The start of a new journey...
As parents we have sat on the fence about Home education for some time. It's always been convenient to send our kids to school so we can work and attend to other tasks. This year when it was the school enrollment week we were already anxious and nervous about it and had also consider Gaelic medium school for our 5 year old daughter but as we were finding it difficult to decide it was suggested to put in an application for mainstream to secure a place in the school which could always be transferred over at a later date. However 2020 has been a bit of a strange year where life for most has been paused with the restriction put in place due to covid.
2020 has been a very strange time to be living in for all of us including our children.
With life put on hold we never got the chance to look into or try Gaelic Medium. Summer flew past and we had landed at the start of term. Off she went, our little girl all excited to be getting some sort of normal routine back and be able to see her friends and teachers again. I was also excited at the thought that after all these months of restrictions and having kids at home, I would be finally getting some time to do more, some sort of routine and some sort of normality back in our life.
The first couple weeks of term were obviously going to be a settling in period with a few teething problems however the whole situation, guidelines and new normal just hasn't settled well with us. So after much discussion and debate we made the huge decision and felt it was the right time to embrace the challenge to provide our daughters education ourselves and made the first step of contacting my daughter's school Head teacher and Local Education Authority.
The process in Scotland is slightly different than in England. I'm not that well versed in the different laws so I'm not going to go into any detail but ensure you research the withdrawal process appropriate for your area/region. So far, so good. We wrote an email to our local authority requesting to withdraw our daughter with a brief outline of how we propose to educate her, within a couple days we then had a short phone call to discuss our application further. The application is then passed on to a Manager to complete the application and approve. Now we just have to wait for confirmation and we are good to go.
I've started this blog so we can keep a record of our Home Ed journey and share it with you. I'll add links and useful resources and ideas as I find and use them or for later use, which will also help keep me organised and motivated in our journey.
In the meantime we are learning through enjoying a slightly slower pace of life, taking in the end of summer as the season starts to change and exploring nature.
Take Care xx
