Home education possibilities

[ceevee]

My kids learned by doing things they were interested in until they had thoroughly learned everything there was to know about that subject, or until they lost interest. Sometimes this meant that they were doing one thing for up to 3 months at a time! It all balances out, and over time they get a balanced education.

 

You can't believe how relieved I am to hear that!!

We home educate our son (he never went to school...only nursery for a short while) and one of our biggest worries is that he is uninterested in some subjects, but lives and breathes others.

 

Often this changes after a month or so...I'm glad to hear thats 'normal'.

 

The only other thing we worry about is the yearly visit....

We often feel a little intimidated...as if being tested...

 

Our son is definitely better off 'socially' in my eyes. He does mix just as well with adults as children.

Edited November 12, 2010 by ceevee

[hennypenny]

It has worked out really well for my two anyway Even though they seemed to spend ages on learning one thing at a time, whatever their current interest was, they still seem to have an astounding amount of knowledge on all kinds of different things. We have found that they can get through all the work they need to pass a GCSE in about 6 months so I stopped worrying.

 

My son has just been awarded his PhD this week, so we did something right

 

You do know that you don't have to accept a yearly home visit don't you?

 

Do you come to the home ed group meetings at all? There are lots of younger children come along now, and loads of different activities for them to do.

[ceevee]

Well done there!

 

We never came to the meetings..no.

Most we did was the Puss in Boots panto!!

 

What are the meetings like? What is the usual agenda?

Re. yearly visit....

Don't we need some kind of education assessment though? To make sure we are meeting all the legal requirements?

[hennypenny]

There are several different meetings, so each is different in character. There is a weekly meeting at an adventure playground where the agenda is to play, sometimes there are craft activities too, depending on the weather.

 

There is a monthly meeting at a Monkey Bizness, a soft play area, where the children play and adults chat.

 

There are regular skating, swimming, tennis and cricket sessions, plus language classes, computing classes, art sessions, music sessions, cooking sessions, wild life and conservation groups, outings to the panto,cinema, Disney on ice etc etc. There are museum visits and all sorts of other activities going on from time to time. Are you on SYHEC, the local email list where all these are discussed and arranged?

 

The home visits are LA policy, not law. The law states (paraphrased) that it is the duty of the parent to provide an education suitable to the age, aptitude, ability and any special needs of the child by full time attendance at school or otherwise. There is no monitoring duty laid on the LA, as the duty to provide an education is laid on the parent not them.

 

The only duty laid on the LA is to make informal enquiries into the educational provision IF THEY HAVE REASON TO BELIEVE THAT NO EDUCATION IS BEING PROVIDED. Case law states that a parent would be unwise to ignore such informal enquiries. You can meet your requirement to satisfy their informal enquiries by various means, a visit is only one of them, you can choose to send in a report, meet with them somewhere other than the house, etc etc. There are lists of different ways on the home ed websites. There is no provision in the law for them to continue to make enquiries year after year unless they have a reason to believe something has changed, some LAs say that the passage of time is enough reason to enquire again, but there is no legal reason why that should be annually, that is simply what Sheffield LA has settled on - in some LAs they have parents thinking it is the law that they should be visited every week, and have work marked by a teacher, and they have to have a classroom to work in and provide weekly lesson plans etc etc, - really the LAs make it up as they go along.

 

Social services are a different matter, they have right of entry to the home, so you have to allow a visit if they are involved, but they should not be routinely involved in educational matters unless there is some other suspicion of neglect or abuse.

 

In our case we had visits for our oldest but for our youngest we wrote to the LA and said that in view of how well our oldest was doing (he had GCSEs by 12 and went early to uni, was the youngest ever entrant on his PhD course etc), they could have no reason to believe we were not providing a suitable education and we would prefer to have no further contact. They said that was fine, so we haven't had anything to do with them in the role of parents since then, although I have been meeting with them for years as a representative of Sheffield Home Education Network, so I am not unknown, but they hadn't met my daughter until recently when she did GCSEs English Lang and Lit using their office as an exam centre, so they met her then.

 

We chose not to have visits as we are completely autonomous in our educational practice, ie, our children lead their own education and we simply facilitate by helping them to find out about the things they want to know. We never did any formal study or divided the world of knowledge into subjects, forced them to read or write etc. Although this educational theory of trusting children to learn the things they need to know has a long and illustrious record of good outcomes, it does not fit easily into conventional educational practice and we found that LA visitors wanted us to fit into their methods and to force our children to do things like writing and studying subjects they had no interest in, which we did not want to do. When we did have visits the poor souls were bemused as we had no conventional work to show them at all, and they could not understand such things as for instance my daughter going from doing no written work whatsoever all her life to completing a GCSE English Lang and Lit in 5 months (2 years earlier than her peers) and getting A*, simply because she was interested and self motivated to do it. If we had had visits during her non-writing years I think they would have found it hard to understand that children are quite capable of learning well without showing visible evidence, so we chose to dispense with that pressure.

