When home educated kids get towards being teens, things tend to go one of a few ways. Sometimes, as in Fran’s case, they head off into school; sometimes they stick with a very autonomous and alternative education, trusting that aptitude and interest and enthusiasm will serve the child well when they get to a point of either wanting to access mainstream education or get a job. In the ten years I’ve been home educating, I’ve seen that come good so many times that I’d trust that approach if it was right for any of my kids. Often, however, the child and the parent veer towards the conventional and start a process of collecting mainstream courses and qualifications, accessing exams and courses through a variety of means.
Before Fran went to school we had concluded that we would aim for her to collect a core of gcse exams and that we’d do that by studying the courses until she was 16 and then she would go college and try to spend a year there and do all the exams at the end. It was an easy way to make sure she had a fall back plan to her dream of dancing professionally, the fall back plan at the time being agricultural college. The huge frustration for home educators is that, despite paying taxes to have a right to a school place for a child, we don’t have access to exam centres by right and so have to enter exams as private candidates, if a centre can be found at all. Schools are misinformed and don’t want to risk an unknown candidate fouling up their stats, even though in fact that doesn’t happen as private candidates don’t count in performance stats. And private candidates have to pay, with £250 per exam sitting being an oft quoted sum of money.
It’s not fair and it means people have to be creative and look for ways of sitting exams, even if it means doing them as they can afford to, or later on as evening class or mature students.
Since going to school, Fran remains slightly in the home ed camp because the school could not fit her into the history gcse classes and the intention was for the school to provide support for her to do this at home with me. The reality of this has been unimpressive and we are now looking at her doing igcse via a distance learning course, similar to the ones provided by this college. Hopefully this will be not only a course she will prefer, but be easier for us to manage, going back to the old style of relying on ourselves totally, rather than waiting for support from school.
My greatest responsibility of course still lies with the other girls, who are now all reaching a point where either school, or more diverse and stretching learning is on the horizon for them. Maddy and Amelie are both enjoying working harder and have very different needs, so a plan a, with a potential school move if it looks good being plan b, needs to be in place. I’m starting to think in terms of providing more concrete plans so they are ready for gcse if that is what they want. Although Fran has adapted well to school, the amount of written work, revision and tests has been a steep learning curve and it strikes me that Maddy might need more of a run up to that if she does go to school at any point.
So, if I have any home educating readers left ( 😉 ) I’d really like to know how you see the teenage years and any formal study going? Do you use online courses, a local college, a particular tutor you know via home ed land or other places? Do you have any recommendations for how to approach formal qualifications or where to access them? I thought I would try to put together a list of recommendations for people who mightier some inspiration.
I found lots of ideas, links and gcse related stuff from these two websites http://alittlebitofstructure.webs.com/
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HE-Exams-GCSE-A_AS_Levels-OU-Others/
Abi knew what she wanted to do so it made her exam choice easier.. She does Maths at home and takes her exams at Wells Cathedral school. She did English at Strode college in a post 16 class. She goes to Bicton college one day a week to do Animal Care and is putting together an animal related science portfolio. She has recieved a conditional offer to do animal care at our local college based on these courses.
Emma has no idea really so she listed 7-8 subjects she might like to do and we will keep them in mind. She has just started Art and food technology at http://homeedpartners.co.uk/ via distance learning and a once a month visit. They are also an exam centre/montessori school, and run several gcse lessons a week as well as being distance learning facility. We suspect we will use this as an exams centre as well as possibly using http://www.oxfordhomeschooling.co.uk/.
hope that helps.
We’re a step behind you, but C’s been (very slowly) working her way through Catherine Mooney’s English IGCSE course. She’s quite capable of doing English early and I thought it would be nice to get one out of the way before embarking on something more challenging, but at this rate she’ll be 15 before she’s worked through the book.
Not quite sure what we’re going to do about the rest. Unless something surprising happens in terms of motivation it’s going to take C a while to pick up enough GCSEs to do anything with. But she’s really not keen on the idea of school.
A local friend is a couple of steps ahead of us. She started HE at 14, and is basically doing GCSEs from home, some this year and some next. So her Mum’s done all the legwork of finding exam centres etc. She’ll be sitting most or all of hers at her old school where her brother still goes, but it also transpires that our lovely LA have a special centre where HE kids can sit exams quite cheaply just for asking.
We’re looking at it all, a little afraid things will have to change 🙁 L is 13, and hates the idea of ever setting foot inside a school. I think that, unless we had no other option, we are not going to use school for any part of his education. Locally there is a discussion going on with the LA to see if we can work out funding for a variety of things – GCSE’s included – which was instigated by the LA. I hope it’ll be in place by the time we need it! At the moment our plan is to pick a subject, find a school locally that will let us sit as an external candidate, see what exam board / s they are willing to use and work backwards from there – I expect we will have to find a syllabus and work through it for each subject. From my own enquiries, there are more and more external candidates sitting exams, and fees are dropping. I was told £60 – £100 for the exam itself, but then there are the materials we’d need to actually study the subject . . .
