By midweek, our house is about as far from tidy as a house can get. Every flat surface has an ongoing project on it, or a pile of paper, or an open book, or something one of the children has decided is a treasure. The preschooler’s toys have migrated from the playspace to the dining table and there’s a spoon in the garden. My digital filing looks roughly the same.
This is also the house where three children are receiving what I genuinely believe is a solid education.
Those two things are not in contradiction. That’s more or less the point of this site.
We didn’t start home educating for ideological reasons. It was a practical solution to a specific set of circumstances — we were living outside the UK, the local school system wasn’t the right fit, and teaching at home seemed manageable for a year or two. That was in 2016.
We’re still here.
What kept us here wasn’t a philosophy (although the more we read, the more we believed in that too). It was the evidence in front of us: children who were learning well, who were curious, who had enough space to figure out how they actually think. At some point, “temporary solution” quietly became “this is just how we do things,” and home education stopped being something we were doing and became something we were: a home-educating family, figuring it out as we went along.
We now have three children in home education simultaneously — two teenagers and a little one learning to read. Which means we are, at any given moment, both well into this and starting again from the beginning. Secondary school planning and phonics. GCSEs (probably) on the horizon and a child who still needs the day to involve frog-catching and slime and precarious bike-riding.
You don’t qualify in home education until your children age out of it. Which means you won’t know for certain that you did it right until after the job is finished. Most days that’s fine. Some days it isn’t. Both are normal.
Everything on this site is the theoretical essence of how we home-educate. The practical advice is how our homeschool runs when everything is working — and how we flex when it isn’t, which is also often, because this is a real house with real children and a teacher who gets the theory but doesn’t always hold up her end in practice.
That gap between the plan and the actual day is where most home education happens. It’s where this site lives too.
What you’ll find here: frameworks for planning a curriculum without recreating school, practical tools for the structural side — timetables, record-keeping, lesson planning — honest writing about the days when none of it goes to plan, and free resources built from ten years of working out what actually helps.
It’s UK-specific, because the legal context matters and most of the internet isn’t written for us.
If any of it’s useful, the best next step is the resources page — everything there is free. Or if you’re right at the beginning, start here.
