Onboarding for homeschoolers
What do you wish you’d known?
What do you wish you’d been told when you first began your home ed journey?
At the UnConference for alternative education back in April, I hosted a discussion about whether some form of national community of home educators would be a useful thing in the UK. (You can read a summary of our chat here.)
Charlotte Mason founded the Parent’s National Education Union in 1897, with the aim of supporting parents teaching their children at home—advising on what and how to teach. Sadly it was disbanded in 1989 (so recent!). Today, there are home education charities (like Education Otherwise), and many facebook groups, and an organisation called Streams Education which aims to ‘encourage, equip, and connect’ home educators. But there’s nothing quite like the PNEU.
There are barriers to a national group. Home educators are a diverse bunch, and what’s useful to me might not be useful to you. And many of us don’t like the idea of being on someone’s list. Sure, maybe they want to send me useful information, but are they going to want to check up on me too?
Nonetheless, I think there is room for improvement in how new home educators are welcomed to the fold. One participant said the best way to find out about local opportunities was to join the local WhatsApp group—but that until you’re in the group, it’s very hard to know that it exists or who can get you in. Particularly for parents who find themselves home educating having never initially planned to, finding a local, helpful, friendly community is hard.
One of the participants in the discussion used the word ‘onboarding’, and that’s exactly right. When you start a new job, you’re free to work in the way that suits you, but there are still useful things to know. A good company does this onboarding well, which makes new staff feel welcome and helps them settle in. Many of us have had the miserable experience of starting a job at a company that doesn’t do that process well. You have to discover everything for yourself, you often feel very alone, your confidence will flag. This is exactly the experience of many new home educators, and it’s not a great way to get started.
Instinctively, I shy away from the idea of yet another charity or organisation. And a national network in England already exists: the local authorities, each of whom has an Elective Home Education Officer responsible for overseeing the home ed families in their locality. Many families are under the radar, but when a child is taken out of school to be home educated, the EHE Officer knows about it. Ideally, that officer would send a helpful welcome pack (not a terrifying, threatening one) to every new starter, which would help them find their local community and get off to a flying start.
Maybe the local authorities aren’t the best way to go. I don’t know. At the moment, what I’d love to hear about from readers is what you think such a welcome pack should contain. For me, there are two tiers of information:
The legal stuff that’s the same no matter where you are in the country. What your rights and responsibilities are. You don’t have to do a 9-3 school day, or stick to school terms. You don’t have to follow the National Curriculum, but if you want to it’s freely available online. (If you think this stuff is obvious, I see new home educators asking these questions on facebook every day.)
The local stuff. Where you can go swimming during the week, where the local exam centres are where your child can sit GCSEs etc if they want to. How your child can get vaccinations that are normally administered at school. Whether there are local groups that meet regularly, or a friendly, experienced home ed parent who can introduce you to some WhatsApp groups. (No, I don’t know if people want to volunteer for that either.)
So my question for you is: what do you wish you’d been told when you first began your home ed journey? You can answer no matter where you live in the world—not all of it will be applicable here, but lots of it will.
And if you live in a country—or a part of the UK—that does this particularly well, I want to hear about it!
I’d love to get a wide range of responses, so please feel free to share with any groups you’re in.
I don’t have all the answers, and I don’t yet have a plan, but I think there’s room for improvement. Hearing from you is a great place to start.
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Oh man, just what you've touched on here makes it very clear that educating in the US and the UK are very different things in some ways (your children get vaccinated AT school?!).
Texas (where I live) has no oversight on homeschooling at all. You don't have to register with the state in any way, so it's legally very much open. (I have mixed feelings about this, but that's a conversation for another time).
Culturally/locally, I've found that the easiest way to find community have been being plugged in with a Church. On my side of town, most homeschoolers are Evangelical Protestant, on the other side of town is where all the Catholic homeschoolers are. They don't all belong to the same parish or church, but they all attend one, and find their network by word of mouth through their church connections. Religious reasons are HUGE motivations to pull your kids out of school here, and a lot of the group homeschool activities (co-ops, field trips, etc) are planned within those groups.
If you're a secular homeschooler, at least in a smaller city, you'll have a more difficult time. When I've met secular/non religious homeschoolers, it's at the public library run homeschool group or the one run at the local science museum. They're ironically a bit less organic and are dependent on an outside institution noticing that homeschoolers exist and offering something for them.
I grew up as a homeschooled ‘student’ in Geelong, Victoria, Australia. My mum still runs the local home educators’ Facebook group, which became over time the main avenue for new homeschoolers onboarding (just in Geelong of course). Victorian home education on-boarding takes a decent bit of confusing paperwork, and so new people often take to the Facebook group to ask for help in filling out the requisite ‘lesson plan’. When you know how to do it though, it’s easy - the regulators don’t actually care much at all what you put, as long as you tick the boxes. Long story short, I think an important part of an ‘onboarding’ package would be an easy-to-understand run-down of local regulation (and how to get around it, too!). :)