At Le Loft, we recognise that there are many reasons for educating your children at home. In a better world, schools would be so good and curricula so interesting that educating your child at home would be a bottom-of-the-list choice for most parents. However, the reality is that the education system in this country is failing large numbers of students, with the result that home-education becomes a preferred, sometimes a necessary, response to an unsatisfactory situation. We understand this, and we understand the difficult choices that parents are forced to make. We are sympathetic with and supportive of those parents who have made this decision, whether willingly or otherwise. When enrolling a home-ed student, we have a number of guiding principles:
1) You are less likely to get caught staring out of the window in your bedroom than a classroom! Similarly, because it is easier to ignore unfavoured or difficult subject material if you don't have a teacher to bend your ear, the home-ed student needs to listen to (and obey!) their 'teacher within'. We believe that this is the first rule of home-ed.
2) To facilitate this, we strongly advise that the home-ed academic day should be comparable to a normal school one in terms of duration and timetabling; likewise, the home-ed academic year should mirror that of schools. Thus weekends, half-terms, holidays, tests, mocks and exams fall at the same time for both sets of students, preserving both friendships and social norms. As a rule of thumb, we would expect home-ed students to undertake 20-25 hours of study per term-time week, embracing English (3-4 hrs), Maths (3-4 hrs), the 3 Sciences (6-8 hrs, including practical work), a second language (2-3 hrs), with another 6 hrs being shared between the Arts and the Humanities. Very few parents could provide all of this unaided!
3) We believe that all serious study requires structure, and that serious students will prioritise their lives accordingly. This is especially so for students who are following an examined subject. At Le Loft, we try to provide some of this structure: our block-booking system of tuitions works effectively for the home-ed student because it encourages the development of a 'divide and conquer' strategy; we treat each block as a unit of time and of anticipated progress. We understand that home-educating parents are likely to be paying several different tutors and so will recognise the unique value of the structure we offer here.
4) We are tutors, not teachers; we follow in the wake of a student's progress, but we cannot direct it. We can only advise on or correct the things that a student brings to their tutorials. We can, and do, set objectives, homeworks, tests and assignments. We provide structured tutorials and structured workshops to assist, but we cannot do our students' learning for them. Our most successful students are the ones who have fully grasped this.
Please contact us or come and see us at Le Loft if you would like to know more about how we work.
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