Starting home educating comes with many worries and questions! And there are so many resources out there, it’s hard to know where to start. So here is a bit of help (and please know that it will get easier, you will get your head around it all, and the opportunities are endless to really tailor your young person’s education to their needs):

-educationalfreedom.org.uk is a fantastic resource when starting out, so too is educationotherwise.org (most of your getting started questions are answered!) 🙂  (educationalfreedom.org.uk has a fantastic report-writing guide (along with other fab resources))

-one of the many benefits of home ed is that you can tailor the education to the young person … to their strengths, goals, interests, etc. (that being said, many parents (and often your local authority) want to ensure that a young person keeps up with Maths, English and Science appropriate to their level and aptitude

-whilst a ‘full time’ education is often defined by schools as 32.5 hours (and some LAs try to enforce/promote this idea too), the key thing to remember is that a school education is very inefficient, and many of those hours are not spent learning

-many home educators, in my experience, do something in the range of 15-30 hours of learning a week, but this does not need to be weekdays, does not need to be between the hours of 9 and 3, and does not need to ‘mimic’ school (activities such as doing chores, shopping, cooking, building a project in the garage, going to hunt fossils at the beach, etc can all count as ‘education’)

– the English National Curriculum, if you wish to follow it (you don’t have to), can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculum

In terms of IGCSEs/GCSEs:

1) this podcast goes into a wealth of detail about your options, things to consider, and subject choices:  https://home-education-matters.captivate.fm/episode/35

2) this is a useful (home educators only) FB group to join: https://www.facebook.com/groups/HomeEducationGCSEsIGCSEsExamsandAlternatives

3) there is a really useful starting out with exams guide you can download here (scroll down a bit): https://homemadeeducation.com/faqs/

(You will also come across the terms ‘home educating’ and ‘homeschooling’ being used interchangeably – they don’t mean the same thing but don’t worry if you accidently use the wrong word!)