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.
Guilty on all counts

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.

The planning is the part that does not solve itself

StudyDen plans the year so your evenings stop going on deciding what comes next. Years 1 to 6 are live, sequenced week by week on Oak National Academy’s lessons, with a record the parent can actually show. Music is the one national curriculum subject this plan does not carry. Everything else runs Year 1 to Year 6, apart from critical thinking, which starts in Year 2, and computing and French, which start in Year 3.

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Read next

Your first month of home education: do this, not that

The month that decides whether it sticks — and the mistakes almost everyone makes in it.

Your first week of home education: a day-by-day plan

The week's only job is settling in. Here's a plan you can steal day by day.

What a home education day actually looks like, hour by hour

Not the Instagram version — a normal Tuesday, hour by hour, in a normal UK house.

The two longer guides

Deregistering from school sets out the law, the timing and a letter you can copy. For the sceptic at your table answers the relative who thinks you are winging it. Neither needs an account.

Written for families in England unless stated otherwise. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own rules, and a child at a special school follows a different process. Nothing here is legal advice.