NB. Each country has its own rules, regulations and laws for home education: this website approaches homeschooling from a UK perspective.
These are the questions about that come up most often. Answered clearly & honestly, because the internet has a habit of making home education sound either terrifyingly complicated or utopically simple, and it’s neither.
Is home education legal in the UK?
Yes. UK legislation requires all children to receive an education appropriate to their age, ability and aptitude, but it doesn’t specify that this has to happen in a school. Parents have the legal right to provide that education themselves. There’s no required number of hours — government guidance suggests schools aim for 32.5 hours a week, but that guidance applies to schools, not to home educators.
Are home educators inspected?
Not currently in the way schools are. Your local authority may make contact to satisfy itself that your children are being educated, and it’s sensible to keep some record of learning for this reason — a portfolio of work, a simple log, anything that demonstrates you’re doing what you say you’re doing. (If you want some help with this, I’ve shared the Evidence of Education report we use here.)
Note: The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill has now completed its passage through both Houses of Parliament and is in the final ping-pong stage between Commons and Lords as of April 2026, with Royal Assent expected shortly. When passed, it will introduce compulsory registration of home-educated children with local authorities, and some families — those classed as “relevant children” — will need local authority consent before deregistering from school. However, the practical details (what information you’ll need to provide, how visits will work, timelines) won’t be confirmed until secondary legislation and statutory guidance are consulted on and published after Royal Assent. The earliest these measures are likely to come into force is late 2026. Check current guidance at edyourself.org for the most up-to-date picture.
Do you have to follow the National Curriculum?
No. The National Curriculum is available online and is a useful reference point, but it’s not binding for home educators. Most of us use it as a guide rather than a prescription — particularly for core subjects — and build from there based on what our children actually need.
What records do you need to keep?
Legally, none are mandated as of April 2026: see note on changing law above. In practice, keeping records is worth doing (even if not mandated), both because it gives you something to show a local authority if they ever ask, and because tracking progress is genuinely useful for you as an educator. A portfolio of work, a simple log of topics covered, samples of writing across the year. Nothing elaborate, just proof that learning happens often. If you want a formula to follow, you can download the template we use to collect evidence of education here.
Do you have to school 9 to 3?
No. Home education lets you make schooling fit your family rather than the other way around. One-to-one teaching is significantly more time-efficient than classroom teaching — a concept that takes forty minutes to explain to thirty children can be covered in ten minutes with one. Most home-educating families find they need fewer hours than they expect to cover the same ground.
Is home education expensive?
It can be, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s possible to home-educate on a very small budget using library books, free online resources, and materials you already have. It’s also possible to spend a great deal on curricula, resources, and tutors. Setting a budget early — before you start buying — is one of the more useful things you can do in the planning stage. The concrete costs of home-educating occur with exams and qualifications: ranging from £30-80 for music exams or online interest-specific-course qualifications, to £300 at the higher end of the GCSE scale.
How do home-educated children get qualifications?
GCSEs and A-levels are available to home-educated students, usually taken as external candidates at a registered exam centre. Most home educators take IGCSEs (International GCSEs), which are available to private candidates. Costs vary but expect to pay somewhere between £100 and £300 per exam. Functional Skills qualifications and BTEC vocational courses are also options if standard GCSEs don’t fit your child’s learning profile or goals. Your child could skip exams entirely if a different path is more suitable for them: the choice is yours.
Can home-educated students go to university?
Yes. UK universities accept applications through UCAS for home-educated students: the difference is that without the school reference, home-ed applicants need to source references independently — not as hard as it sounds. Some universities have specific guidance or alternative entry routes for home-educated applicants, so it’s worth checking individual admissions policies for courses your child is interested in.
Foreign universities are also an option for home-educated children, and one that is increasing in popularity. Applications for foreign universities often place weight behind portfolios of work as well as exam results, which can be beneficial for home-educated students who have focused on interest-led study.
Is homeschooling hard?
Yes and no — which is probably the honest answer to most questions about parenting. The days when it works are genuinely wonderful. The days when it doesn’t are genuinely hard. What changes is your tolerance for both, and your ability to tell the difference between a difficult day and a sign that something needs to change with how your homeschool is running. Most difficult days are just difficult days.
Can you work and home educate at the same time?
Some people do, and it depends heavily on the age of your children, your work pattern, and the style of home education you’re following. One-to-one teaching takes less time than classroom teaching, and not all home education requires parental input all day — independent work, online courses, and project-based learning can all run alongside a work schedule with some planning. Lockdown-style WFH-plus-homeschool was not representative of what real home education looks like; don’t use that experience as your benchmark.
Can you stop home educating?
Yes. There’s no obligation to continue. Children can be enrolled in school at any time, and natural transition points — the start of secondary school, the GCSE years — tend to make the move easier. We keep a rough sense of where our home learners sit relative to their year group in core subjects, specifically so that if they ever needed or wanted to move into school, the adjustment would be manageable rather than overwhelming.
What if my child has already started school — can I still switch to home education?
Yes, and it’s increasingly common. To withdraw a child from school you send a deregistration letter to the headteacher — the school must comply. After that, it’s generally worth building in a deschooling period before starting formal home education. Deschooling is a period of time for both you and your child to decompress from the school system before building something different.
Do I need to be a qualified teacher?
No. There is no legal requirement for home-educating parents to hold any teaching qualification. What you need is a willingness to find out what your child doesn’t know, and a reasonable ability to help them learn it — or to find someone who can.
Most home-educating parents are not teachers. What they are is attentive to one specific child, which turns out to be more useful than formal training in managing a classroom of thirty. The things you genuinely can’t teach — a subject that’s beyond your knowledge, a specialism at exam level — can be outsourced to tutors, online courses, or group-learning with other home-educating families. Nobody teaches everything themselves.
The question underneath this one is usually: but am I enough? That’s harder to answer in an FAQ, but ten years in, the honest answer is that most parents who ask that question are more than capable. Rephrase the question from ‘Can I teach this?’ to ‘Can I facilitate this?’ and the answer is probably yes — even on days when it doesn’t feel like it.
What if my child has SEN or additional needs?
Home education is often a good fit for neurodiverse children precisely because the variables that can’t be adjusted in a school — sensory environment, pace, structure, social pressure — are largely within your control at home. The curriculum can be built around how your child actually learns, supporting their needs, rather than them being expected to adapt. It’s not without its challenges, and getting the right frameworks, routines and support in place takes work, but for many families with neurodiverse children and/or SEN, home education is the schooling option that finally makes learning feel possible.
