Practical Strategies for Home Schooling

Home schooling looks very different from one home to the next.  Unfortunately, there's no set template to work from because how a child learns is highly individual to them, and in many home-schooling scenarios, the driver is that the broad formula of a mainstream education isn't suitable for them. 

What home schooling does offer is flexibility, allowing you to adapt learning to support progress and confidence, rather than squeezing your child into a school's routine.  But it is not necessarily a straightforward or easy path to tread. 

Home schooling doesn't mean that parents have to take on the whole responsibility of educating their child alone, there are a plethora of resources out there to support home schooling, and home schooling can take many forms including: -

However, whatever the home-schooling model or reason, there are some things that can make it run more smoothly and ideally more effectively. 

Sherpa Tutors, one of the UK's leading online tutoring platforms, has pulled together the following tips for home schooling.

Whatever Level You're Working to Try to Build an Achievable Routine

Knowing when learning will happen reduces uncertainty and makes it easier for children to get started. This doesn't mean following a full school timetable, a child who can manage 10 or 20 minutes of focused learning can make more progress in that timeframe, than sitting for an hour losing interest and feeling overwhelmed. Consider at what time of day your child is most able to engage in learning because sometimes mid-morning or afternoon might be a better time to start than early, particularly in the teenage years. 

The beauty of home schooling is that learning doesn't have to happen at a desk.  You can step outside of the textbook entirely. A walk in the woods can teach more about trees, lifecycles and chlorophyll than any diagram.

For younger children, everyday activities are often a good starting point, for example, weighing ingredients, using measuring jugs for volume, cupboard doors to explain angles, or water heated in a saucepan to illustrate states of matter.

As children get older, you can evolve into hands-on science. Simple experiments work well at home such as growing crystals from salt or sugar solutions, building a small volcano with bicarbonate of soda and vinegar, extracting DNA from a strawberry, or slicing a potato into salt water to demonstrate osmosis. None need a lab, just curiosity, a bit of a plan and mess tolerance!

Podcasts, museum visits and documentaries are a brilliant way to supplement learning, since they often introduce real life and wider examples than can be found in textbooks.  And the beauty of podcasts is that they can be on in the background in the kitchen or on car journeys to promote subliminal learning.   

The Tricky Boundary to Tread Between Being Both Parent and Teacher

Probably the biggest challenge of home schooling is that parents are still parents.

Part of growing up is questioning authority, and the form a child might take to challenge a parent is very different to the way they would challenge a teacher at school.  At home, things can quickly become so much more personal and highly charged, while a teacher maintains a professional distance, and introduces learnt strategies to handle delicate situations.  Furthermore, there isn't the end of lesson bell at home that enables you to quickly change back to parent child relationship. 

Knowing the balance is incredibly difficult, you want your child to do well but at times pushing too hard can trigger a 'melt down'. However, stepping back too far can cause anxiety over whether enough has been achieved.  This becomes especially hard when a child has anxiety, SEND or fluctuating capacity. So even if you have a plan of what you intend to achieve in a lesson, always have a realistic and enjoyable back up plan to diffuse difficult situations. 

Sometimes you need to take the small wins, applaud yourself for completing one task, or for adeptly introducing a break and managing to return to the topic later in the day, because both are very real achievements. 

You Don't Need to Go it Alone

Home schooling can be exceptionally tough, however, fortunately you are not alone and there are lots of local home-schooling groups and online support communities to offer practical advice and reassurance from parents facing exactly the same problems.  So while there might not be an immediate solution, sharing a problem, asking for help can make it considerably less isolating. 

If You're Working Towards GCSEs and A-Levels There is Considerable Planning and Paperwork to Do!

For families working towards GCSEs, A-Levels or other formal examinations, there is an important administrative side to home schooling.

In school or college, the school or college chooses the exam board, pays for the exams, and provides the timetable and place to sit the exams.  If a student is home schooled this responsibility falls to the parent or guardian. 

Choose Your Exam Boards Wisely

One plus of home schooling is that you can choose your exam boards and cherry pick the curriculum.  It's worthwhile putting in the time to carefully research exam boards and their syllabuses, the most common chosen exam boards being AQA, Edexcel, OCR and Eduqas.  You can choose a different exam board for each subject, so for example in history each exam board will offer different periods, so play to your strengths. Or if you're studying English Literature, each exam board features different set texts.  There is a large amount of research needed and sometimes speaking to a teacher or examiner can help in this respect because they know the curriculums, examination expectations and marking schemes inside out. Forty-six per cent of Sherpa tutors are qualified teachers, and 16% are qualified examiners, so they are uniquely qualified to advise on examination board content, marking schemes and evaluate which exam board might best suit your child.

Try to Choose Exam Centres Near You

Home-educated students can't always sit exams at their local school, you need to find exam centres that accepts external candidates for your chosen exam boards. Availability varies considerably by area so research this well ahead of exams, because if there is no examination centre near you, you could end up having to travel far afield for a 9am exam, which can cause havoc for the stress levels of both the student and parent.

Exams Cost Money

While schools pay exam entry fees, if you're home educating you are responsible for entering your child and paying the exam entry fees.  These costs mount up quickly and need to be factored into your home-schooling budget. 

For many families, the traditional GCSE route isn't the right fit, and Functional Skills, vocational qualifications or blended approaches may be worth exploring instead.  There are a plethora of online resources to research these pathways.

At A-Level, the type of support needed often changes radically. Older students can often work far more independently which is a valuable skill to learn, however, the depth of knowledge needed to teach a subject at A-Level steps up considerably.  It's worthwhile transferring independence to them gradually, putting them in control of their own deadlines, time management and planning revision.

Being both parent and teacher isn't an easy balance, and you don't have to manage it alone.

Sometimes a student needs specialist support in a particular subject. Sometimes the challenge is confidence or motivation. And sometimes the parent-child relationship has become so tied up with learning that bringing in another person gives everyone breathing space. Tutoring can provide a very effective option, to helicopter in highly specialist support where needed, either in the run up to exams, or where specialist SEND tuition can provide the right level of support and much needed respite. 

There's no perfect way to home school, and while it offers many advantages, it's certainly not the easy option and sometimes progress is simply the ability to pick things back up after a tough day!