Home education:
tips, tricks and teasers
Home education has been around for decades but the last year has really thrown it into the limelight. The number of children registered for home education recently rose by 75% in the UK – that means more than 40,000 pupils were taken out of school between September 2020 and April 2021, compared with an average of 23,000 over the previous two years.
There are three key reasons why parents might have pulled their child out of traditional schooling: fear for their child’s health, worries that their child will fall behind, or families simply thriving with homeschooling after school closures (you might not believe us, but it’s true!) Anyway, whether you are an established home educator, have started your journey in the last year or are just thinking about whether it can work for you, you might find some useful nuggets in this blog…
Tips for starting out
Taking the leap and starting home education can be scary so we have popped our top five tips below to get you started:
- It’s very likely that your local council has lots of helpful information. You can use this website to find support based on your postcode – it is definitely worth a look.
- The home education community is one of the best out there! There are so many amazing groups and organisations that you can tap into for help, advice and support. A quick google search or look around on Facebook will show you some local and regional groups that you could join (and a few more suggestions later in this blog).
- Remember, you don’t have to be an expert in everything! There are so many subjects you could teach your child at home, you can’t know every single one to GCSE level (if you do, you’re superhuman!) So don’t be afraid to seek help – whether that is finding resources online, hiring a tutor for a subject or two or using education technologies to support with content, teaching and marking.
- Test what works for you. Absolutely find out what works for others and give it a go, but every single home educating family will take a different approach. Try different ways of working and see what sticks – for example, keeping structured hours for lessons (e.g. 9-3) might help with a routine or you might find being flexible and working outside of traditional hours gets better results. There is no right or wrong way to home educate.
- Finally, don’t be afraid to change. Whether that is adapting how you teach, when you hold lessons or even making the switch back to in-school learning, do whatever works best for you and your learner.
Top five home education resources
It’s amazing how much support is out there for home educators – but it can almost be overwhelming! Here are our top five resources that you might like:
- We’ve mentioned them once but here they are again – Education Otherwise. From letter templates to send to your local authority, to information for medical professionals involved in home education, you can find a whole host of useful resources here.
- Are you an instagram fan? If so, make sure you check out @ourmuslimhomeschool! Or, you could sign up to their weekly newsletter to get access to free resources, inspirational advice and community events.
- We also LOVE getting daily updates from @homeedjourney_uk – make sure you follow them for relatable content and fun ideas to try at home.
- Hope Education has a fantastic home learning hub. Take a look to see some great ideas for outdoor learning, fun arts and crafts activities and ways to incorporate PE into your home curriculum.
- And finally, Numerise. More on that below...
How Numerise supports home education
Whether you would like help with teaching new methods or a little bit of extra practice, Numerise can help.
We know how long it can take to create or source high quality maths content (we spent 10 years developing our bank of 40,000 handwritten questions!) So let us take that off your hands – you can trust our content because Numerise is built by the brains behind award-winning HegartyMaths and Sparx Maths which are used in over 50% of secondary schools in England.
As well as high quality content, here are the top five ways Numerise can support home education:
- Long term learning – we are here to support you for the long haul! We have 13 courses from Year 6 to 11 for home educators in England. With a range of short courses (12 lessons) to longer courses (87 lessons) you can save hours of time on planning content and making sure the whole curriculum is covered.
- Video support – whether you panic when you hear the word maths or find it a piece of cake, an extra set of hands would never go amiss. We have an explainer video for every one of our 40,000+ questions so if your learner is stuck, one of our amazing maths teachers will talk them through the problem in front of them, explain the method and help them get to the right answer.
- Reassuring insights – we know reporting to your local authority is an important part of home education so want to make that easier. We send you weekly emails updating you on your learner’s progress that week and you get your very own dashboard providing evidence of your learner’s work, achievements and more.
- Strengths and weaknesses – Numerise constantly assesses what your learner is good at and what could do with a little more work. We then provide a short list of these to help guide where your learner could focus next.
- Learning techniques – Numerise isn’t just a bank of questions. We have years of experience and knowledge that are woven into our maths. We use learning techniques like scaffolding, spaced repetition and interleaving to ensure every learner has a solid understanding of every topic they cover and it sticks in their brain for the long term.
Don’t take our word for it – hear from other home educators:
- Over 93% of home educators agree Numerise has improved the way they learn maths at home
- 100% of home educators say that Numerise has built their learner's confidence in maths
- 100% of home educators would recommend Numerise to others
Let us know what you think
We’d love to hear from you – get in touch at [email protected] with your home education tips!