My oldest has recently finished her last set of IGCSE exams (International GCSE). As home educator you can do things differently to schools and one of the things that we did differently was to stagger her exams. And I know some people find this strange and wonder why we did that so here is a quick explanation of why we chose to stagger her exams.

Firstly cost. If you kid is in school you do not need to pay for there exams. However if your kid is home educated you have to pay for every exam that they write and you have to pay for every mock exam that they write. This gets very expensive, I am talking thousands of pounds. So staggering the cost does help.

Our second reason was me. We did not use tutors for her subjects it was me, my daughter, her student books and some online videos. I was the one guiding her and answering her questions for every subject that she was doing and I was doing that while still home educating our other kiddo. Honestly there is NO way I would have managed if she did all her subjects together at one go.

Do I think I did I good job preparing her for her exams? Yes. I am not going to sugar coat it, it was challenging, I worked as hard as she did, because there was quite a bit of content that I had to teach myself and understand so I could explain to her. I also had to understand what was needed for every exam and how the exam board wanted her to answer the questions.

It was time consuming. Really time consuming. If you are planning on home educating your kid through GCSE exams please understand you are going to be diving in with them and it is going to suck up a lot of your time.

But it is totally doable as long as you have the right attitude and are prepared to jump in with your kiddo you can do it.

I am glad we chose to stagger her exams. YES.

In fact we are already planning on staggering my youngest exams. We have already started him on two of his IGCSE subjects which means we will probably write these two subjects early. Bearing in mind he wants to do two more subjects than his sister did and his sister is potentially wanting me to teach her one of her A level subjects. So again there is no way that I would be able to commit to doing all of that, doing it well and doing it without killing myself unless we chose to stagger his exams.

Home education means you do have choice and one of those is around when your kid writes their exams. I am glad we chose to stagger her exams. If I did it all over again I would still stagger them.