Yet, again, today, I have found myself trying to grapple with the biggest challenge of home educating a three-year-old - persuading her that she doesn’t want to go to school.

School is endemic in our culture. Everyone goes. Everyone assumes that Daisy will go. CBeebies devotes hours per week in attempting to brainwash her into wanting to go. No matter how hard I try, the rest of the world is making school sound so utterly appealing, that I’m having some difficulty in getting her to accept being home educated.

Don’t get me wrong - she’s three. She doesn’t have anything like enough information to make an informed choice, and I’m the parent; I’m the one who gets to make the choice, and I have no problem with it being a unilateral decision, particularly in the early years. But it would certainly make my life easier if the whole of modern culture wasn’t preoccupied with trying to make school seem fun.

Most of the children who GO to school, of course, would describe it at “boring”, and not fun at all, but since it is seen as an inevitability, there’s actually a fairly robust conspiracy to keep that information away from three and four year olds. Adding to the confusion is Daisy’s own ideas of what school is like, and what home education would be like; a few times, she’s expressed an unwillingness to have a “home-school” because she perceives that it will necessitate replacing our furniture with school-type furniture, and then where will we sleep, and sit to watch the telly? She doesn’t comprehend, because she’s three, that the purpose of school is concerned with education*, and it’s the education part that we’re interested in addressing at home, and no matter how carefully I try to explain and reassure, I’m fairly confident that her head is full of bizarre and confused assumptions about what it all means. For example, I imagine that any convincing attempt at school-at-home will have to include the taking of a register, in order to be accepted at authentic. Still, that shouldn’t take long: “Daisy?”, “Here.” All done.

Maybe I need to start asking her to think about WHY people go to school, as a route to understanding the concept of education, as distinct from school attendance.

* Actually, whether the purpose of school is education, is wide open to debate, and worthy of it’s own post. Education is the bit of school we’re concerned with, however.

This question has been simmering at the back of my mind for some weeks, now. When Daisy and I started putting sounds in our Sounds Book, we took it with us to a few places, in order to show it off. On one of these occasions, a relation of mine took the opportunity to ask me about the home education - were we still planning to do it? I smiled, nodded towards the little book, and said, “We already are!” To which the person responded, “Yes, but I’d expect you to do that anyway.”

I was utterly bemused. Why? Why on earth would I send her to school, AND teach her myself? Either I will educate my kids, or someone else will - both is not an option. But of course, lots of people DO do both, and actually, I can remember her doing both when her kids were small. It seems like insanity, to me. And a little bit unreasonable - school is a pretty exhausting business, without parents adding to the pressure at home, surely?

I appear to be fundamentally abnormal, in terms of the types of middle-class parents that I would loosely consider to be my peers. I don’t want academic achievement at any cost. I want my kids to get an efficient education, from one source or another, and I’m not interested in papering over the cracks with extra lessons. Either school is good enough, or it’s not.  If it’s not, then do something else.

Over the last few months, probably since Daisy turned three, I’ve started to feel less like Home Education is something we’re PLANNING to do, and more like it’s something we ARE doing. Part of that is to do with the fact that her contemporaries are, without exception, regularly attending nurseries, now, complete with government vouchers to pay for it.

Someone I was chatting with today seemed vaguely surprised that I considered nursery to be formal education, and was therefore choosing not to use it - since all her son does there is play, sing, and hear stories. For my own part, I never considered sending Daisy to nursery. It’s the beginning of the system I’ve chosen to avoid, as far as I can see, however play-based and informal it may be - and with the introduction of the new Early Years curriculum, I suspect it’s about to become less so.

Pretty much every government edict on the subject of education makes me just a little bit more pessamistic and cynical about the system. Sometimes, for a laugh, I watch Teachers’ TV, but mostly it’s as an excuse to shout abuse at the telly. It seems to be a dedicated propaganda channel, for the government to pass edicts from the Department for Schools and Families to ordinary, hard-working, over bureaucratised teachers. The problem seems to be that every time government senses a “problem” with education, they try to do something extra to address it. They never, ever, ever say “Something we are doing is causing this problem. Let’s find out what it is and stop doing it.” It’s just not how they think. So, at the last count, children were expected to spend an hour on literacy, an hour on numeracy, an hour on exercise, an hour on “culture” (whatever that means - no doubt the guy who’s idea it was had specific ideas, but I’ve got degrees in culture, and I know that McDonald’s and EastEnders both count…) - there are only five hours in a school day. One more edict, and there’ll be no time left to actually learn anything! There’s already very little time for creative, imaginative, thinking-outside-the-box teaching, that engages children according to their individual temperaments.

But that’s me ranting about a system I’ve already decided not to use.

What I’m currently concerned with is twofold - the challenges of successfully managing the education of a three to five year old, and the decision-making process surrounding what to teach Daisy, how formally to do it, how thoroughly to do it, and how early to start.

Pre-school education is so ingrained in British culture, now, that there’s actually very little else. It’s a unique age-group. When she turns five, all manner of extra-curricular activities open up, of the type Rainbows (which is baby Brownies - they weren’t about in my day), etc. At the moment, she’s too old for the toddler stuff (a fact that became blindingly apparent at Musical Minis last week, when she pushed a child over who was half her size - I was utterly humiliated…), but too young for the school-age stuff. The reality is, nursery is about as much formal activity as most children can handle in a day, so there’s very little demand or (consequently) provision for children of this age outside of traditional nursery/playgroup situations.

