Does What We Do Count as a Suitable Education?
It’s a Thursday somewhere in the middle of the first term of your family’s home education journey. The language lesson has just collapsed because you can’t remember the definition of a subordinate clause in English, let alone French. Quantitative chemistry sounds as complicated as quantum mechanics, and you just miscalculated 7 x 8. Education…that’s what you’ve promised to take on. The education of your child. And yet now, in this moment, you can’t recall the basic trigonometry formulas. The questions “Does what we do count as a suitable education? Are we doing this right?” spin in your head.
The short answer is that it almost certainly does, and you probably are. But “almost certainly” and “probably” isn’t very comforting at 3pm when someone (maybe you) is in tears, and is even less so at 11pm when the question’s still spinning, so here’s the longer answer.
In this post
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 Section 7 of the Education Act 1996, and it has never been defined more precisely than that in statute.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, recently passed into law, 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. (For a full overview of the current legal position, this post covers the implications of The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act for home education.)
There is no list of subjects. No required hours. No curriculum. The guidance for Elective Home Education 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. It’s all skills building, directly links back to core curriculum or expanded subject knowledge and is exactly how children learn.
Does it have to look like school?
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 identifying and countering, because it isn’t the legal standard, and it isn’t always the most effective way to learn.
It might be that your child thrives with a structure that mirrors how schools teach — with timed lesson blocks, a predictable lesson schedule and linear learning — but a more flexible approach, with a rhythm instead of a schedule, following their interests and integrating academics into project-based learning is an equally valid way to learn. Suitable to their age, ability, and aptitude: that’s the standard.
What “full-time” actually means
Full-time is often 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. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act does not introduce a mandatory number of hours of learning for Elective Home Education; however, secondary legislation (the small print behind the law, which is yet to be decided) may introduce guidance for parents on how learning must be calculated.
When to stop asking the question
The real answer is that “does this count” is a question that might never fully disappear. Not because you’ll be getting it wrong, but because regularly reassessing exactly what your child is learning, and how, is the main role of a parent-teacher home-educator. The anxiety around the question though —that quietens over time. When you’ve built a portfolio of your children’s work that proves to you, them (and yes, if needed, the local authority) that they are making progress, the question will feel less of a problem and more of a reminder to reassess what they are currently studying, learning and doing with their days. If your child is curious, engaged and progressing, the education they’re receiving is suitable.
If you’re at the start of your home-ed journey and haven’t yet accumulated evidence that proves to yourself that yes, they are learning enough, it’s harder to quieten the doubt on a day when modal verbs are not making sense to anyone.
What actually helps is to keep a loose record. Not a full breakdown of what was covered on which day, but just enough to remind yourself what they’ve actually done when 3pm on a hard day comes round. A note at the end of the week is enough: this week they covered x, y & z. Over time, you’ll have something that answers the question for yourself and also helps you pull together a report for the local authority. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act is expected to ask parents to estimate the amount of time spent learning, so keeping a rough log is enough for both your own peace of mind, and to complete any report secondary legislation introduces.
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. If you’d rather a scaffolded template to fill in and complete in on go, that’s what the home-ed report tool’s for. Fill it in, save, tweak, send.
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.
