We started home educating out of necessity: here’s why we now do it by choice (and what we learned in the process) says Sarah Whiteside
When we started our home education journey the hardest thing was maths – my worst subject. I had no affinity with it, no confidence about what my five year old son needed to learn, or in what order. To help me teach him, I’d signed us up to an app that offered gamified lessons, voiced by cartoon characters, designed to make it all seem fun.
It was still hard to persuade him. I tried everything. Maths was vital, I told him, not optional.
He was the kind of kid who would make electrical circuits for fun. He was always building something, always asking why. For all I knew, he might want to go into robotics. Or surgery. Or rocket science. He would need some maths for that.
If he had still been at school, there would be structure: a curriculum, tests. It’s not that I believed in those things exactly, but I had no model for what learning might look like without them. I felt the weight of responsibility. I needed help. I needed those jolly-voiced lessons.
No going back
We started home educating in a state of emergency and without a plan. My son, who we now know is autistic, had proved himself unable to function in a mainstream classroom. Every day the teacher’s report got worse. Though school did what they could – offering fidget toys and a quiet corner, time out in the deputy head’s office and, later, a reduced timetable – the day came that I went to collect him and he was so wild-eyed and distressed that at first he didn’t recognise me. That was when I knew: I couldn’t take him back there.
We are not alone in this. Though some families choose home education from the start, many have a similar story to ours, coming to it out of necessity after a school placement breaks down. This can happen for a variety of reasons but, in my experience, neurodivergence is a common one.
Coined by sociologist Judy Singer, the term neurodivergence covers autism and ADHD, as well as those with dyslexia, dyscalculia and certain chronic mental health conditions such as bipolar disorder and OCD. It’s a term that recognises the diversity of human experience and articulates the need to create systems that work for all. Current estimates suggest that 1 in 7 people are neurodivergent in some form. Although, these days, it is largely seen as a difference rather than a disability, predicting gifts as much as challenges, many schools have not caught up. Designed to teach a standardised curriculum to large groups of children, they are often a poor fit for neurodivergent minds.
No other model
For parents like us, who never intended to home educate, it’s no surprise the starting point is often to replicate school. Most of us have no other model of what education might look like. But, if school has not worked, it’s also no surprise that this approach is flawed.
