How Home Education Works

Six months ago, my husband and I decided that we would home educate our son. We had no choice – he had become school-phobic through no fault of his own. We had watched him go through months of agony and been through the same ourselves. We had watched our son go through the sort of stress which, had he been an adult, would most likely have ensured him months off work and counselling. And yet, we were still advised to force him back into a situation that affected him so badly. It had got to the stage where he was threatening to harm himself. He was a nervous wreck, and close to a breakdown.

The reason, as is often the case, was a bullying problem that had not been dealt with effectively. Our boy had lost faith in the teachers to sort things out. Frankly, so had we. Surely every child has the right to feel safe at school?

Other schools were not really an option at this stage, although we tried. However, by this time our son had lost faith in the whole education system.

To be honest, the thought of home education terrified us initially. We could not afford to employ home tutors, and we were not teachers. There were some excellent correspondence courses available but they were far too expensive for us to even consider. However, we soon discovered there was a wealth of information at our fingertips. We joined an excellent group “Education Otherwise”, which consists of other home educating families, and began attending local meetings. EO also has a network of people who can be contacted for advice. The Home Education Advisory Service is also very good. Many museums allow us free entry on production of our EO card.

For the first ‘term’ we realised that our son needed a period of recovery. He had lost his sense of humour, his self-esteem, and was sleeping badly, suffering from frequent nightmares. For those few months we allowed him to choose to learn about things he was most interested in. He did this with an enthusiasm that astounded us.

Now, several months later, we understand what home education is all about. The child is educated rather than schooled. There is a big difference.

Our son learns from many different sources – CD roms, the internet, library books, history, geography, science, biology, English, maths, I.T. and DIY programmes on digital satellite television programmes and also from the BBC Learning Zone and 4Learning. He reads two newspapers daily and is keen to discuss various topics such as politics and education, among others. His computer skills have rocketed. He has started up his own website building business, and has written to professional people for advice, of his own accord. We are trying to find a mentor in this field to guide and encourage him further. His latest project is a website for home educated kids, where they can all communicate with each other. Socially he still has friends that he sees in the area where we live, and he has also made other friends through Education Otherwise.

Our child is not doing GCSE courses at this stage but can go on to college and take these when he is older – if he chooses. I imagine academics reading this will throw up their hands in horror, but our child is motivated, he is learning, and most of all he is happy.
He is following a path of his own choosing, with supervision and tuition from us, his parents. Imagine if we had gone to a school and learnt only the subjects that we truly enjoyed and were interested in along with the basics of English and Maths? Imagine if such a school had catered only to our individual needs, rather than forcing us to learn languages which we loathed, and wouldn’t even need later in life, for example? How many of us, then, would be in careers we love rather than jobs we hate because we had been able to pursue subjects which we had a thirst for learning about? Not possible I know in the education system as it is, but in Home Education – yes!

Since I wrote this piece which was printed as a letter in our local newspaper, our son has had the website he created for kids of EO accepted by the council of EO. He has also done a week’s work experience at a company which creates and makes computer games. I am sending this in case it may help and encourage other people who are worried about home educating.