Getting son to do online school

[Pinkocelot]

My son's always been quite rebellious and difficult to handle. Not unpleasant generally or out of control but he doesn't like following rules (especially mine) and is quite lazy. Anyway he's got online school as he's at private school. Any advice about how to get him to do it? He wants to stay on at sixth form so I think it's important that he does school now. It's a bit of a disaster him not having GCSE exams this year as it might have been a wake up call for him. He wouldn't care if I didn't cook or do his washing as he'd be happy to live off sandwiches.

I home-schooled ds from age 10 - 16 and this was always a problem! He was happy spending hours online playing games but at his worst took 3 days to do a 1 hour maths lesson. He is now home from University and all work is online during lockdown.

What has worked:
Keep it short - mornings for work, afternoons for play
Rewards - complete one lesson, get favourite food for lunch, or stay up until 1pm on Friday night, or small donation towards purchase of new game/phone/obsession (depending on cost this could be broken down into rewards that cover the next 2 months). Internet access to be granted in the evening only if the day's lessons were completed.
Discuss what HE wants to achieve from his studies - our DS wanted to go to Uni but had the wierd idea that most people who got there didn't need to study and that it would 'just happen'!
It was never easy - we had lots of rows I'm afraid!

Thanks Blathering. It's good to hear from someone who's out the other side! Hilarious that they don't connect the studying with actually getting somewhere in life. However, I do get that we've got the benefit of experience that they don't have. Appreciate your advice.

As he's year 11, does he actually need to do it? I have a year 11 dd, who has optional A Level bridging work. I think she's done a little bit, but not much - she's usually quite motivated but in these circumstances she knows the work isn't' actually necessary. If she was doing Maths or languages A Levels, it probably would be, so she didn't lose ground but for humanities this isn't the case.