I'm a long-time lurker, and have greatly appreciated the wit and wisdom found on these boards. Thank-you! Now I'm in a situation where I'd love input from those of you who have London-area independent school experience.
Background:
We are an American family currently living in the U.S. DH works for the Department of Defense. We are hopeful that DH will be transferred to London which would mean a move around June 2015. We have twin boys in a local public school. At the time of our move, they will have completed 4th grade.
We're considering living in central London for the unique opportunity of big city living for the few years we'd be there. That means I'm looking into schools such as the American School in London. The U.S. government would be paying for the education of my kids. HOWEVER, the government won't fund education prior to 6th grade (the State Department does, but not the Department of Defense, and we're under those rules). As you can see, this leaves us with a gap of one year during which we cannot afford to fund their education ourselves.
Rather than deal with the uncertainties of a London state school for the one year, I'm strongly considering homeschooling the boys. I'm qualified (M.Ed.) to teach them, and the chance to thoroughly take advantage of all that London has to offer through its museums and so forth is very appealing. Not to mention the rest of Europe being so easily accessed. (Studying Ancient Rome? Let's go see the Colosseum ourselves!) No worries about fitting travels around term time!
My concern is how the school(s) to which we'd be applying after that year "off" would view the break in traditional education. The applications all seem to involve transcripts and teacher recommendations, etc. If I were to use one of the online homeschooling companies, there'd be traditional testing and grades to submit, but teacher recommendations would have to be from the previous year here in the U.S.
Thoughts? Thanks in advance!
