Home educating a gifted child

Our son was always slightly different to his peers in development and interests. Whilst at the crawling stage he would be busy playing with pram wheels and a pudding basin and his visitors sat with their teddies. He always found the toddler groups a nightmare and often screamed. I was told to persevere, but inwardly felt he just didn’t’ want to be there. At nursery he became so unhappy that he stopped singing, something he had always done, and eventually stopped talking. It took several months and a number of Thomas trains to coax him back to talking and singing.

From nursery/prep school traumas we moved onto reception at a local state school where I would have to go out to buy books to put into the library so he could bring something suitable home. He was an able reader at this time and made no progress in that year, coming top of the class. After several discussions and initial promises to accommodate him, it became clear that no help was on offer. In fact the only help came from the children, who at the end of the year, still had no grasp of the alphabet! Moving on, we tried a further three schools over the years until he was finally removed by us after Year 5.

In each school, be it state or private, his differences were not identified, and he was bullied and mis-understood instead. I was labelled an over-protective mummy, but he was so miserable at school and happy at home. Every summer holiday was a nightmare where he constantly asked ‘how many days until school?’. At school he struggled to cope with noises, lights and the buzz of classroom life. He felt isolated and friendless, unable to fit into their system.

One area of interest that kept him going was music. From the age of 6 he took up piano, followed by cello, then singing and viola and music theory. To date, he has achieved Grad 8 singing and Grade 5 viola with distinction, and is preparing for Grade 7 piano, Grade 6 cello, and Grade 6 theory. We have had some patient teachers over the years and some that perhaps couldn’t cope!

As with all his academic subjects, he fires off questions relentlessly, and has an uncanny knack of discovering a weakness a teacher my have in their subject. He has to verbalise everything he is learning, it is his way of reinforcing what he has learnt. Worksheets are just a frustrating repetition of what he already knows.

By the end of Year 5 the Head finally agreed that maybe there ‘was something going on there’ and we saw and Educational Psychologist who assessed that he was very bright and had Asperger’s Syndrome. This came at the time he also had a diagnosis of Chronic Fatigue Syndrom (CFS) and Myalgic Encephalopathy (ME), which the Educational Psychologist could not agree with at all. We felt very let down at the joint meeting with her and the Head, and gave our notice to remove him from the school after persevering for a further term. At this time our son one day said that life was not worth living, and this broke my heart. Some of the incidents that occurred in school are perhaps best not mentioned; abuse is not too strong a word.

I spent that summer holiday researching home education, and we took the step to register him with the then LEA on the first day of the new school year. That was three years ago, and I wish that I had had the confidence to never have sent him to school and kept him at home to find out how he learnt best.

From the start, there was a joint sense of relief, no more screaming at the start of term; or tears in the morning; no more uneaten lunches because he was too stressed to eat; no more bullying. My husband now goes to work without having the pantomime of getting him into the car on time to dash into the city, to double back to his own work through heavy traffic. Because of his CFS my son is usually unresponsive or tired until 10 o’clock, or sometimes later, so we start working when he is ready.

Over the three years at home we have tried and discarded various forms of learning. The way our son learns is quite different to school methods where there is a lot of repetition and reinforcing. When we commenced home education he would have been finishing KS2 if at school, so I picked up from there and came up against a brick wall. My son wanted nothing to do with this material, he was bored, so we moved onto KS3 for Maths, and other subjects. In time after the tutors we were using had left, we hit the road for IGCSEs. We have gone down the route of tutors from a reputable agency, which has caused us grief; we have tried the famous CGP workbooks and written on perhaps three pages. We have also tried their study books, which were deemed unhelpful by my son.

Correspondence courses and on-line school have all been tried with varying degrees of success. Audiocassettes for language got a big thumbs down because there is no visual element to the presentation, he favoured the BBC Learning First Steps courses followed by their Ma France and a German course from a news site in Germany.

We have found that he learns best when he is relaxed, and mostly from just reading the textbook. Generally, he retains about 85% of the material in this way; the rest is covered when we revise. He dislikes writing out exercises so we discuss most subjects, but he does have to do some maths on paper (under protest). He now reads some subjects for himself, usually kneeling on the sofa, arms draped over my footstool with the textbook on the floor. He enjoys learning from well-structured CD ROMs that are interactive, when he was smaller he loved the Jump Ahead software followed by the Learning Ladder series, for maths we used the maths2x1 for KS3 and 4. This was topped up with an IGCSE text and CD ROM in preparation for the exam this May. All in all my son’s learning experience has been an experience for us too. I wouldn’t like to say how much we have spent on aborted courses and textbooks.

In three years he has progressed from KS2 (almost) to IGCSE and beyond, he has just sat IGCSE Maths and Chemistry at 13. He still struggles with times tables and has no grasp of the size of numbers, but really enjoys Differential Calculus, and can’t wait to get to grips with Complex Numbers. This from a child who struggled with KS2. Peculiarly, his real strength lies in the literary field; he has a desire to be a writer.

We have a hospital Consultant’s letter requesting his Access requirements, which has helped enormously with his coping with the exams. He is allowed a break halfway through to ‘chill’ and also 25% extra time to help with the slowness of writing, along with a keyboard for essay-based exams, since writing in volume is too painful to his joints.

We anticipate that he will sit a few exams at a time to spread the stress/workload. One big advantage of being at home is that we get to decide which subjects he sits and when. On the downside it is a big headache for most home educating families to find a local exam centre that will let candidates sit their particular exam subjects and exam boards.

We are trying to avoid specialising him too early, we want him to have a broad-based education, and be free to choose later. We hope he takes around 13 IGCSE/GCSEs, sitting a few at a time. He needs time to recover from his health problems, time to catch up on his emotional development and time to decide what he really wants to do.

A common comment aimed at home educators in general (and we have had our fill of it) is the big question of socialisation. Our son has some friends not many, but that is partly due to being on the 99.7 percentile and thinking on a different level so much of the time, and other children find him hard work. HE is great with small children, very caring and kind, and happily engages with adults and will hold forth on the political situation if allowed. He does sing in a local small choir, which has taken a while for him to cope with.

We have seen him maturing with his social skills over the last three years, and with the help of some acting lesions when he is well, we expect that he will be fine in the end. A retired vicar suggest acting skills as he, like our son, had Asperger’s Syndrome and had to learn how to portray himself as a caring person although he already was inside.

For us it is always difficult gauging the right balance of time spent with friends and time resting. With his CFS life is quite unpredictable, he can suddenly have frail spells with no warning, only to pick up and seem almost well again. Coupling this with the stress he suffers going out, mixing in a crowd or just visiting a friend, it is almost impossible to gauge how much is too much. It’s always the days after a visit that show how well he has coped.

My one big ‘if only’ is if only I had had the confidence to stand my ground when he was small and follow my instincts to keep him at home, then we would have spared him a lot of pain and trauma. As it is, we have learnt from our experiences. He hopes to get to Oxford, although he is unsure which Degree to go for – will it be English Literature, or Latin, or History, or maybe Music, or maybe even Maths?

For further information and support:

www.nagcbritain.org.uk
0845 4500295

www.nas.org.uk
0845 0704004

www.meassociation.org.uk
01280 818968