Welcome to Home Education Matters, the weekly podcast supporting you on your home education journey.

Welcome to another episode of Home Education Matters.

And today I'm joined by Nicola and we are going to be talking through some of those questions, concerns, disposal, doubts that you have before you start home educating.

And we're going to be doing it kind of in real time because Nicola is in that process where she's thinking about whether she should home educate or not, but she has questions and she has things that she's worried about.

So I thought that I'd invite Nicola on, I can kind of share with you all listening some of the answers that I would give to somebody who is thinking about home education that might help people listening who are a bit on the fence or a little bit concerned about the process.

So first, firstly, Nicola, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today.

Do you want to tell our listeners a little bit about the kind of background to why you're thinking about home education?

Sure.

Hi, Eleanor, thank you for having me.

So I have been aware of home education for, for a while.

My eldest has just turned eight and when she first went to school it was Covid era and things were a bit up in the air.

She didn't go to nursery till she was three, so she had a few, a few days a week while I was working and then she started school.

But it all seemed, she seemed very young.

She was a summer holidays baby and she was just for starting in reception.

So I found out from a friend I didn't know myself, but she was putting her child in part time.

I didn't even know that was an option.

So I emailed the school and they reluctantly agreed that she could start part time.

So she did and she did three days a week, I think, initially, but she missed.

One of the days she missed was a Friday and it was unusual.

I could tell in the school that, you know, a lot of people didn't do that and the teacher definitely put some pressure on.

What would you say, you know, to bring her back in, you know, sort of the phonics.

We consolidate all our learning on the Friday and she's missing that.

She said, I think, you know, she needs to see a speech therapist because she's, she's struggling with the hearing, the sounds and pronunciation and she's not getting the right words out and that maybe it's hindering her reading and things.

This all came quite as a shock to me, I suppose, because I, I could tell maybe that her speech wasn't perfect, but I'd always kind of Interpreted for her as mums do.

And to me she seemed like she was doing really well.

You know she, from before she was 2, she could name all the dinosaurs and numbers and the colors and you know she's.

That's the first time I thought she was doing well but.

And the teacher started talking about oh maybe she's got learning delays and things like that.

And so it's kind of pushed me to support her in.

So she did by the end of the year go go full time.

At that point I asked her how she found school because I did offer to home educated because I was off at that point with my second Doctor who.

I was on maternity leave.

But she loved it, she loved school and she'd gone to school with quite a few close buddies that had been to her nursery and she was very happy.

I suppose it was play based learning then so she was quite content.

So she stayed.

But then she moved into year one and there's a little bit of continuous provision I think.

And then that was kind of petered out through that year.

Years two and three, sorry one and two, she had the same teacher and she really loved her and that helped I think to kind of keep her happier there.

But then things really started to unravel at the end of.

Well throughout year three I suppose she had a few different teachers things.

I just had a.

My third child and she was just so unhappy.

Every time she was going into school it was.

She didn't want to go and she just was.

She just seem, I don't know how to describe it but as, as if the light just went out and she was this bubbly, happy, playful kid and everything seemed to bother her.

She'd say, you know, all the kids hate me, I've got no friends.

She did seem to have like a close friend but everything seemed to just be too much on the social side of things.

I kept speaking to the school and they said, you know, everything's fine.

She runs around the playground, everything seems fine with her.

But she was coming home and you know, just every night, oh, I hate school, I don't want to be there.

And it all I guess came to a head near the end of last year when she said to my aunt that she wanted to, she didn't want to carry on lizards.

Which obviously was very upsetting to, to hear and I couldn't even understand that she even knew those words.

And she talked about how she was going to do it and I just said, you know, that's, that's enough, you know, we have to we have to take her out.

But I didn't know how we were going to do it.

I didn't really have anybody on my side, if you like.

My husband was not exactly supportive of it, didn't seem to understand it.

Thought you needed to be a teacher to have done itself or, you know, and he's like, you've got the baby and Lillian, you know, just, you don't have the time.

You're working.

How are we managing it?

And it was always dismissed.

But just before this, before some holidays, I just had a real heart with him and said, you know, it's been on my radar for years, but I've always.

There's a million reasons why you don't do it, isn't there?

You know, you can easily talk yourself out of it.

It's just the norm.

It's the standard.

Everybody does it.

And to move away from that is quite scary, I guess.

So I really kind of gave my side of why I wanted to do it.

Said that, you know, I feel like we're losing her.

She's.

She's just becoming this, this kind of introverted kid that, you know, she doesn't want to join in with things.

She's dreading school every day.

She's only herself for like Saturday and then Sunday.

She's already upset for the next day.

And, and he finally listened and kind of told I. I've just blurted out everything I'd ever heard from every podcast, every.

Everybody that I follow who's into home Ed, and, And he just said, all right, okay.

You know, I said to him, I can't do this without you.

If you're not on board.

I.

It's too, it's too much.

But he started reading up about it and yeah, he said, you're right, it's what we need to do, so let's work out a way that we can do it.

But obviously it is still a massive decision and I've been trying to educate myself, I suppose, and work out how I can do it logistically with reducing my hours at work.

So that's where we're at at the moment as to when and how to.

To take the leap.

She has gone back this year because when she, my younger daughter, wanted to, was going to start reception again part time, she was doing three days.

We asked for a delayed start because I realized that was an option, but went through all the layers of different local authority and governors and all that, and it was just a null.

Salford's really notoriously difficult, apparently, to get a delayed start.

So she does three days a week.

And I thought in a way that could help me if she does that a little bit, because she loves reception.

She walks in, she doesn't even look back.

She's happy.

It's all play.

Then I can hopefully in the next couple of weeks, bring Lucy out and focus on her more in this first year to get started.

So it sounds like you felt that there was no option but to home educate and that.

And it feels like it's the right thing to do, but also a very scary thing to do because it's really unknown.

And this is the thing, is that even though lots and lots more people are home educated now than five years ago, and then 10 years ago and then 30 years ago, it is still a very minority decision.

And that makes it really inherently scary when you start doing something that other people aren't doing.

And the very first thing I would say, which is probably what you've already done, is to immerse yourself in your local home ed community.

Join all the Facebook groups.

The local Facebook groups, Even if you can start getting yourself out there, like making connections with other mothers who are home educating, who are just starting, things like that, just stop sort of like getting yourself so that you feel that it's less just you on your own doing it.

The local Facebook groups for home education are really, really important as well as the national ones and, you know, getting the books and listening to the podcast and things like that.

I think the local Facebook groups are your first point of call to just feel like, oh, okay, like there are other people, like, you know, three miles down the road who are doing this very thing.

Yeah, yeah.

So over the summer I did, I did do that.

We joined a few sort of Salford home ed groups and we've gone to a forest school, which was on.

On the weekends.

And that was great because not everybody there is home eds, but a lot do.

So made a couple of friends, had some kind of play dates after that as a result, and I guess there's options there.

But some of the groups, it was difficult to get in because they ask, have you deregistered yet?

And I haven't.

So they said, you know, well, come back to us at that point.

But it's really hard.

And I understand why, why local groups do this.

It's because sometimes, not very often, but sometimes you get school parents who just kind of want their children to do the kind of extracurricular stuff.

And it's a very different thing when you home educate to, to just, you know, having your child flexi Schooling even, for example.

So I understand why they do that.

But it's such a shame because it means you can't get a sense of it, really, until you dereg.

And deregging is kind of scary in itself because that's the big step.

So I know there's going to be people listening.

I mean, I don't know, maybe there are.

Maybe I'm cynical, but I'm guessing there's going to be people listening who are thinking, like, who the hell does Eleanor think she is, positioning herself as some sort of homeschooling expert, which I'm not.

Right.

So I'm not any kind of expert in this.

And I'm here to try to reassure you and to answer your questions and to kind of help you out, purely because I've been doing it a long time and as part of the podcast, I've spent, like, many hours, many hours meeting people and talking to them about home education.

So I would do my very best to help provide any guidance and reassurance I can.

So I know you've got a list of questions and things you want to ask me.

So hit me up.

Let me see if I can knock some of the skittles down that make you feel a bit braver and a bit less.

A bit less nervous about it.

Okay.

There's quite a few questions, so I'm.

Here for the questions.

Oh, yes.

It's like a quiz.

I like.

I like quizzes.

I like tests.

This is good for me.

All right.

I know this is a big concern for everybody.

It's the socialization aspect.

I understand that people say, you know, it's, don't worry about it, you will find your people.

