I was homeschooled for eight years, from age 11 through to college, before it was a novel way for tiger parents to show off their dynamic commitment to their children’s education. Now, if millions of parents and families are suddenly going to be homeschooling their kids for the coming weeks Read more…
This is the first full week of exams at our NSWLearning exam centre and it started me thinking about our relationship with exams as home educators. As somebody who did his teacher training in the 1970s, I am old enough to remember the great counter-cultural educational movements of the 1970s Read more…
If you have come to read this blog post as a result of the headline then you probably fall into one of two groups of people – the first ‘group’ is pretty much pro-home education – you may actually be a home educator or you may know somebody who is Read more…
Like much of the country, I have been following events in Westminster over the last few weeks with increasing disquiet. I am not going to comment, here on Brexit, but on the language used by politicians. I was brought up to be polite – indeed, I can remember my mother Read more…
Monday 6th September 1999 was what they call a quiet news day – no single event dominated the day’s newspapers in the UK. Tony Blair had been Prime Minister for two years and Mambo No 5 was top of the UK charts! For NSWLearning however, it was a hugely important Read more…
It took me a while to acknowledge the truth that Zac is autistic. I knew he was since he was 6 months old but I sort of tried to ignore it. Everything inside of me hoped it wasn’t a real thing (mostly because everything outside of me said it wasn’t Read more…
I am sort of going to have a moan here but hopefully people will bear with me and understand where I am coming from. In recent months at the NSW exam exam centre we have spoken with a number of parents whose children have been enrolled with various learning providers Read more…
A few years back, I had a conversation with a mum whilst her son was sitting an exam here at the NSWLearning exam centre. We got into discussion about success and failure, in particular what we as parents measure as success in our home education adventure. As we chatted, I Read more…
Home education is an incredible adventure! It provides us, as parents, with a remarkable opportunity to enjoy our children’s company and grow wise as we all learn together. Like all genuine adventures, however, there are times when pressure builds and the whole thing feels like a lot less fun that Read more…
One of the great advantages of homeschooling is the flexibility that it provides us with as parents to shape and schedule learning to fit in with the needs of our individual children. With the best will in the world, schools find this level of personalisation virtually impossible – not because Read more…