Free first session

I offer all parents thinking of taking up home education free advice and a free first session. In addition to one-to-one on-line tuition, I can help parents and care-givers  help their children meet the assessment objectives for each unit of their KS4 and KS5 courses. I can advise on choice of specification and which might be the optimal IGCSE course or A Level course for your child. Advice is provided on-line and via seminars and webinars or from my home in Sussex (above). Contact me at richard.marriott.english@gmail.com to find out about webinars and seminars for parents coming up in the next term.

Why home educate?

I am a passionate believer in home education. There are two reasons for this: all that’s wrong with school education; all that’s right with home education. There are some great books and articles out there to tell you what’s wrong with traditional school-based education (time spent in corridors, time spent on repetitive tasks waiting for the last student to learn what the first got ages ago). A good place to begin is Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (1970). What’s right with home education? Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Emile (1762) offers a wonderful romantic portrait of a father educating his son and includes a passionate polemic in favour of vegetarianism.

Where do we learn?

Not, I would say, at a desk. Desks are where we show other people what we’ve learnt. Desks are for exams and writing essays. Exams and essays are where we show other people what we’ve learnt. So, what I’m most passionate about is learning – whether it’s at school or at home. Apart from tutoring ,I lecture. And because I want my lectures to be densely detailed (I want my audience to get there money’s worth) I pretty much type out the whole script in advance, so that it is shaped to emphasise and link together the key points. The typing out happens at a desk, that’s just the boring secretarial bit: the ideas happen when I go out for a walk or a run or am busy doing something else. Can you think about any moments when the penny dropped for you? When you realised something? That’s when the learning happened. Now, how many of those moments happened at a desk?

How does your child learn?

Probably they can’t tell you. But can you think of any significant conversations, things they said that made you think, yes, she’s got that? What was happening? What was the context for the learning? I somehow don’t think too many of those happened at a desk. And were you doing something? Was your child experiencing something? Jane Austen’s novel, Emma, (1815), is not on the surface a novel a novel about schools. But it is about Education. Emma is twenty-one years old. She’s had a governess. In other words, she’s been, to some intents and purposes, home-educated. But her real education, her moral education – that’s the education that matters to Jane Austen – takes place in her conversations and experiences with the man who loves her, Mr Knightley. It certainly doesn’t happen at a desk, or out of the pages of a book. Emma has whole lists of books she means to – but never does – read. As my eighteenth century friend, Rousseau, says: ” I hate books, all books: they only teach us to talk about things we know nothing about.”

How to read

Now, I don’t want to disappoint you: I’m not actually anti-books. In fact, I love them! But I don’t think we always want to sit at a desk while some teacher intones the next chapter of Lord of the Flies. (Were you one of those who always read ahead and then, suddenly asked to read, couldn’t find the right place?) It’s even worse when some poor child is asked to sight-read aloud to the class and a great work of English Literature is reduced to stumbled-through fragments and disconnected, uncomprehended syllables. Most books in the real world are read on beaches, on trains and on sofas – not at desks. And one of the best things to do with a poem is learn it – or a bit of it by heart – and then recite it and think about it bit by bit while out on a walk. That never happens in schools. 

What next?

Down to the nitty gritty. If you are home educating, what are the steps? I can talk you through all this on the phone – for nothing. But here are the basics.You’ll need to let the Local Education Authority know, find an examination centre, choose an specification and find a tutor. Let’s take those one at a time. 

• Let your Local Education Authority know. You can do that by an initial phone call and then an email. They may try and put you off with threats of inspections and visits. The chances are they’ll be so under-resourced that they’ll completely forget about you. That doesn’t mean we are not going to do things properly.
• An examination centre is usually a local school or college.  Centres get money for ‘private’ candidates – for letting your home-educated child take the exam at one of their desks, in one of their rooms, with one of their staff invigilating. Your son or daughter’s result, incidentally, won’t be listed as one of the centre’s results. 
• There are four ‘home’ examination boards in England and Wales: OCR, AQA, Edexcel and WJEC, the Welsh Board. In addition there is the CIE, which offers examinations internationally. You will probably choose, at KS4, an IGCSE (International GCSE) rather than a GCSE. The reason for this is that the home boards’ GCSEs require an assessment of Speaking and Listening – it’s a difficult complication to get round for ‘private’ candidates. All the home boards offer GCSEs and IGCSEs in English and English Literature. You will choose the same board for English and English Literature, if your child is doing both subjects (two separate qualifications). Because English Literature is text-based – lots of set texts to learn, my advice is always to minimise the texts you need to learn for English. I will outline the Specifications that are most popular with my students in the next section.
• Finding a tutor: you know what I’m going to say! Contact:

richard.marriott.english@gmail.com

or phone 01435 661 321 or 07812 742 164

Choosing the right Specification at Key Stage 4

Here’s an outline of the three most popular exam specifications in my experience (syllabuses as we used to call them). In the next section, I’ll help you compare them so that you can choose. I’ll discuss these all with you by phone if you want – at no charge: I’m as passionate exams as I am about English and education in general.

