Monster & Teeny

Monster and Teeny have never been to school or nursery. We’ve never hidden our Home Ed status when directly asked but we’re not ‘known’ either. When the forms came for school places I chucked them in the recycling. A reminder came for Monster, cautioning that if we didn’t return them we might not get a place in our favoured school. As we didn’t want a place in any school I recycled that too. If at any point we’d been asked to clarify exactly what we were doing with regard to the children’s education then we’d have replied that we were making private arrangements, but noone ever asked so we never told.

I remember myself asking incredulously about testing, checking, someone making sure we were doing it properly when we first started researching Home Ed, which just goes to show how indoctrinated I had been in the ‘nanny knows best’ mentality of the UK. It seemed amazing that we were allowed to do this and didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Whilst I am now a very long, very enlightened way from that thinking (I’m choosing to blame it on having a newborn and a toddler at the time ) I have always thought it would be naive to imagine we will retain such freedom all the way to Teeny reaching 18 and the end of formal education age. I never gave much thought to how things might change however and enjoyed the freedom of allowing Monster and Teeny to discover  how Home Education would best suit them and through a journey of discovery, constant reevaluation, conversation and experimentation we are achieving just that.

In our opinion.

Which is where it begins to get scary really. Because up to this point it has only been our opinion that counted. For me, it still is and that is precisely as it should be. But thanks to Ed Balls’ Home Education review and Graham Badman’s report and recommendations our opinion is looking likely to count for less and less.

I firmly believe that all of life is experimental. I believe parenting is incredibly experimental and the many, many manuals, approaches and pieces of advice available on the subject back this up really. There is no set way to rear a child because children are people and people are individuals. There is nature and nurture at play, a whole load of demographic variables, different experiences, fate, accident, health, wealth, intellect and much, much more which makes up the sum total of who we are at the end of our childhood, let alone at the end of our lives. As such education should be the same, a voyage of discovery, predominantly self-directed, never ending, constantly tangenting and evolving depending on all those external influences I just mentioned.

This works for us. Monster and Teeny are stimulated, interested, engaged, curious, busy, motivated, open to any and all new experience, full of questions and the ability to find answers to them. For them, for us and for pretty much everyone who comes across us our Home Ed is deemed to be a success. Very subjective I know, but then isn’t everything in life? Subjective and relative - wealth, health, happiness, intellect, appearance, education. Is that not what makes humans so very fascinating and interesting? Our diversity and differences? Our varied perspective and opinions? Our diverse experiences and dreams?

Fingers crossed the Select Committee will debunk the Badman report and see all that is wrong with it. Fingers crossed the sterling work of so many of the Home Educators I am proud to be one of will enlighten the government and maybe the public at large that we’re doing fine and don’t need to have any of the ridiculous and downright terrifying restrictions and regulations enforced on us. May the picnics, the mass lobby, the letters and visits to our MPs, the press coverage, the bloggers, the fab work of HEYC and all of the other amazing positives that have come about as a result of this will do their job and we’ll be left alone to continue doing what we do, answering to ourselves and making it work for us, in our opinion.

If not I guess we just fight and deal with one point at a time. In theory there is no need to register, they can simply merge their databases and by elimination put us on a register as Home Educators. If not, if we need to queue up somewhere to add our names what will happen if we don’t? Will we be prosecuted? Will our children be taken away into care? Will they be forced into schools? How will this be managed? If they can’t create the register without us registering how will they find us anyway? What punishment will be levied for not complying and how will they find all those additional school places anyway?

If they want to visit us in our homes will they need search warrants? On what legal basis will they have right of entry? What if we’re not home? How will they find enough staff and get them properly trained to come and visit us all anyway? A quick google shows there are about 20,000 schools in the UK (private and state) which even at conservative estimates of HE families means there are more homes in which children are educated than schools in this country - that’s a hell of a lot of homes to get round.

If we submit an annual plan to be held accountable to who will read it? How will they measure us against it? We cannot and will not forward plan our lives in that way. I will detail what we’ve learnt this past year and state that we plan more of the same for the coming year. That will surely suffice given the richness and breadth and balance of a year in our lives and all the opportunities it offers. 

As an optimist I have to believe that this madness will be halted before it goes further. I have to believe that no matter how crazy or unreasonable the hoops we asked to jump through become there will be a way through them while retaining what is important to us. We are resouceful, creative people with imagination and passion for what we believe in, we will find the way to navigate a new path through, even if the landscape becomes steeper, harder and stonier.

