UK home education guide
Thinking about home education but not sure you can do it
Updated · 1 min read
This is not written from the middle of home education. It is written from two years of reading about it, before my daughter is old enough for school at all.
My daughter is three. I started researching her education early — and couldn't stop.
What I found first
126,000 kids already out
Home education in the UK is growing double digits year on year. This isn't a fringe anymore — it's a quiet movement.
What surprised me most
Leaving is the easy part
One letter. No permission, no panel. The legal side that scares everyone turns out to be the simplest step of all.
The letter is ten lines. The fear of the letter lasts months longer than the letter.
What nobody had solved
The planning black hole
Every parent I read about hit the same wall — not teaching, planning. What to teach, in what order, every day, for years.
Every account said the same thing in a different way. The teaching was fine. It was the endless deciding that wore people down: which topic, in what order, and whether something important had quietly been missed two terms ago.
So, being a dev dad
I built the missing piece
A full primary curriculum — planned, sequenced and paced — so the parent's job is showing up, not sequencing 4,833 lessons.
Why I'm telling you
You might be two years behind me
If you're where I was — curious, worried, googling at 2am — the research is done. You can start from here.
What two years of reading changed
It did not change the legal picture, because the legal picture is simple and was simple the whole time.
It changed what I thought the hard part was. The hard part is not teaching a seven-year-old to read, or answering a letter from the council, or finding people to see on a Wednesday. It is holding a coherent plan across every subject for years, on top of everything else a family already does.