POP Hove

This month’s theme: STORY 📖

Wait - isn’t “story” just…English lessons?
Absolutely not.

At POP Hove, we’re exploring story in every direction it can possibly go:

🪞 Your story - Who are you? What shaped you? Where are you headed?

🎬 Storytelling as power - How do the best communicators move people to action?

💰 Stories that move markets - Why does an investment pro need to understand narrative? (Spoiler: the global economy runs on stories)

📚 Story across formats - Film, podcasts, data visualisation, photography… how does the medium change the message?

🌍 The stories we’re told - Which narratives shape our world? Who gets to tell them?

Here’s what we’re really doing: We’re helping teens understand that EVERYTHING is a story.

Your CV? A story about your capabilities.

A business pitch? A story about solving problems.

Climate change? Competing stories about our future.

The teens who can craft compelling stories - about themselves, their ideas, their vision - they’re the ones who’ll shape what comes next.

This is more than a creative writing class or GCSE English, it’s learning how the world actually works and how we tell this to ourselves and each other.

What’s a story that changed your life? 👇🏽

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

“Home educated kids are gonna be weird.”

Yeah. And? 🤷🏾

nails it: “Have you met a kid?! They are all absolutely mental.”

[Quick note: We know “mental” can be loaded language for some - Hannah’s using it affectionately here, but we hear you if that doesn’t land right for you]

Here’s the point:

Every kid is gloriously, wonderfully WEIRD in their own way.

School doesn’t make them “normal” - it just teaches them to hide their weird.

Home education? It lets them BE themselves.

The “weirdness” people worry about is actually:

✨ Curiosity that hasn’t been crushed
✨ Creativity that hasn’t been standardised
✨ Confidence to be different
✨ The courage to think for themselves

At POP Hove, we celebrate the weird, the wild and the wonderfully unique.

Because the world doesn’t need more carbon copies, we need originals.

——

What’s your kid’s most delightfully “weird” quality? Brag about them below 👇🏽

Thomas Edison went to school for exactly 12 weeks. His teacher called him “addled” - too confused to learn. His mum pulled him out and said: “I’ll teach him myself.”

The result?

💡 1,093 patents

💡 The light bulb, phonograph, motion picture camera

💡 Changed the world forever

Here’s what his mum understood that his teacher didn’t:

Edison wasn’t confused. He was CURIOUS.

He didn’t need to sit still and memorise. He needed to experiment, tinker, fail and try again.

He didn’t need a rigid curriculum. He needed the freedom to follow his obsessions.

“I never did a day’s work in my life - it was all fun.” - Thomas Edison

At POP Hove, we get it.

Some kids don’t fit the school mould. Not because there’s something wrong with them, but because there’s something extraordinary waiting to emerge.

The next Edison might be:

→ The kid who can’t sit still in class

→ The one asking “too many questions”

→ The learner who needs to DO things, not just read about them

→ YOUR child!

School rejected Edison. Home education unleashed him.

What could your child create with that kind of freedom?

The 6 Core Competencies that will actually prepare teens for the real world 🌟

💛 Emotional Management - because life hits different when you’re 16.

🗣️ Communication - the skill that unlocks everything else.

🪶 Self Leadership - knowing who you are and where you’re going.

🔮 Visionary Thinking - seeing possibilities others miss.

🧭 Navigating Change - because the only constant is… well, change.

⚖️ Achieving Equality - creating a world where everyone can thrive.

Some of them are about YOU. Some of them are about US. All of them matter.

Here’s what gets us most excited: We’re not just talking about these competencies, we’re building real learning experiences around them.

Sneak peek of what we’re planning: A former board member of Women Who Code is designing a learning journey on digital skills and ethical AI to work through with our teens. Not theory…Real skills. Real mentors. Real impact.

…Because when you partner with people already changing the world, learners don’t just study change, they CREATE it.

More announcements coming soon… 👀

Which competency do you think today’s teens need most? Drop your thoughts below 👇🏽

Ever wondered why we chose “POP”? 🎈

It stands for Pursuit of Progress.

Here’s the thing…we’re not interested in whether your child can regurgitate the right answers for their GCSEs.

We want to know: Are they progressing toward something that matters to THEM?

Because here’s what traditional education gets wrong:

❌ External validation over internal growth.

❌ Arbitrary benchmarks over personal meaning.

❌ Performance pressure over actual progress.

❌ Someone else’s curriculum over their own curiosity.

At POP, we flip the script:

✅ Progress matters more than performance.

