How to start homeschooling: The first 4 weeks

The first month of home education is when the wheels either fall off or the shape of a working routine starts to appear. Nothing you decide in week one is permanent, and most families revise their plan several times before Christmas. But there's a rough sequence that works for most people: paperwork first, then setup, then routine, then recalibration.

This guide walks through week by week. It's written for families in England primarily, with brief notes where the rules differ in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland. It assumes you've already decided to home educate. If you're still deciding, that's a different question, and one worth taking your time on.

Pick a starting approach before day one. You can change it later – almost everyone does – but showing up on Monday morning without any plan tends to blow up faster than any specific plan you might pick.

The four main approaches:

Structured, following the national curriculum. Free scheme of work via Oak National Academy; day-to-day content via BBC Bitesize and gov.uk. Best if you might return your child to school, or want a familiar scaffold.

Self-built, mixed resources. The most common route in practice. You pick topics, use free content plus workbooks from CGP or Collins, and adjust as you go. More flexible but demands more planning.

A pedagogic approach. Charlotte Mason, Montessori, or unschooling. These aren't curricula – they're philosophies. Best if you have a clear view on how you want your child to learn.

Online school. King's InterHigh, Wolsey Hall Oxford, Minerva's Virtual Academy, Nisai, Cambridge Home School Online. Fees range from about £2,750 to over £10,000 per year. Best if you're working full time or want structure without teaching yourself.

Pick one. Give it three months. Adjust after that.

Week one is admin. Get it out of the way early so you can focus on the child in weeks two, three and four.

If your child is currently at school, send the deregistration letter to the head teacher. There's no prescribed format. A workable version:

"Dear [head teacher], I am writing to inform you that [child's name], date of birth [DOB], currently a pupil in [year group], will be electively home educated from [date]. Please remove them from the school's admission register from that date under Regulation 9(1)(f) of the School Attendance (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2024. Yours sincerely, [name]."

Send by email with a paper copy, or by recorded delivery, so you have proof. Keep a copy for your records. The school will inform the LA of the deletion.

If your child has never been enrolled at a school, skip this. You don't need to notify anyone (as of July 2026 – this may change once the Children Not in School register goes live, expected 2027).

Use the rest of the week for setup. Physical space (not a bedroom desk if you can help it). A basic set of resources for each core subject. A calendar. And one commitment outside the house for week two – a sports club, an art class, a home-ed meetup, a museum visit. Book it now, before the routine gets in the way.

Don't try to recreate a school day. The rhythm of one child at a desk for a full school day is exhausting for the same child and demoralising for you.

A workable primary starting shape: 90 minutes of core work most mornings (reading, writing, maths), an hour of a project or theme in the afternoon, and generous unstructured time for play, reading and being outside. At secondary, aim for two or three focused subject sessions of 40 to 60 minutes with breaks between, plus independent reading and skills practice.

Week two is where you find out how your child handles one-to-one focus. Expect it to be slower than you thought in some places and faster in others. Maths might take 20 minutes to cover what a school lesson stretches over an hour, because there's no waiting, no admin, no transitions. Reading a novel together might turn into a two-hour discussion. This is normal.

Make time this week for the LA response. Once you've deregistered, the LA will usually make contact within a few weeks. A short written summary of your approach – aims, subjects you'll cover, resources you'll use, how you'll assess progress – is usually enough for a friendly informal enquiry. You're under no obligation to reply, but a calm response is easier than an escalation.

What you can lawfully decline: a home visit, a meeting with an LA officer, a meeting with your child alone, adherence to the national curriculum, entering your child for exams, or a specific format for your response. Department for Education guidance is explicit that LAs "should not specify a curriculum or approach which parents must follow".

Somewhere around week three, a lot of families hit a wall. The novelty of starting has worn off, the routine hasn't settled, and the child (especially one who's come out of a difficult school situation) starts to unravel a bit. Home educators call this deschooling.

