‘Can I teach my kids at home?’ is the wrong question if you’re thinking about home education.
The right question is: ‘Can I provide a good education at home?’ And the answer to that, for most parents, is probably yes — because providing an education and being a teacher are not the same thing.
One of the most common reasons parents don’t pursue home education, even when they think it might be right for their child, is the fear of not being qualified. It’s an understandable fear, but it’s based on a specific idea of what education has to look like — one that home education doesn’t have to follow. You don’t need a teaching qualification. You don’t even need to be the one doing the teaching. Your job, as a home-educating parent, is to facilitate a suitable education. How you do that is entirely up to you.
What facilitation actually looks like
Home education is not a single thing. It’s a broad category that contains everything from structured parent-led lessons at the kitchen table to completely child-directed learning with no timetable at all. Most families land somewhere in the middle, and move around within that middle as their children grow and their confidence develops.
Here’s what three different days look like in our house:
A teacher-led day (roughly two or three times a week):
6.30: Preschooler up — snack, book together, settles to playdough and an audiobook 7.30: Wake up teens — everyone out for a 40-minute walk 8.30: Breakfast, showers, laundry on 9.30: Table lesson 1 — dystopian fiction study with teens / preschooler worksheets 10.30: Break for teens / maths with preschooler 11.00: Table lesson 2 — maths with teens / preschooler on Reading Eggs 11.45: Teens on MyGCSEScience / preschooler helps prep lunch 1pm: Lunch, read to preschooler 2.15: Table lesson 3 — AI project study 3.00: Preschooler writing / teens independent study (languages, folder work) 3.30: Garden with preschooler 5.00: Read-aloud
A regular day:
9.30: Table work with me — teens / preschooler worksheets 10.30: Weekly folder independent study for teens / preschooler reading and games 12pm: Lunch prep, housework, check-in/parent-led tutoring for teens 1.00: Lunch + read aloud 2pm: Folder work check-in / preschooler maths, art, games 3.30: Garden, bike ride
And then there are the days that look, from the outside, like nothing much is happening:
6.30: Preschooler up — bike ride and sunrise picnic 7.30: Teen one wakes up energised, picks up the video montage they started the night before 8.00: Teen two reads the news, comes to breakfast with questions about a current event 8.30: Breakfast becomes a conversation — what happened, how, and most importantly why? The preschooler listens. Everyone has opinions. 9.30: Teens follow their threads. One teaches themselves the software as they go, finishes the montage, then researches copyright law for audio usage because they need to know. The other reads further, fact-checks across sources, and settles on an essay topic to make sense of what they’ve found. Preschooler gets a morning with Mum. 11.45: Everyone makes lunch together — and talks about what they did all morning 2.00: Handwriting and a podcast, all three together 3.00: Teens back to weekly folder — maths, science, project work
Into all three kinds of days slot hobby clubs, sport, and whatever else life requires.
On this ‘doesn’t look like school’ day, teen one taught themselves software, encountered a real legal question, and researched the answer because they needed it. Teen two read the news, checked their sources, and wrote something to make sense of it. Nobody planned that morning. That’s not a gap in the timetable — that’s the flexibility of home education in practice. And that breakfast chat? That’s conversational curriculum in action, and it’s one of the things home education can do that school genuinely can’t with a class size of 30+.
(I’ve created a framework to guide you through using Conversational Curriculum with your home-learners. It will help you take a good chat and turn it into a lesson. If you’re interested, grab it here.)
Option 1: You teach them — and you can
If you want to teach your children yourself, you absolutely can. Research consistently shows that whether a home-educating parent has teaching credentials has no notable bearing on their child’s academic outcomes. What matters is engagement, consistency, and a loose plan.