CIE First Language English (0500): two two-hour exams

This is for students for whom English is a first language. There are lots of combinations available of different exam components including coursework. Most home educated students I have taught taking this specification opt for these two components. 

Paper 1: a two hour reading comprehension task on previously unseen texts that has structured and extended writing questions.

Paper 2: a two hour “Directed Writing and Composition” is based on previously unseen texts that has two writing tasks.

Edexcel IGCSE Specification A: two exams: 2 hours 15 mins + 1 hour 30 mins

Edexcel IGCSE Specification B: one three-hour exam

How do I choose an Examination Specification?

You’ll notice a couple of things about the CIE and Edexcel Specifications outlined above: CIE and Edexcel B all test a response to previously unseen material. There are no texts to learn! Who would want to learn texts you can study in advance? Well, Edexcel A gives you the security of studying in advance texts that will be examined on both papers. A word of warning though: Edexcel A has an unseen text on Paper 1 and there are a lot of texts to learn not knowing which one will be on your exam. And with Edexcel A you have to study an Anthology of Literature texts in advance of Paper 2, again not knowing which one will rock up on your exam paper. In my view, there’s something to be said for learning the skills to help you tackle any texts, unseen or studied in advance.

Edexcel B has the shortest total examination time: three hours. But that is three hours all in one go. Risky? CIE makes you sit at a desk for twice for two hours at a time, but if you blow one exam, the second gives you another bite at the cherry.

I can discuss all these things with you and help you work out what we think might be best for your child. Most of my students opt for Edexcel B or CIE. So why do Edexcel A? If you are not doing both English and English Literature, Edexcel A gives you the chance to study some English Literature and if you really want the security of studying one of the exam texts in advance, Edexcel A gives you that. 

Common to all the examinations is a pattern of Section A Reading and Section B writing. And common to all of these are assessment objectives, things you’re being tested on, set by the government’s Joint Council for Qualifications: ‘Joint,’ it applies to all the exam boards. Examiners all work with mark schemes that set out the descriptors for each level of achievement in each assessment objective. That, frankly, is why you need a tutor. These descriptors can look deceptively simple but they do need interpreting so that we understand exactly what it is we have to do to meet them. That’s where I come in. I can show you and your child easy ways and easy-to-remember ways to produce the kind of writing that meets the highest level descriptors. That way, the examiner has no choice but to award your child the highest level of achievement. Just a reminder: richard.marriott.english@gmail.com, 07812 742 164, 01435 661321 for free advice and a free first session. 

Choosing an A Level Specification

There are many more choices at A Level than GCSE, including the Cambridge Pre-U exam and IB exams. There are the three main boards, AQA and Edexcel and OCR, as well as WJEC, the Welsh Board. Your first choice is which subject of the three available: English Literature, English Language or English Language and Literature.

• As a brief guide, English Literature is text-based. You will study eight texts, including texts written before 1900 and one Shakespeare text. It really helps if you enjoy reading! Good students will read other books by the authors of their set texts and they will read critical essays and biographies of their authors. It also really helps if you are interested in people and the problems they face, the difficult choices life presents us with and the feelings those choices arouse in us. You will care about how we conduct our lives as individuals, the feelings we have for our parents and the people we love; you will care about the way we organise ourselves in groups and societies and the ways we distribute power among people in societies. You will wonder how the possible existence of forces outside ourselves, any God for example, might influence the way we conduct our lives, relationships and societies. And you will want to refine your own ability to express your thoughts and feelings in words that say precisely what you want to say in an influential and powerful way. 
• English Language is not text-based. There are no set texts. But you will read very widely and you will learn a huge body of skills. It can suit students who are more science-minded, students who can categorise and enjoy categorising and sub-categorising knowledge. If you already know your nouns from your verbs, your concrete nouns from your abstract nouns and things like that interest you, this might be your course. So much of English Language falls into four of this and four of that: four open word classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs), four closed word classes (prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, determiners), four clause elements (subject, predicated, complement, adjunct). But it’s about much more than that. It’s about how we acquire we speech and written English and how Language constructs our identity. It is very much about how who controls the language has the power. You will study theories about language and about the interplay between language and ideology. 
• English Language and Literature is a cross between the two. Do not underestimate the very demanding nature of this course! Rewarding, yes; demanding, yes! You will be required to demonstrate the same skills as both the stand alone English Language and English Literature courses.