It's all over

When I was one

I ate a bun

The day I went to sea

Just over a year ago, I found a scrap of paper on which The Kid had written these lyrics, the beginning of a song she liked. Only one word was spelled correctly. By the time she started school in September, I think she could probably have done it with just one word spelled wrong. She never had a spelling lesson; she just read and read, and wrote blogs on behalf of her teddy bear.

Yesterday The Kid participated in a qualifying event for a national quiz championship. She came home very excited, having qualified to represent the school. Of course, she'll be long gone by January and someone else will take her place at the area heat, but oddly that doesn't seem to bother her. She told me a few of the questions.

Bizarrely, one of her successes was spelling "cauliflower" correctly. I was flabbergasted: she's not a very advanced speller yet. "Cauliflower"?? It turns out that she has been reading her dad's seed catalogues which he keeps beside the toilet. As for those school spelling lists over which she toils every week, usually scoring 100%... those spellings have not stuck in her mind at all. What she learns one week is forgotten the next, and when writing up her homework she must ask me how to spell words which I know she "learned" for a spelling test just a week or two ago.

So, there's no hesitation about leaving school on her part or mine. Small Fry, naturally, is over the moon: "Mousie NOT go a mill!" And home ed friends are delighted that their friend is once again free to play with them.

One legacy of this term at school is a mountain of white polo shirts and t-shirts. Washing them for the last time, I look forward to Christmas. The Kid will be receiving dyes and fabric pens with which to home eddify these uniform items. A colourful future beckons. I can't wait.

Goodbyes

She has finally officially decided to leave and told everyone, and in went the deregistration letter. Apparently there is a waiting list for The Kid's place at the school, so there will be no going back now. To my slight annoyance, her main class teacher has kept up a campaign to change her mind, saying that if she leaves school she'll fall behind (she never did before), she won't be able to take exams (true that it's more awkward, but there's more flexibility over what to take, when and how), that she'll never get into college without having been to high school (I think she will, if she's determined). Sigh. Well, The Kid has expressed an interest in starting some more formal study after she leaves school, so I hope that will help reassure her that her teacher is mistaken.

Her other teacher (who is also the head) has not pestered her so much, saying simply that it would be a real pity for her to leave now when she is doing so well. He reminds me of those people who never leave a job until it becomes intolerable. Is it impossible to do well in one setting, and yet aspire to something even better?

I remember once a few years ago, when The Kid got chatting to another girl in the library. The girl did not quite believe that home education was possible, and came to me for confirmation. Sure enough, I said, The Kid did not go to school. The two went off to the other side of the room to continue their conversation. Her mother (possibly the last adult in England to be unaware that home education is legal) was surprised and interested, and chatted with me at some length. She declared that it sounded like great fun, and she wished she could do it, but of course it wouldn't be fair on her daughter, who loved school so much. "Well, she might like home education even better," I said. "You could ask her."

She called her daughter over. "Would you rather learn at home with mummy instead of going to school?" The girl took this as an offer, rather than a theoretical question. "YES!!!" she said. "You mean I DON'T HAVE TO GO TO SCHOOL any more?? Can we start NOW?" Her mother looked alarmed: "But you like school. And what about friends? Who will you play with?"

The girl pointed at my daughter: "Her! And her friends. She says she has lots, and they get to go skating and swimming and over to each others' houses on school days. School was okay, but not going to school would be ten times better!" Looking dazed, the mother soon left, but not before I had pressed some information about the local home ed group - and our phone number - into her hand. I never heard of her again, so I suppose she found some other reason against home education.

Bunking off

Small Fry has been very ill for several days. As The Kid seemed slightly off-colour Sunday, I kept her home yesterday in case she was heading the same direction as her sister. I'm sure the school would have agreed with this decision, not that I asked their opinion. As it turned out, she bounced cheerfully around the house all day yesterday, and I had decided to send her to school today.

Late last night, I changed my mind. Taking her to school would have meant waking the little one, who desperately needs her sleep. She's been up often in the night, sleeps late, and takes at least three naps a day at the moment. Then there would be the problem of preventing Small Fry from puking all over the car when she's not yet old enough to wield a sick bucket while I drive. I might stop her from being sick by withholding water from her, but that seems cruel. And she's so ill she can't keep down her essential prescription medicine, so I was considering taking her to hospital for it to be injected. We might still be there when school finished. If I'd been in hospital with one child all day, I really didn't want to have to think about how to fetch the other one back from school. The Kid would stay home today for her sister's sake.

Of course there were other alternatives to keeping The Kid off school. I could cheek a relative, friend or slight acquaintance to take her to school or let her come round for a few hours after school until her dad could collect her after work. This seems to be the Done Thing in such cases. A sibling's illness is not generally considered a good enough reason to keep a child home from school. Education is important, after all. One has to make an effort.

