UK home education guide
School hours vs home education hours: the real comparison
Updated · 1 min read
None of these sums are complicated. That is what makes them uncomfortable: anybody can do them in a minute on their phone.
Parents who do them stop waiting for September. Sum #3 made me start building.
Sum #1 · your actual time with them
You get 18 summers. School books…
Six hours of every weekday, age 5 to 16. The holidays are the leftovers.
13
of your eighteen, spoken for
Sum #2 · the six-hour myth
The school day, audited
The conversation every home-ed parent has eventually:
How do you fit a whole school day into a morning??
Much of a 6-hour day goes on registers, queues and transitions rather than teaching. Queues, registers, waiting for 30 kids to settle.
We just skip the queue.
Sum #3 · the one that stings
30 kids, one teacher. Your child's share
Divide the attention in any classroom. That's a whole school day.
12 min
a kitchen table beats it before 9am
Twelve minutes is not a criticism of teachers. It is what one adult divided by thirty children comes to, before the register, the settling and the tidying up. A kitchen table beats it before nine in the morning without trying.
Sum #4 · you'd be joining, not jumping
126,000 kids already learn at home
The Department for Education's own count — up 13% in one year. Their parents did these sums and stopped waiting for the system to change.
Sum #5 · the whole exit, honestly
Leaving school = one letter
The short version:
- Write ten lines to the head teacher (no permission needed)
- Child comes off the roll — legal the same day
- No panel, no inspection, no waiting for September
- Then one job left: what to teach, every day, for years
What the numbers add up to
Do the sums and the case stops being ideological. Time with your own children is finite, a school day contains far less teaching than it contains hours, and leaving is one letter.
What the sums do not do is teach anybody anything. Once you have done them, the only question left is what your child would do all day instead, and that one takes actual work to answer.