'What I got wrong was trying to be a teacher': how to last the distance at home schooling

On the first day of home schooling, my eight-year-old daughter read a book about Ancient Egypt for 30 minutes then spent the rest of the day bouncing on the trampoline dressed as a badger while simultaneously trying to soak the cats with the garden hose. My 11-year-old daughter mostly did maths problems on IXL, a virtual learning website, when she wasn’t making toast. This wasn’t quite what my husband and I had planned.

Our first act as home educators had been to devise a detailed timetable that included two PE sessions (trampolining, skipping, cat chasing), creative and “journaling” time, den-making, cosy reading time, as well as three hours of academic work, all divided into 45-minute segments. But somehow the hours slipped away along with my intentions as I tidied, cooked, cajoled, shouted, checked my phone, and got absolutely no work done (despite multiple deadlines). By 4pm I felt we all deserved a break, so declared the school day complete and turned on the TV.

But the TV did not turn on. On day one, our 15-year-old set had broken – a cruel blow. I gave the girls my computer so they could watch a film (meaning I still could not work) and went to bed an hour before my elder daughter, exhausted.

This introduction to reality took place a week before the official closure of all schools across the UK. My husband and I are freelance journalists, so withdrawing our girls from their primary school seemed like the right decision – even though we made it at 8am that Monday, and hadn’t given any thought to how we would educate them or keep them entertained (while at the same time doing the work we needed to do to keep them fed).

On day two, my younger daughter made a multicoloured Lego pyramid, in keeping with the Ancient Egypt theme. The older one and I visited the local library to get educational books such as Why Is Snot Green?. There was trumpet and piano practice, and a trip to the nearby park that involved the girls smashing stones to make flints while I stared at my phone/the end of the world as we knew it.

On the third day my husband, Mike, and I both had to work, so the girls ran wild, argued, cut up things that were not meant to be cut up, and fought over the iPad. That night I drank two strong vodka and tonics while Mike tried to engage me in a conversation about rationing loo roll (“We could use back copies of the New York Times?”). I felt sad for my 11-year-old, who would not be celebrating her final year of primary school, for my diabetic mother isolating in her sheltered accommodation, and for the world in general.

But at least we are all going through this together, especially when it comes to home schooling. The following Monday saw around 7 million children in the UK waking up with no school to go to, and no notion of when they would be returning to their classrooms. Even before schools were officially shut, the WhatsApp groups set up to organise Christmas presents for teachers had taken on a new flavour: artist parents offering weekly Instagram lessons, musician parents posting instructional videos on YouTube, preparation for a Zoom meeting for an entire class of eight-year-olds (mayhem), and long lists of e-resources. Many of these came via friends of friends who already home school (in 2019 approximately 60,000 children in the UK were taught at home). Home schoolers are themselves an invaluable resource – they’ve done the thinking and the planning that the rest of us, flung into an entirely new relationship with our children during a time of confusion, fear, sickness and grief, have yet to do.

“My first bit of advice is to take a break from the curriculum for a couple of weeks. Let them enjoy themselves. Do not start thinking you have to be a teacher,” says Samia Tossio, a founding member of Sutton Home Education Forum. Allowing yourself and your children a period of adjustment is something recommended by most of the people we spoke to, from home schoolers to teachers to tutors. “What I got wrong, in those first few weeks, was trying to be a teacher,” says Tina Powick, who lives in Suffolk with her four children and has been home schooling for five years. “I had to ‘de-school’ myself. It wasn’t my children I’d taken out of the system, it was myself.”

Professional educators also encourage parents to take time to reflect. Rick Toop is the assistant head teacher at a secondary school in Surrey. “Give yourself time to plan – at least a day, but maybe even a week,” he says. “Work out your moral purpose. What do you believe is important? Be really clear, write it down, because this is the thing that is going to drive everything. Also, work out what success means to you. Because if you don’t know how to spot it then you are never going to be able to reward it, which will be demotivating.”

Once you’ve worked out your measure of success, you can establish a reward system. “The key is to reward effort and not outcome,” says Toop. “So, what do you reward? Perhaps curiosity, determination, organisation. You can give points for being focused for a certain amount of time, for showing good self-evaluation. After a child has earned 10 points, download a song off the internet for them or something. This is more important than creating a detailed timetable.”

Ah, the timetable. By day four, comedy timetables were being circulated on social media. This was also the day that a friend delivered learning packs from the girls’ school, including workbooks, which were useful because my husband and I still had deadlines, at least until the 11-year-old asked me to help her with a maths problem… “Don’t stress if you don’t understand the work your child has been set,” explained her form teacher, Hannah Langmead-Thorpe. “We aren’t expecting you to teach your children new concepts and ideas, we just want you to support their learning. If your child comes across something they don’t understand, then ask them to try something else until you can help them. Then explore it together.”

