Thoughts on home education from my 22 year old son

You may wonder what happens to children once they finish home education.  My two eldest went on to Sixth form college, university then employment.  I still have four children at home, aged 10-16 years old and we work towards IGCSEs.  At 16, we consider the options available according to each child's interests and needs.

I asked my 22 year old son if he would shoot from the hip and write a post on home education.  Whatever take he wanted would be fine - I would publish it unedited.  He has trained as an actor but he is currently working in a call centre in London and going for auditions in between times.

I hope I may be able to tease more posts out of him in the coming months but here is the first...

So I went to school until I was 10 years old.  When I was a kid, I certainly seemed to have a bit of an Alpha-Male complex!  For some reason, from the age of 4 until 9, I had it in my head that I was just amazing when I was with my classmates.  However,  my family moved house to a different town so I had to start fresh in a new school.  I went into that school with the same complex, and to be honest I kind of got what I deserved.  I wasn’t popular at all in the new school and I definitely became quite unhappy.  My big sister, for other reasons, wasn’t fitting in at her new school either. 

I think after several weeks of me coming home complaining about school eventually pushed my Mum to start looking at alternatives for me.  We looked at other schools in the area, slightly smaller ones where I may fit in a little more and be a bit happier.  However, nothing seemed to really fit. 

Then my mum and step-dad started looking into home-ed.  I had no idea what it meant, other than the fact I would never have to go to school again!  Seriously, ask any 10 year old boy if he never wants to go to school again, and probably 8 times out of 10, they will shout “hell yeah!”  

My home-ed experience certainly made me who I am today.  I was very lucky to have essentially four parents, my step-parents included, who are all very intelligent, in different fields!  My Dad is an accountant, so he is fantastic with numbers, my Mum’s versatility and ability to turn her hand to anything is invaluable, my step-dad has a huge creative flair and a brilliant ability with drama and creative writing (as well as having a biology degree), and my step-mum has a fantastic business mind.  So in this respect, I was incredibly lucky, even though now I am 22 I can still just about retain a little of all the stuff we covered in those years!  

Something else that benefitted me hugely in the 6 years I was home-taught, is the fact that we used to go travelling all around Europe in a motorhome.  I must admit, after the first couple of tours around France and Spain, the novelty did begin to wear off.  When I hit the age of 14, I began yearning to be able to have the opportunity to socialise with people my own age.  Because of all the travelling, it limited my chances to become more involved in the social clubs that I wanted to be a part of more, the football teams and the drama clubs.  Both of these were huge passions of mine, and I became ever more frustrated with our frequent excursions out of the country.  

However, looking back at that period of my life, I don’t regret any of it.  At the time I was going through a tough age and I guess my natural instinct to was rebel against my parents.  Truth is, travelling in a motorhome, meeting so many different people along the way really did broaden my mind.  Forgive me if this does sound a little pretentious, but I now have the ability to see a wider picture and I put that down hugely to being so close to my family whilst experiencing so many adventures on our travels.  Yes, because I barely saw people my own age when growing up, it did perhaps hinder my social skills (especially with women!) when I began college, however I think I have finally learnt now…although I am still a little useless with women ha.

In summary, home education is not just about what grades you want your child to get.  Grades come with natural intelligence I believe.  If you are thinking about teaching your children at home, just to get them better grades and GCSEs, then I firmly believe you are doing it for the wrong reasons.  However if you want to do it to broaden your child’s horizons as a person, and you feel like you can offer them the outlets and those experiences that they wouldn’t get if they were at school, you should certainly, certainly consider it.

Home education and a career in drama

The blog has been a bit quiet as we have been off travelling in the trusty motorhome.  It has been a while since we made a trip and it was great to bring the family closer together again.

One leg of the trip was to see Leo (now 22 years old) perform in an adaptation of "Great Expectations" in Bath.  He has been studying Performing Arts - Acting for three years and this was his final performance piece. It was a brilliant production and I felt all those lovely maternal feelings of pride and amazement of how the little boy has become the young man.

Consequently, I thought it may be helpful to others to chart Leo's education/home education path and a few of the issues we have dealt with along the way.  In HE, you just want your children to be happy and to do what makes them happy.  If they can find a career in those fields when they are older, you feel that is where they are more likely to find contentment in life.

Leo went to school until he was 10 years old and we made the decision to jump ship.  We were becoming increasingly dissatisfied with schools' striving for league table positions skewing the whole notion of an education.  Leo had always been an extrovert and a showman.  He had always exuded a strong presence in any situation.  When he started attending a drama outreach group run by a local theatre, he came into his own.

Our then extensive travels meant that he could rarely be part of any production but he always loved drama club.  After attaining seven IGCSEs and at age 16, we tried to direct him away from drama toward something "sensible that he could always fall back on" and to leave the drama as a hobby.  He went to Sixth Form College and did his AS year studying Maths, Further Maths, Psychology and Performance studies.  He also joined the college's own theatre company.  It became very apparent where his interests lay and this showed in his AS results.

At this point, we agreed that he could switch course to the BTEC Diploma in Performing Arts - Acting.  It was a two year course that was the equivalent of three A levels and was purely assessment based - written and performed.  He thrived on it although it also presented challenges by way of the fact that he was always with the same people in class.

The next stage was to apply to drama colleges.  These are notoriously difficult to get in to if you want to study acting.  He had three interviews and two call-backs but unfortunately did not make the cut.  However, he applied to universities where the courses more or less matched the content of the drama colleges and accepted a place at Bath Spa University.  Uni life has occasionally been pretty tough on him and has presented financial challenges he did not foresee. But it has also been fun and he has made good friends.

In 2011 he auditioned for the National Youth Theatre and succeeded in gaining a place on one of their summer schools.  He has subsequently auditioned for other NYT productions and projects and was part of the show to welcome athletes to the Olympic Village in London 2012.  He has been to Saudi Arabia on a special project and is going to be assisting in running one of the summer schools like the one he originally attended.  He also has a call-back for a production.

In addition to innumerable productions on his course, he worked with the RSC production of "Dunsinane" where he played Lady Macbeth's son.

He came close to getting a role in a film being shot in Jordan recently but had to decline it as he had not yet finished his uni course.  His aim for the next year is to build up some funds through casual/retail jobs and then to put his energies into finding roles in London and further afield.

Though I will always be concerned that a job in the arts does not bring in a regular and secure income (very familiar with that one personally!) I feel that he should follow his heart and use the skills he has been blessed with.  Who knows where the journey will take him.

I may well ask him to write a guest post...