My priorities are entirely different. School, to me, is just some place to go for a change of scenery and a bit of exposure to something different. It's an unfortunate quirk of the system that it is so all-or-nothing, that choosing to use school puts parents in the position of breaking the law whenever they keep children off school without permission. Having seen how well my daughter can learn without school, I find it hard to see the urgency of sending her to school on days when it's very inconvenient. Disturbing an ill toddler in order to deliver her big sister to school is almost inconceivable to me now.

I've learned a useful lesson from the school runs this term: I'm just not committed enough to take my daughter to school day in, day out year after year. I've often been tempted not to take her, simply because I couldn't be bothered, though today was the first day I'd actually failed to do so. If we were in this for the long haul, I could imagine myself finding more and more excuses to keep her off school. Whenever she wants to go to school again, as she probably will at some point during high school, she'll have to be able to get herself there without my help. Next time, she'll go to the local school. No more school runs for me.

Have I always been this lazy, or has the flexibility of home education made me lazy? I don't know. It's hard to remember how the world looked to me in those ancient days when I thought school might matter.

Uniformity

In the beginning, I was so keen to conform. I tried to establish what the school's actual uniform policy was, so I could follow it to the letter. Several conversations with the school secretary left me little the wiser. She showed me a price list of items which could be purchased from the school office, but explained that I was free to buy most things elsewhere. Repeated questions about what was actually required bore no fruit. In the end, I just sized up the other children and aimed for a similar look.

Uniforms make some home educating parents see red. Uniforms are cited as one proof among many that the institution of school is set to destroy children's free will by demanding conformity. I can appreciate this view.

On the other hand, having attended a non-uniform school, and having been teased for wearing the clothes our family was willing and able to afford, I can also see the other view. As a parent, I do find it far easier to get my daughter out the door now that I can simply tell her to put on her uniform. This has put an end to the inevitable faffing over the location of her favourite trousers (usually in the wash, of course) and angst over whether this top goes with that cardigan and whether it's fashionable enough. Will wearing a uniform crush her individuality and turn her into a mindless clone? Maybe so. Under the circumstances, I think I can live with that.

What's more, I may be the last mum in the country to have discovered this secret: unless your child attends an awkwardly fussy school, uniform is blissfully cheap! Spotting jumpers in just the right colour at Matalan for an exhilarating two pounds each, I closed my mind to images of children working in sweatshops abroad, and bought a few. These were to be spares, to tide us over until I could buy a couple of logoed jumpers from the school office, and thereafter to use in case of washday emergencies. The Kid declared these bargain jumpers to be beautifully soft and cosy inside. At the time, I fully intended to buy the "proper" school jumper in due course. At nine pounds it was not a steal, but neither was it extortionate.

Then two things happened. First, The Kid managed to lose two jumpers at school in the space of two weeks. (How one can lose a distinctive jumper with one's name written on it, in a small school of under 70 pupils, I cannot imagine. Other parents tell me it happens often. It's one of those great mysteries of child-rearing.) Second, I looked around and noticed that a substantial minority of children were wearing jumpers and cardigans in the correct colour but without the school logo. I concluded 1) that the loss of a steady stream of £2 jumpers would pain me less than the loss of £9 jumpers, and 2) that the school did not much care precisely what the children wore.

I remained pleased with my purchases. They faded rapidly in the wash, but I expected to need them only for a term. Anyway, the fading made them even easier for The Kid to keep track of.

The school secretary made passing remarks to The Kid about the necessity of buying a proper school jumper. In the absence of an official communication, I instructed her to ignore these remarks, or direct the secretary to me. Then, in the middle of November, in the weekly newsletter, the headteacher made a pointed remark about the variety of nonstandard apparel in evidence among pupils at the school, and reminded parents that logoed jumper was required.

Pushed to the wall, I finally emailed him, with a copy to the secretary, asking to see a copy of the school's uniform policy. I mentioned that I hadn't seen it before, and suggested that perhaps other parents were also confused and in future it might be useful to cite the uniform policy in the welcome pack sent to newly-enrolled pupils.

There was no response. The secretary, however, continued to raise the jumper issue with my daughter, with the result that some of her classmates began to give her grief as well. Previously, they had teased her only over her coat, shoes and umbrella, most of the other families being considerably better heeled than ours.

Now I was annoyed. Home education, I suppose, has turned me into a troublemaker. It was no longer a question of £9. It was about authority being overstepped (just as Local Authorities so routinely overstep their authority in dealing with home educating families). You see, I had begun to suspect that the school did not actually HAVE a uniform policy. No doubt you'll be wondering whether I have nothing better to do with my time than stir up trouble in a school where none of the other parents has ever had a problem with buying a jumper. I wonder that too, especially considering that my daughter probably would be leaving soon.

