her to vomit and is prone to picking up any viral illnesses floating around. This has meant she missed 15 days last year and 3 so far. This third day of absence has led to a visit from a school welfare officer. This has greatly upset my daughter who feels she can't take time off in case she gets into trouble.

To add to this she struggles with the merit and demerit system the school has ie. Warnings for a missing ruler or calculator for instant. This leads to her becoming very anxious and affects her sleep and appetite and I am worried her mental and physical help is going to continue to suffer. She has been distraught to the point I was genuinely worried she may harm herself in some way.

With regards to HE I currently don't work weekdays so I have the time. I am happy with the huge resources I have found online. I would like to teach the cirriculum on the core subjects and then offer life skills to complement that.

My main concern is my ability to teach at the level to allow her to pass these exams successfully. At the moment we don't have spare funds for tutors but would save up for the GSCE exam fees.

Any advice greatly appreciated!

My advice would be don't de-register her. You have time before GCSEs to sort this out (and it may take that long.) If you keep her in the system you may get funding for her to do online schooling (look up alternative provision). Get Googling on options. Get reading: https://www.ipsea.org.uk/ and ask school if they will do an EHCP for you. Minverva's Virtual Academy is an alternative provider for some LEAs and my daughter really thrived. Good luck.

Also, take her to the GP re the period pain. Both of my girls have had debilitating periods, and we shouldn't just accept it. Even if they are not able to help, if you end up needing to have an EHCP the more evidence you have the more helpful it is.

Thank you for your help.

Given the unhappiness she is experiencing at school and the disruption which her health issues are causing to her education, home education seems like the way to go. You sound confident enough about doing it in the short term, so why not aim to do it for the next two years?

During that time you can learn more about how home educated kids do GCSEs and figure out whether it would be viable for your family. For example, it is common to do just enough subjects to get into college, usually six or so, which eases the financial and academic pressure. (Of course, your child can still learn other subjects, but without doing exams in all of them.) Not everybody uses tutors. Some parents learn alongside their kids. You might be able to pay for a little targeted help where it's really needed. For example, one of my kids prepared for English Language IGCSE entirely under their own steam. However, we couldn't understand how to apply the marking scheme and didn't have a clear idea whether they were on track for the mark they wanted and if not, where their issues were and where they could easily pick up more points. As a one-off, we paid £30 for an online service to mark a mock exam. My teen got some detailed feedback and reassurance that they were approaching it correctly.

You could have the backup plan of sending your daughter back to school after a two-year break so she can sit exams there, or doing some at college, which would be free. If she is going to go back to school, do make sure that happens no later than the start of Y10. The school system is so inflexible that it's hard for them to accommodate new pupils much later than that.