A group of home education parents have been running a weekly day in Torfaen for their children to learn and socialise.
They’re called FIRE Home Education and meet on Wednesdays at Woodlands Field Neighbourhood Learning Centre in Trevethin – known as the Log Cabin.
Last month, I was invited to do a talk and answer questions from the children about writing and local journalism.
During my visit, I sat down for a coffee and a chat with Carrie Powell, one of the parents, to find out why it was set up and hear about their plans to continue it over the next year.
Each week, they run sessions on different topics. Some are led by the parents themselves or they bring in experts. For example, a staff member from a bank came in to talk about money management.
She said: “FIRE stands for ‘Fuelling Innovative and Resourceful Education .
“It’s a really nice community feel. They’ve got the play park outside. A lot of our children are neurodiverse, and they need movement breaks so they can go outside and use the swings and the climbing frame and run around and then come back in and do some more learning and socialising.
‘Great friendships’
“They like being with their friends. We’ve got zero tolerance for bullying, so all of the children here are lovely. They make great friendships, and it’s a really positive place and safe place for them to be.”
The weekly session started last September after several parents who were already offering sporadic opportunities at different venues decided to do something “official” and organise it together.
Carrie said: “Sharon [a home-educator] came along and said we need something official and something that’s running regularly, and so then we set up the committee. I think there is about six of us on the committee who are the founder members.”
I asked Carrie why she home-educates her son, who would be starting year eight in September.
She said: “So my son was in primary school when we first considered home education, and he was really struggling. He’s autistic, he has sensory-processing difficulties and hypermobility, which causes a lot of pain and so he was struggling in school.
“He wasn’t coping with the noise of the classroom. He was constantly in pain. He wanted to be taking his shoes off in the classroom all the time because his feet were hurting.
“That wasn’t acceptable in case anybody got a chair on his foot and that type of thing, and then when he couldn’t cope with the classroom noise, the school’s way of dealing with that was for him to go into a pod on his own, but he never took any of his schoolwork with him.
‘Parents’ evening’
“He would just go and sit there on his own, although he was in school, he wasn’t actually receiving an education, so when I went into parents’ evening and looked at his work and there was just no completed pieces of work.
“So he was missing a lot of the really important building blocks for math and English and things like that, because, of course, they have to carry on with the rest of the class, even if he hadn’t got the information sort of down and learned.
“So I planned to take him out for one year, for year six, and get his education level up, and then put him into [a local secondary school]. So that’s what I did. He had a fabulous year six as home-ed.
“We worked really hard on all of his maths and learning. He made great friendships and everything. And then he went into [a local secondary school] and he was back out within a fortnight because it just wasn’t conducive to him for learning. He was having to carry a lot of heavy stuff, which when you’ve got hypermobility and you’re in pain anyway, you can’t learn when you’re not comfortable.
“He wasn’t finding the lessons interesting, and just straight away, my happy boy had gone again. He wants to be educated, he’s an ambitious, intelligent boy, so he made the decision that he can learn more from being home-educated than he can in the school system, so yes, I took him back out and we haven’t looked back now.”
Her son is studying for several qualifications.
Agored Cymru qualifications
Carrie said: “We do a lot of home education just us, but we’ve also bought into Crossroads Educational Consultants, and so he’s doing an Agored Cymru Level 2 qualification, so although he’s only in year seven, he’s doing GCSE equivalents. He’s doing practical learning in the outdoors and personal social education. He’s hoping to sit his Welsh second language GCSE at the end of what would be his year eight now, in the summer.
“He’s doing his Bronze Trinity Arts award. As well as building on his maths, English and everything you know in a way that he loves, he’s a massive fan of War of the Worlds, so we do a lot of English literature around plays and radio plays and all that type of thing. He’s learning, he’s healthy, he’s happy, he’s got great friends, and he is loving life.”
A benefit for parents is the chance to meet up with others having similar experiences to support each other.
Carrie said: “It’s really great to be able to offload with people who understand, because a lot of the time, people who aren’t in the home-ed community look at it from not a very positive way so it’s nice to be with people who understand and we do, we do have a lot of parents that are just starting off that will come in and just be so relieved to find a safe place.
‘Burst into tears’
“They’ll look over and they’ll see their child who they thought couldn’t socialise, smiling and talking, and they just burst into tears.
“They’re just so relieved to have found a way out of what they’ve been in, this competitive circle of just negativeness and pain.
“Another bonus of home educating is because children are neuro-diverse, they don’t like places when they’re very busy so you’ve got that opportunity to take them on holiday when it’s quieter so a lot of home-educated families, home educate through August because they’ve taken their holidays in sort of June, July and then go go back into it.”
The parents pay £50 a week to rent the hall and are planning a meeting soon to see if it’s feasible to run it through 2025/26.
Carrie said: “We’ve managed to just about do that this year. The problem we’ve got going forward next year is that we don’t have the money to do it again.
“Parents are paying for qualifications and other things for their children because when you home-educate your child, you’re financially responsible for every single thing, and it’s a massive undertaking, especially with all bills going up, petrol is going up and all of that.
“You don’t get any extra money coming in from anywhere to pay for this, it’s just you’ve got to find the money. Over the next month or so, we have to have another parents’ meeting and work out if and when and how we can do this again.
“Ideally, we’d love to keep it like this. This is perfect, but whether we can financially afford it [as] what we need is £1,950, ideally, sponsorship from a local business would be amazing.
“We fall between the cracks with getting grants and things. We’re not going to get council help because we’re not in their system.”