by Alannah Cohen
The first two posts in this series explored identifying education aims and recognising progress towards them. Having some idea of what we’re hoping education will achieve can help us make decisions along the way. Thinking about what progress might look like can help us notice learning when it happens, including when it turns up somewhere we weren’t expecting it.
Aims are described as providing a narrative thread to help us make sense of why we’re making the choices we make and how different experiences and bits of learning fit into a bigger picture. When it comes to writing a home education report for the local authority, we are taking that narrative thread and making it visible to someone who wasn’t there; in other words, telling the story of our child’s education.
This post is drawn from a conversation between volunteers from our helpline and report checking teams about how we help with that, what makes an account genuinely informative and what we would most like home educators to know when they sit down to write a report. During the conversation, we kept coming back to the same thing: we want to be able to see your child, and their life, in their education.
If you contact our helpline about putting a report together or send us a draft to check, there’s usually a very practical reason: you need to present information about your child’s education to your Local Authority (LA) and you want to know whether you’re doing that effectively. Of course, one of the primary things we do as report checkers is to suggest edits for flow, readability, grammar and punctuation. Clear writing matters, but ordinary language and examples often give a clearer picture than formal educational terminology. ‘He is developing critical-thinking skills’ is an educational sounding conclusion, but it doesn’t explain how you got there.
Including detailed observations really helps the child’s experience to shine through, such as this example of a child questioning a cathedral tour guide. The child asks, “I’ve been to other churches and cathedrals with really tall, fancy pulpits. S____ cathedral’s pulpit is quite grand. If they spent all this money on building this cathedral, why is the pulpit so small and insignificant?” Rather than simply stating that the child uses critical thinking skills, this concrete observation shows the critical thinking in action. It also shows social skills and confidence and, most importantly, it shows almost first-hand how the child engages with and uses their learning in the world around them.
AI has made it particularly easy to turn simple observations into polished educational language. Sometimes, if used well, that can be helpful for organising or refining what you’ve written. But making something sound ‘professional’ is not the same as bringing the story to life. If the particular details of your child disappear in the process, the polished version can often end up saying very little.
You know your child and their education in a way that we never can. Our Education Otherwise (EO) volunteer teams bring our own experience as home educators, alongside the perspective that comes from supporting lots of different families to describe theirs. Sometimes a report brings an education to life all the way through, other times there are snippets of it and we can help you draw more of it out. Occasionally some apparently minor detail you’ve mentioned in passing is the bit that makes us think, ‘tell us more.’
A report might explain that your child uses a particular maths workbook, which level they’re working at and which topics they’ve covered. This is useful information, but if the approach is not explained somewhere in the report, the child themselves gets lost. Equally, you might write that your child taught themselves animation. There’s potentially a whole story sitting behind that short statement; their reactions, good and bad, to things they’ve done, watched or read and how those experiences show up in or influence their animation work.
There is another part of the story that’s worth making visible too: why this education works for this child. If your child loves working through textbooks, that’s part of their story. Perhaps they need to know what’s coming next, or enjoy working sequentially and get enormous satisfaction from finishing a section. Another child might follow an interest from volcanoes to Pompeii, Roman history and Latin before attempting to recreate an eruption in the garden. Most home education probably contains its own mix of different ways of learning, adapting as children grow and their needs and interests change. There isn’t a particular kind of home education we’re hoping to find when we read a report. We want to understand yours. Coming up in September we will be hosting a Q & A session with a local authority officer to understand their view on what they look for in reports too (more details on this coming soon).
This takes us back to our aims again. Knowing what we’re hoping education will achieve can help us make sense of the little moments. When we come to tell the story, that narrative thread helps somebody else understand how our children’s experiences, learning and progress fit together, and you don’t have to sound like an education professional to do that.
Our EO volunteer teams’ own experiences of home education are an important part of what they bring to the support we offer. We know that learning doesn’t always arrive neatly labelled. We can sometimes recognise the significance of something you’ve mentioned almost casually and help you bring more of it into the story. You bring the knowledge of your child and their education, but by asking you the right questions we can help you make that knowledge more visible to somebody who wasn’t there. Conversely, we sometimes identify occasions when a report slips from making the child visible to oversharing. You can access this support through EO’s helpline when you’re starting the process or need help along the way, or through our report checking service when that first draft is complete.
For most of us, the immediate purpose of writing a report is simply to give the LA the information it needs. There is, however, a wider benefit to telling these individual education stories well. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 will bring changes to the relationship between home educators and Local Authorities, including registers of children not in school as well as new information requirements. The relevant provisions are not all in force yet, and further detail about implementation is still to come. This is likely to mean that more home educators have contact with their LA, including families in areas where there has previously been relatively little. Whether or not that is a change we would have chosen, it also gives us an opportunity. Every clearly told education story gives somebody outside our community another chance to see what home education can actually look like in all of its forms. It means showing how your approach and curriculum are just right for your child. Taken together, our unique stories can build a much richer picture of home education and show how a breadth of approaches can truly meet the different needs, interests and aptitudes of individual children.
Telling your child’s home education story isn’t really about finding the right way to sound, it’s about making visible what you know about your child and their education, finding the narrative thread and describing it clearly enough that somebody else gets to see the life and learning that you see every day.
The Education Otherwise Helpline is also free to all home educators, whether members or non-members, and is open six days a week: Monday to Friday from 10am to 6pm and Saturdays from 11am to 2pm.
Find out more about the service and membership or contact us about volunteering.
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Author bio: This post is a collaborative effort between EO’s helpline and report checking teams. Our report checking service is available to everyone, and while we ask for a voluntary donation or membership to help support our wider charitable work, we seek to turn no one away because they cannot afford to contribute. Our trained, volunteer-led report checking team routinely handles a steady stream of reports a week, with submissions checked daily.
