Hi Clangers

Very briefly its been the inflexible education system that has been the biggest challenge but we are rising to it. We have a 15 yrs old (almost16) just going into yr 11. Before we left oz I had several conversations with education dept and connections and was assured that there where places in yr 11 at daughters old school and they had to take her back. Yipee! not quite the case in reality, although they do have places available and could take her they could or would not be able to offer her any gcses at all. We had been led to believe that our idea of our daughter studying for 5 gcse's in a year was possible with a lot of hard work by our daughter. However school have final say and said she would have to go into yr 10, daughter opossed to this and I can understand her reasons.

So apparently because we have supported her education dept say that she has refused a place at school and therefore we are on our own............ hmmm nice one!

After several days of trying to get around it we where left with homeschooling her the gcse's, a possiblity but daughter would have had very little 'social' contact or support from peers.

So after a lot of wrangling whe is now doing 2 gcse's Maths and English at home and we are paying for 1 hour of tuition (£20) for each subject and paying for the priviledge of her sitting them £150 each one and we have to find somewhere for her to sit the exams.. she is doing a full time course, first diploma (apparently equivalent to 4 gcse's) in horse care at a further education college. She loves it!!!! though it is hard work physically some days the academic work she is finding very easy. The people she is with on the course are of all ages and all walks of life, which is good as it is giving her some great life experience. The other students all look out for her as she is the youngest but she is in familiar surroundings as she learnt to ride there 5 years ago. Hopefully it will either confirm one way or the other that thats the way she wants her career to go....(ideal job would be mounted police)

She can progress onto a national diploma then degree course if she so wishes but her first choice was to go to sixth form college to do A levels in Law, Sociology and Psychology, but we have just found that this is probably unlikely that she can go because they dont do gcse's!!! only resits of maths and english but we will apply for special circumstances! So unless you have a profile of at least 5 gcse's then they wont take you....

We have just had a letter from her old school in support of her going to sixth form and stated her academic abilities as good and was expected to gain 10.5 gcse's at B or above....... Yet they wouldnt help us facilitate her at school main reason given is gcse's are mainly modular and it might affect their statistics if she didnt get all the 5...

The next challenge has been to try and get funding for the course she is on, yes you guessed it none is forthcoming so we have to fund that aswell (£1079) and yet at the place she does her course once a week they have 'naughty' children (her words not mine)coming for free riding lessons for being good at schooll grrrrrrrrrrrr bit pissed off with that but thats life I suppose.

We have also found out that she cant have a free bus pass to her course because apparently she has refused to go to school.....

But this is just a snap shot of the past few weeks but and yes we are still happy to be back HOME warts and all.xx
soryy but you did ask.