One Week to Go: From Meetings to Mangoes (and a Few Wobbles in Between)

Next week is my last week at work

Even writing that makes my stomach flip a bit. After years of routines, meetings, and inboxes that never quite get to zero, I'm about to swap the office for a backpack, the commute for tuk-tuks, and the calendar for... well, probably still a calendar, but one with a lot more sunshine and fewer Teams calls.

It’s exciting. It’s terrifying. It’s happening.

This week has been full-on with school meetings, because — yep — we’re officially deregistering the kids. That moment you press send on the form that says, “We’re taking their education into our own hands”, and you suddenly wonder if you’ve lost your mind.

Especially with Oliver. He’s about to miss Year 9 — that all-important “foundation year” before GCSEs. The system doesn’t really do flexibility. It's more: sit down, keep up, and be good at everything, even the stuff that makes you want to throw a textbook out the window.

Honestly? I’ve always struggled with how rigid it all is. How we expect kids to fit a mould, tick the same boxes, pass the same tests — even when their strengths lie elsewhere.

It’s like forcing square pegs into round holes, then blaming the peg for not fitting.

Well, we’re giving our peg a passport and seeing what happens when you let kids learn in their own way.

To his credit, Oliver has been incredible through all of this. While we’re over here bouncing between excitement and total panic, he’s just quietly got on with it. He’s asked smart questions, weighed up the pros and cons, and reminded us — without meaning to — why we’re doing this in the first place.

He gets it. He knows this isn’t about taking a year off — it’s about leaning in. To life, to learning, to moments you can’t plan on a timetable.

Yes, we’ll still study. Yes, we’ll keep him on track for GCSEs. But we’ll also learn how to budget in foreign currencies, how to navigate night markets, how different cultures live, and what the world looks like when you're not seeing it through a whiteboard.

And let’s be honest — we’ll mess some of it up. We'll miss buses, argue about Wi-Fi, and probably forget the odd worksheet. But we’ll also laugh more, grow together, and see our kids thrive in ways we never imagined.

WanderLearn isn’t perfect. It’s not polished. But it’s ours. It’s a chance to raise confident, curious kids who know there’s more than one path — and that sometimes, the best education doesn’t come with a grade at the end of it.

Here’s to the last week of “normal” — and the start of something far more meaningful.