That’s a challenge. In some ways, if she’s still home educated by the time she’s five, I think we’ll have done the hardest bit. But, I’ve got her signed up for pre-school swimming lessons, which is the exception to the rule, apparently, and I’ve agreed with a friend today to make a regular playdate with her little boy, who does nursery in the morning, but still has energy to make friends in the afternoon (he’s four, so has a bit more stamina than some…).

The other thing is about learning to read. Daisy is only three. One of the swearing-at-the-telly things that I get hung up about is the absurdly high expectations that we have of very young children, over formal education. Many, many children aren’t ready to read before they’re six or seven, but I’ve a sneaking feeling that if you’ve not already got it by that age in our educational culture, you run the risk of having missed it - no one will ever actually try to teach you to read again. One of the advantages of opting out, is I don’t have to conform to government expectations of when Daisy should be able to read.

Except she’s ready. At three. She’s interested in reading, she likes books, she’s spotting letters when she sees them out and about, she’s absorbing the Beeb’s “Fun with Phonics” segment like a sponge. She’s totally ready.

So, against my own better judgement, this week, we started some formal phonics work. We’re loosely following the Jolly Phonics handbook (which I acquired, rather than bought), and we’re making a Sounds Book - every day we’ve written a letter in, and pasted pictures of things that start with that letter. I think she’s getting it. She doesn’t really get blending, which is the fundamental step between “t-a-p” and “tap”, but according to the book, that’s the second step. This week is about getting six letter sounds in her head, so we can start to play with them.? As an aside, I typed tap into Google, to find a picture of one for the book, and she either read it, guessed it, or recognised it, so maybe that’s closer than I realised.

My instinct is that she’s more of a phonics child than a look-and-say child - my friend this morning said the opposite of her son, so I don’t think I’m presuming. I like Jolly Phonics - it’s just structured enough for me, without feeling like a straightjacket. I’m totally prepared to stop, if it’s not working - she may be too young after all. But I’ll let you know how it goes…

I’ve had a little more time to think about the good days and bad days, with a little help from the commenters on my previous post, and I got to wondering why I felt the need to explain the bad days away.

The fact is, not working is psychologically tricky.

I don’t miss work one iota. I’d long-since stopped enjoying it, it was a huge source of stress, and in the scheme if things, nothing I did there seemed very important. If I miss anything, it’s the relationships - and not even specific relationships, really (though there are people I’ve lost touch with, and I’m a little sad about that). What I actually miss is the day-to-day interactions. But actually, I get that vicariously from Kevin. He laughs at me, for treating his job like a soap opera, but as long as I get ten minutes a day of update on who’s in trouble with their wife, who’s pregnant, who’s fallen over drunk and damaged themselves, and who’s given the Big Boss an earful over something, I’m fine. A little bit of office drama is all I’m after, and it doesn’t take long to fulfil that need, even second hand.

There is a deeper need, though. You have to work much harder on your opinion of yourself, if it’s not externally validated by a pay-packet. When I was in work, however bad I felt about myself, there was always the reality that I was worth a certain amount of hard cash to someone, and that actually, there were plenty of people who thought I was good at my job, and respected me in it, as a bonus. That didn’t stop me from plunging into deep pits of self-loathing, but it was at least some kind of external anchor.

My decision to give up work altogether is an unusual one, particularly amongst the sorts of women whom I might consider to be my peers. Almost everyone works part time, at least, plenty work full time, and I don’t envy them a scrap. Life shouldn’t be lived at the pace that requires, in my opinion - at least, my life shouldn’t. It would kill me.

Because it’s unusual, and because it has now been accompanied by the even more unusual decision to home educate, I feel a faint, but constant pressure, to prove that it’s not a mistake. To prove that I can cope, that it is, indeed, the best thing for all of us, and that I’m capable of making a success of it. And that’s where it’s going wrong - I shouldn’t have to prove that, and in fact, I don’t have to prove it.

I don’t really believe in mistakes, and I certainly don’t believe in regrets. I make my choices in life to the best of my ability, based in the information I have available at the time. If the information turns out to be flawed, incorrect or incomplete, that’s not my fault. I did the best I could, and that’s fine. Very few decisions are unmitigaged disasters - most of them are about selecting from a range of perfectly reasonable options, and deciding which one to invest your energy into. Most people consider school to be the easier option - that may be true, it may not, but it’s just another option. I can invest my energy in educating my children, or I can invest in getting them up, washed, dressed and out of the house every day, so that someone else can educate them. It’s only different, not better or worse.

The point I’m trying to make, is that my mum stayed at home with her children, until I was nearly ten, I think, but she did so because it was normal, because no alternative ever occurred to her, and consequently, she didn’t spent those ten years justifying the decision, and trying to explain away and justify the bad days - which, as I said in the previous post, everyone has, in every role. It doesn’t make you a failure, it makes you normal. Except I get caught up trying to prove that. Which is a waste of my energy.