 

Some people think that if we don't have visits from the LA then we could be all abusing our children, but there are lots of other safeguards to prevent this, our children are out and about in society and are seen by dozens of people from shopkeepers to guide leaders, neighbours and football trainers etc etc, who could report any signs of abuse. Being seen by a teacher every day doesn't prevent the abuse of hundreds of children each week, so why would a yearly visit prevent it in home education?

[JoanCrawford]

Hennypenny, can you give me some advice? My daughter hasn't been to her school since mid-October, she was bullied and can't face going back. Tried to get her transferred to another one but we heard yesterday that they have said no. The schools that do have places in Y8 are not the sort of schools I'd want her to go to, and she doens't want to go to them and they are physically too far from where we live to get her there. The schools nearer us that we could consider are all full. Education and Welfare people are pressurising me to send her back to her old school but this is not an option for us. I want to home educate her, even if it is just a temporary measure until a decent place comes up, but I accept that a place may not come up. I am a trained montessori teacher and am well educated myself, I do know from what i've read that my daughter would benefit from a home education at the moment. BUT, I am single and have to work full time. So would I be able to work with her in the evenings and not have the LA on my case? Do I de register her from school now? Any help or guidance would be great, thank you .

[hennypenny]

The responsibility laid on the parent is to provide a full time, efficient education, whether at school or at home. There is nothing in the law that lays down the time of day or even the days of the year that education takes place, so if you want to educate her in the evenings and at weekends then that is your choice and no one from the LA has any right to question that. When you start to analyse the school day, with all the breaks and sitting waiting for everyone to sit down and get started, I believe the actual learning time comes to something like 2 hours per day or less, so you only have to do that much to keep up, as well as the fact that children learn much more efficiently and quickly one to one, so you do not have to schedule in anything like as long as a school does to pick up any topic. It would probably be worth taking a few days off to accompany her to home ed meetings so she gets to know some others, then after a while she might feel confident to attend them on her own, or with her new friends, the home ed community do look out for each other and I am sure she will find people to spend time with while you are at work.

 

It will not be easy, but if she has not been in school since October and you have managed since then, I am sure you will be able to manage in the future as well.

 

If you decide you do want to home educate her, then you are best to deregister as soon as you can, because as long as she is on a school roll the law that applies is truancy law, but once she is not a registered pupil of a school then completely different law applies. You need to write to the proprietor of the school and tell them that you wish her name to be taken off the register as she is now being educated at home (make it the present tense, not future as there have been problems with them saying you are not educating them at present.) Go to one of the home education sites such as http://www.home-education.org.uk or http://www.education-otherwise.org.uk to get the legal wording for a deregistration letter.

[JoanCrawford]

Thank you so much, that is really useful and very reassuring. Will have final chat with her tonight and hopefully get that letter sent off on Monday! Thank you again

[JoanCrawford]

Oooh one more thing, where/when is the best place to meet some of the other parents and their kids - would be particularly interested in similar age to mine?

[hennypenny]

What age is your daughter again? What area are you in?

 

At the moment, there is a meeting on Tuesday afternoons that is a general play meet, Tennis in the morning on Tuesdays, there is a Spanish class on Wednesdays that is looking for new members, there is swimming every alternate Thursday, skating on some Fridays, trampolining on Tuesday evenings, gardening at Unstone Grange on Wednesdays, a workshop with the rangers at Shirebrook nature reserve 1st Wednesday in each month, there are a couple of toddler playgroups, but you won't be interested in those, ermmmm, I am trying to remember, I am sure there is more, but we don't go to as much nowadays as my daughter is older.

 

The best idea is to join the SYHEC yahoo email group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SYHEC/ where everything is posted up, you can look on the calendar on the yahoo group home site there (although people can be dozy about updating it). You will get about 10-15 emails a day from the group, but it is where all the events are arranged so it is worth joining.

 

You are welcome to pm me for more details on any of these, or if you want a phone number to ring for a chat, or any more questions etc

 

Best of luck

 

Janet

[wendy222]

hi hennypenny just had a call cant get jack back into school he wants thr full so need 2 appeal so back 2 hd till we can get him sorted he is so board anything i do is not rite and he dont no wot 2 do so were goin round in circles thinkin of gettin a tutor for him as he wont let me help hope you are well