The exams Yahoo group that Carol recommends is the best place to get info on all the options. You can ask for recommendations for courses or get support if you’re going it alone and there are people there who have supported lots of home ed kids through IGCSEs and even A levels. I’d suggest that people ask there before they pay out money for any course. I have seen excellent course material and very poor stuff.
Our 14 year old has two IGCSEs under her belt and is planning to get four more before going to college at sixteen. She followed Catherine Mooney’s course for English language. For geography I helped her with just textbooks and past papers and that was perfectly do-able (even though I gave up geography at fourteen) and we covered all the material between September and June of one year. I’ll be doing the same to help her through history. Her other parent is helping her through the IGCSE maths syllabus – once again just using textbooks. She is studying for biology and chemistry in a group of home ed kids, led by a local home ed mum, which seems to be working well. We aren’t planning to pay for any more courses or tutors.
We use a local private school as an exam centre at a cost of £70 per subject, which isn’t too bad. Exams yahoo group can help with finding a centre too.
No idea if we’ll be doing just the same for 11 year old as it depends what he wants, though I suspect we will advise him to get at least a few qualifications as it keeps options open at sixteen.
We’re still art home full-time though dd2 has started making some noises about trying school. Dd1 would be in year 9 and we are working towards doing gcse maths and biology at home by ourselves and English with Catherine Mooney’s igcse course. We’be just found a local exam centre so hoping all goes smoothly. Her passion is art and textiles which is what she wants to do at college so were working on a portfolio approach and hopefully an Arts Award which we’ve just about sorted out.
Dd2 wants to pursue either music or performing arts at college so we’re following a similar plan but with music exams (passed grade3 before Christmas) and Lamda exams via her theatre arts group, as well as Arts Award.
And I would second the Yahoo HE exams group that Carol recommended above, wonderful source of knowledge.
We’re probably at the same stage as you are with Maddy with my eldest Aidan, he is now year 7. Everyone around us seems to be enrolling their children into Secondary schools which has made me even more nervous than I already was. He’s so unacademic (if there is such a word) which makes matters worse. I shall be watching this post avidly too to get some clues, so thank you for sharing 😉
Open University is another option. I know of several teenagers (and one a little younger) who are doing courses with them. Also the local college here accepts teens without GCSEs – several home educated kids have gone straight in to do Btecs on the strength of an interview. They have all done very well so the college has a good view of home educated students. We also use tutors – if you can get a big enough group of kids together this doesn’t have to be a really expensive option. We have a GCSE drama group going – with about 18 kids involved. Some colleges welcome teens at evening classes (one of my friends dds did her GCSE spanish this way), and I know that you can do certain btecs through things like air cadets. There is also a local drama group that offer a gcse in drama.
Aternative schools are often happy to accept he kids for exams (think steiner/montessori), plus centres like kip mcgrath So there are lots of options, you might just have to do a bit of digging to find what you need. HTH. 🙂
Thought I’d done a comment on this but seems not. Short version is that dd (14) has two IGCSEs now – one after following Catherine Mooney’s course and one that she studied for with just my support and a textbook or two. She’s planning on getting four more and we’re not planning on buying any more courses, though she does study biology and chemistry in a group with other home edders led by a local home edding mum. We use a local private school as an exam centre at £70 per subject.
The best source of info is certainly the yahoo exams list and I’d suggest that it is wise to ask their for opinions before buying any course at all. Course material and support can be very variable.
I’m planning on home educating my now 2 yo and 5 week old so don’t have any direct experience of this but my Mum home educated my 2 younger sisters so have their experience to share! They live in Dartmouth, South Devon and did iGCSE’s with Lydia who
sat the exams at a centre in Bristol which was a pain as it was so far away. Lyd then went to a local sixth form college for A levels and is now studying at UEA. Julia (almost 15) is also doing iGCSEs but luckily they’ve found a school mcch nearer to them in Torbay that is happy to have her sit the exams there. It seems to have worked for them and although they had to pay to sit the exams I don’t think it was as much as £250 (though I could be wrong!)
Obviously different families have different needs etc but what looks like it may work best for us if for Aprilia to stay with me a few more years and then follow in her friend’s footsteps at ReaseHeath college which is mainly agricultural but does animal husbandry etc as well. They offer courses starting at 14 at “foundation level” which she could probably manage well enough now to be honest as they assume nothing more than a basic idea of reading and writing (no, wait, listening and dictating, they assume that literacy has passed you by too!)