And like I say, I've already started with a little bit of that.

But I was concerned that when I spoke to a local lady who I just happened to bump into on a car boot sale, and I said, do you home ed Bernie Sands?

Just the way she was talking, and she's like, yes, I do.

And she was talking about it, and her.

Both her children had been brought out because of special educational needs and the school wasn't meeting that and totally understand that.

And I said, what is the percentage of that in the general home ed community?

How many people do it purely because their child is maybe not happy or just for reasons that they just don't want their child to ever go to school?

Like, you, what position, percentage of.

Of the population would you say you are versus people that have had to come out for their, you know, their child struggling?

I asked her and she said it was quite high percentage.

She said it well, she said it was.

Most people were people that felt forced into it, I suppose, as opposed to chosen it as an alternative path for their child.

Not that they weren't met for at school then their needs weren't met, but more that they just.

I'm not wording this very well, but.

I know what you mean.

I.

What I call in my head ideological home educators.

Yeah, yeah, that's versus kind of more like a kind of anti school or school refusal or school rejection.

Home educated.

Yeah, yeah.

It's really interesting because there is.

You.

You've summed up really the two camps.

I don't mean camps as in they're separated, but I mean the two types of home educators.

You've summed it up perfectly.

There are home educators that have never sent their child to school or ideologically just don't really agree with school.

Don't really like school doesn't suit their lifestyle, whatever it is.

Yeah.

And they're kind of like what I call ideological home educators and they tend to home educate all the way through and don't really try school because it's just not really on their radar.

And then you have home educators who try school and just assume that school is going to work and then something happens and it doesn't.

Bullying, anxiety, neurodiversity, a bad experience, something like that.

And then, then they start looking around for alternative.

Now you fit into that second camp where really I think if your daughter had enjoyed school and was absolutely fine with school, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

Home education wouldn't be on your radar.

So when it comes to percentages, I've got two things to say about that.

So the first thing is that when I started home educating, if you can count it as starting, because I never really started.

I was in the first camp there just kind of.

I fell into it.

It just wasn't something I thought about.

Pretty much everybody in the home education community were the first camp, the ideolog, home educators.

I met very few that weren't that.

That's not to say that their children didn't have neurodiversities, but that wasn't the main reason they were home educating.

There was a period of time before COVID round about like the mid 2010s when there was a lot of what's called off rolling when schools were getting rid of pupils from their school role that had neurodiversities because it was affecting their.

Well, I don't actually know why to be perfectly Honest, it's a really interesting thing.

But my guess is it was affecting their GCSE results or something, I don't know.

But there was a lot of off rolling.

So a lot of people came to home education round about that kind of mid 2010s.

And then during COVID again we got more people in.

So there was a shift then.

So you ended up with more people who are home educating, who weren't, who hadn't actively chosen home education.

Home education had kind of been foisted a little bit upon them circumstantially.

Now I will say that I have met home educators of both types and I don't think it makes really any difference which home educator you are.

I've never felt that there's like a sense of them and usness about that or any kind.

And I'm the first to admit when there are cliques and things in home education, because there are.

But I've never really felt a sense of disconnect between like some groups are more for the ideological home educators, some groups are more for the school review rejection home educators.

We've been to play dates with all sorts of different, different circumstances and different children.

It's never made any kind of difference at all to our experience of home education.

So that's from my perspective, I would guess to answer your question, that at the moment it's probably more the second camp, this, the school hasn't worked out for them camp.

Whereas 10 years ago, 15 years ago, it was definitely more of the first one.

I don't think that's.

That don't that makes any difference.

The only very slight difference it makes is that there were times when I was at a kind of home ed thing and I would sit with some of the other mothers and the entire conversation was how annoying school was.

And I kind of sat there, didn't really have a lot to say because my children hadn't really had that experience.

And I found that a little bit like why are we talking about school?

We're not in school, we're not doing school.

And I think, I think for a brief period I found that a little, a little not exactly frustrating, but it was just.

I felt a bit left out from that experience, I think.

But that was honestly the only palpable difference I ever noticed between the two groups.

I don't think you'll seem or feel left out in some way by ideological home educators or.

I don't know, I don't think you'll notice anything when it comes to that.

I wouldn't worry about that.

No, it's just.

Well, you know, how Lucy will kind of ingratiate herself and I hope that's.

A really good question.

And one thing I will say is that I think that schooled.

Parents of schooled children really worry about this when they join home education.

They worry that the children, that their child won't feel part of a group or will be left out.

I have never experienced that in home education, like, honestly, I never have.

That's not to say it doesn't happen.

I'm not here saying that other people's experience of that didn't happen.

Of course it.

I'm sure it does happen.

But in my experience of home education, home educated children are extremely welcoming and very inclusive.

There is no, like, playground, like cliques and gangs.

I honestly never, ever experienced that.

No.

Oh, that's really reassuring.

Yeah.

So a question about how.

How do you know if.

How your child is doing?

So in the sense that I understand your children are older now and they've done GCSES and those kind of things, but as a younger, as a parent of a younger child who, you know, is pre SAT stage, pre gcse, how do you gauge how well they are doing, if targets are being reached, if you're making an absolute mess of it, or if they're doing really well, if there's no kind of formal testing till gcse?

If you are following the national curriculum.

Let me spin this round to you in a mildly combative way.

Why does it matter?

Well, just in the sense of whether, you know, for a slightly angsty mum who's maybe thinking, am I absolutely ruining my child's future by taking her out of school, it would be reassuring to know that.

I'm not saying to test her all the time or anything like that, but just if there was a way to gauge, oh, you know, she can do that, she can't do this.

And do you kind of go through the curriculum?

I think, oh, yeah, they can, they can do that kind of stuff.

Or do you just wing it and see how you get on until two seats?

I mean, one of the.

One of the scariest bits of home education and yet one of the best bits of home education is that all in any of these approaches are open to you.

So, yes, you can, absolutely.

If the academic development is a concern for you.

And I was like that.

I wanted to know how they were doing academically.

I would buy them workbooks for their age.

So they.

Back when I used to be able to go to Toys R Us and get them but you can get, go to the works and stuff and get like year 7 to 8 maths and stuff like that.

Carol Vorderman.

I don't know if she still does, but she did a whole range of them.

Yeah, I would, I would kind of buy those books and then, you know, kind of like, you know, vaguely work my way through them or sometimes I would literally just go to the, to the works or Smiths or wherever and I would pick them off the shelf, skip through them and not buy them because I would just flick through, through them and think, oh yeah, no, I'm pretty sure they can do most of that.

Or I would just be like, oh, okay, we haven't done fractions, we probably ought to do more fractions.

And then I would maybe do a bit more fractions.

But there are really simple, easy ways to see if you're keeping up in inverted commas.

But I will say that academically, in a class of 30 children, year three, five of them won't be able to read.

Five of them will be reading way beyond their age.

You know, 10 of them won't be keeping up with the class at all.

Another 10 will be sitting there bored and disengaged.

Within every year group in school you've got a huge range of where people are on the academic spectrum.

And I will say that it doesn't really matter.

I think this is why I kind of pose that question is because at a young age your child's not going to be like illiterate, they're not going to get to 16, not be able to read or write.

That's not going to happen.

And all you're doing really, I think at a young age that is the most important thing.

I think when you home educate is, well, two things.

Firstly, you are prioritizing their well being and their sense of security and safety and confidence in themselves and all of those very important things that a good school also does and a bad school doesn't or a bad school experience doesn't.

But secondly, you're allowing them to have a relationship with learning that is not one of frustration, it's not one of feeling inferior, it's not one of anxiety, it's not one of comparing themselves with somebody else.

It's not one of thinking why do I even have to know this?

Or feeling detached from their learning.

Home education allows a child to be really engaged and enthused by learning.

It's something that they can just really enjoy.

And that relationship is unique.

In home education.

You can't get it in the school system because it's an enforced system of learning.

And because it is unique to home education, it allows your child to have a relationship with learning that they would never have access to otherwise, which is this idea that learning is actually something that they want to do.

They like doing, and they're very confident and comfortable at doing.

Now, that kind of confidence and autonomy in their learning can't be taught.

It pre exists in us and it tends to get removed in the school system.

So actually, I would say that how you would know if they're keeping up?

Well, you could get workbooks and find out if they're keeping up, but I can promise you that they will be way ahead in lots of other things.

That's what I would love, is for her to have a love of learning, because at the moment she comes home and, you know, she's got a whole lot to do.

