For parents who’ve decided to educate their children at home, that decision, big as it is, can often be the easiest part of the process – the tricky part is figuring out HOW to do it! What is a home education curriculum? What will home learners study? In the UK, home education curriculums are defined, curated and facilitatated by home educators – so how do you go about doing all of that?
Define the Curriculum for Your Homeschool
(N.B. Curriculum can be used to refer to the schoolwork a learner will cover over a period of time: Curriculum is used here to refer to the overall education – academic, skill-based and interest-focused – that a home-educated child will receive.)
Home educators have a lot of flexibility to choose the curriculum that is right for their child. In the UK, home educators have complete freedom to choose the curriculum their homeschoolers follow; the education homeschooled pupils receive.
As a parent, this is both wonderfully freeing and incredibly daunting: You have the option to tailor your child’s education to their skills and interests, but also have ultimate responsibility for the education they will receive. As a home educator, these choices can feel overwhelming.
It can be helpful to break down the process into a series of questions that can refine your definition of education and, from that, a homeschool curriculum.
Q1: Does the curriculum need to meet a specific need?
Long-Term Home-Ed
If your purpose is to home-educate throughout your child’s schooling, the goal will be helping your children ‘graduate’ homeschool with qualifications (of some sort) that will enable them to take the path to independence afterwards – be it to further education or work. In this case, homeschooling would lead to GCSEs/equivalent exams and the curriculum ‘need’ would be to provide a complete education ages 4-16.
Short-Term Homeschooling
Home education doesn’t always have a long-term goal. Home-ed might be a stop-gap solution between schools (eg. after a house move), or because of family circumstances (eg. relocating abroad for a period of time). In such cases, the curriculum need would be to keep learners on track with their peers and engaged with learning.
Home Education to Delay School Entry
Lots of families home-educate until secondary school to delay the start of formal education, supporting a play-led learning environment for primary school years, focusing on the child’s academic strengths (home-ed during early years is a common choice for ‘gifted’ children), or providing extra support to pupils whose academic development might be slower comparatively to schools’ age/ability expectations (eg. delayed readers).
Children who will transition from homeschooling through primary years to secondary school in a school setting need to be academically on track to keep up with the school curriculum. The curriculum need would be teaching home learners the academic curriculum covered in Year 6 SATs.
Parents who wish home learners to sit the 11+ exam before weighing up secondary school options must ensure the curriculum covers academics in a way that prepares home learners for the exam. In such a situation, the educational need to be met would be ensuring the curriculum includes plenty of practice with verbal and non-verbal reasoning skills – great to include in any primary education; vital to prospective 11+ pupils.
N.B If home education has become your family’s education choice because of traditional schooling having failed your children in some way, don’t worry about the long-term plan initially. Homeschooling is daunting even for parents who actively choose to home-educate; if you’ve found the choice thrust upon you, it’s natural to feel overwhelmed.
Take some time out to help your children reignite a curiosity for learning and plan a curriculum/educational road-map later, when your child is once again a happy, engaged learner. If you feel your family has been forced into choosing home education, this post might be useful.
Q2: Which Subjects to Study in Homeschool?
With the long-term goal defined, the first step in planning a homeschool curriculum is deciding which subjects home learners will study.
What do you define as core curriculum? Which subjects will always be scheduled into a homeschool timetable, form part of a daily/weekly learning schedule and be non-negotiable on a home-ed contract?
Early Primary (0-7)
For young learners, learning to read and write + basic numeracy (counting, times tables, basic addition/subtraction, shapes etc) is the cornerstone of education.
Focusing on these skills, though play & practice, and giving them a strong base of general knowledge – covering science, geography, art et al – sets them on track to progress later on in their education.
Upper Primary (7-11)
English, Maths, Science are core subjects for primary school-aged children.
What else the curriculum needs to cover ages 7-11 depends on your long-term education goal (eg. 11+ exams/long-term home education etc).
We approach home education as a series of academic building blocks, which I explain in more detail here, and focus on expanding general knowledge, developing skills and encouraging curiosity during primary school home-ed.
Secondary School (11+)
Curating a home education curriculum for secondary school can be daunting. Building on the (globally recognised) core academic subjects (Maths, English, Science) is the logical step – but what else do homeschoolers need to learn?
A good place to start is looking at the UK government’s framework for national curriculum. For secondary school, the recommended list of core subjects is Maths, English, Science, History/Geography and a Foreign Language – collectively known as the Ebacc.
The beauty of homeschooling though, is that a curriculum can include more than, or utterly redefine, core curriculum. Home education allows you to tailor an education to your children’s academic strengths, to nurture their talents and to follow and encourage their interests.
If your child is a whizz with computers, swapping geography lessons for coding courses might be a more productive choice. If they are drawn to art, a history curriculum that focuses on the history of art might be a more engaging learning path than one that follows the timelines of European history.
