Home education and working

[Litchick]

Following from another thread I expressed my interest in HE but also have to admit that I adore my work.
I work from home as an author and need space and time to write and think.
Currently I have found the perfect school for my kids but secondary looms and I question whether I will find anything as suitable.
So my question is - do any of you manage to continue working?
Suppose I should add that DH can't help. He works long hours, often abroad. And my family live 200 miles away - they can help out but not regularly.

I'll watch with interest, Litchick. I'm wondering about HE too, for DS (4), but both part-time work and time for my love of music (to write, play, record, etc) are and will be important to me. I simply don't know if HE can really be an option, and yet DS is not much enjoying his start to school, even though he is still going only part-time. I don't like to continue to make him go when I can see how anxious he gets about going, and how much he thrived over the Christmas holidays. And I can't imagine him going full-time later in the year. It's difficult to balance everyone's needs in this kind of situation, isn't it?

I hope you get some helpful responses.

Hi Twoddle, I HE our two (4 and 5) and I am a musician! I still have time to write, record, and teach music. I HE in a very structured way and my Mum HEs one day a week which helps. I find the strain a lot less now the kids are HE rather than at school (long journeys to school were taking huge chunks of my day.) Just thought I'd say!

I teach piano from home, and my girls are fantastic. I'm pretty mean on them in one way - when I am teaching they stay in their bedrooms and get on with work, or read, or do something else very quiet. They are not allowed to disturb me unless it is a dire emergency (of the I'm about to bleed to death kind, not of the I can't find a pencil kind!). Home ed works beautifully for us. I teach 3 days a week and these days are quite quiet and serious, I guess. The other 4 days we have a blast! We visit stuff, go on trips, meet friends. I don't think it hurts them at all to see that I have to work to keep a roof over their heads and that they are not to jeopardise that.

I've probably had it quite easy because I've been doing it since before my eldest was born, so they've grown up with it, but I think you can train children that there are times they can rage through the house and times when you can't be interrupted!

Having said that, I probably work around 16 hours a week, give or take a bit. I'm not sure it would be so fair on them if it was full time.

Thankyou for your replies.
It's a big quandry for me.

Hi
I'm HE'ding my 5 yo. I'm on maternity leave at the moment, but due back in March. I'm hoping to work one day a week and get a nanny/au pair type person to look after the two bigger ones and take them to their HE group - while granny will care for the baby. I know other HE'ers who use au pair types for some days or parts of days and some actually work full-time and have a full-time nanny doing HE. I think it's perfectly do-able if you can pay for some childcare, if you don't have family to do it (time will tell if I'm right).

I've got a 3 year old who is home educated (I know she isn't compulsory school age but nothing is going to change when she turns five so I kind of figure we're already home educating).

I'm a single mum. I work about 30 hours a week for myself, but do some of them at odd times.

I've just hired a nanny who works for another family as well - so she does 3 days there and 20 hours for me. I'm sure she'll do some things that happen to be educational for DD but doesn't have to do anything specific.

I'll be doing the out of the house parts of my job while she's with DD; and other bits will continue to be done alongside DD (we have a bit of time every day or couple of days to 'work' on our computers together - which I plan to draw out as she gets bigger into a daily(ish) working on whatever we want to individually time) or when she's in bed. So most of the time I'm still with her.

I'll be using the time DD is with her dad to do nice things for myself in (can't count on it enough for working during but if its things that can be done whenever like nice baths, or walks or going for a swim etc then it not a problem if he brings her back early or arrives late - well it is but not major)

I do get tax credit help; but you might find that if you can afford private school fees now you can easily afford a nanny or an au-pair. And secondary school children wouldn't need the close supervision that a 3 year old does.

I'd echo the point that (some) secondary school age children require much less active supervision than a 4 or 5 year old, so your options are different at that stage. For young children, if you're not available to be involved a lot of the time, you would really need to provide another responsible adult like an au pair or granny and that depends on what is available/affordable for you.

But by secondary age, many children are able to pursue their own activities for an hour or two at a time without any input from an adult, and that tends to get longer as they get older. Obviously they still need someone around to help if they get stuck and to be "in charge" but you don't have to be as "hands on" so can spend a reasonable amount of time on other things.

It depends also if you are planning to "teach" your children things, or if you are going to follow a syllabus of some kind, or if you are going to let them choose their own path and do what they find interesting. There are lots of resources out there if you want to follow a syllabus, with planned courses and materials and a tutor to mark their work and go over anything they need clarified. There are also internet schools which cover the academic subjects, with qualified subject teachers and a set timetable - my DS is coming to the end of studying for iGCSEs through one of them and that has meant that he is studying at home but does not require me or DH to be available to work with him.

HE is very broad, so there are nearly always ways of making it work to fit your own situation!

Thanks for the positive messages - it hadn't occured to me that a nanny would be interested in HE. And I could certainly afford it if I dropped two sets of school fees.
Hmmmmm.

Dear Litchick (and other posters),

Are any of you in London? I'm a single parent living in Camden, London, with my 7 year old daughter (who currently goes to a private school).

I'd very much to home educate her, but could only do so if I pooled resources with another/other families. Would anyone be interested in this?

Please contact me if this is of any interest, and I will give you much more detail of what we could offer.

Just thinking laterally-are you stuck with the area that you live in or could you move? My DH works long hours but we had a wide choice of where to live and chose one on the combination of good schools and reasonable house prices.