The child in front of you is the curriculum.
Every plan I have written that ignored who they actually are was abandoned inside a fortnight. Start with the child and the plan survives contact with a Wednesday.
Five chapters
How we got here.
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School came home
In 2020 the kitchen table became the classroom, the way it did for almost everyone. I expected to hate it. What I noticed instead was that a slower pace and one-to-one attention suited them, and that a morning could hold more learning than a whole day at a desk.
I filed that away as a curiosity of an odd year. I was not thinking about home education. I was thinking about getting through the week.
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The path we assumed did not open
We had a school in mind. It did not work out. That is a sentence I can write calmly now, and it was not calm at the time — it was weeks of phone calls, and the particular fear that comes from running out of options for your own child.
Home education started as the thing left on the table rather than the thing we chose. I want to be honest about that, because a lot of families arrive the same way and are then told they should have felt more certain.
A kitchen table in the first weeks after leaving school: an adult and a child working side by side, papers, no timetable on the wall.
Photography brief
The first weeks, when nobody knew what the day was supposed to look like. -
We chose it on purpose
Somewhere in the first term it stopped being a fallback. We sat down and looked at what each of them actually needed rather than what a year group said they should be doing, and decided to keep going deliberately.
That is the moment I would point to if you asked when we became a home-educating family. Not the deregistration letter. The evening we stopped treating it as temporary.
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It changed more than the schoolwork
The academic side improved, which I had hoped for and was still relieved by. What I had not expected was the rest of it: a house with less friction in it, mornings that did not start with an argument, and the slow return of children who wanted to tell me things.
I would not claim that for everyone. I would say it is the part nobody warned me about, and the part I would miss most.
Anna on a coast path in spring, mid-distance, the sea behind. Weather as found. Adults only.
Photography brief
A Tuesday, which is the part that still surprises me. -
Then I could not find anything
Groups, tutors, workshops, trips. All of it existed within half an hour of us, and almost none of it was findable — three Facebook groups, a WhatsApp thread and somebody's word of mouth.
I spent more time looking for things than doing them. That gap is what Termly came out of, and it is why I now write this stuff down instead of assuming everyone else has already worked it out.