She does not want to do it.

It's.

It's usually only spellings in a math sheet, but, you know, she's done.

You can tell she's.

She's had enough with.

With school.

She.

She does it reluctantly.

But I worry that after four years of school, is it too late?

Have I already killed that love of learning?

How do you reignite that?

You know, I know you say you can't teach that someone, so is it just time that will hopefully reignite that interest in learning?

And is it just time will tell.

Yeah.

And to answer the question, I'm actually doing a podcast on deschooling in the next few weeks, and it's interesting that I haven't done one because deschooling is a really fundamental idea in home education.

I cannot believe I've done like 120 episodes I haven't done deschooling because.

No, it's not too late.

It just.

I think the general rule of deschooling is I don't know where this came from.

I don't know how accurate it is, but I think it's one month of deschooling for one year in the school system for both of you that is not just your daughter.

And so the longer you're in the school system, the more in inverted commas, deschooling you have to do.

And deschooling is all about just re.

Engaging that relationship with learning.

So four years in school, four months deschooling?

Yeah.

I mean, it's.

It feels a little bit crude, but that's the general.

That's the general theory.

And as I say, I'm doing a deschooling podcast so you might want to listen up for that one.

But generally it's no, it's never too late to re.

Engage that love of learning.

And your daughter's really young, you know, she's really young.

There are people who take their children at 15, 16, and that's not too late, it's just, it's older.

Right.

So there's more established things going on there.

Yeah.

Our goal is to take her out now.

I already feel bad.

I think you get the mom guilt, whatever, don't you, earlier, hopefully in the next few weeks when we send the D reg letter that hopefully we'll be able to get her started.

She hasn't had a horrendous start to this year.

She's, you know, at first she seemed okay the first day or two, and then it's, it's dropped again into not wanting to go, but I guess it's just taking that leap.

It's.

When, when do you do it?

It's just a scary prospect.

I suppose at the moment it is.

Scary, but it's never going to not be scary.

It's never going to not be a scary thing.

And assuming that you've got all your circumstances in place where so you actually financially and physically can look after her during the day without having to go to work or whatever, then there is no sweet spot moment where you're like, yeah, I'm not scared anymore.

I'm going to dereg today.

That doesn't happen.

You're better off just.

Just doing it.

It's a bit like ripping a plaster off.

Just.

Just do it and then it's done and then you come out the other side and you're doing it.

Yeah, yeah.

I think it's.

It's just having that confidence to, to do it and, you know, thinking, can you, can you fit this in your day?

Because I've read so many people say that, you know, they regret not taking the child out, but they don't regret home education.

They don't ever look back and with regrets to that.

So that does give me some more confidence in that area.

Are you confident about the amount of time you have to do it and how you're going to approach it?

Well, I work, but I normally work three days a week in the nhs, so I'm a community physio.

I'm out of the house.

There's no options with that.

But I, after going back for mat leave and reduced it to two days, which they're letting me do temporarily, but they keep saying no to a permanent fix to that One of the days that I'm at work, my husband is off and he works from home normally.

So my goal is that there'll only then be one day where I'm not around that she can manage grandparents at the moment.

And a combination of that and my husband working from home, setting us some bits and bobs to do.

Now though he works from home, he does also have to leave for different site jobs, but not all the time, not necessarily every day.

We have grandparents really close by that would step in if you need to go out for an hour or two or whatever.

They would watch her but it's.

She still wouldn't have somebody with her all the time.

And I suppose it's.

She's really happy.

She will play Lego for they, you know, they think that her attention is really short in school, but she will play Lego for hours or playing a bill or crafting.

She will do that really focused work.

She's, she's got endless patience for that.

So I guess it's just getting your head into the right space of.

Well, just because she's not doing a lesson per se from 9:3, you know, getting the head out of how, of how it was for school, how it's set up.

Because everybody has mentioned it too.

It's like, well, you know, you work and you've got to get the baby snapping, you've got to do meals and all those kind of things.

How would you give her lessons all day?

And I, you know, you don't want to be on a screen.

You limit a screen used to an hour in the afternoon where she watches tv.

How are you?

Not overly rely on that, but from what I've read it's about two hours at the moment.

For her age even that is hugely long.

Is it like that's crazy long.

Yeah, I mean when you said there I sort of slightly laughed about how you're going to do lessons all day.

It's like that is literally.

I don't know any home educator who replicates school in that way.

I honestly don't.

And maybe there must be because there's a home educator who does every kind of approach you could think of.

But to give you an example, my children at that age.

So Your daughter's what, 8ish?

Eight?

Yeah.

My children at that age maybe like three or four days a week.

My daughter at 8 would do maybe half an hour, 45 minutes a day of actual in inverted commas learning, like sitting down at a table with some, a pen in her hand learning.

And my son who always liked A bit more of that kind of stuff.

He would maybe do 45 minutes, maybe pushing up to a two lots of half hour or something.

I don't know.

That's that at age 8.

Now that's not that that was all they were learning.

No way.

I mean, wow.

They learned so much.

Your daughter would be learning so much during her Playmobil and her Lego, like life itself is a constant learning process for all of us.

But for actual sit down lessons, I wouldn't be looking at any more than an hour.

Like honestly, not at all.

And bear in mind, when my children were doing GCSes, my son did 11, he did four A levels, he never did more than three hours a day.

And he was what, 16, 17, 18.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

So you don't need to do anything like they do at school.

I, I was a teacher briefly, for my sins.

I was a, I was a teacher.

And there is so much filler in schools, like so much filler.

The actual time spent learning sitting down learning is really, really minimal.

And bear in mind that what you're offering is one to one version of that, as opposed to one to 30 or one to 25 or one to 20 or whatever the ratio is.

So it's so much more effective as well.

You really don't need anything like that.

That amount.

You don't even need to do it.

As you'll know from listening to the podcast and stuff, there are very successful home educators who never do a little bit of this sitting down with a pen and workbook.

They just don't do that.

And the child is still remarkably educated and able to get any qualifications they want.

So you don't have to put yourself under pressure to do a certain amount of learning.

I keep wanting to put it in inverted commas because obviously learning is so much more expansive than that.

But if you do want to have a structure whereby every single day she does a little bit of something at a table just because it makes you feel better and also because you just want to kind of get that kind of rhythm to your days or pattern to your days, I would be steering clear of anything that smacks of school.

So anything that's like boring or very work sheety and I would be going for sitting down and doing things like drawing, coloring, reading, watching really cool documentaries and then maybe writing something about them.

You can get some really fun workbooks.

There's some really nice home ed kind of curriculums out there that you can do that you can sit down at a table and do.

But I would be really Making it not schooly.

Because I think if you, if it feels a bit like school, like, oh, this is the kind of thing we did in school, I think you're more likely to get a pushback that you wouldn't get otherwise.

That leads on to my next question.

Curriculums I have seen online, you know, you see a lot of people selling them or advertising different ones.

Obviously there's the national curriculum, but I've heard, you know, that it's not really moving on with, with the times.

But if you follow that, obviously that will lead you more into the GCSES and qualifications.

I'm shaking my head at this point.

Okay.

Only because.

Let me just interrupt briefly that the curriculum at age 8 is not helpful for your GCSEs at age 16.

It's really doesn't.

There's no, no, there's no.

You could do a forest curriculum, AJ and still do your GCSes quite happily.

13, 12, 14, GCS.

The GCSE curriculum is, is almost like a little.

It's like if you go for a McDonald's meal and you get that paper bag and you got your drink and your chips and your burger in there, right?

It's like its own little self contained meal that you carry around in a bag.

That's what GCSE learning is.

You like, if you want to do GCSE astronomy as an example, because my son did, so I feels relevant in my head.

You pick up your little bag of GCSE astronomy curriculum, you study it and you sit the exam.

Doesn't matter what you did at aj.

So if that's helpful, you can eliminate that.

So talk to me about other curriculums.

Yeah, so you know, I've heard, is it the Swedish different?

Like America's got lots of homemade curriculums, like the Bold and the Beautiful.

Is it?

And different other, other countries, like, where do you find them?

Like Twinkl has the national curriculum and lots of worksheets.

But if you are like me and want to at least initially link it to something so you know, you, you know you're kind of on the right track.

How do you access these different curriculums?

Is it something that you pay for?

I can't seem to find them online.

A curriculum is basically a fancy word for things you're going to learn.

