Home schooling in Dubai is no longer the secretly non-conformist option that it used to be. A growing and increasingly assertive community of families across the emirate is increasingly choosing to educate their children outside the traditional schooling system - due to carefully considered reasons that run a spectrum between philosophical alignment with child-led learning, to discontent with the rates or methods of conventional schooling, to the practical demands of an internationally mobile family living that makes consistent school enrolment genuinely hard. The route to take in the case of home-educated students in Dubai, who are preparing to take the IGCSE, AS and A Level examinations, is clear and totally achievable by enrolling directly with the British Council as a private candidate and taking the examinations on their own, without any school affiliation. The qualification obtained is the same as one obtained at a school - there is no difference between universities and employers. What home-educated applicants require is the professional academic support that will transfer their learning to the performance in exams. Amourion Training Institute has been offering just that to home-schooling families throughout Dubai for over two decades. Dr. Anil Khare answers the most important questions.
We are home educating our child and planning to register them with the British Council for their IGCSEs. How do we structure their academic preparation across multiple subjects?
Dr. Anil Khare: The way to structure multi-subject preparation at the IGCSE level to a home-educated student would be to develop the type of coherent academic framework a school would provide automatically as part of its timetable, curriculum planning and teacher supervision. In the absence of that institutional structure, the risk is unequal preparation - subjects the student finds interesting get disproportionate preparation and the rest are left behind until they have little time to do it. We solve this by formulating the whole preparation plan at the beginning that maps out all the subjects against the British Council examination timetable, allocates the proportionate time to study each subject against the level of difficulty of the examination and provides in-between progress checkpoints. Every subject will have a specialist tutor who will be knowledgeable of the Cambridge or Edexcel specification in examination-specific detail. The result is a preparation system as organized and responsible as any school setting, but all precisely tuned to the needs and learning style of the home-educated student.
My home-educated teenager is highly capable but has never sat a formal examination before. How do you prepare students for the examination experience itself?
Dr. Anil Khare: Examination technique is a specialized, learnable skill that has nothing whatever to do with subject knowledge and in the case of home-educated students who have never taken any formal examination, the development of the technique is one of the most significant aspects of preparation. Knowing how to read an examination question accurately, how to budget time over a paper, how to organize answers to fit the requirements of a mark-scheme, and how to give consistent performances under strict examination conditions are all skills that have to be developed rather than assumed. We introduce past paper sessions with time limits gradually -starting with single questions under relaxed conditions up to full paper simulations under strict examination time so that by the time the actual examination by the British Council comes, the format, the pressure and the conventions are all well familiar. The students who have undergone fifteen or twenty full simulation examinations before their real examinations approach them with the calm confidence of actual preparation rather than the hoped-to-be, found-to-be resilience.
My child is home educated and wants to sit A Level Chemistry and Biology to apply for Medicine. Is this realistic without a school laboratory?
Dr. Anil Khare: Entirely realistic, and a channel that we have supported with great success many times over. The practical aspects of both Cambridge and Edexcel A Level Chemistry and Biology are examined by way of written examination questions and not observed laboratory sessions. All the applied skills under test are: experimental design, variable control, data processing, uncertainty analysis, graph construction and writing of scientific conclusions are all practical skills which are fully developable through organized, directed written practice in a tuition setting. We conduct special practical skills courses with large volumes of past paper practical questions, training students on the exact examiner conventions that yield marks in all types of practical questions. Applicants to Medicine who are home-educated and receive this preparation are consistently performing competitively on practical papers against applicants attending schools. The lack of a laboratory is a logistical difference, rather than an academic disadvantage, where preparation is effectively organized.
Home Education, British Council Examinations, World-Class Results
Having your child being home educated up to IGCSE, AS and A Level qualifications is a long path, quite achievable and well-trodden in Dubai. The formal qualification is offered by the British Council through the private candidate route. Amourion Training Institute offers the specialist training that counts. To home-schooling parents all over Dubai who are willing to develop an examination preparation framework that is as rigorous and structured as any school but built completely around their child we are ready to start.
Contact Amourion Training Institute — Dubai
Phone: +971 55 956 4344 | +971 4 355 4850
Email: training@amourion.com
Website: www.amourion.com
Dubai Centers: Sheikh Zayed Road | Jumeirah Lakes Towers, Office 2401, Fortune Tower | Dubai Silicon Oasis, Office 410, SIT Tower Abu Dhabi: Hamdan Street