Getting started
Everyone's Going Back to School. We're Not.
By Laura · Founder, Home Ed Ireland
The uniform aisles in Dunnes are picked clean. The back-to-school ads are on a loop. Facebook starts filling with first-day and back-to-school photos. Someone at the shop asks if you’re “all set for school.”
And we’re not.
My daughter is six, and she has a way of cutting straight through all of it. When someone asks what school she’s starting, she just says, plainly, “I don’t go to school.” No apology, no long explanation. Just a fact about her life. It took me a good while longer to say it as easily as she does.
The wobble is normal
Saying it out loud is one thing. The quieter doubt, the kind that shows up when no one’s watching, can take a little longer to settle.
Even when you’re sure about your decision to home educate, a wobble is normal, and even inevitable at times like these. You can have made the most considered decision of your life and this period will still find the soft spot. Everyone else can’t be wrong, can they? Are we missing something? Should we be doing more?
It arrives uninvited, and passes just as fast. Chrissie felt both in a single trip to the shops:
I popped into Dunnes to pick up a few bits and stopped in my tracks. The school uniforms were everywhere, row after row of grey, maroon and blue. Shorts, jumpers, PE kits and joggers. For a moment, my body reacted before my brain caught up. Was I supposed to be panicking? Had I forgotten something? Should I be rushing around like a headless chicken, ticking things off a list?
And then I remembered: we don’t do this anymore. And the most wonderful sense of calm came over me. So I took a breath, had a little smile, and we carried on with our day.
– Chrissie, home educating since April 2026
That wobble isn’t a sign you’ve made a mistake. It’s just what it feels like to do something out of step with the crowd, and to notice the crowd moving.
It gets easier. Lisa, twelve years in, put it best:
Back to what?! In the early days, I felt like I was doing something illegal! But now? Couldn’t give a monkeys. It’s definitely gotten easier over the years.
– Lisa, home educating for over 12 years
You don’t have to “start” the day the schools go back
Part of what settles that wobble is realising there’s nothing you’re late for. There’s no bell, no date on the calendar that means begin now, and that’s not a gap in your plan, it’s one of the best things about going down the home-ed route.
The school year needs a launch because thirty children have to move as one. Yours doesn’t. You can ease in, start slow, follow the good (will also accept ‘not raining’) weather while it lasts. The week everyone else goes back can mean a quiet beach, the library all to yourselves, a slow morning with no one rushing anyone into a uniform.
Learning didn’t stop over the summer, and it doesn’t need switching back on now. It’s been happening the whole time.
You’re not on your own out here
If all of that still feels daunting, you won’t be doing it alone.
When the whole town is doing the school run and you’re not, it’s easy to feel like the only family in the county who chose differently. You’re not. Not even close. There are home educators in every corner of Ireland, meeting in forests and libraries and community halls, running WhatsApp groups and park meet-ups and messy art mornings, swapping advice and second-hand books and the odd reassuring “us too.” Whatever county you’re in, there are people nearby doing exactly this.
Find them. Browse the groups and meet-ups near you. It changes everything about how this season feels. It’s a lot warmer with a few people in it who get it.
And the ones who’ve been at it a while will probably tell you similar to Aingeal here:
For anyone starting off, my advice would be to trust your gut. You know your own children best. You facilitated their learning to walk, to talk, to feed themselves. This is no different. I help my children to learn but they are my greatest teachers.
– Aingeal, home educating for 10 years
The good part
Because for all the wobble, this isn’t a lesser version of the year everyone else is having. It’s your own.
Picture a Tuesday that’s the woods after breakfast, an hour lost in a project because no bell comes along to end it, the shops when they’re quiet. More time together, fewer early-morning battles, days that bend around your child instead of the other way round.
Ask almost any family who’s done it a while what they’d change, and most say the same thing: the time they got back was the whole point.
So, this week
When the ads and the aisles and the group chats all say one thing, it’s okay to be doing another. And if you’d like to make it your own, we’ve gathered a few ideas for a not-back-to-school tradition.
For us, we’re torn between doing something to mark the occasion and ignoring it altogether. Perhaps when our daughter gets older she might feel the ‘everyone is doing the same thing except me’ thing more, and organising a trip or something might become more important.
We’ve technically been home educating since my daughter left crèche in 2025, just before she turned five, but back then there was an unspoken understanding in almost all our interactions with people, a sense that she’d start school at six, like everyone else, and the not-yet was only temporary. Now she’s six. We’ve applied to register with Tusla. It feels more real now, and I know the questions might come a little more often. That’s okay. We’re ready for them.
However you’re feeling as everyone heads back (sure, wobbly, excited, unconvinced, all four before lunch), you’re in good company out here.
And if you ever need the words, you can always borrow my daughter’s. She doesn’t go to school. Simple as that.
Last updated 28 August 2026.