Okay, so like if you were to, if you were to say to yourself you wanted to learn Spanish because you're going away on holiday, you wouldn't think to yourself, right, I need a Spanish curriculum, you'd be like, okay, I'm going to go on duolingo and I'm going to get like an audiobook of Spanish right now.

It's.

We get ourselves in such a tizzy when it comes to our child's learning.

We kind of think, oh, I need this curriculum or that curriculum.

But a curriculum is really just people who are selling resources to help to help your child learn some things.

That's literally all it is.

It's a framework whereby they sort of say, oh, if you follow our curriculum, your child will do maths and they'll do these topics, or if you follow this curriculum, your child will learn about these books this year or something.

Now the benefit of a curriculum is it takes out your thought process in as much as you don't really have to worry too much about what you're going to be teaching that year in inverted commas teaching, but what you.

What your child is going to be learning that year.

Because the curriculum kind of lays it out so you don't have to think about it.

You could just be like, oh, okay, I know that like, for example, we did something called Story, the Story of the World.

I think it's called Story of the World, which was an American history series for books and they had workbooks and it really encompassed history, but also geography and also language arts and, you know, all sorts of different things.

And so while that theoretically was a curriculum for quite a lot of the subjects, it actually even had some maths and stuff in there now I think about it, and some science actually, and art.

So it really was a curriculum in its own right, I suppose.

And by following that, it meant that I didn't have to sit there and think up, okay, what are we going to do for geography today?

Or what are we going to do for history today?

Because I just of did what the book told me to do.

Now, really, quite quickly, I found that a little bit boring and a bit restrictive.

So I just branched off and did my own thing.

And it very much depends.

Some parents really like to just do their own thing and be like, oh, what should we do for maths today?

We haven't done fractions, let's bake a cake and chop it into bits.

Other people think, I don't know maths, oh my God, I don't know Christ algebra, I don't know.

And.

And they really need some input.

And especially early on you can really feel that you need the structure almost like a scaffold to just kind of.

Support you bang it off.

Just because I think if I just start with that, then I'll As I get more confident, I'll be able to move away and maybe do more project topic learning those kind of things that I've heard about.

But I think as a newbie, I'm gonna need something to just loosely follow because I don't know what she's already done.

You know, school, they give, you know, the report at the end of the year, but it's really, it's like a sentence.

You know, they've done this, you know they're coming on in mass, but you don't, you don't know what really they've done.

Everything I tell her at the moment is, oh, yeah, I already know that.

All right, okay, yes, it's, it's irrelevant what she's done.

If she's done it, she'll tell you and then you move through it quicker or you don't do it or she hasn't done it, she'll tell you and you do it like it makes no difference what she's done.

Don't worry about what school have done or haven't done.

This is about what you two are going to do together.

And I agree.

I think in the early days, unless you're very confident about things, it is nice to have a bit of a structure so you can sort of think, oh, okay, I don't have to, like, I'm not doing all of this on my own.

I've got a bit of backup.

And then it is really just a case of doing some research.

Don't spend too much money because like you say, chances are you're going to end up doing your own thing.

So I would be like, having a really clear budget, trying to find something that covers all the bases that you want it to cover.

Bear in mind that a lot of things won't cover maths because a lot of them will cover lots of other things.

Maths is always slightly separate, I think, sometimes in these curriculums, but not necessarily.

So find one that covers the bases you want to cover.

And if it's got a really obvious gap, like it doesn't do English or it doesn't.

Or maybe it does American English, you want to do English English.

Or maybe it doesn't do maths or whatever.

Or science, whatever, or practical science.

Don't forget, you can plug that in.

You know, you can do that little bit yourself and just like throw a bit of math and throw a bit of science in.

But the other thing you need to think about is what you want your home education to look like.

What are the values you're looking for here?

Is it that you want your daughter to be super engaged with the natural world?

You know, like, do you, do you want her to be a really autonomous learner?

Do you want her to have that kind of scientific rigor, you know, analysis and understanding?

Do you want her to be a big voracious reader?

Like, what is the vibe you're looking for?

And then try to find a curriculum that kind of fits that vibe.

There's no point going for something like, like a very, like a kind of practical, hands on, sciencey, craftsy curriculum if actually, you know, that's really not your thing and it makes a lot of mess and you got other children to look after and it's just going to be kind of chaotic.

You may prefer something that's a bit more, okay, let's incorporate it into a nature walk or let's incorporate it into sitting and watching particular videos every day, for example.

Whatever works for you.

Whatever is your kind of vibe.

I think as a home, as a.

Home educator, I think it's hard to know what you buy a business that you start.

But so maybe that will evolve for me.

But I just wanted to be happy.

That is, that's all I'm after.

And seeing her play, I think that that kind of gets eroded.

Not that school is, you know, horrendous, but she's there for the vast chunk of her day that she's awake and alert and like her best hours are there so that when she comes home she's just, she just wants her hour of TV and she wants dinner and then it's, it's time for bath and bed.

You know, it's just there's no time.

Whereas at the weekend she can just devotes herself to playing with her toys and things.

And I think that is what she needs more of.

I think you've answered your question perfectly.

Then.

I think you need a play based curriculum.

If, I mean, I really don't think you need a curriculum, however, right?

If it makes you feel better, get a play based curriculum.

Or think to yourself, okay, let's do a little project, like she gets to design something on paper that she then makes in Lego.

And then she has to like explain to you afterwards, like how she did it and what, what she found difficult about it and how she would do it differently next time.

That's the scientific method.

You're ticking off science nicely.

You're ticking off literacy, you're ticking off writing, you're ticking off research.

There's a lot of soft skills and hard skills in there that you could do Just with a Lego project over two weeks.

Play based learning.

Yeah.

I think it's getting maybe your mind in that head that, that space that is seeing that as learning as opposed to, well, I've got no worksheets to true.

So I think it's going to be changing in me more than anybody else that's going to need to happen.

That shift will happen because what you will do is you will see her learning through the day as she's playing, as she's interacting with people at the garden center or whatever.

You will see that happening and then you will start being, being like, oh, actually learning is taking place all these times.

One thing that might help, which I was like doing, was keeping a little homeschooling kind of journal where I would write down the things that I thought they'd learned that day.

And you'd be amazed how many things they learn when they're not sitting, sitting at a table.

Yeah.

Just out and about.

Yeah, yeah.

Just.

I don't want, I can appreciate the learning, you know, if you take it to the library or if you take it to the shop and she's working out the money and the change and those kind of things.

But I suppose, you know, if I'm kind of doing a washing and looking at the baby, I don't want her to, to get lost in that.

So it's, it's just having projects and things that she can be keeping busy with.

Keeping busy is an interesting idea because I am a firm believer in the benefits of getting very bored of children being very bored and entertaining themselves.

And there's a lot of learning that could be done there.

And it's one thing that at a, at school there's always something, something, something, something, something like that.

You know, it's very, it's regimented, but it's also very busy, sensorily, very busy.

And I think that home education is lovely for the, for the just the sheer amount of time when a child is both kicking around, doing what you're doing.

If you're feeding the baby, if you're washing, doing all those things, they can be there with you doing all that stuff or they're just on their own kind of like drumming their heels and being like, I'm bored, I'm bored, I'm bored.

Right.

Until they're not bored and they find themselves an amazingly creative, imaginative thing to relieve their boredom.

And these are skills that most children don't get to develop because they're not given the chance to get bored.

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

I mean she doesn't say, I'm bored at home.

She's always immersing herself in crafts or projects or something like that.

I just.

I hope that I can get reading to be something that she's.

She likes to do, because the school book she comes home with, she.

She does it because she has to, not because she wants to.

So I've tried to.

I'm building up a bit of a library.

I've been to the charity shops and trying to get as many books as I can to entice.

There's a nice thing, which I think is.

I think it's the Charlotte Mason approach, which is called scattering.

You kind of scatter books around, so you just use or you scatter stuff around for them to engage with.

And I think that there's two things with reading.

I think the.

Firstly is.

I think it's really good to model it, so if you can read, read yourself.

And then.

Yeah, it's hard.

I know.

It's super hard when you're busy.

I know.

I do know that.

It's really, really hard.

I have not read a book since she was born, which is horrendous.

It's a really nice discussion to have with her, isn't it?

To say, look, you know, I used to like reading and I haven't done much reading.

Why don't we both go to the library together, choose a book we really like the look of, and then sit in the library with a cup of tea and do some reading.

