As schools across British Columbia implement provincial requirements put in place to keep learners and educators safe during the COVID-19 pandemic, many families with school-aged children have turned to alternatives to traditional, brick-and-mortar schools.

“SelfDesign Home Learning – which was called HomeLearners’ Network until recently – provides an alternative for families across B.C. who wish to have their children learn independently at home,” says Nikki Kenyon, Principal of Educational Programs at SelfDesign Learning Foundation.

“As a homeschooling program, it would best suit families where the parents wish to take on the responsibility for their child’s education and are not concerned with BC Ministry of Education requirements.”

The program has been serving learners since 1989.

SelfDesign Home Learning differs from SelfDesign Learning Community, our regular kindergarten to grade 12 program, in a number of ways. For example, Home Learning families don’t work with an educator, and parents take responsibility for their children’s learning program and do not report to the school. This means there’s no cap on the number of learners who can register in SelfDesign Home Learning each year. In addition, learners’ work is not assessed, and learners neither earn credit for courses in grades 10 to 12 nor graduate and earn a high-school diploma. However, registered homeschoolers in grades 10 to 12 can take online courses from a different online school, which gives them more options, and many of our homeschooled learners have found ways to access post-secondary education without a high school diploma.

Under the provincial School Act, parents who wish to homeschool their children are required to register their children in a recognized school, such as SelfDesign Learning Community.

A parent’s perspective

SelfDesign Home Learning parent Sylvia has helped guide her three children through the program since 2006. One son is now in his second year of university, and the other two kids are in their final years of home learning. She says the experience of SelfDesign Home Learning has been a gift for the entire family.

“We have had the freedom both to dabble and to dive deep, to partake of the buffet of knowledge in the way that best suited each child,” she says. “We have enjoyed the gift of time, having the flexibility to volunteer in our community, join clubs, build things, play music, or just sit in the treehouse and muse on a sunny afternoon.”

And most of all, she says, “We have had each other. Our crew’s bonds are strong and deep and permanent, because we had the precious opportunity to spend so much of our lives together all these years.”

New resources for SelfDesign Home Learning families

This year, to enrich the at-home learning experience, SelfDesign Home Learning is providing learners and families with access to a suite of subscriptions to high-quality online learning opportunities.

“Learners can choose from subscriptions to BrainPop, Go Zen, Enchanted Learning, and more,” Nikki says. “These resources were not available to registered homeschoolers through SelfDesign before.”

“We’re also sending out more newsletters this year,” says SelfDesign Home Learning Coordinator Suzanne Gregory. “They include information about Indigenous Education resources and the SelfDesign camps and gatherings that are open to Home Learning families, articles about learning at home and in the community, as well as the information we always provide on free learning resources and ideas on how to approach home learning.”

The change, Nikki says, ensures SelfDesign Home Learning families can continue to access helpful learning resources and services.

“All independent distributed learning schools in B.C. stopped providing expense assistance to their registered homeschoolers this year,” she says. “We feel, however, that it’s important to support at-home learning by providing access to some of the quality online learning resources we offer our kindergarten to grade 12 learners in SelfDesign Learning Community.”

SelfDesign Home Learning parent Sylvia says, “I feel so grateful that B.C.’s legislation makes homeschooling this way possible and equally grateful that SelfDesign Home Learning makes it easy.”

Learn more about SelfDesign Home Learning we encourage you to visit our Home Learning page: SelfDesign Home Learning.