Online home education: how to get started

Home education is legal in England under section 7 of the Education Act 1996, which asks parents to provide an "efficient full-time education suitable to age, ability and aptitude". Those are the only real requirements: suitable, full-time, and matched to your child. You don't have to follow the national curriculum, keep to a timetable or enter your child for SATs or GCSEs.

If your child is currently on a state school's roll, you deregister by writing to the head teacher, who removes them and tells the local authority. Home-educated children must be registered with the local authority, which can make informal enquiries to check the education looks suitable. The rules changed recently and a local authority handles them differently case to case, so check the current position on gov.uk and with your own local authority before you start. For the detail, see our guide to the rules and the law.

That's where the national curriculum is genuinely useful, even though you don't have to follow it. It sets out, subject by subject, what's usually taught and in what order, so it gives you a recognised yardstick to work from and a simple way to show what's been covered if the local authority ever asks.

The most common mistake is building a copy of the school day at home. You don't need to. At home there's no class of 26, no moving between rooms and no waiting around, so an effective home day is much shorter than a school day. A day that holds up usually looks like this:

Almost every family hits the same three.

Trying to be the teacher in every subject. You can't be an expert in English, maths, science and a language all at once, and you shouldn't try. Your role is to hold the structure and find the right material or tool for each subject.

Confusing quantity with quality. Four focused hours at home often cover more than a full school day. More hours isn't more learning, it's just more resistance.

Forgetting the social side. Most families manage the academic part. What tends to slip is the friends. Clubs, sport and other home-educating families aren't an extra, they're part of the plan.

The biggest burden in home education isn't the subject matter. It's that you have to be parent, planner and teacher in every subject, every single day. That's exactly the burden we built Jabba to take.

You set the day up in a minute and choose what to work on and how much. From there Jabba does the teaching itself: it teaches the full range of subjects in step with the national curriculum, goes one small step at a time, gives hints instead of answers and lets the child write the answer. You don't have to know the material yourself, and you're not inventing worksheets the night before.

Because Jabba works in step with the national curriculum, your child covers what school would aim at rather than random material off the internet, and you get a running record of what's actually been done. In the parent overview you see every conversation, progress and the day's mood, so you keep the overview, and a simple record if the local authority ever makes an informal enquiry.

Jabba is an AI tutor and a learning companion, not a treatment, and it isn't a registered school. The responsibility for a suitable education stays with you, and informal enquiries are the local authority's. But as the daily engine of the teaching, so you can be a parent rather than a teacher in six subjects, it's built for it.