Or, you know, like, after I put the baby to bed, let's sit just for half an hour together, put a candle on, have a hot drink and do some reading and make, like a really nice thing.

So I think modeling and scattering are really good when it comes to reading.

So, like, have really enticing books all around.

My daughter's really dyslexic and she learned to read quite, quite young and reasonably, seamlessly for this, for somebody with dyslexia, she was, what, five?

I think.

And it was purely because I just.

I scattered loads of Cressida cowl, like how to train your dragon books around.

And she was like, read to me, read to me.

And I'm like, I don't have time to read to you.

I did, but I wanted her to read for herself.

And so she just started out of sheer frustration, forcing herself to read.

And I think if you just scatter really enticing books around, that helps.

Great.

Yeah.

Well, my son's really good at throwing them all on the floor, so the.

Deck he's Your scatterer.

Right, yeah.

So that's a good idea.

I'll do more of that.

I mean, she could read fine.

It's one thing to read, but yeah, I would try and get some more enticing options for her.

That's great.

Once it's once.

Reading isn't a thing that she has to do for a certain amount of time at a school or a certain amount of pages.

You'll probably find that she rediscovers her love for it.

Yeah.

Yeah, I hope so.

Next question, next question.

Would you recommend at this age getting any online courses, tutors, Oak Academy, those kind of things, or leave that to later or avoid it?

I'll do.

Well, that's a big question.

I mean, it really, really depends.

I mean, you can do what you like, you know, you can genuinely do what you like.

I'm not against any of that stuff.

Some courses are better than others.

I wouldn't be doing anything like Oak Academy, really.

I wouldn't be doing anything that was bit schooly, I think certainly to begin with.

But we tried all sorts of things.

We did Kumon, that was pretty mixed success.

We did some Elearn with Amy, who's actually been on the podcast.

She, she does beautiful animal courses.

If your daughter likes animals, she's got amazing animal courses.

Two very different things you're talking about there.

You know, you're talking about something that's basically like school by video.

Then you're talking about something that is like a really engaging, fun young lady talking about animals.

I mean, it's like a really different thing.

So a lot of it will depend on the courses.

I certainly don't think you need to get a tutor as of yet.

I don't think there's any need for that.

Like that's something you can think about if you feel that there's a lack, like if you get to the point.

And again, I'm certainly not against tutors.

My son had a math tutor round about that age, age 8, because he was very, very, very good at maths and I was very, very, very bad at it.

And I wanted someone who could really engage his passion for maths and who could share his love for numbers.

So I, I brought that in, but I didn't, I would never have gone straight into that.

You know, obviously we'd home educated all the way through.

So I think that anything like anything expensive or regimented or commitment y. I would probably just press pause on and just see how you get on, see what she likes, see what the gaps are and then You've got eons of time to work through this.

There's no pressure.

Okay, that's good to know.

In terms of their learning types and you say, you know, working out what kind of learning type they have.

How did you ask?

The same with your children.

What was their learning type and what was the best way to teach them?

You know, whether it be a visual learner or learning by doing, etc.

I don't think I even know what they are.

I really don't.

I mean, do I?

Maybe if I thought about it.

I just never had to think about it.

Like when I was teaching, I had a little initial that I put next to all the pupils names V, A and K for visual, auditory or kinesthetic learner.

I didn't really care then, I certainly don't care now.

Like it just doesn't make get any difference at all.

However, your children will, by what they choose to interact with will give you information about how they like to interact with their learning.

If they like to write a lot of stuff down.

My son always liked to kind of write stuff.

He liked workbooks and worksheets and like given a choice, a plain piece of white paper with printed questions was his dream.

He really loved that.

You give that to my daughter, she would throw it on the floor and be like, that's boring.

Where's the app that that has this learning in it, right?

So it's a really, really different thing.

You'll know by how they choose to interact with their learning.

What I would do is give them millions of options for routes into the learning.

So if firstly, I would very slightly question the use of the word teaching because you're not really teaching, you're really just opening up her, you're inviting her into a topic.

So say for example, you wanted to do Ancient Greece, right, As a topic.

So you're not going to teach her ancient Greece.

What you're going to do is you're going to have maybe a book that you got from the library about it.

You maybe have Percy Jackson that you're going to be having on an audiobook.

You're maybe going to have a documentary you found about ancient Greece.

You may be going to have like a twinkl worksheet that you printed off about ancient Greece, like a reading comprehension.

You're maybe going to have lots of toilet rolls and Sellotape and you're going to make the Acropolis wait, the Parthenon or something, right?

So you will get a sense of which is the one that she really likes.

So which is the one that she spent her time on, which is the one that when at the end of the topic and her granny is saying, oh, like what did you learn about ancient Greece?

And that sounds cool.

And she's like this, this, this isn't this.

And you think, oh, well, all of that came from the toilet roll kind of Parthenon or all of it came from that Twinkl worksheet.

You'll get a sense of what she's absorbed.

Was it from the documentary?

Was it from the crafty stuff?

And you will get that kind of sense.

But just open up all those opportunities for her to engage with it.

We'll try.

Rather than.

This is your book for this.

Lots of options for learning.

Yeah.

And it's more fun for you and it's more varied for her.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

I should go to schools and be an education consultant.

That's a niche.

Okay, next question.

Okay, so my next question is I understand that a lot of people when they're busy or they're working from home, they will put their child in front of a screen for whatever sort of learning.

Watching documentary, watching tv, whatever.

I find with my daughter that that's not ideal for her.

So we have limited her to.

She just has an hour a day of TV for the reason that she gets quite addictive to.

To anything screen based.

She has a thing, I think it's called times table Rock stars that school giver.

And she was initially doing that, you know, on a.

On the phone and she would.

But she would literally wake up in the morning.

First question was can I go on TT Rock stars.

And all through the day, can I go on it?

Can I go on it?

And we just found that it wasn't so much about.

She didn't love to learn a time stables.

She would put it on the easiest one.

It was just, it was just about getting the coins and, and the coins meaning that you could buy whatever virtual clothes for your character and it was all about that and rather than any learning through it and it just became all consuming so we kind of stopped it.

But how do you navigate all the options online so the screen use doesn't get overused, shall we say?

Again, that is such, such an individual topic that you as a family have to decide on.

I know that there are many families that don't have any limits on their tech use or screen use and that works for them.

Other families have super lockdown screen use and that works for them.

Now, I was a little bit similar to you.

My children had a really similar experience with something called Prodigy Maths, where I sat with them one time.

They loved doing it and I thought, oh, great, they're doing maths.

How wonderful.

They sit for hours doing maths.

And I sat there with my son for one hour, and he did two really simple math questions in the whole hour.

And the rest of it was like little battles and avatars and all that stuff.

And I thought, well, this is such a.

Like a waste of time when he could have just done those two questions in two minutes on a piece of paper.

But other parents would think, no, that's fine, because he's happy, he's engaged, it's not doing him any harm, and he's doing a little bit of maths as well.

Personally, I found that screen use took away from our time, and I.

Our time was precious and still is.

And so I limited screen use just because it limited the time that we had to do other things.

But that wasn't to say that there wasn't screen use there.

But it's different, isn't it?

In actual fact, as part of my masters, I did.

I studied social media use and loneliness.

That was what my thesis was on.

And what came through very clearly was that there's no such thing as just a screen being a good thing or a bad thing, because it's all sorts of different things that you're engaging with.

If you're on WhatsApp, chatting with somebody, it's very different to doom scrolling on Facebook, which is very different to watching a YouTube video, which is very different to responding in a Facebook group.

These are all very, very different interactions.

And we as adults recognize that.

We recognize that, you know, if you're like this now, me and you on Zoom is not the same as me going on Instagram.

Even though it's the same medium, it's completely different.

And it's exactly the same with children.

If you sit with them and you're watching a David Attenborough documentary and you've maybe done a little worksheet where you pause the video quarter of an hour in because you pre watched it and done your little worksheet and you're like, can you fill in what type of whale has the mesh mouth?

And they write baleen in.

Now, that's a really different experience to giving them an iPad for 40 minutes because you want a bit of peace and quiet.

I'm not saying that's a bad thing.

I was a big fan of CBeebies when my two were little because they're very close in age and I needed a Really a really slow run up to my day.

I needed a bit of peace and quiet with a cup of tea.

I sat them down and watched.

They watched CBeebies in the morning for like an hour or something because I needed that.

So there's nothing wrong with that.

You as a family need to understand where your values are being conflicted with screen use or if they are being conflicted with screen use and then just have a balance that works for both of you.

