Submitted January 2005

The first thing I have to say is that I don't think there's any right answers for Home Ed (just as there aren't for schools). The circumstances and needs of every child are different and what worked for us is unlikely to work for everyone. Mike was thrown out of his school in February the year before he was due to take GCSE, so he had just over a term of his GCSEs already done. The circumstances left him unwilling to transfer to another school and there were practical difficulties in matching the courses he had already started. I am not terribly sympathetic to schools generally and my wife did her own GCSEs at home so home ed seemed a natural option. It was also particularly easy for us as I work from home and I did A levels in Mike's key GCSE subjects. We were also financially well placed to hire tutors/buy books/pay for trips etc, although in the end the whole process was surprisingly cheap.

Our starting point was to ask Mike how he wanted to approach HE. He was offered a choice of a broad syllabus, exploring his own interests, or targeted study leading to GCSE. The advantages and disadvantages of both approaches were discussed. He was an academic high achiever and he wanted to go to university so, in the end, he chose the GCSE option. In retrospect, I am not entirely sure that this was the right approach but it made life a lot easier. He returned to mainstream education at Sixth Form as he wanted to have lab facilities available and taking the GCSE route not only made this easier but has meant that he now has no problems keeping up with his conventionally educated peers.

As Mike had been in a private school, he is one of those kids the government says just 'disappear' from the system. He was never deregistered and we never had any problems in this area. We started by 'shadowing' the GCSE syllabus his friends were studying but that soon stopped. If you do GCSE by HE, one of the nicest things is that you get to choose your own options. He could choose his own books for English Literature and Classical Civilisation (although he went with the ones his friends studied) and his own History options (he chose quite different ones from the school). He also got to choose his own projects for Maths coursework and (although nudged a lot by his correspondence course) for his sciences. Going to Sixth Form and finding just how much coursework projects are guided and spoon-fed by college has been a shock. (Note: my guess is that most HE projects contain far more of the student's own work than do school projects. We forever felt guilty we might be helping too much. We shouldn't have - some schools practically write the kids' projects for them.)

Subject by subject, this is what he did:

French. He had two one-hour lessons a week with a French teacher (as in a teacher from France who taught French). She set homework and the whole thing was very formal but he loved her and did very well. There is no way he would have got an A* at school. It wasn't that expensive.

Maths. For about a year I taught him for an hour or more every day. We used the CPG book as a coursebook and supplemented this with stuff from the Net and the Times CD-ROM. Once we'd covered the lot, he had a professional teacher come in about once a fortnight to help him with stuff he was struggling with and to do coursework (which I couldn't do because it can't be assessed/supervised by a relative). He got a B.

History. It was me and a variety of books. Thanks especially to the wonderful johndclare website, (and the Imperial War Museum, which is a much under-rated resource). We are both spitting that he didn't get an A*. That's the problem with learning everything that seems interesting and not focussing on the exam - but we DID have fun.

Class Civ. This is an easy A*. It's books. You read them. You tell people what was in them. You don't need a lot of help. That said, I have read Antigone, so we spent a long time on that (and there's some great web-sites that we looked at) and we did go to Pompeii for a long weekend - which was amazingly cheap (thank you Easy-Jet and Millets for the tent) and has to be the best school trip ever. Mike is a reasonably sophisticated and well-travelled lad but his first sight of Pompeii blew him away. There are some things you have to see in real life.

Chemistry. NEC correspondence course. They take care of coursework, which is a huge plus. And he got A in every subject they did. It's not a great education but they know exactly what you need to pass the exam and they spell it out very simply. They do all kinds of money off deals if you start part way through a year (as we did) so I would thoroughly recommend them. Plus (because Chemistry is hard work and I'm weak at it) we used the Times CD-ROM and CPG books (Mike says CPG is wonderful). And we got a friend who's just completing their first year at Oxford to go over what they found helped them. It was just an afternoon but it really helped at question spotting and highlighting key areas, so I'd definitely get help from a recent student if you know one.

