Reflections on week one of homeschooling: Supporting parents and looking to the future

I work for the Chartered College as a Research and Learning Specialist and I’m also a mum to three sons aged 1, 7 and 10. Up until last Autumn, I’d been a teacher and Assistant Headteacher in Primary schools for 15 years but I recently left my job in school to start a part-time PhD. Like so many others, what used to be my weekly routine has now been thrown up in the air by COVID-19. Having left teaching, I quickly find myself becoming a teacher once more. This time, a home educator to two children who definitely don’t listen to me as much as my pupils in school used to, and to one toddler who has an insatiable drive to chew phone charger cables and grind food into the gaps between my laptop keys. This post aims to combine my experiences as a teacher and a parent in order to try and begin answering the question - ‘How can we best support parents in homeschooling their children?’ It also considers what this situation means for education as a whole and where it might lead