According to research, within the first eight months of the current school year the number of children being registered for homeschooling rose in the UK by 75%, with the main reason being due to anxiety around Covid. The Department for Education says it supports parents that are homeschooling and it plans to launch a registration system.
As well as anxiety around the coronavirus, many parents also felt that their child’s learning was regressing due to schools being shut which led to many taking matters into their own hands. The number of parents switching to homeschooling, and removing their children from the school register and notifying the local council, continue to increase.
Many parents see more benefits in their child’s education with long-term homeschooling as opposed to traditional in-school learning. Unlike face-to-face teaching, homeschooling can be tailored to a child’s individual needs, allowing them to thrive at a quicker pace. One parent mentions that her son couldn’t really thrive until looking into homeschooling: “He was starting to regress. They were doing phonics and he can read already,” she said. “The school said they couldn’t give him higher-level work.” Since homeschooling, her son is now thriving academically.
Some parents have also removed their children from school due to a learning disability. Covid has given these parents the final push to make the decision a permanent one. One parent claims that their daughter, who is awaiting a formal autism diagnosis, was struggling in school but thrived once at home: “We wouldn’t have had that break in school. I felt duty-bound to send her in, but because she wasn’t there, you could see how happy she was.” Another parent, whose child also has autism, claims that his family had a very difficult time finding special needs provision: “I think we had reached the limit of what we could do in the structure. From the experience we are having, I’d be hard pressed to think about going back.”
Although there will still be many parents that would prefer their children to continue their education in school, undoubtedly many children and parents are thriving with homeschooling as an alternative option. Online learning platforms such as CoreSciences make the home education process much easier for both students and parents. The platform is easy to use and caters for GCSE science students of all abilities, including SEND students or those that may seek more of a challenge. All required practicals are performed via hands-on, fully interactive lab simulations with unlimited access, ensuring safe completion of essential experiments with no need for equipment or a lab. This makes CoreSciences a great solution for parents that want to make homeschooling permanent but are afraid that their child may miss out – with CoreSciences they don’t have to.