You are not failing
You might be reading this with your heart pounding, a half-drafted email open on your laptop and a small person watching television in the next room. That is exactly where hundreds of parents are this afternoon, and thousands were last week. You have not ruined your child. You have not broken the law. You have not even done anything unusual.
Home education is one of two equally legal routes through compulsory schooling in the UK. The law was written to allow it. The Department for Education publishes guidance for families doing it. Every local authority has a dedicated elective home education (EHE) team because it is a common enough choice that councils staff for it year-round. The feeling that you are alone in a worst-case scenario is the panic talking, not the reality.
What follows is a plain checklist for the next three days and a short note on what comes after. The point of the next 72 hours is not to start home educating. The point is to rest, file the paperwork calmly and let your child settle. The real work can wait.
What actually has to happen in the next 72 hours?
Three things: the deregistration has to be in writing, you need to save the paperwork and everyone (you, your child, the rest of the family) needs to slow down.
The first thing is the only piece of legal admin. If you have not already sent a written notification to the head teacher saying you are withdrawing your child to educate them at home, use the letter template in the related reading below and send it today. Email is fine. A one-line acknowledgement from the school office is enough proof that it landed. If you sent the letter earlier this week, do not resend; just save the copy in a folder labelled "home education" and move on.
The second thing is not really admin at all: open a folder (a paper one on the shelf or a folder in your email app) and drop in the deregistration letter, the school's reply when it comes and any letter the local authority sends later. That is the whole of your record-keeping for the first fortnight. Nothing else needs to go in yet.
The third thing is the hardest. Do nothing educational for three days. No workbooks. No schedule. No set-up of a classroom corner. Read to them, take them out, let them play, cook something together. Your job for this weekend is to let the adrenaline drop out of the house.
Why does my child seem so strange this week?
A note on the word "deschooling". Deschooling is the settling-in period after a child leaves school: the weeks or months when they decompress, sleep more, and gradually re-engage. The word describes this adjustment, not the legal act of leaving school (that is deregistration), and not a pause in education. Learning continues throughout; it simply looks quieter than a classroom.
Because they are deschooling, which is the normal and expected settling-in period after coming out of school. A child who has just left a classroom often behaves in one of a few ways that can look alarming from the outside. They might sleep more than usual. They might refuse anything that smells of a lesson. They might become clingy or, equally, disappear into a long, quiet solitary activity for hours. They might watch the same video six times in a row. They might say they are bored, then get furious when you suggest something, then do something beautiful half an hour later.
None of this is a warning sign. It is a nervous system coming down from years of timetabled pressure. The informal rule of thumb in home-ed circles is a month of deschooling for every year your child spent in school. That is a rough guide, not a law; some children settle in a fortnight, some need a term. Try not to measure.
What helps during deschooling is ordinary life, at a pace you can sustain. A Montessori-inspired starting point is to lean into what the educator Maria Montessori called practical life work: cooking, washing, mending, caring for plants, sweeping, pouring, cutting fruit. Slow, hands-on, satisfying, with a clear beginning and end. It gives a settling child something to focus on without any of the classroom signals that might still be raw. It is also, incidentally, good preparation for every other kind of learning that comes next. The academic work (reading, writing, maths) can wait a few weeks and you will lose nothing.
What will the local authority do, and when?
The school will tell your local authority that your child has come off the roll, usually within ten school days, and the LA's elective home education team will write to you a few weeks later. That letter is almost always a polite informal enquiry, not a summons.
Most LA letters ask in some form: "Could you tell us a little about the education you are providing?" You do not have to reply the day it lands. You do not legally have to reply at all, though most families do in writing because it closes the file quickly. When you are ready, a calm one-page note describing your approach, a rough rhythm of the week and a few examples of what your child has been doing is usually plenty. There is a dedicated article on writing that reply in the related reading.
A small proportion of LA letters are more formal: they cite Section 437 of the Education Act 1996 (the section of the statute that sets out the formal Notice to Satisfy and School Attendance Order process) or mention a School Attendance Order by name. These are rare and they are the point at which you stop reading blog posts and contact Education Otherwise (the UK home-education charity). See the red flags box at the bottom.
What do I not have to do this week?
Almost everything. You do not need to buy curriculum, set up a classroom, pick a pedagogy, write a plan, register anywhere new or start a timetable. You do not need to commit to a label (Montessori, Charlotte Mason, unschooling, eclectic). You do not need to decide today whether this is for a term or for good. You do not need to print anything off Pinterest. You do not need to post about it on social media. You do not need to answer questions from strangers.
The single thing worth starting this week, if you have the energy and not before, is a small notebook where you jot three things your child did that day. Not a report. Three phrases. "Pressed apple juice with me. Read two chapters of the tiger book. Cried when we went inside." That notebook becomes the quiet backbone of everything else you will later do (LA correspondence, progress reviews, your own confidence) without any of it feeling like work.
A real family's first 72 hours
A mum we will call Maya deregistered her Year 3 daughter on a Monday after a meeting at the school that had gone badly. By Monday evening she had sent the letter and not slept. On Tuesday she put all her curriculum Pinterest boards in a "later" folder and took her daughter to the library and a cafe. On Wednesday her daughter refused to get out of her pyjamas and watched three hours of television; Maya made beans on toast for lunch and cried in the kitchen. On Thursday she made a folder called "home education", filed the sent email and the school's one-line confirmation and wrote three sentences in a cheap notebook. That was the whole of her first 72 hours.
The LA letter arrived three weeks later. Maya replied in her own time, with a one-page note describing a broadly child-led, Montessori-inspired approach and the rhythm of a normal week. The LA closed the case the following month. The only thing Maya says she would change, looking back, is that she would have started with the tea sooner.