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deregistration

10 things you don't need to home educate.

17th October 2016 by Jax Blunt 11 Comments

1) A Tuffspot (or own brand alternative).

Feels like every early years home education thread you go near on Facebook these days is all about the Tuffspots, and people worrying about how to home educate if they can’t afford/don’t have room for/just plain don’t want one.

It’s OK. You don’t need to be laying out messy play daily for your child, or building intricate small world scenarios overnight, or stocking up on whatever other craze has hit your local group. You don’t have to do it the same as anyone else. (Get messy or don’t. Get down with the small people if you want to. If a Tuffspot rocks your world, great! If you can’t see the point, move on. It’s OK. There will be another fashion along in a minute honest.) (Image link is Amazon affiliate.)

2) Permission from your local authority/headteacher/family and friends.

Except in very specific circumstances in England, where a child is a pupil at a special school, (laws vary in different parts of the U.K., please inform yourself according to where you live – start here perhaps) all you need to do to deregister a child from school is send a letter saying you’re doing just that (check the right wording, get a receipt). If your child has never been to school, there’s no one to register with, no matter how much local authorities might like to pretend otherwise. If you go to deregister and someone tells you you have to have a meeting/get clearance from the local authority ask them to quote the law requiring this. (The special school situation is slightly different. You’ll want to do some research.) And  when they can’t? Go forth and home educate.

3) A curriculum.

No, you don’t have to follow the national curriculum. No, children do not have to sit particular sets of qualifications at particular ages. No, you don’t even have to have regard to the broad and balanced idea you’re likely to have heard lots about. The legal requirement is set out in section 7 of the education act 1996, and says

The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable—

(1) to his age, ability and aptitude, and

(2) to any special educational needs he may have,

either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.

You can use curriculum resources if you want to (I have done myself from time to time), but no one gets to dictate which ones or how.

4) A timetable or structure

Just as there’s no nationally defined curriculum for home educators, there’s no particular set hours. Full time as referred to in the law mentioned above doesn’t mean keeping school hours – for starters you probably aren’t home educating 30 children, so your child is getting a much higher amount of contact time than they would be in school, and it’s accepted that learning can and does take place outside school hours. More on this on edyourself. You don’t need to do what you do following any particular structure, although again, if structure works for you, go for it. Above all else, home education has to be about what works for you and your family.

5) Laminator.

You don’t have to print out the Internet and coat it in plastic. Honest, you don’t. And if past experience here is anything to go by, most of the stuff you do laminate will get used once, maybe twice, and then disappear. Go steady with the plastic, for all our sakes.

6) Car

This one may seem slightly tougher – you probably want a car for getting out and about to all those fantastic resources, groups and so on you’ve discovered are available to you. And I’ll admit it’s definitely a nice to have – but I personally know a variety of people without cars who manage just fine. Home educators are a innovative bunch – you’ll find a way to make it work.

7) Degree or teaching qualifications.

In fact, you don’t need any qualifications. And why should that be a surprise? Teacher training is largely about how to control a classroom and deal with planning/paperwork – you don’t need to do either. You don’t have a classroom, and even if you want to plan, you’re doing it for a much smaller number of children, and you don’t have the same tick boxes teachers do to keep up with. Don’t worry if your children decide they’d like to learn something you aren’t good at/ interested in, there’s a whole load of resources out there. Find an online course, pal up with a friend, look for a tutor if you like. Lots and lots of options.

8) A billion books.

Now, I’m not going to lie to you here – books are good. Books are one of my most favourite kinds of thing. But you don’t actually need to own all of them all of the time. You can use a library, download lots of classics for free, haunt charity shops, swap with friends. And the ones that you really do want? Lots of cheap ways to get good books – look out at the works, the book people and so on. (there’s a handy affiliate link in the sidebar if you need assistance getting there 😉 )

9) A massive income/ big house.

As with anything else in life, being rich makes it easier. But you don’t have to have a huge budget to home educate, or a mansion to live in. Lots of resources are free or cheap online, libraries are great, charity shops are plentiful. Also, having your kids in school isn’t actually all that cheap – uniform, resources, trips, travel, it all mounts up. The immediate obvious cost if you’re home educating is that someone has got to be with the children, and that person can’t be holding down a traditional job at the time. Working around home education can be challenging at times, but there are all sorts of ways of getting by (will be writing more on this very soon).

