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The most common profession of home educating parents is teachers.
Go figure!
You might think, as ex-teachers, we’d home educate by simply schooling at home.
You’d be right.
As we began, that was the obvious path for us.
Once we decided to home educate and stopped sending our older two to nursery, we had workbooks and worksheets coming out our ears. We bought ‘schooley’ resources and planned activity after activity.
Somewhat weirdly, attempting to mimic parts of the school experience at home left us feeling frustrated, disillusioned, and ultimately disappointed.
As we delved deeper into the realm of home education, we became increasingly drawn to the idea of self-directed learning and deviating even further from traditional methods through unschooling.
Perhaps you’re thinking of home educating your child and the rebel inside your head is curious about the greater freedom of unschooling. In this post, we’ll share our personal insights of both approaches and hopefully fill you with inspiration and confidence to consider these options for your family.
Curriculum and structure when schooling at home
Typically, home-schooling is a more flexible version of school, just at home. A parent or tutor leads learning about specific topics, often following the national, or another, curriculum.
Curricula can seem unquestionable; like Minerva, the goddess of education, benevolently bestowed the perfect template of knowledge upon us.
Sure, someone’s clearly put a lot of thought into things like the UK’s National Curriculum. But the questions we constantly come back to are:
- Do we need a nation or a world full of people with the same narrow breadth of knowledge?
- What agenda does this “someone” have when determining what our children learn?
No doubt think tanks that come up with these learning structures see merit in what they choose to prescribe. The apparent aim of giving children access to the same level of learning no matter where they are is admirable too. They can be a useful starting point.
There is flexibility built into the National Curriculum too, but no matter where it’s delivered, it tends to follow a linear path split into tidy subjects for specific ages/levels.
School and most curricula often prioritise remembering facts or specific processes rather than original thinking. When 65% of our kids will end up with careers that don’t even exist yet and will have to educate themselves in the future to some extent, it doesn’t seem fit for purpose.
There is research to suggest the best learning is messy, where connections are made across different subjects and contexts.
Home educators can dip in and out of any curriculum they choose and supplement as they see fit – and there are many different learning frameworks out there to choose from. Some are project based, which increases the opportunity for “messy’ learning.
It’s worth noting some of the benefits to following a set program of lessons:
- There’s fewer things to consider as a teacher/parent
- It may reduce decision fatigue on what to cover and gives confidence that children won’t miss anything fundamental
- Weeks can be structured around the lessons
- Children might also really like it!
We started out doing some form of home-schooling. With the little workbooks we bought, we tried to sit the kids down for learning time and spent ages looking for resources and organising activities. In this instance, a simple framework might have been useful. However…
Structure isn’t necessarily necessary for learning at home
Perhaps it’s because our kids have never been to school, but structured learning ultimately didn’t wash with them. The workbooks come out on occasion but only if they choose. They generally they prefer to do their own thing.
When we began schooling at home our planned outcome was the goal, but it didn’t seem to serve the kids and often left us feeling frustrated.
We became more aware of their ability to find their own focus, inspiration and value in the world around them.
Morphing in to facilitators, rather than teachers removed sooo much resistance. It reminded us of working with older teenage students at school who’d chosen to follow specific further studies rather than being force fed ‘useful’ knowledge.
Our approach evolved into unschooling.
Unschooling is child-led, self-directed learning. Children do what they are interested in and work with the adults in their lives to determine what that learning might look like. Often, and especially at a younger age, it looks like play.
We’re taught from our time at school that sitting at a desk and being taught at is the only way to learn. It’s natural to think that it should be the same when schooling at home.
It’s simply not true.
It’s utter bollocks!
Talk to any child that is obsessed with dinosaurs or football or fashion… nobody drilled those endless facts into their heads. It all came from their own intrinsic desire to learn. Engage in conversation and you’ll find they’ve picked up elements of history, geography, science, maths, english and a whole lot more.
Unschooling is fluid and one thing often leads to another.
One minute you’re watching a show about superheroes and the next minute you’re figuring out if it’s plausible for Wolverine to retract his adamantium claws into his forearms and still have a full range of movement in his wrist – thats physics, biology, engineering & more!
In our opinion, the greatest learning is messy and nonlinear.
Have anyone else’s kids discovered geometric sequences before learning how to do basic primary level numeracy like column addition?
Although it may appear to an outsider that progress is slow to materialize in unschooling, learning is actually happening continuously. Participating in self-directed learning is a marvelous experience that requires patience, trust, and a significant amount of deschooling ourselves.
Home education doesn’t have to be a bureaucratic nightmare
Planning and delivering bespoke content to your child takes a lot of effort. Even if you subscribe to a predetermined curriculum with lesson plans, you’ve still got to deliver those lessons and check your kids’ work.
When teaching works it feels really rewarding!
Whether it was because our children were so young or because they had never been to school before, or because we found the change in role from “parent” to “teacher” uncomfortable and strange, the whole process never yielded the results we wanted. Even at school, those days where everything clicked with the classes we taught, were few and far between.
Perhaps that was a reflection on the quality of our teaching? Ha!
Or maybe, it’s because a forced education isn’t the best way to get people to learn.
Learning doesn’t have to happen from activities set by parental/teaching overlords. We’ve seen that by surrounding the children with stimuli, especially things they’re interested in, information is absorbed and solid understanding of the world around them is continually formed.
