| Home education resources for parent-teachers
Did you know you don't have to send your children to school? Under British law, you’re simply required to ensure your child receives the education prescribed under the Education Acts
Interactive teachers The group took its name from the Education Act, which states that parents are responsible for providing education for their children ‘either by regular attendance at school or otherwise’. This website gives current and prospective parent-teachers a wealth of practical information and a series of links to related sites. The home education site offers a variation of useful links, too. If you want to compare and contrast with the United States, which has a thriving home education community, search for ‘home schooling’. The Home Education Advisory Service in another valuable resource. It features a list of publications that offer advice on educating children at home. You can also get an extremely helpful information pack from the Advisory Centre for Education. It's well worth looking at the online magazine dedicated to this subject, Choice in Education. It has a wide range of articles and publishes letters from parents about the benefits of home education. Choice also organises an annual ‘HesFes’ (Home Education Festival) – a great excuse for a week away in Dorset for home-educated children and their parents. As useful as all these websites may be, there’s nothing like learning from the experiences of parent-teachers who’ve educated their children at home. Luckily, many families who use home education have their own websites.Go to Sophie and Max for an absorbing diary of highlights and pitfalls of home educating. What you discover when you click through these personal pages is that there is no right or wrong way to educate your children at home. Most of the families allow a child-centred method of learning, which means the children dictate the pace and level of what they learn. This can be liberating for the children and democratic for the parents. Critics tend to point at home-educated children and say they lack socialisation. But the criticism is misguided. Generally, home-educated children get a much broader degree of social experience than their classroom-based peers. Evidence shows they interact with a wider range of children and adults, and have a greater gift for being imaginative. They do tend to be less ‘conforming’ according to the social rules of a school, but by the time most home-educated children reach school, usually at A-level stage, they have already conformed to the wider norms of society. |