We are Susan, Dom, Agatha and Peggy and we are a home educating family living near Manchester. The voice of this account is usually Susan for academic content, and Dom for trip content. We started home educating in 2020 and the girls each chose to continue doing so for their secondary education. They will go to college at 16 to complete A levels and will most probably go on to university.
Our girls are very bright and super curious. They have such a thirst for knowledge and the school system killed that within months. A move to a private school thankfully restored it and they thrived. But us parents didn’t under the financial pressure: we were paying people to spend more time with our kids than we were.
Covid then came. We loved learning together at home and we enjoyed supplementing everything the school sent home. We handed our notice in at the school, Susan did the same at work to be home full-time, and we’ve been home educating ever since!
Five years on, we’re ALL thriving. We’ve all grown in so many different ways and our family unit is tight.
The girls are doing several GCSEs a year each until they hit college; Aggie did her first one in year 7 and Peggy has done the same. They want to do them and we actually enjoy doing them! The girls have ambitions and they need the academics to realise them. They also need new knowledge and challenges; it’s what they crave.
Alongside academic work, every penny we have goes on travel, both within the UK and abroad. We live very frugally so we can experience as many things with the girls as we can.
We feel immensely privileged to have this lifestyle but it’s not all amazing. It’s hard. Unbelievably hard sometimes. Susan works harder now than she ever did under paid employment and so much more is at stake. We could really mess the girls’ lives up…
In this blog we’ll share with you what our home ed life looks like. We’ll share the good bits and the hard bits too. Our home ed life most definitely isn’t perfect!
Why are we doing this website?
First and foremost, this is a diary for the girls that they can look back on to remind themselves of the adventures we’ve had. They regularly go on and have a look at past pictures and talk about what we’ve done. We can also share our journey with friends and family more readily. We don’t post everything we do on here but we do include home ed things that we know other families could do too.
We also want to give back to the home education community. We have gained so much from looking at other peoples’ posts and blogs. This has often saved us hours and sparked some amazing ideas and for that we’re very grateful. Maybe something we’ve researched and written can be used by someone else? What a waste for resources to be sat in a Dropbox folder!
I frequently get messages asking how we approach a particular subject or about how we tackle GCSEs etc. As the same questions keep coming up, I’ve found it’s much easier to write my reply here on our blog and refer people to that, than to reply the same thing multiple times. This also means other people can see the answers too.
Now the girls are working more independently, we find we have pockets of time which we’d like to use for some good. So, we’ll be adding to this blog little and often.
Everything on this site will always be free. We do include Amazon affiliate links for many of the books and resources we use. If you do choose to buy something using one of our links, we can get a few pence at no additional cost to yourself. Any funds raised will go towards funding the girls’ GCSE exams. We’ve got a very expensive few years ahead of us!
Monthly Round-Up
May 2025
