If you’re a parent or guardian in the West Midlands region* and you are currently home educating, then we’d love you to apply for a grant. You can apply as an individual/family or as a group or network. We welcome children’s involvement in the application process; we just ask that the parent/guardian is the sole point of contact and supervisor for the grant.
*Anyone that is home educating in the following areas can apply: Birmingham, Solihull and Black Country, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent, Telford and Wrekin, Coventry and Warwickshire, and Worcestershire.
Grants must be used to develop an aspect of your children’s religion & worldviews learning.
The fund has been co-designed by a group of home educating parents and three charities that champion religious education: All Saints Educational Trust, Culham St Gabriel’s and St Peter’s Saltley Trust. Because a lot of education funding is directed towards schools and formal settings, we wanted to run a special fund for home educating families who would not usually be able to access grants like this.
Our co-design process was supported by The Social Innovation Partnership.
Our grant decision-making panel is a wonderful group of home educating parents and guardians from the West Midlands with a range of backgrounds and lived experience of home educating. We are experimenting with an approach to funding called ‘participatory grant-making’ which aims to shift decision-making power away from grant-making organisations and to the people and places that will benefit from the money.
Our co-design group developed a set of four criteria to help decide which projects to prioritise for funding. These can be used to help guide your application.
The members of the grant decision-making panel are:
Beverley Adams. Bev is a dedicated home educating mother and grandmother with a passion for education. She co-founded Time & Space Learning in 2012 promoting self managed, consent based and democratic learning. She is concerned with protecting the right to home education in the UK and spent time researching and studying this when completing her degree in Law with Education Studies. Along with being involved in the co-creation of the Religion and World Views Home Educators Fund she is a director of Home Education Legal Project(HELP) and a trustee of Joy Baker Fund. In any spare time she enjoys walking, reading, knitting/crocheting and visiting coffee shops.
Jen Jenkins. Jen supports schools in Coventry and Warwickshire as the RE, SIAMS & Spirituality Officer for Coventry Diocesan Board of Education and was until recently also the RE Facilitator for Coventry and Warwickshire. She has helped to pioneer the shift towards a religion and worldviews approach to RE, as leader of one of the three teams in the Religious Education Council’s Religion & Worldviews Curriculum Project. Jen loves art and story and is most at home amongst nature. She recently started home educating her youngest son and is finding out for herself what RE is like outside of the school context and is excited to help other families develop their work on religion and worldviews.
Alice Khimasia. Alice has been unschooling herself alongside her four sons for many years and believes in children’s right to learn in safe environments which prioritise consent and wellbeing and centre the learner. Many years ago, she trained as a secondary RE teacher and remains committed to promoting good religion and worldviews education, enabling people to encounter and explore diverse ways of being, seeing and experiencing the world and to grow in compassionate citizenship. Alice’s sons have followed different pathways into work aligned with their interests and she is passionate about encouraging and empowering parents to co-create learning journeys with their children which reflect diverse needs and interests. Her youngest son continues to learn from home.
Avnish (Nishi) Pankhania. Nishi is a Mum of 2 children – one is home educated & one attends a school. She is part of a busy family who tries to build in a spiritual practice that suits them all as well as working, learning & serving. Nishi works as a Coach for a charity that supports the UK motor industry and she also facilitates peace education workshops in West Midlands & Warwickshire schools
Simone Roberts. Simone is a wife and dedicated mother of seven, home educating her youngest six children since birth. With a lifestyle approach to learning, Simone integrates subjects of importance through everyday experiences, focusing on family values and emotional intelligence to nurture healthy relationships with self and others. Her passion for holistic education shines through her emphasis on both academic and emotional growth. In her free time, Simone enjoys bike rides, walks in nature, playing the flute, and creating unique wall art using surplus fabric and broken jewelry—adding a personal, creative touch of therapy to her busy life.
Ligaya “Liel” Wills is a mum of 4 (ages 7-17y) who started their home education journey in 2021, in partnership with her husband Steve, after moving from the US to the UK around the pandemic season. Having lived in 3 countries in 3 different continents (Manila, Philippines, California & Texas, USA and Rugby, UK), she is integrating her global perspectives and experiences into their home ed journey, digging into their own diverse cultural roots whilst exploring many others through relationships, literature, media and travel. She also has a Bachelor of Arts in TV & Film and a Master of Arts in Education. She enjoys cooking and baking whilst listening to music, audiobooks and podcasts, serves in her local church through singing and playing the piano and loves hanging out with family and friends, especially when it involves good food and music!
We wanted to run a pilot project in a small area of the country to test the model. One of the partners for this project is the St Peter’s Saltley Trust which funds activities in the West Midlands region, so we decided to run the pilot in this area.
If you have several projects in mind, you’re welcome to put in more than one application. However, the fund pot is limited and we’re keen that it reaches as many home educating families as possible, so unfortunately, we may not be able to support all your ideas.
No. This project doesn’t seek to impose a particular belief or understanding of religion, but to encourage home educators to develop new and creative approaches to their children’s learning about worldviews and the development of their own worldview (religious, spiritual, non-religious or otherwise). We know that great things can happen when children and young people explore these big questions.
Yes. We welcome applications from home education groups or projects that are led by home educating parents/guardians.
We want to make the fund accessible to people that cannot usually apply for grants. We therefore welcome applications from home education groups or projects provided they are led by home educating parents/guardians.
When you apply for a grant we will collect your first and last name, your address and email address. Your address will be used to ensure that you’re within the catchment for the grant (West Midlands region). Your name and email address will be used to contact you about your application.
We will share your project proposal, but not your contact details, with the members of our decision-making panel and our consultant evaluator who follow our policies on confidentiality, privacy and data protection. If you are awarded a grant, we will ask for your bank account number and sort code to pay the grant to you. This information will be stored by Culham St Gabriel’s for the sole purpose of administrating the grant, and will not be shared with anyone else.
We take the privacy of home educating families very seriously. We will not share your personal information with any other third party. We will not share your personal information or application with local authorities or other government bodies. To learn more, please have a look at our Privacy Policy.
You can apply by filling out an application form, or you can apply by arranging a friendly video call with our Fund Facilitator, Julia Minnear. See our Main Page for more information.
If you would like the application form to be provided in a different format or language, or need any other support, please get in touch – julia@cstg.org.uk