10) A child.

Just kidding. This is the one thing you do need. Second and subsequent optional 😉

Other things that will come in handy – patience, a sense of humour, readiness to think out of the box. Home education isn’t for the faint of heart, as stepping outside the norm can be a little scary at times, but honestly, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

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Filed Under: It's where it is Tagged With: deregistration, home educate, home education, home education resources, home schooling

Playing home education bingo.

18th May 2016 by Jax Blunt 6 Comments

a b c 1 2 3 chalkboard Most of the time I’m happy to talk about home education. I love to chat about the different ways children learn to read. (Phonics. Picture books. Reading eggs. Montessori materials. Osmosis.) I can enthuse for hours about following interests, the value of playing online games, how great the world of nature is and so on.

And other times, it feels like I’ve said it all before, and that I’m banging my head against a very big, very solid brick wall.

When I go on facebook and the home education groups are full of people pulling their year 6 children out of school because they’re fed up of stressed children who aren’t being children, and yet some Baroness feels she can blog about parents feeling entitled, and failing their children by taking action to protect them from that stress.

But the principle that parents should co-operate with teachers and the school in the orderly testing of their children must be beyond argument. It was a terrible example to set to their children – that is, if you don’t like what today holds, or you find it stressful, just skip it.

(You’ll want to sit down before you read the rest of that article. Or even better, protect your blood pressure, and don’t go there)

Yes, that definitely feels like a very solid brick.

No, Baroness Deech, it is NOT a principle carved in stone that parents should cooperate with teachers and schools in the testing of their children. Perhaps you could explain to me how testing enhances the educational process? Because I don’t remember that research. Or perhaps you could point me to the national agreement that shows precisely *how* learning archaic language terms will help our children reach their full potential, because I must have missed that one too.

Another set of things I seem to have missed are the law changes that require home educators to register with their local authorities. They much have happened, surely, given that Sir Michael Wilshaw, head of Ofsted, pontificated about the process on Radio 4 the other day. (You can read another home educator’s take on that here .)

No, they haven’t happened. Sir Michael is either badly informed, guilty of wishful thinking, or just completely misspoke.

Hard to tell which.

As a home educator, if your children have never been registered with any school, you don’t have to tell anyone that you are home educating. You just carry on with the education that you’re offering.

If, and only if, your children are in school, then you need to inform people. The process differs in the different parts of the UK, but in England, in a mainstream school what you do is deregister by informing the headteacher. It is then UP TO THE HEADTEACHER to inform the local authority.

Not the parent. And the local authority do not have to follow up on it – they have powers to make informal enquiries IF it appears that no (suitable) education is being provided. Many local authorities overstep this line, and many home educators spend a lot of time supporting newcomers through this minefield. I do a fair bit of it myself, in the online world.

It’s another tick for home education bingo.

Along the path to home education, it’s almost impossible to escape conversations about socialisation. It’s difficult to know what this refers to – for some people they are talking about friendships, for others they are talking about children acquiring the unwritten rules of society. Here to tell you that both of those things can and do happen out of school, so it’s kind of a red herring either way.

Another topic that will probably come up is neglect – you can reply that home educated children are subject to exactly the same oversight as every other child, with local authorities social services departments having perfectly adequate powers to investigate. In fact, many home educated children are referred to social services just because of people’s ignorance around home education. Education is not a welfare issue, no matter how many times people talk as if it is.

Tomorrow I will probably bounce back and be my usual cheerful and patient self regarding all of this nonsense. I’ll paint, sew, cook, explore nature, read books, troubleshoot computer programs and assist my children with all their home education activities, just like I am doing today in and around this rant. I’ll do it with a smile, probably.

It would really, really help if people like Baroness Deech and Sir Michael could get their facts straight and stop spreading misinformation in the meantime.

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Filed Under: It's where it is Tagged With: Baroness Deech, curriculum, deregistration, home education, homeschooling, Sir Michael Wilshaw

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