I’m going to say this upfront, so nobody feels lied to halfway through: this post does not contain an inspiring origin story, a five‑step guide, or a confident woman standing at the top of a hill proclaiming she has cracked parenting forever. This is not that; this is the slightly frazzled, real explanation of why we’re home educating and how it’s actually going, written from the middle of the journey, not the end.

Also, if you’re looking for productivity porn or colour‑coded schedules, I regret to inform you that you are in the wrong place. Please exit calmly and enjoy Pinterest, there is none of that here either sorry.

Right, expectations should now appropriately low.

The question “Why did you decide to home educate?”, comes up constantly; from family to begin with, from friends, from strangers, from people who ask it as they’re genuinely curious and don’t know much about it, and from people who ask it like they’re waiting for us to slip up so they can gently suggest school “might be better.” And for a long time, I didn’t know how to answer without either over‑explaining our decision and why it was the best for W, or feeling like I had to justify our entire existence.

We didn’t always plan to do this, it just happened but the pieces sort of slowly built up over time. We didn’t sit there when W was a baby, smugly thinking we’d outsmarted the system. She was enrolled in nursery and primary school when she was of age. We bought the uniform, shoes, Paw Patrol (and other characters or Smiggle) backpacks and all of the little containers for packed lunch. I cried over tiny jumpers like a normal, emotionally fragile adult watching my not-so-tiny baby become more independant in her school life. For a while, school was… fine. Not amazing, not awful. Just fine in that slightly numbing, low‑level stressful way that you convince yourself is normal because everyone else seems to be coping and maybe it was just me. She enjoyed school for the first couple of years, yes there was issues but nothing a stompy Mama Bear couldn’t deal with.

But slowly, something started to feel off and all the sugar coating turned sour.

Not in a dramatic, pull‑her‑out‑immediately kind of way. More in a constant background hum of discomfort, that dread that sits in your stomach at the thought of sending her back into the fray. Our child was exhausted in a way that didn’t make sense for her age, bone tired weary. Weekends weren’t joyful; they were recovery periods for all of us! Holidays were never long enough and were spent undoing the emotional fallout of term time. There was this sense that so much energy was being used just to get through the day that there was very little left for actual learning or joy.

Outside of school, we had this bright, funny, imaginative human who asked a million questions (her catchphrase was “did you know?”) and wanted to tell you every thought she’d ever had. Inside school, that version slowly faded as she masked to fit in. And the hardest part was that nothing was technically “wrong enough” to warrant alarm bells, she was seen as just being a little bit overly sensitive and extremely bright so she’ll “toughen up”. Which is exactly why it took us so long to trust our instincts, it was always a “maybe it will get better” sort of thing.

The turning point wasn’t one big moment itself, the pandemic and lockdown did help us realise that something had to change as she blossomed with learning at home then. To the point that she was drawing diagrams of T and B cells (which I had to Google..) and whipping out her microscope and slides to try “assist” scientists and doctors. The slides were just of vegetation and cloth but we appreciated her enthusiasm! When the signal to return to school came it was a series of small moments of the dread on Sunday evenings and the tears over things that felt disproportionate. The way that she started shrinking herself to fit in again. And eventually, the question we couldn’t un‑ask: if this were a workplace, would we tell an adult to just push through?

The answer was no.

So we stopped asking a child to do it. We did decide that there was 2 options, change to another school that was highly thought of, or home education. We did decide to opt to try a different school and W was perfectly happy and fine for the first year she attended, we thought we had cracked it! And then the bullying resumed in other ways. She started becoming a shell of herself again. We had been there, done that, and we weren’t willing to put her through it all again when all we had before was broken promises. Our decision to worldschool also came into the mix so at the mid point of Primary 6 we removed her in favour of home education.

Choosing home education wasn’t about rejecting school as a concept as we know it works wonderfully for a lot of children. It wasn’t about thinking we could do it “better.” It was about recognising that what works brilliantly for some children was actively draining ours. And once you see that clearly, it’s very hard to ignore.

One of the biggest things we’ve learned since stepping away from school is just how much learning happens when you stop forcing it into rigid boxes or having a check list. Without the constant pressure of keeping up, ticking boxes, or performing understanding on demand, curiosity started to come back. Slowly at first, like a cautious animal poking its head out after a heavy storm or winter. Then with enthusiasm to persue what she liked and wanted to know about.

