Your child has left school. Here is your first week.

If your child has just left school and you are reading this at the kitchen table wondering what on earth happens now, take a breath. You have a week in front of you, and a week is plenty. Nothing about the next few years has to be decided in it.

We know because we have sat where you are sitting. Our son left school in Year 9 with nothing lined up, no plan, no curriculum, no idea what the local authority wanted from us. It felt like free fall for about a fortnight. Then it didn't. This is the guide we wish someone had handed us that first morning.

It covers England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have their own rules, so if you are elsewhere in the UK, check your own nation's guidance before acting on the paperwork steps.

One job this week actually matters legally, and it is a small one: tell the school in writing that you are now educating your child at home.

In England you do not need anyone's permission to home educate a child who is at a mainstream school. The gov.uk home education page is plain about it: if your child is at school, you should tell the school you plan to educate them at home, and the school must accept a full withdrawal. The exceptions are a child at a special school, or a child under a school attendance order, where you do need the council's agreement first.

That is the legal bit done. Everything else this week is about you and your child, not the system.

Now let your child stop. Properly stop. If school ended badly, and for most families reading this it did, your child is carrying more than you can see. Two or three days of nothing much (sleep, walks, a film, cooking tea together) is not wasted time. It is the ground you will build on. Home educators call this deschooling and some families take weeks over it. You don't have to, but don't skip it.

While they rest, here is what you actually owe the local authority in England. The answer is less than the school might have implied.

• You must make sure your child gets a full-time education suitable to their age and ability. You do not have to follow the national curriculum for England, keep school hours, or teach the way a school does. That comes straight from gov.uk.
• The council can make informal enquiries to check the education is suitable. In practice that usually means a letter asking how you are getting on, sometimes an offer of a visit. You can reply in writing. There is no inspection and no test.
• If the council genuinely thinks your child is not getting a suitable education, it can serve a school attendance order. That is the far end of a long road, not something that happens because you took a week off.

So when the first letter from the council arrives (in our experience the school will usually have told them), don't panic. Reply politely, say you have started home educating and are settling in, and that you will be happy to describe your approach once it has taken shape. That is a perfectly normal answer in week one.

If you are in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, the duties and the process are different. Check your own nation's guidance before replying to anyone.

By the end of the week you want two things in place: a shape to the day that your child can live with, and a habit of writing down what happened. Neither needs to be impressive.

The rhythm. Pick a start time that is later than school was. Do one thing that looks like learning in the morning, something practical or outdoors after lunch, and stop early. Something like this:

Three mornings a week is a fine first week. You are not trying to replicate a school timetable. You are trying to prove to both of you that learning still happens here.

The record. Get a notebook or start a note on your phone and write three lines a day: what they did, what they read, anything they asked about. That's it. In a month you will have something you can show the council if they ask, and more importantly you will be able to see the progress that is invisible day to day. If you use an online platform, most will keep a learning record for you, and you can choose to share it with your local authority if that is ever useful.

Talk to your child about what they want. Ask what they hated about school and what they secretly liked. Their answers will shape the next few months more than any plan you write this week.

And find other home ed families. Search for a local group on Facebook or ask at your library. Meeting one family who has done this for a year will do more for your nerves than anything in this guide.

The thing that will nag at you all week is exams. If your child is in Year 8, 9 or 10, you will be lying awake doing GCSE maths on the years. Put it down. Here is what you need to know now, and only now.

Home educated children in England do take GCSE-level exams, as private candidates, by entering through an exam centre that accepts them. Most families use the international versions (Pearson Edexcel International GCSE or Cambridge IGCSE) because they are built to be sat without coursework, which is the private candidate's biggest headache. One wrinkle to know about later: Cambridge IGCSE sciences include a practical element that private candidates cover with a written alternative-to-practical paper, while Pearson International sciences have none. The subjects nearly everyone starts with are maths, English and the sciences.

You do not need to choose a board this week, or this month. A child who left in Year 9 has until the summer of Year 11 on the usual school timetable, and in our experience plenty of home ed families take exams a year later than that, or spread them over two summers. The order of operations is: settle, rebuild a daily habit, then pick subjects, then pick a board, then find a centre.

For now, the only exam-related job is to keep maths and English ticking over so there is nothing to catch up on later.