How to keep a home education record
When we started home educating, I kept everything. Every handwriting practice sheet, every wrong-answer maths sheet and every single resource I ever used to teach a lesson. I didn’t know if anyone was going to ask to see what we’d been doing, and was terrified I wouldn’t be able to prove we’d actually been educating them because our days rarely looked like school. There were papers stored everywhere, multiplying every week and I never even thought about digitalising the paperwork because some things are simply too obvious. Ten years later and there’s still too much paper around, but in a more streamlined, manageable way, and I keep a record of their learning in a single Evidence of Education report, updated periodically, that I could share with the local authority if needed.
On this page
Do I need to keep records of our home education?
One of the most important reasons to keep a record of your children’s learning has nothing to do with legislation. In those first months of home education, when you’re still finding your feet and the days feel shapeless and you’re genuinely not sure whether what you’re doing counts, having a record can be the difference between confidence and a spiral after a tough day (and there will be tough days, even if they’re rare, because that’s just the texture of life as both teacher and parent and pupil and child). Looking back at what a term or a year actually contained, the books we’d read, the projects finished or in progress, the skills (academic and not) that the kids have developed or improved upon does something useful for your parent-teacher brain: it makes the invisible visible. In home education, where a lot of the best learning happens without structured plans around it (often by choice — learning doesn’t have to look like school), writing down what a child has actually covered can help you reaffirm that choice that your gut knows is the right one but your brain sometimes can’t justify.
Under Section 7 of the Education Act 1996, the education you provide must be efficient, full-time, and appropriate to the child’s age, ability and aptitude. Home education rarely looks like school, which means explaining exactly what and how your children are learning, even when you know in your gut that they are, can be tricky. This document notes your approach to home-ed (structured, daily rhythm, child-led, Montessori, project-focused etc), the subjects covered, and the progress your child has made.
Home education records and the law
For parents in England and Wales, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 received Royal Assent in April 2026 and has generated a lot of noise — partly because a law being passed isn’t the same as its rules taking effect. The home education measures can’t actually apply until secondary legislation and statutory guidance have been consulted on and published. The earliest that’s likely is 2027, and the official government deadline “by the end of this Parliament“ suggests details might not be finalised until 2029. So if you’re already home educating, nothing changes right now and there’s nothing you need to do yet.
When finalised, the Act will bring in compulsory registration of home-educated children on a new Children Not In School (CNIS) register: parents choosing elective home education will need to register with their local authority within 15 days of deregistration, and families already home educating will be required to register once the system goes live.
The new law will require parents to estimate how much time is spent on learning, not provide in-depth details of the education provided. That doesn’t mean, however, that the LA might not ask for more details. This Home-Ed Report template follows the shape of what a local authority would reasonably want to see, not what the government requires you to document: family details, your approach, subjects covered with approximate weekly time allocations, progress notes, the learning environment, any SEN provision, plans for the coming home-ed year, and a checklist of any evidence you hold — workbooks, handwriting, art works, certificates etc. There’s a completed example (using a fictional family) so you can see what a finished report looks like before you complete your own. Think of it as a useful starting point for conversations, not a legally required record.
(Read more about the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 here.)
A digitally organised homeschool
I am the last person who should be advising on organisation. My desktop is a chaotic mass of screenshots, half-finished downloads, stickie notes piled on top of stickie notes and the paper filing situation is, if anything, worse. I have been home educating for nearly ten years and I have never once maintained a filing system for longer than a term before it quietly collapsed: the boxes are pretty, they just require me to reliably file the paper.
What I have managed, eventually, is a digital system that does most of the heavy lifting without requiring me to be naturally organised or sacrifice the family’s suitcases. That’s the version I’m sharing here so take it as a ‘system that works if you follow it’ and feel free to ignore it as loosely as I do — what looks like chaos can be organised and no one is inspecting your filing or measuring your kids’ education against it.
The paperwork problem
Home education generates more paper than you’d expect. Worksheets, project work, art that definitely needs keeping, art that definitely doesn’t but you can’t bring yourself to throw away, notes you made during a good lesson and the first draft of a lesson plan. Mock exam papers, certificates, the fourteen printed maps from the geography unit and the weekly study lists. Even if your child learns at home predominantly via online sources, there will still be more paper than a school backpack contains even when you don’t know quite where the papers come from.
Going predominantly digital doesn’t solve the problem entirely, but it does mean the chaos is contained somewhere you can search. The principle is simple: photograph or scan anything worth keeping, recycle the rest, and build a digital folder structure you’ll actually use.
What to keep and what to throw away
You don’t need to keep everything. Handwriting practice pages, routine maths worksheets, the rough working — none of that needs to be archived. What’s worth keeping is work that shows progress, a subject or topic covered in depth, evidence of a skill they’re developing and some kind of loose record of what weeks have looked like.
In practical terms, that means completed projects (space, dinosaurs, the history and evolution of a video game), written pieces that demonstrate what your learner can do now compared to before, any test or assessment results (mock papers/spelling tests/maths quizzes), and a selection of work across subjects that shows an honest picture of what their overall education covers.
Photographs and scanning
For artwork and anything three-dimensional without sentimental value, keeping a photo is enough. A dedicated folder in your cloud storage labelled by child and year. You don’t need to tag or categorise it beyond that unless you want to, because the folder itself is the archive, but a topic tag helps over time if your child ends up revisiting an interest or you want to repeat an activity with a younger sibling.
