Transcript

ILONA:

You decided to educate Iris Grace at home. What led you to that decision, and what are the pros and cons of home education?

ARABELLA:

So my original intention was Iris to be educated in a school, and I worked for many years to try and make that happen. It wasn't like I was this parent that thought, "Oh, home education, that's my dream" at all. In fact, we're positioned in the village right on the main road that has a bus to the local schools--

[LAUGHTER]

--so I thought that was good news when we bought the property. But Iris didn't get on well at all at preschool. It turned into a very sort of distressing time in both of our lives. She started self-harming and all of the progress that had built up over those months just disappeared really quickly.

One thing with children who are on the spectrum, when things are going wrong, they can go very wrong and really fast if they're in an environment that they can't handle. It's actually quite shocking how quickly things fall apart and how they break down sort of in front of your eyes. It's really sad. They can't eat. They can't focus. They can't concentrate. They start doing things like self-harming behaviours.

So after about three weeks of seeing that, I had to take her out. And then it was a case of me kind of regrouping and saying, OK, what do I do now? And we looked at other options for schools, but there just didn't seem to be anything that was appropriate. And I realised that, to give her what she needed at that time, it needed to be at home.

We did the whole home ed thing, and it's hard most days. I mean it is hard. It's not like I can say to you it's a dream. It's a lot of hard work and preparation because you're a teacher, you're a mother, you're a therapist-- also a photographer and everything. So it takes up a lot of energy, but what you get back is amazing, and that gives you the energy to carry on the next day and the next day.

And you're a lot more free, and you can move with the child's interests. And if you've prepared something-- say, on an elephant theme, and Iris suddenly decides that she wants to be into the orchestra, I can go with that. I don't have any other children to worry about. When you're working one to one, you can just go with the child's interests.