Not going back to school in September? The Home Ed Daily. Home education UK.

Not going back to school in September? A guide to starting home education

Not going to school? Home educating instead?

September has a strange amount of power. The shops fill with uniform, lunchboxes and stationery. Social media fills with first-day photographs. Conversations turn to new teachers, new classrooms and the question every child seems to be asked in August: “Are you looking forward to going back?” And if your child isn’t going back, it can feel as though the whole country is marching in one direction while your family quietly steps sideways.

Perhaps you’ve spent the summer deciding. Perhaps school had already become a source of anxiety, exhaustion, bullying or distress. Perhaps your child simply wasn’t thriving there. Or perhaps nothing dramatic happened at all. You’ve just realised that the conventional school system isn’t the only way to educate a child.

Whatever brought you here, deciding not to return to school in September can feel enormous. It can also be the beginning of something much bigger than simply changing where lessons happen. Home ed is not school relocated to the dining table. For many families, it gradually changes their whole understanding of what education, learning and even childhood can look like.

Start with the child in front of you

When a child is struggling at school, our instinct is often to ask how we can help them cope better. Can they become more organised? More resilient? Less anxious? More focused? Better at sitting still? Better at keeping up?

But sometimes the more useful question is whether the environment itself is working for that child. That was the idea behind my earlier piece about “changing the environment, not the child”. Home education gives families the unusual freedom to alter the conditions around learning instead of repeatedly asking the child to adapt to conditions which aren't serving them.

That might mean allowing a child who is exhausted to sleep later. Giving an anxious child more control over their day. Spending longer on something they find difficult without the embarrassment of the rest of the class moving on. Letting a child who is fascinated by one subject disappear into it for three weeks.

It can also mean removing some of the things which were getting in the way of learning altogether. Noise. Comparison. Peer pressure. Constant transitions. Rigid timetables. Performance anxiety. The expectation that 30 children of the same age should all be ready for roughly the same thing at roughly the same time. Sometimes, once those pressures disappear, you begin to see a very different child.

You don't have to recreate school at home

One of the biggest mistakes new home educators make is assuming that they now need to provide their own miniature school.

You do not need a six-hour timetable. You do not need a classroom. You do not need to teach every subject every day. You do not need to buy an entire curriculum before September arrives. And in England, you do not have to follow the National Curriculum. Parents are responsible for ensuring that a child of compulsory school age receives a suitable full-time education, but there is considerable freedom in how that education is provided.

Some home educating families do use timetables, workbooks and online courses. Some follow the National Curriculum quite closely. Others use projects, tutors, museums, documentaries, practical activities or interest-led learning. Some are autonomous or self-directed. Most families end up somewhere in between, changing their approach as their children and circumstances change.

That freedom can initially feel slightly terrifying.

School gives us a ready-made answer to almost everything. What should an eight-year-old learn? Look at Year 4. What should they be doing at 10am on Tuesday? Check the timetable. Are they making progress? Look at the assessment. Remove school and suddenly there is a lot of empty space. But empty space isn't the same thing as nothing happening.

Learning may look very different once you stop looking for school

I used to imagine learning as something wonderfully tidy. Workbooks gradually completed. Subjects neatly divided. Progress moving steadily upwards. Things started and finished. Actual home education has cured me of that fantasy rather efficiently.

Real learning can be wonderfully messy. A child becomes obsessed with something for a month, then abandons it. A project starts enthusiastically and sits half-finished on a shelf. Nothing appears to happen with maths for weeks, then suddenly something clicks. A conversation in the car becomes more memorable than the carefully planned activity you spent an hour preparing.

Children learn through cooking, gaming, books, documentaries, gardening, art, shopping, building things, travelling, talking to adults, caring for animals, researching questions and working out how everyday life actually works.

Learning does not always announce itself by waving a worksheet in the air. This is particularly important when we think about self-directed learning. In her Home Ed Daily article about how children learn outside school, clinical psychologist Dr Naomi Fisher describes young self-directed children learning largely through play, exploration, conversation and intense interests. As children mature, some become much more focused on goals, skills and future plans. That development does not necessarily happen according to the timetable we have become used to seeing in school.

That does not mean every child should be completely autonomous, or that academics never matter. It means there is more than one route through childhood. Readiness matters. Interest matters. Development matters. And learning does not suddenly stop because nobody has written “English, 10.00–11.00” on a whiteboard.

School is not the definition of childhood

This can take some unpicking, particularly if you went to school yourself.

School is so embedded in British childhood that it can be difficult to imagine growing up without year groups, assemblies, school plays, uniforms, sports days, school gates and September beginnings. Yet mass schooling is historically relatively recent. For most of human history children learned through family, community, play, observation, practical work and participation in everyday life. School is one model for education, not education itself.

Naomi Fisher wrote beautifully about initially seeing the absence of school as a hole in her children's lives. Looking back once they were older, she realised her children didn't experience their childhood that way at all. Their lives weren't defined by the school experiences they had missed. They were defined by the things they had actually done: games, interests, swimming, drawing, trips, friendships, playgrounds, hobbies and family experiences.

I think that's particularly worth remembering in September. Your child isn't necessarily beginning a childhood with something missing. They're beginning one which may simply be organised differently.

Give yourselves time to recover from school

If school has been difficult, resist the temptation to make the first week of September the grand opening of 'Your Family Academy', complete with colour-coded timetable and 47 new subscriptions. You may both need some time. People often call this period “deschooling”. It is essentially a period of adjustment after leaving school, when both child and parent begin letting go of school routines and expectations. Education still needs to be taking place, but education can include reading, talking, cooking, walking, visiting places, playing games, pursuing interests, making things and simply rediscovering curiosity.