Physics/Biology. NEC plus help from me, because these are in my area of competence. Biology used to be my thing and watching him move from 'It's boring but I'll get a B' to 'I can see why you like this and I've got an A' was a joy.

English/Eng Lit. His school had him down as an utter star in this so we just left it to itself, which turns out to have been a mistake. No one really knows where this went wrong (and A/B for him was very wrong) but we suspect that he just didn't prepare the exam properly. It did highlight that it's not enough to know your stuff (which he clearly did and there are teachers who'll confirm it) but you have to understand the system. Which, frankly, sucks. So, if we were doing this again, there'd be more essays and crib sheets - but if you go too far down that road, you lose the benefits of HE.

We took a fairly formal approach, with a sort of a timetable (although this was intended to structure the day and was jettisoned whenever it got in the way). We usually started with an hour of maths, as that was a weak area. The hour got both of us into 'thinking school' mode but the rest of the day was often more relaxed. We studied every day in term time and in hols if he had nothing to do. But by working hard in the day, we kept evenings free for sport and other activities. One of the weirdest things people say about HE is that it damages your social skills and that you don't get out much. Mike's sporting activities during HE included karate, ice skating (to professional level) and roller blading (including five a side soccer on skates!). He was active in organising London's Friday Night Skate (several hundred adults every Friday), did volunteer work at his local Youth Centre and was a member of the local Youth Forum. He had a far wider circle of friends his own age than when he was at school and learned to socialise and work with people older than him. I think the single best thing was NO HOMEWORK, so he learned to work hard in the day, get everything finished and then do sports/socialising in the evenings. Isn't that how real life is supposed to work?

The hardest thing was sorting out exam entries. This was horrendous (and expensive - if your kids aren't at school you have to pay all the exam fees yourself). We used the AQA Open Centre but this has since shut down. There are commercial operations that will enter your child for exams but they are not cheap nor especially convenient. Nor will they help with things like extra time for dyslexia. (As soon as Mike returned to regular school, he was assessed and now gets 10% extra time.)

Exam Boards are a nightmare. Although courses are generally two years, they don't publish timetables and stuff until about six months before the exams. Mike had been preparing for an AS level alongside his GCSEs but in the end he had to drop it because of an exam timetable clash. (He sat it a fortnight ago - fingers crossed!) Some other courses had to be changed as we couldn't find a local centre to take the course he'd prepared, so new set texts were being swotted up at the last moment. Exams are tricky and getting trickier. (Mike's old school employs someone half a day a week JUST to handle exam admin.)

As far as study is concerned, the last few months were totally focussed on exams. You have to do old papers (on the Web or buy them from Smiths) and READ THE MARK SCHEMES. I found it really weird when an exam covered an area I deal in at work (statistics and sampling, since you ask) and I would have failed. We taught two versions – the real answer and what you must say in the exam. (For example: avoid revisionist historical theories if you are doing GCSE history; don't argue about whether Dickens was hack or our greatest 19th century author - he was just brilliant. Avoid all thought if you can but, above all, avoid ORIGINAL thought.)

The day after the exam, HE ended. We caught up with real life, while we watched the local school kids trotting obediently into class to waste most of June doing bugger all very badly.

Come September, Mike was off to Sixth Form College. He likes the more adult way he is treated, he has very quickly settled into his own social set, he loves the work (and the lab facilities) and his tutor wonders how he manages to pack so much into his days (although he has had to cut back on sport).

Had we known then what we know now, Mike would have left school two years ahead of GCSE and done the whole of GCSE at home. I can't speak about educating younger kids this way but both Mike and his mother did HE GCSE and both returned to school at sixth form. His Mum went on to Oxford and the Bar so it is clear that HE does not have to mean dropping out of the academic route.

Course changes and changes in exam centres mean that our experience will go out of date very quickly. (Teachers have to study something on all those INSET days.) But if anyone thinks they can benefit from our experience, I'm very happy to be contacted.