My favourite season is always the one we’re just about to go into and the changing of the seasons is a perpetual source of wonder and inspiration for me. I love the newness of spring - the buds of flowers, the hatching eggs of birds, the lambs, the bluebells. I love the long evenings of summer, the camping, the ourdoorsyness of the season, I love the colours of autumn, the smell of bonfires in the air and that crunchy sound of leaves under your feet. In winter I adore the cold brightness of it, the excitement of Christmas and the dark evenings snuggled up round the fire. I love the puddle splashing opportunities of rain, the warmth on your back of sunshine. The climate in the UK and the very definite feelings of the four seasons is one of my favourite things about living in this country.

But today, today was for me what our lifestyle choices are all about. Yes it was September, late September at that but the sun shone bright enough to give me slight sunburn and instead of being at school or work we spent the morning on the beach. We were with friends and while I drank tea and put the world to rights with some of my favourite people in the world Monster and Teeny frolicked in the sea, built experimental sea defences and made up games with some of their favourite people in the world. It was blissful, idyllic and made us all wonder quite why anyone would choose to be doing anything else really.

So not back to school, but loving every minute of our own version of the start of a new term.

But if I disregard my fickle loving everything for it’s own sake-ness I would probably have to nominate September for my favourite month. It’s the month I married in, the month I became a mother in so there are always celebrations. As a child I liked the start of the new school year, the new stationery, shiny new shoes, as a Home Educator I like everyone else going back to school and freeing up the musuems, the parks, the beaches for us lucky few who have no better place to be on a Monday morning.

Our weeks do have a certain amount of term time structure to them - evening activities four out of five weekdays for Monster or Teeny or both which we always enjoy the summer holiday break from and always enjoy the September return to. Most years we have a family holiday in September and this year was no exception; we rounded off what has been a fab summers camping with a last week in our favourite campsite and were joined by some of our very best friends too.

We had a local Not Back to School Picnic in line with other Home Educators around the country. We loved being part of this event, for me it cemented all that is great about what we do - locally it involved children of all ages playing together in the park, having fun, while the adults sat and chatted. We are from all sorts of parenting / religious philosophies, various socio-economic groups from the family who are paying for private tuition to ensure their children get the very best education money can buy to the traveller who lives in a truck and HEs her small daughter, the very school-at-home to the totally free range and autonomous. This was replicated up and down the country with people coming together to celebrate our right to Home Educate, defend it against the threats facing these freedoms and prove, yet again, that we are not hidden, unsocialised people who have stepped outside of society.

I’ve been reading back over some of my previous posts on here recently. Around this time last year I did a ’school report’ style round up of what Monster and Teeny had been up to and I have previously talked a fair bit about what we do and how we do it so if you are a new visitor here then please do have a dig through the archives. I have good intentions to fix something in the sidebar to make it easier to find the posts on certain topics but I have quite a long list with the title ‘good intentions’ so it may not happen any time soon!

So, How and Why then? I think I’ll go with ‘why’ first.

I’ve written a bit about how we found out about Home Education here. I think our approach to life has always been try something, see if it works and if it doesn’t try something else. I’ve never wanted to make a choice I can’t later change and I’d always rather regret doing something than regret not doing it. Starting our Home Ed journey was in reaction to knowing pre-school would be the wrong choice for Monster when he was 3, continuing it has been a series of choices at various stages about it remaining the right path for both Monster and Teeny, aswell as my husband and I. I’ve written a bit about choices here so I won’t rehash that either.

I began with fairly clear ideas about how I would Home Educate, but over the last 6 years I’ve come to realise that actually I don’t really Home Educate at all, I’m simply one of the members of a Home Educating family and there is a difference. Our initial why has long since been lost in the passage of time and now our why is far more about this post, along with this one.

Before I ever had children I was always insistent that I would celebrate them as individuals, love them for who they were not who I wanted them to be, help them find out what made them happy. Home Education seems the logical extension of that for us, which leads me rather nicely to How?

Again, I’ve already written essays on this before so I’ll direct you first to learning, learning everywhere which I wrote 18 months ago but is still a fair representation of how our days pan out. Go and teach yourselves is a pretty good account of how a day could go around here and in terms of planning ahead and where my role is in all of this (before you start assuming I simply drink tea, chat to friends or spend all my time on the internet ) is there in Hopes and Dreams which I wrote at the beginning of this year and is as close to orgo-planning as you’ll ever find me being. Unfortunately none of it requires me buying stationery - I feel this could be my greatest failing as a Home Educator .