And please don't panic-buy resources. Libraries are brilliant. Charity shops are dangerous in an entirely different way because somehow you will come home with six atlases, a microscope and a 1987 book about volcanoes, but at least they're cheap. Use free trials. Borrow things. Explore free websites. Find out what your child actually enjoys before committing hundreds of pounds to programmes which looked excellent at midnight when you were having a home ed wobble.

The early months are partly about learning how your child learns. They're also about discovering how you home educate.

The advantages are real, but so are the difficult bits

Home education can offer extraordinary flexibility. You can move at your child's pace rather than the pace of a class. Spend longer on something difficult. Skip ahead when something is easy. Follow interests. Take holidays outside school dates. Visit museums when they're quiet. Build rest into the week. Learn outdoors. Include cooking, budgeting, gardening and practical skills alongside more traditional academics. Children who struggled with bullying, comparison, anxiety or peer pressure may find a very different social environment outside school. Families also gain something surprisingly precious: time. More conversations. More shared experiences. More opportunities to notice the things your child is interested in rather than only seeing the scraps of energy left at the end of a school day.

But home education isn't automatically easy because it is flexible. It costs money. There is currently no general government funding pot which pays for your child's home education, and families can face costs for resources, activities, tutors and private exam entry. One parent may reduce their working hours. Further education and exam routes sometimes require more research.

There is also the sheer relentlessness of it. Your children are around a lot. You may be simultaneously facilitator, taxi driver, researcher, snack provider, administrator, emotional support department and person trying to earn money while someone wants to explain Minecraft lore to you. Burnout happens.

Home ed doesn't remove family life. It happens right in the middle of it. That is why downtime matters. You do not need to fill five days a week with groups, outings, classes and educational activities just to prove that you're doing enough.

What about friends?

The socialisation question will arrive. Usually within minutes of telling someone you're home educating. Home educated children aren't confined to their houses, but friendships do require some intention.

School automatically places children alongside other children every day. Home education removes that built-in structure, which means families often need to create their own. Local home ed groups are invaluable for this. Facebook remains one of the easiest places to find them. Try meet-ups, clubs, workshops, sports, youth groups and activities. Don't panic if the first group isn't your child's crowd. Sometimes it takes a while to find the people you click with. And social life outside school can look different too. Friendships do not have to be limited to children born within the same twelve-month period. Home ed groups often mix ages naturally, and children can build relationships through shared interests rather than simply sharing a year group.

What if they fall behind?

Behind what? This may be one of the hardest questions to stop asking.

School provides a very clear age-based measuring system. Home education makes it possible to step outside it. A child might be years ahead in one area and apparently “behind” in another. They might acquire a skill later but learn it very quickly once they are ready. They may know a vast amount about something which does not appear anywhere in the National Curriculum.

That doesn't mean we should ignore skills children will need later. Literacy, numeracy, qualifications and future options matter. But fear is not always the best teacher. I still have moments when I look at what teens in school are doing, particularly around GCSEs, and wonder whether we're doing enough. Those worries don't magically disappear when you home educate. What changes is that we have more freedom over the route.

GCSEs are one route. Other qualifications and pathways exist. Some home educated teenagers decide they want exams and work towards them. Others take different routes into further education, apprenticeships or employment. Planning becomes more important as children grow older, but their future has not been cancelled because their education looked different at 10.

If your child isn't returning to school, know the practical basics

For families in England, the legal side is much simpler than many new home educators expect, although it is important to check the current rules before acting. At the time of writing, GOV.UK states that if your child attends a mainstream school and you are withdrawing them completely for home education, you should notify the school. The school must accept the complete withdrawal. Different rules apply where a child attends because of a School Attendance Order, and council permission is required before withdrawing a child from a special school. A child attending mainstream school does not need council permission simply because they have an EHCP.

Once home educating, your responsibility is to provide a suitable full-time education. You do not have to follow the National Curriculum. Local authorities can make enquiries where they need to establish whether a suitable education is being provided.

One important caveat for September 2026 is that the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 introduces changes affecting children who are not in school, and provisions are being brought into force in stages. Before deregistering, particularly where there are additional legal, SEND or safeguarding circumstances, check the current GOV.UK guidance rather than relying on an older Facebook post, article or template.

You don't need to know what the next ten years will look like

This may be the thing I most wish new home educators understood. You are not signing a contract which says your child must never attend school again. You are deciding what works now.

Home education may suit your family for six months, six years or the rest of compulsory education. Your approach might change completely along the way. You may start with workbooks and become more interest-led. You may start autonomously and gradually introduce more structure. A teenager who had no interest whatsoever in formal study may suddenly decide they want a qualification. A child may eventually decide they want to return to school.

You are allowed to adapt. There is no prize for choosing your educational philosophy at the beginning and defending it stubbornly until adulthood. The child in front of you will change. So will you.

A different kind of September

The first September when your child doesn't go back can feel peculiar. Everyone else disappears through school gates and suddenly the parks are quiet. Museums become suspiciously peaceful. The roads improve at 10am. You realise you can go somewhere on a Tuesday simply because the weather is good. There can be grief mixed in with the relief too, particularly when school had once been something you expected your child to enjoy. You are allowed to feel both.

But after a while, September stops feeling quite so much like the beginning of somebody else's school year. It becomes autumn. There are books to read. Places to go. People to meet. Things your child suddenly wants to know. Long conversations. Half-finished projects. Unexpected obsessions. Quiet days. Difficult days. Brilliant days. Days when nobody appears to learn anything whatsoever until they casually reveal three weeks later that they know how something works. That is home education too.

Not going back to school is not the end of your child's education. It may simply be the point where you begin looking at education differently. And you do not need to have the whole journey mapped out before September arrives. You just need somewhere to start.