The school pack included a proposed timetable: hours of comprehension, grammar, arithmetic and verbal reasoning with a bit of RE or geography in the afternoon for light relief. This was, my daughter explained, the timetable she’d been following in the run-up to her year 6 Sats exams. “I am not doing this,” she pronounced. Fair enough. The next day we learned that the Sats had been cancelled, along with GCSEs and A-levels, and although this might well have delighted some children, others we knew found it challenging.

“The year 11 and 13 children have been working really hard. It has been exhausting emotionally,” says Toop. “To be honest, they probably deserve a break. Then you can work out goals with the collaboration of the child.”

Most year 10 and 12 children will still be working towards exams that will happen next year, and have a full schedule of work provided online by the school, reading and assignments and Skype calls. The temptation might be to leave them in a room with their computer for seven hours while you go about your business. But although this may suit some children, others will spend half an hour looking at a PowerPoint and then feel compelled to throw something out of the window, or at a sibling. The aim in these first weeks, says Toop, is to observe your child, learn how they like to learn, and take your cues from that. Some children prefer the rigour of a fully timetabled day, others the more holistic approach of the full-time home schoolers.

“Talk to your kids about their lives, their reading, what their interests are,” says Mike Wood, a home schooling advocate who in mid-March began a Facebook forum (Home Education UK School Closure Support Forum) where experienced home schoolers could share guidance, tips and resources with novices. “Start from there, with TV documentaries or YouTube. Then talk to them some more. The late educationalist Professor Roland Meighan called it ‘purposive conversation’. When I home educated my four children we didn’t own a textbook. We had conversations – then they’d go off and do research. The culture of home school is one of gradual learning, curiosity, developing ideas that don’t easily fit into a curriculum.”

Which sounds laudable, but what about parents who have to do some work? Or are trying to secure new income because their usual job has disappeared?

“The trick is to stop children feeling other people have to provide the education for them,” says Wood. “If they come to you saying they’re bored, tell them to do something even more boring. They’ll then find something more interesting to do themselves. They ask a question, you help them to a resource, then they’re away. Children take responsibility for their learning.”

I tried this approach with my eight-year-old, who wanted to learn about trees. I gave her a book about trees, told her to choose a favourite tree, draw it and create an info sheet. This bought me all of 12 minutes. But it’s early days.

• • •

If you have the money, there is also personal tutoring, with many established companies scrambling to scale up the technology that will allow access to tutors via the web. “This week we started lowering the cost of entry,” says Alex Dyer, director of tutoring platform Tutor House. “People aren’t going out to dinner or on holiday, so perhaps they have a bit more money for education. We now offer group classes for £10-£15 an hour with up to 10 in a class. We’ve set up Key Stage 1, 2 and 3 groups, it’s all timetabled, and by subject.” Dyer says students can sign up to as little as two to three hours a week, with no long-term commitment. “Our platform is similar to Google Hangouts, but the teacher is running the show, so it’s more one way. Kids can ask questions via a text window. The tutor records the class and can share with the parent to review.”

For those lucky enough to have a garden, or a nearby park, the outside world is a rich resource and a contrast to the digital classroom. Rachel Manley is a Forest School teacher based in north Somerset. “You don’t need to buy a mud kitchen on Amazon,” she says. “If you’ve nothing at home you can collect things on walks and before you know it you have a nature table.” Manley also sees nature as an opportunity for parents to resist micromanaging their children’s learning. “If they’re in the flow, leave them and have lunch a bit later,” she says. “So often we ask children what they’re writing, drawing or doing, and they might not want or be able to explain. For children to get to that point where they are just being creative does take a while, but it doesn’t need our input.”

The other benefit of an outside space is that it can entertain children of all ages – and for parents of preschool children this will be a particularly difficult time. “A three-year-old can use sticks to make a little race course for a toy car; an eight-year-old can make a den,” says Manley. “Older children are generally more engaged with tools and fires and generally enjoy a level of risk. They like useful tasks.’

Useful tasks such as, for instance, assembling a television. A week into home schooling, our new TV arrived. If physical distancing rules had not been in place, we would have kissed the delivery man. Week one had been trying; we had probably overseen about four hours of academic work. The telly, we thought, would be the solution to all our woes. Imagine all those David Attenborough documentaries they could watch!

But still, the next day, even with the fancy new TV, our younger daughter lost her temper and walloped her sister with the game controller. That night, in bed, she sobbed: “I have just been feeling sad all day and I don’t know why.” We realised we needed to think harder about our children’s emotional, as well as educational, wellbeing. We decided not to have the radio on 24/7, with its on-the-hour Covid-19 updates. We would try not to stare at our phones with creased brows, and we would limit how much we referred to The Bug. There would be more Skype chats with the children’s friends and grandparents. We would try, as far as we were able, to create a safe bubble for our children and in the process cheer ourselves up, too.