I know what you mean about when they get very into it and like the first thing they want to know is when they're next going to be doing that thing on a screen.

That always raises big alarm bells for me as well.

But you, you will find there's no reason to think that just because you're home educating that's going to get out of control.

No, no.

I guess I was just looking to see if there was any apps and things that were.

Obviously you want them to be fun, but not just about getting the avatar to be the next, the next greatest thing.

There are some really good learning apps.

Now I'm a little bit out of date with mine, but there are some very nice learning apps that are much more gentle learning style and much less sensorily overloady and that really is just a case of trying them out and seeing what works for you.

In my experience, the best screen use is the one that is integrated into time with each other.

So my daughter, who as I say, she's dyslexic so she struggled with her spelling a little bit to begin with.

We used to sit and do this anagram app called letterquest which was almost like a kind of hangman style thing where you had to guess the letters.

But we would sit and do it together because I knew what the word was and then I would say, okay, how do you spell whatever the word was?

And then she would pick from the pre existing letters underneath.

It was a really good way of her guessing the spelling because she had certain letters to choose from.

And so it was a very collaborative screen experience and the same thing.

We did a couple of courses and things that were online and I would sit with them.

I always sat with them during their screen time.

It was rare.

Maybe some like Tokaboka games and stuff where I knew that it was safe and they were just playing for 10 minutes while I made the lunch.

But generally I think collaborative screen time might, might just feel a better fit.

That's good to know.

It's very much up to you as a family.

I know I keep saying that, but.

No, I know it's difficult to answer these questions.

I know a lot of it is personal to everybody thinks about screens and other things.

Yeah.

Also I'm really aware that anyone listening, I don't want them to feel that they're doing it wrong, you know, because there is no doing it wrong.

Just because I do it one way, you might do it another way.

And they're.

Their child is sitting on an iPad for seven hours a day.

That's not wrong.

There's nothing wrong there.

It's just whatever works for you and your circumstances and your child.

Some children need that kind of stimulation to actually relax their brain.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean she has friends that have much more screen use and they're, they're fine with it.

But she really.

Behavior change is, you know, she just, she's not her.

If she has too much time on her.

Yeah.

My son, my son was exactly the same and now he's what, 19?

And he has a phone that he almost never goes on.

He doesn't, he doesn't really use screens because it just isn't his thing.

And some children, it's just not, not.

Doesn't suit them.

No.

One more thing was just I don't understand that your children are close in age, which must help in some regards.

Mine are not really.

I've got 1, 4 and 8, so I'm not home educating them all obviously at the moment, but as time goes on, I'm just wondering, you know, do you kind of find that people would split their time between, you know, I'll do a bit with you, a bit with you, or find things that they can all do kind of collaboratively but at different levels for each other.

It's just a lot of groups and things that I've seen are kind of set ages.

So, you know, you can go to this group from 7 to 11, but obviously then my younger two couldn't join in and those kind of things.

Do you find that's an issue?

That's interesting.

As you say, my two were close in age, so I never really encountered that.

But from my experience of home educating groups, they quite often will let you come with your younger child if you're sort of sitting with your younger child.

Quite a lot of things are now starting up where they have provision for different ages in one building because there's an awareness now of that.

I suppose what you're talking about is that you might have like 3 year old in 3 years with your middle child at school.

Is that what you're thinking?

And Then you got, you'll have an 11 year old and you're worried that there's just very different ages.

Well, my plan is that they will all be coming out of school.

I see.

So you'll be home educating all of them.

Well, this is another question that's kind of coming to it but I guess I want it to be personal journey for them all.

So Lucy, my eldest wants to come out.

We will do that for her.

Lily, it's just started.

Reception at the moment is enjoying it part time but I envisage that will change as, as it moves away from play based learning thing.

I feel that it would be unfair to home educate one and not all I can imagine later in life.

Well why did she get to be home educated in our state school?

You know it's interesting isn't it because I know some parents who do do that who just home educate one and I know other parents that started with one and then they pulled everybody out.

I'm going to be really annoying and teachery and I'm, and I'm going to say that fairness is not doing the same thing for everybody.

Fairness is everybody getting what they need at that time and so it's possible that your children won't all have the same need to be home educated.

However, I am never ever in a million years going to sit here and say don't home educate all your children because as far as I'm concerned everybody should home educate all their children.

So, so like yes, of course, like home educate all of them for sure.

I'm going to, I'm going to also be annoying and bat that question back a little bit because until you get to that point where you're home educating all of them, you don't know how is it Lucy, your, your eldest.

Yeah.

You don't know how Lucy's going to adapt to home education.

You don't know how autonomous she's going to be.

You don't know whether she's going to really enjoy like taking charge of the her own learning.

You don't know whether she's going to find herself at regular groups.

It's all so unknown that you don't really know how it's going to look.

So you won't know how to integrate another child or two children into that scene because you don't know what the scene is going to be.

My advice would be when you get to the point where you're thinking, okay, I'm going to be home educating at least one more, if not two more come back right, Charlotte who also runs this podcast with me, who's one of my new like co host.

Because I now have lots of lovely co hosts to help me out with my podcast.

Charlotte home educates, I think six.

All of varying ages or has done through, through the last like 15 years.

She is the perfect person.

You should come on and have a podcast with her about how to home educate when you've got all these children, all different ages and different needs and different, different approaches.

Because until you know what it looks like, try not to put the cart before the horse and worry about we ever.

How will I bring my three year old in, my seven year old, my you know, whatever they'd be at that time.

Yeah, sounds good.

And finally a fear I guess, I suppose it is is let's say we bring her out and she's doing fine or it's going well but after a while she's like no, I'm missing whatever aspects of school.

I want to go back to school.

That is something that is a bit of a fear for me is that something that has happened to you are.

Is your experience.

I know you've never been to school, but.

No.

Well to be fair they did kind of very part time briefly in a very non committal way went to a Montessori school.

So I guess kind of they did have that.

Yes, it has happened to me and yes it does happen to people.

Firstly, I would say that you just put a.

Just put her back in if she wants to go back in and then take it back out if she wants.

To come back out again.

I mean it's.

I know it's a bit yo yo but you can do that as much as you like.

And I will say that when it comes to, you know, we're talking about D reg at the very start, it is scary but it's not like a one way street.

It's not commitment for life.

You can just put it back in if you want to, you know, you can just do that.

I know it's a logistically a bit of a pain and you might not get the same school or whatever but realistically you can just put her back in anytime you want to assuming that you know, the places are available or I don't know, whatever.

So yes, you can just put her back in.

Yes, it does happen.

If you have listened to the podcast the Journey through Home Education with Ash and Ismail.

They Ash took Ismail out I think a year, two years ago and then a year ago, the last podcast I did with her, he wanted to go back into school.

He was just about to restart school.

The most recent episode was catching up on what.

What's been going on.

And then he wanted to come out of school again.

And so this happens, right?

Children do sometimes think, oh, I'm missing out.

And then they get back to school and they think, oh, my God, crap.

I'm not missing out.

This is awful.

And actually, I had a. I had an experience with my daughter, so.

My daughter's 17, never really been to school.

She said she wanted to try school this September.

I was like, okay, yeah, sure.

Like, let's go for that.

She lasted, what, what, three, three and a half weeks?

And then she stopped last week.

And, you know, and that was that.

And she's fine.

She was just like, yeah, no, I didn't really like that.

I was a bit crap.

And now she's not doing it anymore.

Now she's home educating again, and it's okay.

It's okay.

Whatever the child wants and needs, assuming that it's not just super whimsical, you know, they don't wake up every other day thinking something else, then try to go with that.

It is possible that she will miss friendships, that she will feel a bit left out.

I know that Ash talked a little bit about Ismail kind of feeling like, almost like.

Kind of like what he was doing wasn't kind of normal.

And he almost wanted to feel part of, like, the normality of the school experience.

Like I say, spoiler alert, didn't last for very long, and it is really difficult.

And children can sometimes struggle to project into a reality of something else.

And then they get into that reality and they're like, oh, okay, I actually don't like this.

And then you take them out again and that's okay.

It's okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's just getting into that.

That feeling that, you know, she could.

She could go back if she wants to.

It's not the end of the world.

Yeah.

I guess you.

There's a.

There would be a bit of you that's thinking, oh, you know, I've.

I've failed if she's.

If she wants to.

To go back.

But really, whatever makes her happy is.

Is my goal.

