This is an archived site and is unlikely to be updated. My new homeschooling site - which includes dowloadable Ebooks and other materials - can be found at sarahsellers.co.uk.

<< home

OUR EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY

(Prepared for Bournemouth LEA - 10/1/03 - Re: Rosie Nicole Sellers)


Reasons for choosing to home educate

We chose to home educate largely because Rosie is very bright. We have always known this and always known that there was a big chance that she would end up being ‘bored’ and under challenged at school. This is not the fault of any particular school, but the fault of the education system in general - overcrowded classrooms and not enough teaching staff to be able to give the children individual attention when they need it. We made the decision to home educate before Rosie reached compulsory school age and were doing well. Then, Rosie attended school for approximately one month during October 2002. This was because we caved in to pressure from relatives who felt that Rosie couldn’t possibly be getting a satisfactory education at home. As we suspected, Rosie was classed as ‘high ability’ in her assessment. I asked whether she could be given extra work to reflect this ability (bearing in mind that Rosie had spent several days previously simply tracing her name over and over again despite the fact that I had informed the teacher that she could write independently), and was told that they would get round to it ‘eventually’. This was not a satisfactory state as Rosie was becoming increasingly bored and frustrated and was in fact losing the desire to learn rapidly.

The obvious answer was to send Rosie to a private school where the class sizes would be smaller and she would get individual attention and work suitable to her ability. However, financially we are simply not in a position to do this. We therefore made the decision, that we would return to home education as it had worked well before and we saw no reason why it could not continue to work well.

Other reasons we have for choosing to home educate are:

How we home educate

The beauty of home education is that it allows Rosie to learn what she needs to know from a wide variety of sources. The education we provide for her currently includes:

Home Education Timetable

We do not use a timetable as we feel, in a home education situation, that it is unrealistic and unworkable. Rosie is learning, in one form or another, from the time she gets up to the time she goes to bed. Almost any situation can be turned into a meaningful learning experience from the nutritional value of her breakfast cereal to the study of the clouds when out on a nature walk.

Rosie’s current progress

We are happy to supply the LEA with examples of Rosie’s work if required. This would have to be in the form of photocopies for various reasons a) We do not want her original work to become lost in the post b) some of her artwork is very ‘big’ and un-postable c) some of her writing is in hardback writing books and the postage costs would be huge.

Rosie’s progress in various subjects is as follows:

Summary

Rosie has a full and rich day being home educated. The one-to-one attention she gets allows her to work very much at her own pace which is most important as a ‘bright’ child as she becomes bored very quickly if not given work to suit her ability.

She is sociable, happy, contented and flourishing in this environment, which was sadly not the case when she attended school for a short period.

It is possible that when she is older Rosie may choose to attend school (for example when she reaches Secondary level), and certainly if she really wanted to go then we would be happy with this as she would have reached an age where she was capable of making an informed choice about her education herself. At the moment though, bearing in mind that she has experienced both home education and school, she is a lot happier and is achieving far more in a home education setting and we intend to continue providing her with an education in this way for the foreseeable future.