Scaffolded teaching materials do a lot of the heavy lifting here. For every student textbook, there’s usually a teacher’s edition that walks you through how to structure each topic. You don’t need to be an expert: you need to be one chapter ahead and willing to say I don’t know the answer to that. Learning alongside them is not a weakness, it’s one of the genuine advantages of home education. When you’re working through something you don’t fully know — a new language, an unfamiliar period of history — you’re modelling exactly what you want them to do. You’re showing them what active learning looks like, which teaches them something the lesson itself doesn’t cover.
For UK curriculum resources, Twinkl is the easiest starting point for home educators. From KS1-GCSE, Twinkl resources are ready to use — minimal prep, clear progression, built-in accountability. Think of it like having a very organised supply teacher handle the planning.
Option 2: Online school
For children who need the structure of a traditional school day but can’t manage the physical or social environment of a classroom, online school is worth knowing about. Classes are teacher-led, homework is set, progress is monitored.
Two reliable options for UK home educators:
IWS Online School — Cambridge accredited, with three models: full live timetable, hybrid, or self-paced. Covers primary through to A-level.
Oxford Home Schooling — individual subject tuition, tutor-marked assignments, and a printed materials option for families who want to limit screen time. Available from KS3 to A-level.
Option 3: Tutoring and hybrid support
This is where most long-term home educators end up, including us — teaching the subjects you’re confident in, finding support for the ones you’re not, and building in independent study time as your child’s capability grows.
Support doesn’t have to be expensive. Theatre of Science offers brilliant science content free. The 2 Pound Tuition Hub does exactly what it says. AWEUK provides discounts on home-ed resources and experiences that can make a real difference to a budget.
For tutoring when you need it: UK Tutors, Superprof, and First Tutors are reliable starting points for in-person support. For online, MyTutor works well at GCSE level, Preply has a broader subject range, and Enjoy Education specialises in home-educated pupils including SEN support.
Option 4: Unschooling
At the far end of the spectrum is unschooling — handing the curriculum entirely to the child. No subjects, no timetable, no lessons unless the child asks for them. Learning happens through living.
We tried it for a while. It worked until it didn’t — not because the children weren’t learning, but because I needed enough structure to reassure my own parent-teacher brain that we were covering what mattered. Most families who start with unschooling end up somewhere more structured eventually. That’s fine. The point was never ideological purity — it was finding what works for your child.
[If you’re curious about unschooling works in practice, these posts might be of interest: Structured Unschooling and Pre-teens: a Montessori, Unschooling Approach]
Option 5: AI as a teaching tool — for you and them
This one didn’t exist when most home-ed guides were written, and it’s worth taking seriously. Used well, AI can function as a patient, available tutor across almost any subject — explaining concepts multiple ways, adjusting to your child’s level, generating practice questions, working through problems. It doesn’t replace a good teacher, but for plugging gaps, extending capable learners, and supporting independent study it’s genuinely useful and increasingly accessible. (Nb. I understand the reluctance. As a book-led home-ed family, adding extra screens or non-human teaching into their day-to-day reality is something we think carefully about – but honestly, AI can be great in controlled does, with rules. You can read our AI rules for our homeschoolers here.)
Even if you’re reluctant to use AI for tutoring-style lessons for your home-learners, do explore how AI can support you as a home educator. From creating resources to helping scaffold-teach lessons and answering example questions you can’t figure out, AI can act like a backup teacher and save you time and reduce stress.
(If you’d be interested in reading a more in-depth explanation of how you can use AI as a home-ed teacher, sign up for the newsletter so the post reaches you.)
The point underneath all of it
You don’t need to teach to home educate: your job is to facilitate their education. Most home-educating families end up with a combination of approaches that shifts as the child gets older and as you figure out what actually works. The category you start in probably won’t be the category you stay in. It’s perfectly ok to teach some and outsource the rest, outsource it all and supervise, or delegate the entire teaching process to a curriculum system or online school.
Your job isn’t to replicate school. It’s to make sure your child is learning, engaged, and moving forward. There are more ways to do that than the school system would have you believe, and you don’t have to have it figured out before you start.
