About us: starting our UK home education adventure!

About us:

Welcome to what is hopefully the very beginning of our UK Home Education adventure!

We are a Dorset family of 6 on the verge of the biggest change in lifestyle dynamic that we have faced, starting out our UK home education adventure. After untold evenings spent calming down high-achieving but incredibly anxious young girls currently in years 2 and 4 at a local primary, we have made the decision to run a Home-Education trial throughout the Easter holidays. Why? Home education has always been a topic of discussion in our family, ever since I had my older children. However, my constant reaction has always been one of “I would never have the temperament for that. We’d never survive”, and so time and again, the idea has fallen by the wayside. But no longer!!! After the latest period of overwrought, overwhelmed and over-stressed children, the scales seem to have tipped just enough over into “This situation is simply not working for our family” for me to shift my perspective, and make the jump one worth taking to try and claw back some of the amazing little people we started with. I mean, no 6-year-old should be feeling this stressed, right?!

Working

As my partner and I are already self-employed as tradesmen, and with secondary editing and baking businesses starting to come to life, it could be done with very minimal disruption to our established working lives. Which is a position that not very many people are lucky enough to find themselves in! Having two older boys just entering and leaving their GCSE years respectively, and being acutely aware that the girls’ mental health is rapidly declining, it seems that a shift toward a less stressful and less structured approach to education may very well be the tonic that we need. So here we go, after a fair few weeks of planning and strategising, we are finally taking the plunge (well, maybe more accurately ‘dipping our toes in the water’) to see if we can hack it as a home-ed family.