UK home education guide
Free home education resources in the UK, actually worth using
Updated · 1 min read
The free shelf in UK home education is genuinely good. The one thing it does not hand you is an order to do it all in.
Before you buy anything: the free shelf is better than most paid ones.
7 free resources UK home educators actually use — the honest starter kit before you spend a penny.
#1 · the big one
Oak National Academy
Thousands of free, teacher-made lessons across the whole curriculum — government-backed and genuinely good. (It's the spine we built on.)
Oak covers the national curriculum lesson by lesson, which is why a home-educating parent never needs to write a lesson from scratch. It is free to use, and free to skip when a lesson does not suit your child.
#2 + #3
BBC Bitesize & Khan Academy
Bitesize for quick UK-curriculum explainers; Khan for maths practice that marks itself. Both free forever.
#4 + #5
The library & the museum
A library card is a free curriculum in a building. And many of the UK's best museums cost exactly nothing.
#6 + #7
YouTube & other families
Curated channels for every topic — and local home-ed groups, the free resource that keeps you sane.
The honest catch
Free resources, unpaid planner
The resources are free. Stitching them into 36 coherent weeks is the job nobody pays you for.
Which Oak lesson? In what order? After which Bitesize topic? …every single evening
Free is not the same as easy
Every resource here costs nothing and asks for the same thing in return: your evenings. Somebody still has to choose which lesson, in which order, after which topic, in every subject, every week.
If you enjoy that part, the free shelf is genuinely all you need. If you do not, that is the one thing worth paying for, and it is a far smaller bill than a shelf of workbooks bought in a panic.