And I think it's hard because at her age, you know, she's.

I don't want to entirely make the decision for her, but equally, I don't want to put it entirely on her shoulders, if you know what I mean.

It's a lot of responsibility for her to say, well, you know, this is.

You don't really know what home Ed is.

We haven't experienced it yet, but you want to leave everything you've known and take that option?

Because I think that's too much responsibility for.

For them.

But equally, I don't want to make a blanket choice for her, so I'm trying to involve her, but not totally give her the reins.

Time will tell.

We'll see.

I'll have to update you.

Yeah.

Like you say, she doesn't really know what she's choosing because she's not done it.

So realistically, just give it a try.

Give it a try.

Give yourself a set period of time and be like, okay, we're gonna try, like, I don't know, two terms or something.

And give yourself.

I always say this with my clients.

Give yourself criteria by which you'll know if it's working.

You know, like, how will you know if home education is working?

Is she crying in the morning because she misses school and misses her friends?

Well, that's probably an indication that it isn't.

Is she really.

Has her behavior really deteriorated and she's really angry or really resentful or frustrated or withdrawn or any of these things that you notice when the school experience wasn't working?

Well, if any of those, then maybe home education isn't working, or maybe something needs to change.

So just be reasonably clear about what you're looking for here.

Like, what is it you're wanting to feel would be a sign that it's working and that it's better than the school experience was last year?

That's reassuring.

Thank you.

Would you like to go through any of your other questions and ask me anything that's left over?

Feel free to do that if you'd like to.

I think that is the vast majority.

What would your husband ask if he was here asking me questions?

What's his worry about home, Ed?

Well, I asked him last night.

I said, you know, I'll write these lists of questions.

What.

What would you like to know?

And he said he didn't.

Kind of.

I think he said, I don't want to really put it all on your shoulders, but equally, if you just give me something that I need to teach her, then I'll teach it to her, or I'll give her that opportunity to learn, whatever it be.

But I think he is the same as me in that we've both, you know, both been all the way through school, college, uni, and we're really set on that path.

I suppose that that's how you learn.

And there's some kind of worksheets or whatever.

To, to prove what you've done.

And so I think it will be a learning curve for both of us, particularly to get out of that mindset, I suppose, and to just see learning that it comes from.

From so many other experiences rather than just specific sheets.

But I think if we can do some basics of maths and English every day, it'll help us feel like we've covered everything.

But then you can have hours of play on top of that.

And so hopefully we'll both feel like we're.

We're getting there.

But Russ is quite keen to be involved, more than I thought he would, actually.

I thought it was going to be down to me, the education side of it.

But he's keen to.

To give it a go.

But he says his main worry is her just not wanting to do it, you know, like how you don't.

We don't want to force her.

You don't want to make her do a Lassie or a.

Whatever it may be.

But equally, you know, you don't want to be too firm.

But she's gotta, she's gotta do something.

So, I mean, she will be doing lots of things.

Yes.

It's just because you've not experienced it.

All we've got to base it on at the moment is that, you know, she's got home, which doesn't want to do it.

She does eventually do it, but, you know, it's a struggle, it's a.

It's a fight.

It takes several nights to get it to be done.

And we think, oh, this, this is going to be hard work.

If, if this is how it's going to be every day.

Yeah, we think, like, her attention span is really, really short.

If it's not easy and she instantly has the answer, she doesn't, she doesn't want to do it.

Well, in actual fact, her attention span is not really, really short.

Right.

Because when she's playing Lego and stuff, she has a really long attention span.

Like everybody in the world, if she finds something boring, she really struggles to pay attention to it.

We are the same as adults.

Like, I downloaded this course and I thought it was going to be really interesting.

And then I started.

It was really boring and I was like, I'm not doing that.

I'm going to do another more fun course because I was able to make that decision.

And the last thing you want to do is push up against resistance, you know, is.

Is to start replicating that sense of frustration and resistance that she had at school.

If you're putting something in front of her like maths or English or whatever, and she's resistant to doing it.

That's information for you, not an issue with her.

So that means you need to think about a different route into that.

If you put, like, a Carol Vorderman workbook down in front of her with all his little colors and pictures and cartoon figures, and she doesn't want to do it because she's not an idiot.

She sees that actually, this is maths that you're getting me to do here.

Right?

It's just maths with pictures then.

Okay.

That's not how she learns her maths.

Buy a pizza, chop up a pizza, do some fractions, do some, you know, start.

Start, like, manipulating some.

Some figures around and start looking at multiplications and patterns of numbers.

There's all sorts of ways into learning maths.

I actually did a really nice podcast about making learning fun or something.

I can't remember.

But anyway, there are numerous podcasts about, you know, like, how to make learning engaging.

And I think if.

If you're encountering resistance, that's an issue with you and how you're approaching that particular topic.

And I would take that as information and back off and be like, okay, that's not working.

I've done.

I've done something wrong here, and then come at it from a different angle the next day.

That doesn't mean that home education isn't working or that Lucy is.

Got a problem with her attention span.

That's just something in how you're doing it.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

In my experience of.

Of dads, when it comes to home educating, the main thing they tend to be concerned about is the amount they'll be learning and whether they're going to be held back in the future.

Academically, it's a big generalization, but that seems to be the thing that dads in particular tend to get concerned about.

And all I would say when it comes to that is that realistically, your child could learn nothing in a formalized way from now through to 13.

And at 13, you could sit them down with GCSE curriculum and they could learn that GCSE curriculum and get the GCSE.

Honestly, as somebody who has, like, been through the process, yes.

The only possible exception is maths, where realistically, you kind of need a baseline of maths before you go into GCSE maths, but you don't need to do formalized learning for any subjects before you actually try to get a qualification in it.

You really don't.

It's.

It's all that school does.

The reason they teach repeated lessons again and again from the age of, like, 3 to the age of, say, 14.

When they choose GCSEs is partly because they need to keep the child in the school so that the parents can go to work.

So partly it's kind of like warehousing, but partly as well, it's just to get the child used to concentrating, sitting, focusing, writing, reading.

Now, these are all skills that you can do.

Reading, Harry Potter, writing, shopping lists.

You don't have to do it based on algebra or the water cycle or whatever.

You.

You can build up those skills, those study skills in.

In all sorts of more fun ways that are engaging and you're still building that muscle.

It's like, if you want to.

If you want to build a muscle in your body, you can go to the gym and just do repeated weights, or you can do like an assault course in the park.

You're still building a muscle, but you're doing it in a really different way.

One is really fun and group, like, group activity, and the other is a very solo, kind of repetitive thing and you get to choose which works, works for you.

That's a really reassuring way to look at it that I had not thought.

So that's.

That's nice to hear.

GCSEs and things.

I know yours have gone through lots, lots of them, and you've spread them out.

I think my other half is thinking that she'd go to school for high school.

And I am secretly thinking that we won't be going into high school, but let's say that we do do that at home.

I've seen that varying elements of people say they're quite expensive.

Some people can say you can.

Some people that you can do it a bit later.

You can go at like, 14, is it to colleges and try and do it that way.

Do you have a rough idea of what, say, an average GCSE would cost in, say, English or maths?

Yeah, I have.

I have rough and exact information on them.

I wish I didn't have so much information on how much they cost.

So the thing is that school is really expensive.

I know school is free, but it's expensive, right?

There's uniforms and all this kind of stuff, right?

So school is not a free option.

Now, home education actually is a completely free option, so you can save your money for your GCSEs as you go.

And I'm not saying that from a point of entitlement or privilege.

I'm saying that in the money that you would save from not having to do the school trips or do the school uniforms or the pack lunches or whatever.

You actually can use that money to save towards GCSEs.

So that's one thing I would just say there, GCSes, you can also spread out.

So I.

We did two or three a year over from when my children were 13, and there's two sittings a year, so we did two sit, so that's six, six, 13, 14, 15, four years and two sittings.

So that's about eight, eight rounds of them.

Now, my daughter didn't do a GCSE.

She did seven.

Because you actually only really need seven.

Oxford and Cambridge only want seven.

You don't need.

I think Imperial want eight, but generally you don't need to do as many as my son did.

So you don't have to do that many either.

So bear that in mind.

You don't have to do loads.

But a cost of a GCSE is around about £250.

Sometimes it's a bit more, sometimes it's a bit less.

But if that.

If 250 to 300 is your kind of average ballpark figure, then you know what to expect.

That's for the GCSE.