Being clear in your own mind about what, why (and how) home-learners study is really beneficial when planning a home-ed curriculum.
Q3: Which topics will each subject study include?
Once you know which subjects home-learners will be studying, find a list of topics that are necessary to cover to cover within that subject to meet the long-term home education goal – i.e If GCSE maths is the goal, which mathematics topics must home-learners know to succeed in the exam?
Again, the easiest place to start is with the governments national curriculum guidance. This page lists the programmes of study for each subject for both primary and secondary school curriculum. By going through the programmes of study for each subject, you can make a list of each topic that home learners must learn.
Education in schools follows a strict teaching order to ensure all necessary subject topics are covered within the time-frames of terms/years. Home education can take a less linear approach to teaching subjects. Preparing topic lists is a good way to allow your homeschool flexibility to follow learners interests while ensuring they stay on track with the home-ed goals – simply use a master list of topics and let the learners choose which order to study them in!
Some students like to *understand it all* before moving onto the next topic. So if, for example, a pupil wants to move onto KS3 geometry before starting KS2 measurements, there’s no harm in following their interest as long as you circle back round to ‘missed’ topics.
Caveat: Some topics must follow after others for comprehensions sake – i.e. if a pupil is working at KS3 level for physics, having missed topics in KS2 maths might cause problems. Again, having a topic list helps cross-referencing cross-over subject topics.
Q3: How much time to allocate to each topic/subject?
There are no rules around how many hours you must home educate for. If you take the recommended school contact hours as a guide, it works out at around 6 hours of lessons a day, 32hours a week. From that 32 hours, schools on average provide 4-6 hours of Maths and English lessons, 3-6 for Science, with all other subjects being allocated 1/2 hours of teaching time per week.
Remember, however, that receiving an education at home is drastically different to receiving an education in school. In a class of 30, lessons take much longer to teach than in a homeschool environment. Because of this, home learners are often able to complete the recommended subject topics in a shorter time frame than they would in a classroom setting.
We’ve found that lesson plans intended to cover a 1 hour lesson take around 40-45 in a home-ed classroom.
That means, if you were to allocate 5 hours a day to learning in your homeschool, and one hour a day for the core subjects, Maths, English, Science, your child would receive the same amount of ‘learning time’ as their peers.
With the extra time, home learners are able to either complete courses quicker, or study additional topics of interest.
(You can read about the homeschool timetable we use here and the pros and cons of term-time/year-round/seasonal schooling here.)
N.B. The UK government is currently discussing the regulations around home education (including a home education registry parents would be obliged to sign) and it may well be that rules governing how many hours of education are required to satisfy a home education are brought in. Before starting to educate your children at home it’s advisable to check current laws.
Q4: How will they follow the curriculum?
Choosing to home educate doesn’t automatically make you your child’s teacher. It can! And often does, but it needn’t. A home educator’s job is to facilitate an education for their child. That education can be provided by the home educator in the role of teacher, yes, but it can also be provided via
- online school
- tutors (online/offline)
- courses (online/offline)
Many older home-educated children can, with guidance & support, learn independently from textbooks/digital resources.
If you don’t want to teach – don’t. You can still home-educate your children!
But if you are going to be your child’s teacher, think about how lessons will be taught…
Will you use online resources to help you prepare/teach lessons, or will you use textbooks? Are you happy to use online resources in the classroom or would you prefer home learners to follow an offline curriculum?
In our homeschool, we use a mixture of online/offline curriculum resources. When lesson planning, using the topic lists mentioned above, I start from textbooks and supplement with online curriculum where necessary/beneficial. There’s a list of the online resources frequently used here.
For our homeschoolers, the majority of lessons begin offline even if the resources have come from an online source. This reduces the amount of screen-time in their daily routine, studies have shown that comprehension increases substantially when we read in print compared to digital texts – something we’ve found to be true with our homeschoolers.
For textbooks – a good idea to have on hand for reference purposes even if your main curriculum is online – try out a few different textbooks and see which suits your home learner best. Textbooks to use as teaching resources don’t need to be the latest edition, so picking up second-hand copies from different publishers is a cost-efficient way to figure out which learning style works best for your homeschooler.
N.B When teaching to exams it is important that the textbooks used by home learners are current textbooks that align with the exam board curriculum – before purchasing textbooks for (eg.) GCSE subjects, find out which exam board will be setting the GCSE exams your home learner will sit. The difference between exam boards is in the assessment methods (eg. long/short answers) and the focus study areas, so it is important that homeschooled GCSE candidates study from the corresponding textbook.
If, as is common, your home learner will sit IGCSE exams, the exam boards will be either Cambridge Assessment International Education (CAIE) or Pearson Edexcel.
Before purchasing textbooks for a home-educated GCSE study path, contact your local assessment centre and confirm which exam board curriculum your homeschooler will need to know. You can find a list of (UK-based) exam centres which accept private I/GCSE candidates here. International exam centres tend to function out of local private schools.