It's done! And other educational ramblings

At last! All the coursework for the upcoming exams in May/June went in the post this afternoon. We are all feeling light-headed and very silly, and very relieved of course.

I always thought that coursework would give my two the chance to get some marks squirreled away before the exam proper. It's worth an average of about 20-30%, though in ICT it is much more (60+%). Instead it is the source of much head-banging (by me), tears and tantrums (by K), and leaving everything to the last minute (by D & K). D got his tears and tantrums out the way two years ago when he did GCSEs in maths and chemistry. He still wants to leave it to the last minute but at least understands (vaguely) what is involved. All in all the stress levels in this house climbed exponentially as the March deadline approached. So tonight I will be making inroads into a bottle of wine - if any of you catch me on MSN then please excuse the wild sense of humour and awful spelling.

Getting the coursework done and marked seems to be the hardest bit of doing exams when home educated. The powers that be don't consider us 'alternatives' when tinkering with things educational. I understand that coursework is to be dropped and replaced with some sort of in-school tasks. Quite how we're supposed to manage that I don't know - makes me glad that mine will be beyond GCSEs by that time.

Next year (2009) K will be taking IGCSEs instead - in maths, chemistry and maybe physics. There are two different exam boards that offer them, Edexcel International and Cambridge International. There are more exam venues that sit the Edexcel version. The difficulty lies in finding somewhere willing to accept you as a private candidate. We've been quite lucky there. A secondary school in Portsmouth will happily accept private candidates for GCSE. However my two are doing the Cambridge IGCSE for English and my options are tiny. There are very few places in the UK that do them so we're invading Bristol on two Friday afternoons in May.

My friend B keeps telling me to just skip this stage and go straight on to Open University. It certainly hasn't held her 3 boys back to have no GCSEs. One of them is off to university! I know she's right but part of me just can't let go of the traditional mentality. D has done and passed an OU short course but I don't think K is quite ready to try them yet. We may give one a go later in the year.