I wrote this at midnight but felt compelled to share in the hope that it might help people who are new to home ed or those who are walking the tightrope and are unsure if they should make the leap.

It felt especially pertinent to share as there seem to be many posts regarding children who won’t engage in learning once deregistered – or perhaps more importantly cannot engage in learning.

We deregistered in September 2023. Our story isn’t unique – years of gaslighting, lies and blame from the school.

Our oldest child, Cody, now ten, left school working approximately four years behind in maths – every end-of-year school report had the box ‘needs to try harder’ firmly ticked.

We experienced six months of what I can only describe as complete dysfunction while they recovered. Slowly but surely, we started having good days, the good days started to outweigh the bad days. Over a year on, the bad days are rare.

Six months in, we started ‘dipping’ into different types of learning – do we like this app? No, okay, cancel the subscription and try something else – there was value in us knowing that wasn’t the right path for us.

In August this year, we tried DoodleMaths  – largely because I saw lots of people on within a prominent home education Facebook group that rated it.  Slowly we tried to become more consistent, going from we’ll do it if we remember and feel able, to we will do it most days. More recently we set a target of gaining 17 stars each day to qualify for a small competition that DoodleMaths had on offer.

There have been days where it has been reminiscent of when we were first learning how to play Mario Kart – days where we spent most of the time crashing off the track! – but slowly and surely Cody has grasped these alien concepts.

Sometimes it has taken an explanation from me, sometimes my husband has had the right words. We have used Lego, battle droids and Star Wars space crafts to aid our learning.

We did a baseline assessment today in DoodleMaths, just as a little curiosity check-in.  Cody’s ‘maths age’ has rocketed up to age 9!

I am blown away with pride that they have made so much progress in so little time and it has been so validating to see that they CAN do it, with the right environment and methods that work for them.

Cody is now happy to get their hands stuck into the cookie dough when we bake and help harvest mushrooms – they would have NEVER done this time last year!

The journey to get to this point has all been valuable.  Home ed has been transformative for my children – which further highlights the negligence of their former school and L.A.

I really hope this brings comfort. I think it would have helped me to read something like this when I was completely terrified and traumatised last year. My moment of clarity, within the whirlwind of the not knowing if we should make the leap and deregister, was realising I couldn’t possibly screw it up more than the school were.

I am incredibly grateful to the legendary H.E.F.A. admin team, members of the Facebook group and the local home ed community for being so supportive and inclusive.