Home education for children with SEN and additional needs

A large proportion of home educated children in the UK have additional needs, and a large proportion of those families did not plan to be here. They arrived because school could not or would not meet the need, and often after a long fight. If that is you, the first thing worth saying is that leaving is not a failure of your child, and the exhaustion you are feeling is a reasonable response to what happened rather than a bad start.

Sort the legal position before you withdraw

For most children in England, you can withdraw by writing to the school and the duty becomes yours: an efficient, suitable full-time education under section 7 of the Education Act 1996. There is no duty to follow the national curriculum.

For children with additional needs, several things change. If your child attends a special school, you generally need consent from the local authority to remove them from the roll. If your child has an EHCP, the plan does not disappear when you home educate, but who delivers what changes, and the authority’s duty to arrange provision is different once you have chosen home education. Scotland requires consent to withdraw from a school roll where the child attends a special school or is on a roll.

What you keep and what you lose

• Health provision such as speech and language therapy or occupational therapy is generally health funded and continues, though waiting lists do not shorten because you left school.
• Education provision named in an EHCP becomes a more complicated question and depends on how the plan is worded and on your authority’s position. Get advice specific to your plan.
• Exam access arrangements need arranging directly with an exam centre as a private candidate, and centres want evidence, so keep any assessments you already have.
• Diagnostic pathways continue. Being home educated does not remove you from a waiting list, though school evidence is sometimes requested and you will need to supply your own observations instead.

The teaching part is often the easy part

One to one removes most of what made school impossible: the noise, the transitions, the pace set by thirty other children, the social performance, and the requirement to demonstrate learning in a specific format at a specific hour. What replaces it is teaching at the level the child is actually at, in each subject separately. Spiky, uneven profiles are the norm with additional needs. A child can be years ahead in one area and years behind in another, and neither number is the real child.

How Different Drums helps here

Working level is set per subject rather than by age, which is the single most useful design decision for an uneven profile. Nothing gets flagged as wrong for being out of step with a birthday.

Accessibility is built in: dyslexia-friendly fonts, adjustable text size, colour themes, high contrast, and voice input and output for children for whom reading or writing is the barrier rather than the thinking. The tutor waits indefinitely, never rephrases the question because the silence got uncomfortable, and will take a fifth follow-up in the same tone.

The learning log and reports matter more here than for most families, because you may be evidencing provision to an authority that is already sceptical. Everything done in the app logs itself with dates, and offline work takes a line. 14 days free, no credit card required.