How to track your home-educated child's progress

If you're taking an autonomous approach to home education, where you're led by your child, the key to ensuring they make progress is to notice their particular interests and give them the opportunity to develop the interest further. If a book from the library on mini beasts goes down well, you could extend their learning by setting up your own bee hive, making honey sandwiches and counting how many different types of insects you can spot on a country walk. If your child shows an interest in origami, you could get the atlas out and read about Japan, and learn some words of Japanese together.

Learning autonomously means children will naturally gain a broad education, as their interests will be wide enough to encompass literacy, numeracy and other subjects. Plus, most importantly, they are likely to follow these interests through in greater depth, so their knowledge will be more thorough. 

Don’t forget that you can progress too. As a home educator, keeping an eye out for topics and ideas that will engage your child means you can tap into their interests and find areas that they're keen to learn about and make progress in.

If you're following a more structured home education programme, perhaps with a set daily timetable and workbooks covering the curriculum subjects, you may prefer a structured approach to measuring your child's progress, too. At school, this is done in a number of ways: through observation, teacher assessment and testing. All of these can be replicated at home. For example, with observation, you might set your child a science practical to see how light affects plant growth. By watching them do the task, you can observe whether they've fulfilled the learning objective.

With ongoing assessment, you might give them a weekly writing or maths challenge, and see how their work develops and matures over time. Using workbooks can be helpful in structuring your child's learning and allowing you to see if they're making progress.

You can also give them tests at set intervals - perhaps at the end of each half-term, as would be the case if your child was at school. You could use past and practice papers (available to download for Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2) and optional SATs papers to see how they're progressing in core subjects. 

Joining a home education group is another way of measuring progress by comparing ideas with other parents and sharing knowledge amongst the children, but beware of direct comparisons: the defining feature of home education is that children learn at their own rate, so your child may seem streets ahead in some areas, but less advanced in others. 

Whichever approach to learning and progress you take, keep in mind that the very act of home educating your child means you're invested in their progress: parental involvement is one of the biggest and most positive factors affecting children's learning.

Many home-educated children re-enter the school system either at the start of secondary school or soon after, typically around the age of 14. 'The vast majority of home educating parents acknowledge that the purpose of education is for their children to be able to make their way in the world,' says Dr Thomas. 'Home-educated pupils are also, far more often than not, keen to sit GCSEs and A levels because they understand the importance of having recognised qualifications in terms of getting on in life.'

This doesn't mean your child has to return to school. They can sit GCSEs, A Levels, the International Baccalaureate and vocational qualifications through a local assessment centre or college as an independent candidate, although you'll be responsible for their entry fees. They can do these in their choice of subjects, and the age when you consider them ready: for example, they could take some GCSEs at the age of 14 if they felt capable. 'I can’t think of any children I’ve come across who have failed their GCSEs because of being educated at home,' says Dr Thomas.

Some home-educated children never take formal exams, though, and this needn't be a barrier to entering higher education. UCAS points (for university applications) can be accrued via other routes such as music or drama exams, and some universities will take things like work experience and voluntary work into account if your child has good references. However, it's important to look carefully at the routes into your child's potential course or career in good time (before they'd need to start studying for GCSEs): if, for example, they want to study medicine, it's highly unlikely they'll get a place without three A levels, mainly in science subjects.