Home schooling has been chaotic and challenging and no doubt will continue to be. My husband and I have already lost our tempers with our children in ways that have made us feel ashamed. I have cried in front of them, allowed them to play on screens for far too long, just so I could look at my own screen; but we have also eaten lunch together every day, played in the garden, done crazy art and made each other laugh. If I do get a moment to sit down and work out my moral purpose, to write down what is important to me, those are things that would be at the top of my list: eating, playing, creating and laughing together.

How to research the best online resources

• By now you should know if your child’s school is signed up to a digital resource provider. If so, your child will have a login.

• Good places to start looking for quality content online include the websites of the British Educational Training and Technology (Bett) awards and the British Educational Suppliers (Besa).

• The better online resources will provide more than just video content; there’ll be knowledge checkers, assessment points, and online booklets linking activities to what they’ve watched. Think of a lesson as three parts: teaching, learning and checking. Don’t be put off if the resource seems more like a game than a learning experience.

Emma Slater, digital education consultant

How to get your children learning outside

• For the early years foundation stage, play and exploration are the main elements. Make a potion kitchen: pots, pans and mud-mixing on an old table. Do some waterplay with old guttering, or dig channels in the mud or sandpit. Look for birds’ nests on a walk, spot birds flying overhead, listen to bird calls, find feathers.

• For key stage 1 (five to seven years), try mud faces, mud pies and clay moulding. Plant seeds: understanding seed packet instructions and carrying them out covers almost every area of the curriculum, from literacy and comprehension to measuring distances between seeds and counting, fine motor skills and sensory benefits. Make stick towers, big or small, and build a den.

• For key stage 2 (seven to 11 years): it’s spring! Draw or photograph any plants you see coming up and do the same in a month’s time. Research online the different plants and trees around you. Create obstacle courses with whatever is about: jump from lid to lid, roll a tyre, go over a rope or string without touching it. Try firelighting and cooking outdoors (with adult supervision).

• For key stage 3 (11 to 14 years), engage them in useful activities that support physical development, and anything with an element of controlled risk. Have nails, wood, rope at the ready. Whittling and knife work really engage this age group. Raised beds, digging, mowing, fence building, rope-ladder-making.
  

Rachel Manley, Forest School teacher (wildwood-adventures.co.uk)

Matilda, 12, has been home-schooling in Bristol since 17 March with her two younger brothers and her parents, who run their own building company.

“It’s mainly Mummy trying to help me. She’s set up Show My Homework on my mobile and is checking in on what I’ve submitted. For any really tricky questions Mummy’s already told me to call Grandpa. She is good at the creative stuff, though, and is teaching me cooking every day. She’s already completed an art project with my brother this morning. It’s hard for them as they run a building company, and my dad’s having to remotely instruct our teams.”

Alice, 12, has been home schooling in central London since 16 March, with her brother Ben, 15, her mum, a master’s student, and her father, an auctioneer.

“From websites crashing to too much time with your siblings, quarantine is not my dream come true. Though it is nice waking up an hour later. Just this morning I watched an assembly from my headteacher on YouTube. Thank goodness for laptops and phones or we would all be bored out of our minds. Houseparty [the social-networking app] has become my best friend, making it possible to chat to multiple friends at the same time. Though I do like how relaxing my day is, I am excited to go back to school and my normal life.”

Toby, 11, and Torrin, eight, have been home schooling since 7 March near Aviemore, northern Scotland, with their mum, an editor, and father, head of legal for an IT consultancy.

Toby: “I don’t like not being with my friends and that I can’t talk to them. It’s weird being taught by your parents. I prefer normal school.”

Torrin: “[Home school] is fun because I get to spend time with my family. I find it easier to concentrate. I loved learning about tornados and watching videos with Dad. I work harder with my parents. But school is fun, too, because you can learn with more people.”

Hebe, 11, has been home schooling since March in Bromley, with her eight-year-old sister and her journalist parents.

“At home our schedule is not nearly as tight and I don’t see my friends. Mum and Dad are very good. The lessons are juggled between them, while one or the other works, and in the afternoon both of them are to be left alone. This is different to school, where my teacher has her attention on us, 100%. My teacher was also very helpful in maths, whereas my mum has no idea whatsoever.”

Ry, 11, has been home schooling in Hackney and Essex with his 15-year-old brother Xan since 16 March. His mother, a musician, and father, who works in technology, are separated.

“My parents are freaking out a little bit. It doesn’t help me learn and it is a bad atmosphere. Mum’s worried about not knowing enough and Dad just gets strict. But it’s nice to have Mum helping me with maths. She repeats things till I understand. And she wants to teach me things off the curriculum, like crazy science experiments and morse code.”

Lewis, eight, has been home schooling in Croydon since 16 March. His mother is an RSPCA inspector, his stepdad works in marketing and his dad works in government.

“I like how my whole family is in my class and I get to play with my guinea pig and my cat Monty. I miss my friends and the playground, but I can see my friends on the computer.”

Additional reporting by Mike Higgins and Camilla Palmer