‘I doubt my daughter will do a full day’s schooling by herself while I’m at work’

The shutdown of my daughter Rita’s school has left me totally stranded. I’m a single mum to an 11-year-old daughter in secondary school, and I’m almost at my wits’ end trying to home school her. There have been times when I’ve considered stopping her lessons because of the damage it’s doing to our relationship.

And things are only going to get harder when furlough ends in a fortnight and I’m due back at work.

Her north London school is doing everything it can to help her education by sending her worksheets and tasks to do. But the teaching unions can’t pretend that that’s the same thing as a six-hour school day.

The truth is that home schooling is nothing like going to school. My daughter sees me as her mother, not as a teacher, so trying to get her to do her class work is really hard. We usually have a great relationship, but we’ve started having arguments.

You can see how she’s missing the structure of the school day, and the lack of routine has a knockon effect on everything, from sleep patterns to the basics like bothering to get dressed in the morning.

My daughter is missing so much of her education, but still we’re some of the lucky ones. There are people who don’t have the resources to get their child online for their lessons, or who have more than one child to teach. I honestly don’t know how they do it.

My daughter goes to an inner-city secondary, with children from a real mix of backgrounds. Some won’t be doing any studying at all in this time, so when they go back in September they will have had six months with no education. It will take months for them to get back to normal.

Not only is this testing my relationship with my daughter, it’s also putting pressure on my career. I work in communications for a pub chain, so I’m due back at work in two weeks when we reopen. I don’t count as a key worker, so I’ll be forced to leave my daughter at home all day by herself, or hope that friends and family will be able to help out. I’m one of thousands of women in the same position.

And what about my daughter at home by herself? Will she be taking herself through a full day’s schooling while I’m out at work? I very much doubt it – she’s 11.