Hi
Although I guess we are all very keen to get our children back into full time main stream education. Many of us will probably realise this might take a very long time or indeed have resigned ourselves to the fact that it may never happen.

One approach we tried to re-integrate our daughter into school was to get a Teaching Assistant to visit our home. It took a lot of negotiation with the school, but we managed to get a TA to visit us twice a week for an hour at a time and then gradually for those sessions to move closer to the school environment, we even had a couple of weeks where the sessions took place in our car on the school car park. Unfortunately the final hurdle of going into a classroom with other students proved too much for our daughter, but I wonder has anyone else managed to take a similar approach and get it to work?

Second thing we found which can be useful is the BBC Schools website. They have a lot of really good material which links to National Curriculum and GCSE's, and it is fun, interactive and available without cost or delay. If your child is missing a lot of school I would suggest this is a good quick way to help them learn and keep up with classmates.

Our personal experience of work being sent home from school is very mixed with many teachers sending pretty dull stuff home, then taking ages to mark it, and not being that encouraging.

If anyone else has any good ideas or suggestions for supporting the education side of things without resorting to expensive personal tutors I'd be really interested.

Keith

Hi Keith,

I too have found BBC bitesize to be good for my daughter. if school work is sent home it invariably doesn't get done or as you say, is boring and uninspiring.
My daughter will not be sitting any GCSE's at school as she has missed too much school, but by using Bitesize she can still keep her brain ticking over for when she is ready to maybe go somewhere like learn direct to get some level 2 qualifications without the pressure of being in a classroom.
I know thats not ideal, but it is the best we can hope for.
Penny

Hi there, we have tried the staggered approach to the classroom and failed on the participation hurdle, At the moment my son is willing to do the work at home then he meets up with a teacher a couple of days a week in her office to go through it. It's not actually a classroom and he knows he will be leaving after. It's a start but at least he gets through those doors twice a week.

Does your school have OSCA, an on-line virtual classroom, we haven't tried it yet but school are arranging some tutorials on how to use it.

Bye for now
kirsty xx