✅ Building skills matters more than memorising facts.

✅ Pursuing meaning matters more than following someone else’s plan.

The question isn’t “did you pass?”, the question is “are you growing into who you want to become?”. That’s progress worth pursuing.

What would your child pursue if they could follow their own curiosity? Tell us below 👇🏽

What a week!

We had the first POP session this past week and it was great. We learned SO much (and that’s just us adults!) 🥳

Our theme and word of the month this first month is POWER…and we will be exploring this from any which way we all choose.

This week, we made Power Pops (the POP version of protein balls), and we explored the power of public art 🎨

One of the teens gave us a 9.5/10 and said she didn’t give us the extra 0.5 as “it wasn’t long enough!!!” 🥳

Here’s to more POP power to come…

Communication → Clarity → Connection → Community

This is our take on communication at POP Hove and why it matters:

At school, communication tends to look like this...

- Sit quietly and listen
- Put your hand up and be given permission to speak
- Give the “right” answer
- Don’t interrupt adults

We’re doing it differently. At POP, communication means:

✅ Expressing your actual thoughts (and feelings!) - even when they’re messy or half-formed.

✅ Listening to understand - not just waiting for your turn to speak.

✅ Asking real questions - the ones you’re genuinely curious about.

✅ Disagreeing respectfully - because different perspectives make us all smarter.

Why this matters: When young people can articulate what they’re thinking and feeling, magic happens.

..Clarity emerges. They understand themselves better.

..Connection follows. Others actually get to know who they are.

..Community builds. Real relationships form around authentic communication.

The result? Young people who don’t just wait to be heard, they know how to make themselves understood.

And if we’re being honest: We adults need to practice this too, don’t you think?

What’s one communication skill you wish you’d learned earlier? Let’s start that conversation 👇🏽

Written in 1920, still true today 💔

Right now, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is moving through Parliament, threatening to strip parents of their automatic right to home educate - even when school is clearly failing their child.

The irony is crushing…

At a time when 111,700 families have chosen home education because they want children who CAN produce their own ideas, the government wants more control, more surveillance, more “arranging things for them.”

Agatha Christie saw it coming a century ago: School systems that create passive consumers of information, not creative thinkers.

HERE’S HOW YOU CAN FIGHT BACK:

📧 Email your MP about protecting educational choice.

📞 Contact the Education Select Committee.

📢 Share your home ed success stories loudly.

🤝 Join your local home ed groups.

📝 Respond to government consultations.

The future needs children who can think for themselves, not children who wait to be told what to think.

Are you ready to defend the right to raise independent thinkers? What action will you take today? 👇🏽

In just over a week we’re opening our doors to the world…well, Hove!l 🎉

In the first month (and beyond) we’re focusing on really ‘choreographing’ what we do during the sessions - it helps to have both a dancer and a former Assistant Producer of blockbuster movies on our founding team!! - so that the time and space feel flexible and chill to the teens…AND we have scaffolding if/when needed, so no one is sitting around alone, not doing anything and wondering what to do.

In the second and third months, we’ll be adding some field trips to expand our horizons and for a taste of what’s around us in this wonderful thriving community in Brighton and Hove…this week’s task: Check out some of the trips we have on our radar 🧐

If you’ve contacted us about joining us and haven’t yet received a link to register, let us know!

Your child just left school and you’re panicking because they’re not “learning anything.”

STOP. BREATHE. This is deschooling - and it’s the most important part of your home ed journey.

That kid who’s been glued to screens for weeks? Their brain is literally rewiring itself.

…They’re remembering what curiosity feels like without a bell telling them to stop.

…They’re rediscovering interests that got buried under homework.

…They’re learning to trust themselves again.

Deschooling isn’t time wasted. It’s recovery time…From being told when to think, what to think, how long they have to think it.

The magic starts when you stop trying to recreate school at home.

How long did your family’s deschooling period last? And what was the breakthrough moment? 👇🏽

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Artwork provided by

Teaching kids to “manage their emotions” vs. helping them understand what their emotions are actually telling them.

Which approach do you think serves them better?

At POP Hove, we don’t want kids to suppress or control their feelings. We want them to get curious about them.

Angry? Let’s figure out what boundary got crossed.

Anxious? What’s your intuition trying to protect?

Frustrated? Where do you need more support or a different approach?

Emotional intelligence isn’t about being calm all the time.

It’s about being human… skillfully.

What’s one emotion you wish you’d understood better as a kid? 👇🏽