UK home education guide
Types of home educator: which approach suits your family?
Updated · 2 min read
Nobody picks a home-ed style from a menu. You find out which one you are somewhere around week three, usually by accident.
Two years of lurking in UK home-ed groups says every family lands in one of these four camps.
Type 1
The structured one
Timetable on the fridge, workbooks in date order, terms and half-terms kept. School's rhythm — without school.
Works if: your child loves routine. Watch out for: burning out the grown-up by November
Type 2
The project one
Three weeks deep on volcanoes, then castles, then the sea. Everything — maths, writing, art — hangs off the current obsession.
Works if: your child asks 'why' 400 times a day. Watch out for: the subjects that never come up on their own
Type 3
The out-and-about one
Forest school Monday, museum Tuesday, home-ed group Thursday. The car is the classroom and the county is the curriculum.
Type 4
The mix-and-match one
Structured mornings, project afternoons, out-and-about whenever it's sunny. Honestly? This is where almost everyone lands.
The thing all 4 share
Every type still needs a spine
Structured or free-range, somebody has to know what year 3 maths actually covers — and what comes next. That's the part styles don't solve.
Style = how your days feel. Spine = what your child actually learns. You need both.
A spine is not a timetable. It is the answer to two questions: what comes next in maths, and have we done enough writing this term. Structured families and free-range families need the same answer; they just deliver it in completely different moods.
Which one are you?
Most families read all four and recognise themselves in two. That is normal, and it shifts with the child, the term and the weather.
What does not shift is the question of sequence. Whatever your style, somebody has to know what comes after fractions and whether the Romans were covered last year. Pick a style for how you want your days to feel, and keep a spine so the years still add up.