About me

My name is Sue. I come from Birmingham, in the UK, and my Myers-Briggs type is INFJ. I did a degree in maths from Birmingham University, then worked for some years as a programmer for Severn-Trent water authority, before leaving to have my two sons, Daniel and Timothy, and to be a stay-at-home mother. During the period when they were small, I did some more freelance programming at home, and worked as a registered chiild-minder. We are Christians, and attended first St Stephen's Church, Selly Park and then its daughter church, known initially as 'Church Centre' and later - when it became its own parish - Christchurch, Selly Park.

From 1992-1994 we lived in Colorado Springs in the USA, where I first started to use email, and 'bulletin boards' which were the precursors to Internet forums. Daniel went to a local school, which was not a good experience. Timothy was not old enough for school (they don't start until six in that region) so spent two years at home, where he became a fluent reader, a competent speller, and considerably more computer literate than me.

From 1994-1997 we returned to Birmingham, where the boys were very happy at St Francis Church of England primary school. I became a parent volunteer in classrooms in their school, and also took a correspondence writing course, which led to a few letters and articles being published in magazines. I also wrote a basic guide for teachers learning to use computers in school, in conjunction with my husband Richard.

In 1997 we moved to Cyprus, initially for two years. After Daniel's bad experiences in the Colorado school, he suggested we try home educating for our first year, 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.

We stayed in Cyprus much longer than expected - and are still here. We rented a house for the first nine years, then sold our house in Birmingham in the spring of 2006, and bought a house in Cyprus. You can read more about our family at my Cyprus blog, or about life here in general at my Living in Cyprus site. I started blogging in 2005, started reviewing for the Bookbag site at the end of 2006, and joined a local Christian writers' group in the spring of 2007.

Daniel and Timothy are now 21 and 19. Daniel worked for a year at the local Antidote Theatre, and then spent two years working on the 'floating book ship' MV Doulos from January 2006. He is just about to start a second two-year stint. His current activities can be found on his blog brummie@sea. Timothy has worked for the past two years as a church organist, and has also been studying with the Open Theological College. He hopes to transfer to university in the UK in September 2008. Neither of them has any regrets about having been home educated for their 'secondary school' years.

About the site home-ed.info

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, and start using some form of advertising which would benefit me (or at least pay for the domain name registration) rather than Geocities (now combined with Yahoo), who have their own adverts running. 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.

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 I felt the site was looking a bit dated. So I took the plunge and 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 have updated a few pages at a time throughout March, and hope the site is now consistent, and functional in all browswers and most screen-sizes.