The head did not accept my assertion that a uniform policy is not merely a matter of custom or for him to dictate, but is instead a specific statement which can only be approved by the board of governors and then enforced by the head. I imagine this is a detail of his job which he's never needed to know, never having had parents like me raise a ruckus. He did, however, acknowledge that it would be silly to require me to buy any more uniform now, since it was possible my daughter would leave the school in a few weeks' time. And there we left it. So I still don't know whether the school has a uniform policy. I guess I'll leave that for the other parents to figure out.

Trying too hard

I realise with some embarrassment that I've been driving myself to appear the perfect school parent.

Zealously adhering to the school uniform policy (as I thought it was - at first anyway), I refused to allow The Kid to wear groovy socks even after we'd established that other children expressed their style this way. As requested by the school, for the safety of the children and to avoid churning up the village green, I parked some distance away. I accompanied The Kid to and from school, though she's more than capable of walking on her own and has been used to roaming miles from our home. In the early days I even urged her to do her homework, whether or not there seemed any point to it.

Unlikeliest of all, I joined the PTA. I hadn't quite intended to emerge from the first meeting as secretary, but I wasn't unwilling. I am not really a PTA sort of person, though I am grateful to them for the work they do to raise funds for extras at school.

Really, all of this is very unlike me. Bake sales do not, as my people say, float my boat. In my eyes, walking my ten year old to school across the village green and two small lanes is not a good use of my time. I believe in letting children take the consequences for their actions, as long as nobody gets hurt - and failure to complete homework isn't normally something that would interest me as a parent. Nor do I have an opinion one way or another about uniforms. So what on earth am I doing?

I don't quite know. Maybe I'm seeking a so-called "authentic" school experience for my daughter and myself, like those foreign tourists who must visit the chocolate box village, down pints, watch cricket games and have cream teas whether or not they actually like them. Possibly I'm trying to prove to the world that I haven't been keeping her at home all those years just because I was too idle to buy the uniform, walk her to school, and supervise the homework.

And I know that I'm taking far too much smug satisfaction from The Kid's school successes. She may be the only home educated child these people have ever knowingly met, and it matters to me that she should make the right impression. Ambassador for home education. Living proof that home education does not turn children into social misfits or academic failures. My mother-in-law used to dress her six children immaculately, not allowing them to play outdoors in case of getting dirty and attracting unwanted attention from neighbours. "I didn't want people to look down their noses at me for having more children than I could look after properly," she used to say. This is what I'm doing to my daughter now, trying to turn her into the perfect schoolchild in order to prove something about the merits of home education.

And I want her to feel that she's capable of handling school. If she leaves at the end of the term, I want her to feel she's turning her back on school out of choice, because she knows there's something better out there, rather than skulking back home with her tail between her legs because she couldn't "do" school. If she chooses home education, I want her to be comfortable with that choice. Maybe that's why it's important to me that she knows that she can get up every morning, put on the uniform, mix with the other kids, and do the work.

But I still return to an awkward feeling that I'm using her to prove a point, and in the process I am selling other kids short. After all, there are kids for whom school "success" is an impossibility. Not everyone was born a social butterfly. Not everyone can read well and add up by the age of ten. Not everyone is willing to obey silly rules just because it's expected of them. The fact that some kids don't thrive at school does not reflect badly on them, but on the school system. So I have a round peg who slides painlessly into the "holes" at school: what of it? It's nothing to brag about.

Fortunately my natural tendencies are asserting themselves. Under early morning interrogation about socks, I tell The Kid she can wear what the heck she likes as long as she stops bothering me about it. I've begun leaving her to make her own way across the green to school. Increasingly, I don't even ask whether she has homework, let alone urge her to get it done. Maybe I really am too idle to be a proper school parent.

Sisters

There was one person who did not enjoy the Kid's school holiday last month. Her little sister was distraught. 48 hours after we'd waved goodbye to the departing coach, she came to me, lip trembling.

Rock-a-bye baby,

Pussy's  a lady,

Mousie has gone to the mill,

And if you don't cry,

She'll be back by and by,

So hush-a-bye baby, lie still.

This was the nursery rhyme from which she choked out a few words, tears spilling down her face. "Mousie a mill?" She repeated this frequently for the rest of the week. Nothing we said could console her. I am sure she thought her beloved sister would never return.

Of course, she was pleased when The Kid did come back. But from that day on, she has not stopped worrying that it will happen again. She is not happy to see her sister go off to school. "Mousie gone a mill?" she asks, sometimes crying. "Mousie need come home."

