The question usually arrives around 3pm on a day when nothing went to plan. The maths got abandoned and the printer wouldn’t print. Someone cried (and it might have been you). The afternoon dissolved into a documentary about deep-sea fish that nobody planned and everyone enjoyed, and somewhere between clearing up and starting dinner, you think: “Does any of this actually count? Is this actually an education? Are we doing this right?”
The short answer is that it almost certainly does, and you probably are. But “almost certainly” and “probably” isn’t very comforting at 3pm, and is even less so at 11pm when the question’s still spinning, so here’s the longer one.
What the law actually requires
The legal standard for home education in England and Wales is that your child receives an efficient, full-time education suitable to their age, ability, and aptitude. That phrase comes from the Education Act 1996, and it has never been defined more precisely than that in statute.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, currently passing through Parliament, introduces a registration requirement for home-educated children in England — but it does not change the legal standard for what counts as a suitable education. That standard remains the same as it has been since 1996. (For a full overview of the current legal position, this post covers the implications of The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill for home education.)
There is no list of subjects. No required hours. No curriculum. The guidance notes that children in school typically have around five hours of tuition a day across 190 days a year; and then explicitly states that home education does not have to mirror this.
What case law adds is one useful clarification: an education is “suitable” if it equips the child for life within the community they’re part of, and doesn’t foreclose their options later. That’s it. Not school-shaped. Not textbook-based. Equips for life. Keeps options open.
Why your ordinary day probably qualifies
The conversation over breakfast that turned into a forty-minute discussion about why countries have borders taught something in a way that the best independent schools do.
The afternoon building a bird table that required measuring and problem-solving and several failed attempts covered maths, engineering, patience and perseverance.
The book read aloud in instalments that led to a question neither of you could answer without looking it up, modelling learning as and when you need to find the answer. The documentary about deep-sea fish sparked an interest that might lead to a project about marine conservation.
None of that looks like school. All of it is education. The standard doesn’t require it to look like school: it requires that the child is learning in a way that’s appropriate for them. Talking, doing and exploring is exactly how people learn.
This is both genuinely liberating and genuinely hard to internalise, because most of us spent years in school ourselves and carry an instinct that education means sitting down, working through something structured, and producing evidence of having done it. That instinct is worth noticing, because it isn’t the legal standard and it isn’t always the most effective way to learn.
The part that trips people up: what counts as full-time
Full-time is the phrase that sends people into a mild panic, because it sounds like it should mean something specific and it doesn’t. There is no hourly requirement for home education. What the guidance says is that education should occupy a significant proportion of the child’s life, and in home education, where the ratio is one adult to one or two children rather than one adult to thirty, one-to-one learning often covers the same ground in considerably less time.
Two hours of focused, individualised work covers more than five hours in a classroom, and that’s before you account for the learning that happens in the rest of the day. The question isn’t whether you’re matching school hours. It’s whether your child is learning consistently, in a way that suits them, across the full range of their education.
When to stop asking the question
The “does this count” anxiety tends to be loudest in the first year, and quietens as the years go by. Not because you’ve stopped caring, but because you’ve accumulated enough evidence in your own mind that the answer is yes — the child is curious, engaged, progressing, capable. The worry about whether today’s learning looks legitimate fades as you watch what the learning is actually producing.
That doesn’t mean the doubt won’t occasionally creep in later (it will, and you need to find ways to assess it and silence it), but if you’re still in the first year, you don’t have accumulated evidence yet and without that proof-to-self that yes, they are learning enough, it’s harder to quieten the doubt on a day when you’ want to give up’re not sure if you’re doing it right.
What you can do that actually helps is keep a loose record. Not a formal log of what was covered on which day, but just enough to remind yourself what they’ve actually done when a hard day 3pm comes round. A note at the end of the week is enough: this week they covered x,y & z. Small things count. Over time, you’ll have something that answers the question not just for yourself, but for anyone who might one day ask it.
The Evidence of Education report template is designed to help you do exactly that: capture a year of home education in a format that makes sense to an outside reader, without requiring your child’s education to look like school. You can download that template here.
One extra reminder
Education is about more than ‘school’. Academics are important, but so too are life skills, confidence, experimental thinking and channelling curiosities. Your child’s development in a non-academic sense is as much an education as the topic lists you’re ticking off. Education does not have to be linear, and there is no race to the finish line.
