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, there’s a spoon or two in the garden, and don’t ask about the laundry pile. My digital filing looks roughly the same.

This is also the house where three children are receiving what I genuinely believe is a good education.

Those two things are not in contradiction and 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. A decade later, 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, and no pressure to conform at all. 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 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. We’re a neurodivergent family, explaining both the chaos and the structure that somehow live alongside each other.

Why Kitchen Table School?

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 that’s a lot to absorb. Being a parent is one job, being their teacher is another and the balance between parent-teacher and pupil-child is the most important aspect of home-education. Stressful home-ed is incompatible with successful home-ed. The purpose of this site is to help reframe and reduce some of the stress that comes from wearing two hats simultaneously.

Everything here is the planned version of how we home-educate. The practical advice is how our homeschool runs when everything is running smoothly. You’ll also find honest talk about how we flex when something’s not working, 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 and it’s where this site lives, too. Home-educating, like parenting, is a real-life project that doesn’t always follow the rules. I hope that by sharing what hasn’t worked helps if you land here on a day when 9-3 in-school schooling feels somewhat an attractive proposition. I also hope that the planning tools and everything else on the site help on a day when you’re motivated to plan the year.

This site has ten years of working out what actually works folded into it. There are frameworks and tools for planning a curriculum that doesn’t try to replicate school, practical ideas for the day-to-day side of things, and the 10-minute lesson planner is for when you need a grab-and-go teaching resource that requires no prep at all from you. All resources are free because the point of this site is to make home-ed easier and accessible.

It’s UK-specific, because the legal context matters. Kitchen Table School is written by a home-educating parent with an LLB. The documents available on this site are parent-parent resources, not legal advice — but they’re written by someone who understands what the law says and what it doesn’t require you to do.

If you’re right at the start, the best place to begin is here. If you’ve been at it a while and you’re looking for something specific, the resources page has everything for planning in one place.

If there is anything not covered on the site, or you have a question about any of the frameworks (or anything else home-ed) drop me an email: liz@kitchentableschool.co.uk

Yes, you can teach your kids.