Over the past 7 or so years that we have been involved with the home education community in West Sussex I have noticed that August and September are very busy months for enquiries about home education.Whether people give in to that nagging feeling in their gut that their child is too young to start school or thoughts of returning an unhappy child in a school environment are the motivators I'm not sure. In my experience there are as many reasons for home educating as there are home educating families.
What I am sure of is that Home Educating is popular in West Sussex, a Freedom of Information Request from 2009 shows 385 children known to be home educated and more recent data from Fiona Nicholson suggests between 250 and 500 children. Membership of local groups suggests the same sort of figure.
There are many groups.
A large facebook group called
HEWS (link is to an intro group - you need to meet in real life before you can be added)
Crawley and Horsham Dragons
Worthing Area Home Education
Activeo
Members meet up for Archery, Drama, Horse riding, days at the beach and everything in between.
and a more structured formal group called Etudeo
and, on a more micro level, a HEWS blog ring - I am aware some of the blogs in the ring are out of date and not all of the click throughs are working but it is worth persevering there is some useful information in there. Fixing it is on my list.
If you get stuck leave a comment on this post.
If you get stuck leave a comment on this post.
