UK home education guide
Home educating as a dad: making it work around a job
Updated · 1 min read
Home education in the UK still gets written about as though only mothers do it. Plenty of dads are in it, and they tend to be in it in one of four ways.
The mums get the Instagram accounts. The dads get this. Tag yourself — I'll go first.
The 4 kinds of home-ed dads — tag yourself. (I'm unashamedly type 1.) The dads never get the spotlight in home ed, so here it is.
Type 1
The researcher
Forty tabs, a spreadsheet, a strong opinion on curriculum sequencing. Has read the law twice. (Hello, it's me.)
Signs: cites the Education Act at dinner. Owns a comparison spreadsheet. Two years of bookmarks.
Type 2
The weekend scientist
Monday-to-Friday is the other parent's shift; Saturday is volcanoes, rockets and 'careful, that's hot'. The kids' favourite lesson of the week.
Type 3
The reluctant convert
'They need proper school' — six months later he's the one bragging at work about his kid's reading age. The fiercest advocate once flipped.
Type 4
The quiet engine
Does the driving, the printing, the museum memberships and the difficult phone calls. Never posts about it. Holds the whole thing up.
The quiet engine is the most common type and the least visible. Driving, printing, paying for the museum membership and taking the awkward phone calls is not support work. It is half the operation.
All four dads agree
The planning is the hard bit
Whichever type you are, somebody's evening disappears into deciding what tomorrow looks like. That's the part I ended up building for.
Whichever one you are
The type matters less than the split. Home ed goes wrong when one parent silently owns everything, and it goes well when both know exactly which parts are theirs.
Divide it properly, once, out loud: who teaches, who drives, who answers the council letter, and who decides what next week contains. That last job is the one most families forget to give to anybody.