Getting school life taped.

We are approaching the end of the 2nd term of having one child in school, unless you peddle in the pointless currency of 6 term years like this school does. I’m not sure that was worth the effort of rebranding personally; I only work in 3 terms and I suspect it will go the way of feet, inches and babies weighing lbs not kilograms personally. Who needs 6 tiny terms for heavens sake?

They’ve been 2 unusual terms in some respects, with pregnancies and babies and pantos all getting in the way. We need to start working out how to deal with some of the logistical problems of a school day now, because mostly Fran has been picked up while I was largely house bound and that is tieing the others to the house, something that can’t continue. Buses are a problem though, since they run infrequently and inconveniently to our area so we need another plan. Lunches also need sorting out better, since £40 a month on school ones feels like a lot of money at times, especially when the others appear to have just taken to eating Fran’s portion at home. These are the minor irritations of school life though, washing kit at the last minute, school bags dumped in the hall and permanently attaching woven name labels to uniform. I can deal with those. I don’t mind signing homework diaries or even filling in forms and I don’t have to do the school run.

Fran has settled well. She’s getting plenty of opportunities for school team sports (she loves netball and plays for yr9 already, so she has been going on away game trips to posh schools with scary PE teachers who horrify her!) she is on the AGT register (!) which means she gets invited to very enticing extra curricula activities and she likes most of her subjects and loves science, sports science, dance and maths (!) (!)…. (!!!!!!) She had her first exams last week and came second in her set in science, which thrilled her. In general I like the ethos of the school and so does she. She says she would miss it if she left now but doesn’t regret her home ed years. I quite like the fact take are still doing one subject together, history, and so does she. She feels incredibly grown up now.

There are elements which frustrate her, naturally enough. Disrupted classes are one, the constant obsession with who is going out with who being another. Getting yelled at for going down stairs which are newly one way only is another. There are events which irritate me. I had a full blown strop this week when she was refused a day off to go to a huge science fair which, it turned out, other AGT kids were going to another day. I am never going to believe a day in a classroom beats a positive and educational trip out with your family. The argument that missed days could ruin her education doesn’t cut much ice when you are a discussing a child who is doing well and missed the first ten years of school 😉 We compromised in the end. I may have mentioned the day they all missed while the teachers striked…..

It’s probably best I don’t spend too long ranting about the new ‘Functional Skills’ Paper in English gcse. One exam entirely based on Big Brother and Dragon’s Den. 😯 I ask you… An academic exam where you are actually effectively penalised if you have a life and don’t spend it watching rubbish and inappropriate TV???? I think I may have had a strop about that too. Sigh.

Still other than that it is all going okay. It was still a good decision. And it seems to me that you can’t take the home ed out of the girl. She comes across to me now (and I really do mean across, she is the same height as me suddenly) as a home educated girl who now goes to school. I hope she never loses that. Maybe it says as much as anything about something I have felt for a long time… We are not really a home educating family as such, we are just a family who happen to home educate. The children are less a product of these days as active cogs in the process. I like that.