At its root, to traditionally educate means to:
- Enable students to read, write & communicate orally – literacy
- Ensure the ability to perform necessary day-to-day tasks – basic numerical skills
- Broaden a student’s knowledge and understanding about the world, the universe and our place in it – science/history/geography.
Curriculums around the world are written with these principles in mind; educational building blocks upon which an education can be built.
The UK curriculum recommends that students sit a minimum of 7 GCSEs:
- English language and literature (2x GCSE)
- Maths (1x GCSE)
- Sciences (2 x GCSE)
- Humanities: Geography or History (1xGCSE)
- A foreign language (1x GCSE)
Collectively these 7 GCSEs are known as the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) and whilst it is an accountability measure used as one of the rating tools for UK schools and not a qualification requirement, it is a good subject list to start from when building a home education curriculum.
The UK government describes the EBacc subjects as ‘a set of subjects at GCSE that keeps young people’s options open for further study and future careers’. For home educators who want their home learners to graduate from home-ed on an academic par with their peers, it’s a useful core subject list to start from and to aim toward.
Home education gives home educators the freedom to define education as anything they want: The freedom is both liberating and terrifying! Using the EBacc as a base level for what our homeschoolers are working towards, frees up our thinking to find liberation in how they can learn and what other ‘education’ home-ed can include. I know that if our home learners can achieve qualifications in these subjects, any extra subjects we focus on in homeschool can be subjects of their choosing, focusing on any specific skill or interest.
When planning what your child’s home education will cover in any specific year, finding ‘schemes of work’ for the school year can help plan which topics need to be covered – If you’re going to use EBacc subjects as your homeschool’s core curriculum, Twinkl‘s schemes of work are an easy way to plan the homeschool year.