So if you're doing English language, you might have two papers to sit and you pay your £250 and you get your both papers, both exams, and you get your certificate at the end of it, saying, here's your English language GCSE, so about £250, and you need to do it at a private exam centre, unless your local school will allow you to go to them, in which case you have to do the exams that they're doing generally.

Right, okay.

But what if it was a course like science that needed coursework and things like that involved in the gcse?

That's an excellent question.

That's a very good question based on your podcast knowledge.

So that is a very good question.

And I have done a podcast all about exams which will help with that.

Basically, science exams, you do what are called IGCSEs, which are international GCSEs, because they don't have coursework or practicals as part of them.

International GCSEs?

Exactly.

Equate across to GCSEs, they're exactly the same.

It's just that international GCSEs are done normally by private schools in the UK or international schools abroad, where it's much harder for them to have the practicals assessed by Cambridge assessors or whoever's Edexcel assessors or whatever.

So you would Just do.

For some subjects, you would do IGCSEs and then you can choose if you do GCSE or igcse.

For the others, for example, maths, you can do GCSE or igcse.

Most home educators do edexcel.

Igcse, I think it is.

And for science, you would definitely want to do igcse because there's no practicals for English language.

Most home educators do IGCSE for English language because there isn't a spoken component.

But you can do GCSE if you really want to, but you'd have to find an exam centre that did the spoken component.

So there's all sorts of ways around it.

There are some GCSEs that are really, really, really hard to do as a home educator.

And basically you can' them.

And they are things like PE is hard, Art is quite hard.

Things like dance, drama, they're quite hard to do as GCSEs.

They're not completely impossible, but they're really, really very difficult to do.

But we.

We have so many more options.

My children did environmental management, statistics, Classical Civilization, astronomy, economics.

All of these are not standard GCSES in most schools, and yet we could choose them.

My daughter did travel and tourism business studies.

There are a lot of really fun GCSes, actually, that you don't hear about because the schools don't offer them.

All right.

No, I didn't.

I thought they were later on those kind of courses.

No, no.

God giveth and God taketh away when it comes to home education.

So you can't do pe, but you can do Classical Civilization.

There it is.

Right.

Okay.

That's great to know.

Has that covered everything for you?

I think so.

How are you feeling now about the whole thing?

As I've said to my husband, there's a million and one reasons why it would be much easier to just leave things as they are.

But this is the thing that every day I wake up and think, I can't wait to do it.

I cannot wait to go on this learning journey with it.

I think I'm quite excited, if anything, to do it.

I'm scared as well, in equal measures.

But I am excited to see the freedom that she will have to be able to take all of them out on day trips when it's quiet and it's not too overwhelming for everybody.

And to have the freedom and the time to be with her and to not feel like, you know, she's bonding with her peers and losing the bond with us, which I think I'm finding the Old.

The older she gets.

I think it's.

It's going to be great.

I hope.

I'm sure it will be.

And, you know, you said at the start about how you felt like you were kind of losing her and that you could see that light going.

I hear that so often.

I hear that so often.

That's probably the primary reason I hear people pulling their children out is they feel like they're losing them somehow, like they're not themselves anymore and they're.

They're losing that kind of light in their eyes.

And I think that if you do nothing more than get that back.

Success.

Yeah, exactly.

Because I understand that some people listening or, you know, family and friends might think, oh, she's just, you know, she's one of those needy mums and she wants her kids to be, you know, under the wings forever and never grow up.

But it isn't that I'm happy to see her to grow and to become her independent, but I. I want it to be that she's happy to do it and she's growing at the rate that she wants to.

You know, she wants to play with her dolls and things at the moment, whereas all of her friends at school, the girls have got their own mobiles and they think that toys are silly and they don't get toys for presents anymore.

And I think that's tragic.

You know, I see her, you know, I get pictures when I'm at work, my husband's.

They're all playing in the sand pit together and, you know, they're eight, four on one.

But there's so much, much play and joy that.

And I think this is just my perception, but I think school speeds that up way too fast and they.

They just lose the play and the childhood elements far too quick.

And they're worried about, oh, I look fat in the skirt, or I'm, you know, how do I have my hair to match the other girls and just crap that I just don't want her to get into yet.

I know I can't stop it forever, and I'm not trying to control it, but just to slow it down a little bit.

Well, also, you can.

You can press pause on that until she knows who she is herself and then she can make a decision about that.

When my daughter was in school recently, there were a lot of girls younger than her who she.

She would come back and she would say, oh, you know, they, like, wear so much makeup.

Like they, you know, like really, like false.

False eyelashes and stuff.

And there she was, sitting in the physics class.

Like hand shooting up to answer every question.

And it's.

And there's not to say one is better than the other, but she was still so engaged with her learning that she was enthused by learning the other girls were pretty much turned off and they were thinking more about how they look and how they fitted in and things like that.

And it is like you say, there's a whole lifetime of worrying about that stuff and it's a shame for children to have to worry about it early on.

Whereas because my daughter went to school later, she knew that that wasn't who she was.

So she didn't feel that need to.

You have to conform to that kind of big society pressure.

And so you're allowing your daughter to have that time to be who she wants to be and then she can join the social groups and be herself proudly.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I mean, I don't want to be one of those mums who's like really judge you.

But you see so many girls who are just high school age and you know they've got super tiny skirts, which I know we all rolled our skirts but like, like super tiny and the full makeup, the full hair and you think you didn't wake up like that.

You know, you, you have spent a lot of time to.

And they look beautiful, don't get me wrong.

But really I don't want that to be the life she has, that she has to get that dolled up, that, that picture perfect just to go to school.

I want her to just be herself.

And I think that there is that so much pressure that they, they feel.

If I can reduce that a little bit for us, then I will.

And really that's all we want for.

Our children, isn't it?

For them to be happy and for, for us to feel that we're giving them as much opportunity as we can whilst protecting their well being while we need to until they can do it for themselves.

Well, okay, Nicola, I feel like I've answered all your questions.

I hope so.

If there's any that come up afterwards, stick them in one of the comments because I've come on answer them and then everyone else can see the question too.

But if anyone listen, listening has, I don't know, answers or questions or anything like that, answers for Nicola, questions for me, just stick them in the comments and I will find you wherever you post them, hopefully and I will answer them.

So do feel free to interact with the podcast in that way.

We also have a Facebook group called Home Education Matters where you can come in and you can speak to any of the previous guests and you can speak to me.

And it's a really nice little Facebook group, very small, very friendly.

And yeah, everyone is welcome to join there as well, whether you're home educating yet or not or not yet.

Taking the plunge, that is.

That is fine.

Nicola, thank you so much for today.

I hope it is reassuring and I look forward to hearing all about your journey as it goes through.

Can I just say a huge thank you, not just for today, for listening to me yammer on an hour and a bit, but for the many, many hours of reassurance that you have given through this podcast that is absolutely fantastic resource for so many people like me that are thinking of jumping ship.

And I, I know it's not going to be making you your millions, so.

Doesn't make me.

Doesn't make me pennies, Nicola, because it's.

Not giving you the financial gain.

I really want to know that.

It is massively helping people like me and I hope that you understand how much I appreciate all the time and effort you put in.

So thank you.

I am blushing.

Thank you very much.

It's really nice to hear that because I put these episodes out and I just kind of drop them into the ether and I never really know.

I see all the figures and I'm like, wow, there's like thousands of people listening.

How weird.

But I never really get that much feedback, so it's really nice to hear that because sometimes you're not really sure.

I mean, all these people are listening, but are they liking it or are they just listening?

I don't know.

I assure you they are liking it.

And you know, from.

For me, when there's so many people online that you can follow from all over the world, you don't know who to trust.

But I've listened to lots of different people and you're the one who decided to trust because I think to me you seem so knowledgeable and, and yeah, you might not be an expert in the sense that people might say, well, why should you give me an opinion?

But your experience, you have lived it and that is far more important to me than anybody with a qualification in this.

Just the fact that you've lived it and done so well with your children is fantastic for me.

So thank you.

Thank you, Nicola, that's very sweet.

I can't take hardly any credit for my children, though, because they're just.

They're just like wonders in their own right.

But thank you so much.

It was really lovely having you on and do keep me posted on how you're doing and maybe we can have you back on in, like, six months and see how you're getting on.

That would be fun.

Lovely.

I'd love that.

Thank you.

All right.

Lovely to meet you.

Thank you so much for joining us for today's Home Education Matters podcast.

See you at the next one.

Have a lovely day.