About me

My name is Sue, and I come from the UK. In 1997 I moved to Cyprus with my husband and our two sons. If you want to know more about me or my family in general, you can read in great detail at our family website or day to day life currently at my Cyprus blog. 

We decided to try home educating for our first year in Cyprus, while we settled in. The staff at the boys' school were encouraging about this, although I assumed they would both go to school after the first year. They were nine and eleven when we moved. We quickly discovered the many benefits of home education, however, and kept going. The book Free Range Education: How Home Education Works has a chapter which I wrote, which explains more fully how we began our home educating, and why we decided to continue.

You can also read about some of our early forays into home education - with day to day descriptions, and how we gradually moved from 'school at home' to a much more eclectic style, in the home education diaries at the family website.

Daniel and Timothy are now 23 and 21. Daniel worked for a year at the local Antidote Theatre, and then spent four years working on the 'floating book ship' MV Doulos from January 2006 until it was retired from service in December 2009. He now works in Carlisle, doing media and audio-visual work. His current activities can be found on his blog brummie@sea. 

Timothy worked for two years as a church organist, and studied for a certificate of higher education with the Open Theological College. He applied to university in the UK in January 2008, and was offered a place at Newman College in Birmingham, to study Theology for Education.  He started there in September 2008, and so far is enjoying the course and doing well. 

About the site home-ed.info

This site is now more than eleven years old. 

At the start of 1999, when we had decided to continue our home educating - probably long-term - I did a lot of research online. I found that although there were many American 'homeschooling' sites, there were very few intended for British home educators. My sons suggested I start a site of my own, and although I knew nothing about web-sites, I registered at a free site called Geocities, and launched my first few pages on February 1st 1999. I had a positive reaction from people on UK home education mailing lists, and since I enjoyed writing, I added further pages regularly, and re-designed every couple of years to keep it looking reasonably modern.

In April 2006 someone I had never met, but who read my blog, suggested that I move the site to its own domain, rather than Geocities (now combined with Yahoo). Richard offered me a bit of space on one of his servers, and I registered home-ed.info. I did a fair bit of upgrading and editing as I moved the site, and launched it officially on May 1st 2006.  Since Geocities sites are all closing by the end of 2009, I am very thankful that I made the move when I did.

In the Summer of 2007 I went through every page - now about 120 of them - and cleaned up the HTML to make them compliant with W3C guidelines. This was time-consuming, and I wondered at the time if I'd do better to use some kind of template, or stylesheet.

At the start of March 2008, I realised that I needed to do some more changes. One of the fonts I used was not showing on some computers, and the site was looking a bit dated. So I read a few tutorials on CSS. I found a template I liked ('Leaves' - a design by Smallpark) and played around with it... so much so that it's not recognisably the same, but I'm still grateful to the designer of the template, who inspired me, and motivated me to learn about CSS and make this site much easier to update in the future.  

I hope the site is now consistent, and functional in all browswers and most screen-sizes.  I am continuing to add loosely educational pages to the site irregularly.