It's not a legal status. There's no legal basis for pausing your Section 7 duty during a deschooling period – the duty to provide a suitable education applies from day one. But it's a real psychological adjustment, and pretending it doesn't happen doesn't help.

Signs you're in the dip: your child pushes back on every session, the parent who's leading feels drained by mid-morning, you both start snapping over small things, one or both of you starts questioning the whole decision.

What helps: lower expectations for a few weeks. Read together more, do fewer formal sessions, get out of the house every day, focus on things your child enjoys. This isn't giving up. It's giving the child time to shift out of the school response pattern (waiting to be told, resisting authority, mentally checking out) and into the home education one (curiosity, initiative, sustained attention).

Some families need a week of the dip; some need a term. If your child came out of a school situation involving bullying, anxiety or a mental-health crisis, expect the longer end. Paulauskaite et al. (2022), studying UK home-educated children with neurodevelopmental conditions, found that 76.5% of pre-pandemic families cited their child's deteriorating mental health as one of their reasons for de-registering (parents could select several reasons). Those children weren't ready to "catch up" on day one. Neither is yours, probably.

By week four, the shape of your week starts to appear. This is when you build in the things that make home education sustainable long term.

Lock in one or two weekly commitments outside the house. Home-ed meetups, a Forest School group, a sports club, a museum home-educators' day, a co-op with other families. Community isn't optional. Zhang and Gibson's 2024 UK study flagged social connection as one of the recurring worries for families new to home ed, and the ones who found their people early reported the biggest boost.

Start tracking, roughly. Not a school-style attendance register. Just a shared notebook or a shared doc where you jot what you covered each day, what worked, what didn't. This gives you something to look at when the LA writes to ask, and – more usefully – it gives you honest feedback on whether you're covering what you think you're covering.

Set a three-month review point in the calendar now. This is when you sit down and honestly reassess. Is the approach working? Is the child engaged? Are you burning out? Do you need to swap in an online course, an online school, or a tutor for a subject you're struggling with?

At secondary, week four is also when you start looking at the exam pathway – not to book anything yet, but to understand the shape. Most home-educated families use iGCSE (International GCSE) rather than UK GCSE, because most iGCSE syllabuses have no coursework or non-exam assessment. Cambridge International and Pearson Edexcel International are the main boards. Private candidates sit exams at approved centres; JCQ lists around 190 UK centres that accept private candidates. The list refreshes each December/January. Booking deadlines for June exams can be as early as the first Monday of February, so if your child is in Year 10 or 11, this planning matters.

Oak National Academy (thenational.academy) covers Reception to Year 11 across every subject, free. BBC Bitesize covers KS1 to KS5 with exam-board-aligned pages. Khan Academy is strong for maths (US framing but content-level equivalent).

Across KS3, GCSE, iGCSE, A-Level and IB in sciences, maths, English (language and literature), geography, history, religious studies, economics, modern languages and computer science, Cognito (cognito.org) has all videos and notes free, plus flashcards, quizzes and exam questions free with a weekly limit (Pro removes the cap). It's ad-free and works well for the home-educator core-subject bit of the week.

For legal questions and general home-ed support: Education Otherwise (educationotherwise.org, £17/year family membership), HEAS (heas.org.uk), and Home Education UK (home-education.org.uk). For SEND: IPSEA (ipsea.org.uk) and Contact (contact.org.uk).

Don't spend three weeks planning before you start. The plan will change. What matters more is starting with a rough shape and adjusting.

Don't buy a full curriculum-in-a-box on day one. Try free resources first. If you hit a wall in a specific subject, then buy a workbook or a course for that subject.

Don't isolate. Community is protective, both for you and for your child. Book the meetup, join the Facebook group, say yes to the first invitation.

Don't try to prove yourself to relatives, neighbours or teachers. You'll have doubts and that's fine, but the first month isn't the moment to be defending your choices. Focus on the child and revisit the bigger picture at the three-month review.

And don't try to recreate school. If you wanted school for your child, they'd still be there. Home education works because it isn't school.