It’s not what I had mapped out in my head when she was 3 and we decided home ed was the way forward, but I think it’s right for her – not the imagined Aprilia that I don’t have but the real one who is so different from the one I imagined when I made my grand long term plans.
I did write a long post but it seems to have vanished! So a short version is that the Open University is also an option. I know of several HE kids doing courses with them. Also hiring tutors for a group works out much cheaper than one to one tuition – for example we have a gcse drama group going run by an ex-drama teacher. The cost is split between the 18 teens taking the course (plus the cost of the hall hire) which makes it much more affordable.
HTH!
Hi Merry, we home educated our two right until they were teens. They went onto FE college to do BTecs rather than GCSEs because by the the kids had a better idea of what they wanted to do later on in life and these courses were more suited. It’s funny how you worry yourself sick over these transitional times in their lives yet a few years down the line then they grow and go, just like all kids do and it doesn’t seemed to have stopped them not having GCSEs! They’ve both followed the Uni route.
Hope this helps – it’s a bit late! There’s more support and stories about our HE days and older kids on my website http://rossmountney.wordpress.com which might be comforting! BWs x
I also wrote a long post with lots of links, which has vanished 🙁
You’ve had some good suggestions already; I’d like to add that it’s often not necessary to use correspondence courses or tutors to do qualifications from home. Instead, you can take a DIY approach, working through the set textbook for the qualification and doing past exam papers for practice. The parent does not need to be good at the subject; the textbooks provide lots of exercises *and* answers, and the past papers are freely available online, along with answers and marking information. Each exam board produces or endorses a textbook which is focussed entirely on its syllabus, so if you work through the book, you know you’ve covered the lot. I love the way this gives the family responsibility and empowers the student to take charge of their own work, rather than relying on a tutor to tell you what to do. Lots of people on the HE-Exams list approach exams this way. It seems daunting at first, but there are plenty of people on there to talk you through it.
If something isn’t clicking, the student can look elsewhere – there are lots of wonderful resources online, eg Khan Academy and tutorials on YouTube, BBC Bitesize – see Home-Ed Resources file here for a list of suggestions:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_kJnwII1mUpANzT_c6W4-GsiPRnjdrzTsl74P00EfO4/edit
You can also get tutors in on an as-needed basis, eg booking a tutorial if there is a subject that the child is really having trouble with, or to brush up on exam technique nearer to exams; I think lack of confidence makes some parents feel they have to book weekly tutorials for a year before an exam, when actually they might find that the kids find their wings when they’re taking responsibility for it themselves. If you do want to use a tutor, online tutorials via Skype are much cheaper than face-to-face and there are agencies online which specialise in them. For maths, there is also Conquer Maths, which offers online presentations for maths GCSE and worked examples, or MathsWatch CDs which do the same thing, but in less detail.
My oldest took maths GCSE aged 12, then aged 13 he took Physics IGCSE and Japanese speaking/listening GCSE modules, plus ECDL (an IT qualification, equivalent to a GCSE). This year he’s 14 and will be taking Chemistry IGCSE, Law GCSE, Japanese reading and writing modules (to complete his Japanese GCSE) and Digital Creator (a vocational IT qualification in creative media, worth 2 GCSEs). He has done it all himself – well, apart from the Japanese, which we have a tutor for! And he’s very proud of having done it himself. So far he has A*s for maths and physics, and A/A* for his Japanese modules. He thought the textbooks were all self-explanatory and as long as he could work through at his own pace, and go over things until he understood, he was fine. I think problems can occur with class or group learning if the group has to move on before one person understands everything.
I didn’t teach my son anything – he taught himself. He found the textbooks straightforward and said that as he could do it at his own pace, it covered everything he needed to know. What I did was mark his work or show him
where the mark schemes were and encourage him to work through step by step, and if his answer didn’t match the book’s, to go through it again until he knew where their paths separated, and why. There were a few annoying typos in some of the answers (HE Exams group can help with that) but we worked it out. On the occasions where he didn’t understand things, we found plenty of free resources online to talk through the topic.
I appreciate that this may not work for every
family, but it works for us. DS1 much prefers working at his own pace and being able to flick through a book and move on when he understands; he resents being forced to slog through stuff that he already understands. I would be more inclined to consider outside support in a subject where you have to write essays as DS and I wouldn’t necessarily know how to mark them.
HE-Exams Yahoogroup.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HE-Exams-GCSE-A_AS_Levels-OU-Others
He-Exams wiki: introduction to taking exams as a home-ed family –
http://www.nwilts-he.org.uk/he_exams_wiki/index.php/Main_Page
Thank you to everyone for these. I hope I managed to rescue most of them from spam :/ struggling to make time to reply to comment at the moment but I am reading them all and really appreciate your time and thought.