During her long tenure as an only child, The Kid guarded her status jealously. At three, she realised it was possible for her parents to have another child, and warned us that such a move would not be acceptable to her. This sentiment was repeated often over the following years. Being the parents, we suited ourselves, and when she was nearly seven she acquired a small sister she called "The Yuck." I couldn't say I hadn't been warned!

I had heard from other home educating parents that their children shared a very close bond. This seemed hard to believe. It struck me as unlikely that children who spent plenty of time together would be especially fond of one another. Surely they would be sick of the sight of one another, and fight relentlessly? Still, that was the common wisdom, and it offered a glimmer of hope.

Unbelievably, it happened. The Kid never did turn into one of those "little mothers" who fetch nappies and beg to look after the baby. But the two girls did develop a deep affection for each other. Perhaps the age gap was big enough that each had her own clear place in the family. Perhaps The Kid's home educated friends, who generally liked and helped their younger siblings, were a good influence on her. Perhaps having access to her mum for many hours of every day meant that though the baby demanded the lion's share of my attention, the leftover scraps of attention still added up to plenty of sustenance for The Kid. After all, she was home to take advantage of the baby's long contented mornings and peaceful midday naps - and not, like schoolchildren, home only to suffer the mad morning rush and the evening "witching hour" with a grizzly baby and a family all tired, hungry and short-tempered.

Now, at the school gates, The Kid often dodges my hugs, like any self-respecting ten-year-old with an audience. But she always rushes to her small sister, scooping her up and swinging her around in wild joy. After the ups and downs of a day at school, The Kid seems to find it a relief to fall into the arms of the one person who has always adored her unconditionally.

Parent teacher meeting

I don't know what I was expecting, but this wasn't it. The teacher continues to be lovely and there were no unpleasant shocks at the meeting, but it was an awful lot like going to the GP! In and out in ten minutes, stay focused, no time to chat, the next parent waiting outside the door.

Like everyone at school, Mrs B sized up Small Fry, enquired about her age (three), and assumed she'd be joining her sister at the school next year. I said no, her sister had got a lot out of home education and I expected she would as well.

Mrs B said The Kid had been quiet at first but had regained her confidence very quickly. She had friends, smiled a lot, was helpful and worked hard.

She showed me a bit of The Kid's handwriting, saying how much it had improved with practice since she started school. "It's still painfully slow," she said, "but she'll get better." Painful for whom, I wondered - for my daughter or for the teacher? She praised The Kid's imagination and expression and I said yes, I'd always encouraged her to get her ideas out in any way she could because I didn't want fears over handwriting or spelling to prevent her expressing herself. I don't think Mrs B and I are quite "on the same page" about that: she seems ambivalent about my daughter typing some of her longer essays on the computer.

We moved rapidly on to maths, where The Kid has said that she's on a similar level to most others in the class. Apparently many of them complain of the tedium of the work, though at home she tells me she gets a certain satisfaction from doing repetitive tasks which require only diligence, and little thought. To my great surprise, arithmetic is her favourite subject. I think it may be no bad thing that my daughter finally is being made to absorb the multiplication tables, but I do wonder whether it will really stick. Can her classmates really be as bad at it as she is - considering she has only recently even tried to learn the times tables, whereas presumably they have been working on them off and on at school for years and still don't know them? I mention a few fun maths ideas which my daughter has enjoyed doing at home, which do not rely on computational skills. Mrs B feels that such topics are best held out as a reward for those who have mastered the boring stuff.

I wonder whether most of these kids will ever get that reward, and whether they will still be in a fit state to appreciate it when they do. If football-mad children were only allowed to do drills, never being allowed to play an actual game until they'd attained advanced skills, would many of them stick with football? Arithmetic is useful, but few people feel a passion for it. Perhaps this is why so many people dislike maths?

When the teacher said that perhaps next year my daughter would be doing more exciting maths at school, the time seemed right to mention that she may not be around then. No one at the school has ever asked why she'd left home education behind in order to start school, and so we've neither of us told them that this is a trial period for her - or for school, I should say. But everyone has been very welcoming to both of us and I have no wish to drop a bombshell on the last day of term.

She took the news well, but advised me to encourage The Kid to stay on. Going to secondary is such a big change for children, she said, they really need to be well prepared. In her opinion, my daughter needed social experience at primary school in order to move up to secondary with confidence. I pointed out that she was a very confident child who was used to being with other children and had settled into primary school with ease, so why would she not do likewise at secondary? And that if primary was so different to secondary then why would five more terms at a small village primary school be a good preparation for a big secondary school? Our time was up, and off I went, only later realising that I had failed to say that I doubted she would spend much (if any) time at secondary school anyway!