To get the most out of the site you need your own personal ID. As a home subscriber you will need to set up two: one for the parent, one for the student.

You will then be able to access the forum, conferencing and on-line assessment

for home-schooling

This is a multi-user account for two users: the parent/tutor and the student. The parent can then use all the facilities normally available to the teacher in a school account, namely:

• set homework tasks using our 897 on-line assessments, which are marked instantly on-line
• view and manage progress of the student on the homework tasks
• print exam papers and accompanying mark schemes based on our collection of 1793 exam questions
• print from a huge collection of worksheets (in Excel format), most of which contain hidden answers

As a parent or tutor, you will need to organise your student's GCSE preparation to correspond to a relevant exam specification. This specification may be Higher (grades D to A*) or Foundation (grades G to C), modular or linear or even an iGCSE. We recommend that you contact your student's school to find out which precise syllabus the school is following, or, if you are setting up a home-schooling program then you need to decide on this yourself. All the exam boards provide comprehensive on-line assistance and you can download a detailed specification from all of them. Just follow these links:

• AQA
• AQA iGCSE
• Cambridge iGCSE
• CCEA
• Edexcel
• Edexcel iGCSE
• OCR
• WJEC

Regarding UK law on home schooling, this differs in different parts of the UK. Section 7 of the 1996 Education Act states: Duty of parents to secure education of children of compulsory school age. The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable- (a) to his age, ability and aptitude, and (b) to any special educational needs he may have, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.

• You do not need the permission of an LEA to home educate a child (unless the child attends a special needs school)
• You do not have to hold any particular qualifications to home educate your child
• There are no predetermined hours or times that you must tutor your child at home
• You do not have to conform to the National Curriculum
• You can home educate a child with Special needs
• Home educated children are not required to undertake examinations or SATs

There is a helpful YAHOO discussion group for home educating families at HE-EXAMS