For written work, scan or photograph and save it into the same folder system. Once it’s there, the paper copy can go. The exception is anything you genuinely want to keep — a particularly significant piece of work, a completed sketchbook.
N.B. I’m always an advocate of including kids in the decision of what to keep or throw away because letting them see their progress is a fantastic motivator and developing the skill of assessing their own work will serve them well later, but sometimes I do make a judgment call that clashes with theirs. The number of times I have held onto an artwork they’ve said could be thrown and then have asked for a couple of months later… If in doubt, keep a triage pile: hold it for a month or so and double-check again before finally getting rid of the paper.
Digital filing system
The digital folder structure that works for us has a main home education folder at the top level which holds the timetable for the year, a catch-all folder for subject resources and then a folder per child. Each child’s folder has two sub-folders: work assigned/to be assigned/to review (colour-coded for easy reference) and a completed work folder. Anything scanned goes straight into the completed work folder and is (theoretically) reviewed and organised termly, but essentially acts as a catch-all until I sit down to write up the year.
The key is that it needs to be simple enough that you’ll actually use it when you’re in a hurry, which is most of the time. A three-level structure is about the limit before it becomes more effort than it saves.
If you can, apply the same logic to browser bookmarks: one main home education folder, subfolders by subject or category, and a speculative folder for things you’re not sure about yet. Review it when you review the files and delete as you go.
It starts with one sign-up to a newsletter and before you know it, each morning brings a flurry of 20+ emails into your inbox and it starts to feel like a digital version of the paper chaos. Home education email volume is genuinely surprising. Curriculum updates, subscription renewals, newsletters, progress reports from online platforms, confirmation emails for classes and groups, interesting newsletters from interesting people thinking about education. Left unmanaged, it becomes impossible to find anything when you need it and subscriptions just auto-renew.
The most useful change we made was setting up a separate email address for home education correspondence. Everything related to the children’s learning goes there: their log-in details, progress reports, anything forwarded from external classes or tutors and all the ‘save for later’ lesson ideas you pick up and forget about: now you can find them again.
If your learners are old enough to have their own email addresses, this is also genuinely practical digital literacy in action rather than a lesson about it. Managing an inbox, understanding why you keep a record of communications, knowing where to find log-in details: all of that gets learned by doing. And, emailing your kids is also a great way to add a little distance between your parent and teacher roles. Digital assignments reach them by email, tricky feedback is sometimes easier in writing and if you encourage them to share interesting things they stumble upon, they actually start sourcing lesson resources for you.
If you think you’ll use it, keeping a digital document (a spreadsheet/shared Google Doc) with all the log-in details for educational platforms in one place is useful. If you wouldn’t update it, a running list of passwords stuck to the fridge works just as well. The point is to reduce friction in the home-ed day when someone can’t remember their login and the baby needs an afternoon nap. Lost passwords cause an unnecessary amount of home-ed stress — fix this and you’re already winning.
A weekly home-ed folder
Aside from digitally storing the paperwork, the single biggest change in our homeschool came when we introduced weekly home-ed folders for the kids. In short, a weekly folder contains everything I want them to complete that week that is paper-based. So worksheets, mock papers, articles to read, brain-training puzzles etc. I give them the folder at the start of the week (which, gentle reminder, doesn’t have to be Monday) and they have the week to complete the work. It gives them scaffolded autonomy, teaches them to manage their time, reduces some more of that parent-teacher child-pupil clash and reduces my mental load: everything’s printed, filed and assigned in an hour. Storing the checklist that accompanies their folders also helps when it comes to writing up what we did that year. If you’re interested, there’s more on how we use weekly folders here.
Help writing a report
The hardest part is often figuring out exactly what to write, and that’s why the blank home-ed report template comes with a completed example for you to reference. You can download that for free here.
If you’d like a little more help, the Home-Ed Record builder is a scaffolded, build-on-the-page tool that takes you through the report step-by-step. Fill in the sections, delete what’s irrelevant, save, print, file and use. Simple. To give it a try, drop your email below and we’ll send you the link.
N.B. This is my interpretation of what a suitable record would look like — if any requirements are formalised, I’ll update this page. For now, this is just for you to have something in hand if you’re asked. If you’d like to be updated if things change, drop your email below.
The record is for you, too
Regardless of whether or not legal requirements of record keeping are enacted, keeping a record is worth doing for your own confidence as much as anything else. Being a home-educating parent is hard. You know your children more intimately than any teacher ever could, and so you know instinctively whether or not they’re learning. You know from the conversations over lunch when they explain a topic in detail or ask questions that you don’t know the answer to. You see it during museum trips when they’re fascinated with an exhibit and ask to go back again. You know it from their podcast lists and the TBR piles and the drawings they stick on the fridge, but knowing it in your bones and being able to rationalise the learning that rarely looks like school to a doubting 10pm brain, after a day when a lesson went wrong or you forgot to print the work and everything turned to chaos for ten minutes that felt like an hour while you wrangled attention back to the lesson — that kind of doubt that asks “are they really learning? What they really need to?” — that is easier silenced with evidence than parental instincts.
Photos answer the parent side of the question, “is this right for them?” Really, try it. Open your phone and scroll back a week or so: are they smiling, busy, engaged in something? You can answer the “are they learning” part with the paperwork trail (and tweak it if something is off), but it’s the photos that matter the most. A happy kid is a learning kid. It really is that simple.
Updated: July 2026