Instead of spending a set amount of time on specific subjects or projects, sometimes unschooled children will hyper-focus on their interests and that one thing might occupy them for several days; often followed by several days of doing “nothing”. This nothing allows children to process the world and what they’ve discovered. A luxury that school and many families do not provide with endless activities and the constant need for productivity.
So despite there being no formal lesson planning and lots of freedom, we still make plans but based around our children’s requests. That could be sourcing materials, planning trips to explore an interest or simple logistics.
Unschooling parents still need to be available and engaged. They observe what their children are doing, what they are discovering and provide opportunities for taking things further. Parents need to be ready to jump on a learning rollercoaster with their children, help them to research stuff, help answer their questions, ask them genuine questions and play their games with them.
It’s not necessarily easy, but aren’t those things an important part of being a good parent anyway?
Prove progress in unschooling: Ditching the curriculum for flexible learning.
In the UK, home education is legal. It is the parents responsibility to provide a suitable full-time education for their child. Most parents blindly follow everyone else and send their kids to school never even knowing there is an alternative.
Regardless of which educational philosophy you follow, the law is something that has to be considered.
While the government deems school to be the best form of full-time education. In our experience as teachers, we’ve seen so much evidence that schools regularly don’t hit that benchmark.
Regardless, it’s easy to see how regular schooling at home could be easily justified as full-time education. In fact, it’s often superior to school in many, many ways with focused time and tailor-made learning.
What about unschooling?
This is trickier…
There are no requirements for a set curriculum in UK law and there are no requirements for a timetable. Thankfully, home education doesn’t even have to look like school.
In our house, learning doesn’t start at 8:50am and end at 3:30pm. There’s no set timetable. It’s not unusual for us to explore topics, answer complex questions or even conduct experiments as the day draws to a close. Sometimes they’ll chill and play Minecraft all day.
Local authorities usually ask for a yearly report detailing a child’s learning and their progress. So how do we evidence this?
With homeschooling, it’s generally straightforward and the report will often look similar to a school report, perhaps referencing levels of a curriculum although there is no obligation to do so.
There is continuous progress in unschooling because children are always developing. However, progression is not always in obvious ‘schooley’ activities. We might not even be able to see some of the learning that’s taking place – as learning happens in the head, not on paper. But that progress will surface when you least expect it.
With a schooled mindset it’s easy to feel shit scared that unschoolers won’t learn enough or gain the skills to get a job. It’s just not true. Skills are constantly being acquired. There are surveys of grown unschoolers that show the same.
Even when one of our children are exploring the world of Minecraft for most of the day – there are a million things they may learn and discover (creativity and design, science and engineering, history and culture and much more).
We like to gather evidence of the obvious learnings they do. Usually in the form of photos or videos, sometimes a few notes on a conversation we’ve had, what games they’ve been playing, or notes on our calendar to keep track of the museums and events we’ve been to.
With a little thought, it’s relatively straightforward to map their learning to traditional “subjects” that other people can understand. When you look back over everything they’ve done, without needing to be sat down and taught, it’s quite extraordinary!
Find your own flow.
Choosing the right approach for your family
Perhaps you’re yet to make the leap in to home education but If you think you need to make a choice right now about exactly how you will home educate, you don’t.
Remove that pressure.
This blog is hopefully just one of many things you’ll return to when exploring home education. Your thoughts and opinions may change over time and that’s ok. There is no right way.
If you think it’s fitting, get your kids involved in the discussion and begin by cherry-picking different educational approaches that appeal to you all, and then mix and match to find what works best for your family.
We had a gradual move into unschooling. It evolved as we researched and reflected on our own experience of school and self-directed learning. It was (and still is) an iterative process.
Three years into our decision to home educate we’re still deschooling ourselves and are not yet what some refer to as ‘radical unschoolers’.
That may happen but it might not.
Find your own flow
One thing we constantly do is question ourselves and what we’re doing. Sometimes that means backtracking. We talk to our kids and explain our thought processes. We want them to know it’s ok to change their mind and realise first choices aren’t necessarily the most appropriate.
One of the things that has helped us the most is reaching out to other home educating humans. In the UK there is a big home educating community on Facebook. Talking to them and meeting other families really helped us.
The key for us has been wanting to constantly improve what we do and continually fight to let go of the unnecessary baggage we’ve been saddled with as we’ve grown up in our schooled society.
Deciding to home educate can feel like a big step and it’s ok to make it your own. That’s the point, right?
Schooling at home can provide a balance of structure and freedom that regular school cannot. That structure can be just what some children and parents need.
If you’re interested in unschooling, come to it in your own time. It takes guts, trust, and a willingness to travel even further from the status quo. But for those who choose to unschool, it can be a liberating and empowering educational approach that allows families to learn, grow, and explore the world in their beautifully unique way.
All we suggest is that you remain open to change, continually listen to your children and consider the needs of your family unit.
Home Education Book Recommendations
We’ve compiled a list of our favourite home education and intentional parenting books.
They’re a great place to start off your home ed journey.
Miles, an ex-teacher turned business owner, home educator and co-founder of home-educating blog healthycurious.com, is on a mission to empower others to break free from societal constraints and build the life they desire. He and his wife Louise, unschool their children.
With a rebellious spirit and a strong drive for success, Miles ran a DIY record label and music publishing company for five years after leaving teaching.
As a hobby Miles began creating a large catalogue of white noise and sleep-inducing sounds under the moniker Noise Foundation. Things went a bit nuts and he now receives millions of streams annually on Spotify and Apple Music from all around the world.
In addition, Miles and Louise run Cassette Property Group, a property investment company helping others to build assets for a freer life.