Home education, for us, has meant giving learning room to breathe and grow. Letting questions spiral and fall down rabbit holes of research. Letting a random comment at breakfast derail the entire day because suddenly we need to know everything about volcanoes or WW2 or how money actually works in different countries. And yes, sometimes that means we don’t “get through” what we planned; but what we gain instead is depth, engagement, and learning that actually sticks because she is interested in it. There has been many times I’ve checked what she’s been reading and it ends up being Higher level (remember we’re in Scotland) work aimed at 16 year olds! Purely as it is a topic that she is interested in.

People love to imagine home education as either total chaos or a perfectly curated Instagram reel. The reality is far less aesthetic and far more human, messy and imperfect. Most days start slowly, not because we’re lazy or disorganised, but because connection matters more to us than clock‑watching. We talk, we eat, we exist without immediately demanding productivity whilst our brains haven’t even warmed up. Once everyone is regulated and fed (a genuinely underrated educational strategy) we ease into learning.

What that learning looks like changes daily and sometimes even if something is planned but we don’t feel up to it that day we will switch things about and come back to it later. Sometimes it’s sitting together reading, sometimes she studies as I study, sometimes she does math skills as I write for my degree. Sometimes it’s maths that accidentally turns into a conversation about shops and money and why everything is so expensive. Or meal planning for a week and using online shopping to work out budgeting and then discussing different food groups or the origins of food, or what people ate after WW2 for rations. Sometimes it’s absolutely nothing on paper at all, and yet somehow a huge amount has still happened.

One of the biggest mindset shifts has been letting go of the idea that everything needs to happen every day. It doesn’t, and forcing it usually backfires. Some days are maths‑heavy, some days are all reading and talking or watching documentaries about Fukushima as she’s learning about nuclear disasters and how they happened, how people and society flourished after it etc. Some days are emotionally heavy and we do little formal learning because that’s what’s needed that day. Over time, it balances out in a way that feels far more natural than any timetable ever did. Learning doesn’t switch off just because you’re not holding a pencil.

As for what’s working right now, we’ve found the biggest thing is following interest without trying to control it too tightly. When something captures W’s attention, we lean in instead of redirecting. We find books, watch videos, talk about it endlessly, connect it to other things, which ends up leading to another rabbit hole she might fall down in future. Motivation does half the work for you when it’s genuine, you don’t need rewards or pressure; you just need permission to go deep.

Letting go of comparison has been the hardest and most freeing part of this whole thing; not comparing to schooled peers, not comparing to other home educators, not comparing to families online who appear to have unlocked some secret level of organisation I will never reach. Focusing on our child, her interests, her growth and her progress is the only thing that matters.

This isn’t to say home education is easy. It’s not. You don’t get to outsource the hard bits or the stuff you don’t quite understand and need to learn yourself too. When emotions are big, you’re right there in it. There are days full of doubt where you wonder if you’re doing enough or too much or completely the wrong thing. There’s a lot of unlearning involved; school timelines, productivity guilt, the idea that learning has to look a certain way to count.

But there’s also so much connection. So many moments where you realise your child feels safe enough to be fully themselves, even on the hard days. And that feels like a trade‑off I’m willing to make. I will never forget the first time I heard W laugh when we started home education. She had lost her spark and it slowly came back to her.

And yes, because someone always asks: our child is socialised, she has friends, she interacts with people of different ages, she is learning how to exist in the world by actually being in it. Socialisation isn’t a building, you can’t only socialise in a school situation, it’s a skill that happens all the time, across all ages and in different places. The other point that a lot of people ask is, “what about exams?” And they ask this to someone who is studying for their degree… online. Hm. Well, for one you can do exams online through different systems, some can be taken early or spread them out, or even skip exams and go straight to online university such as the OU! In a time when we have information at our fingertips it is even easier to get an education online. But she is 12, we have many years of learning to do first and then, once she is older, we can decide what path she would like to take.

If you’re reading this because you’re considering home education, or already in it and quietly panicking that you’re doing it wrong, here’s what I wish I’d known earlier: you don’t need to have everything figured out. You’re allowed to change your mind. Bad days don’t mean failure. Rest is not wasted time. And learning is so much bigger than worksheets.

We’re all just figuring it out as we go and this is just what it looks like for us, right now.