Home Grown Skills

When Jodie and I started home educating, the resources weren't the problem. There were plenty of them. The problem was that most of them felt like school, just at home. Worksheets dressed up in primary colours. Multiple choice questions about things that would never matter outside of a test. Plenty of "curriculum aligned" and almost zero "real life alignment."

What we kept coming back to was this: if you've chosen to home educate, or even if you just want your child's learning to extend beyond the school gates, you don't want more of the same. You want something that actually prepares them for the world they're going to live in.

That's exactly why we built HomeGrownSkills.

Teaching them to pass life, not tests

HomeGrownSkills is an interactive platform for children aged 4–16, built around life skills. Real ones. Money Skills, Cooking & Nutrition, Digital Literacy, Real Talk (Social and communication skills), The Natural World, Get Active (Physical literacy) the kind of subjects that make a child more capable, more curious, and more confident in the actual world they're growing up in.

We didn't sit down with a national curriculum document and work backwards. We sat down as parents — as home educators — and asked ourselves: what do we actually want our kids to know?

The answer was never how to fill in a bubble sheet.

It's not just screen time in a different format

One of the things we were determined to get right: the platform had to get kids off the platform.

Every subject includes offline exercises. Real things to do. Conversations to have. Tasks to complete in the actual world. And because home education works best when the family is part of it, we've built conversation prompts in throughout — not as an afterthought, but as a core part of how the learning works.

Your child won't be sitting alone clicking through content. They'll be talking to you. Doing things alongside you. Which, in our experience, is where the real learning actually happens anyway.

There's a whole world to explore — not just skills to tick off

Skill Builders are the backbone of the platform, but they're not the whole picture.

Project Corner is where learning opens up. Children can explore countries and cultures through World Explorer, dive deep into history through Back in Time, or wrestle with genuinely big questions, the kind that don't have a neat answer at the bottom of the page. We're talking space, ancient civilisations, the oceans, topics that spark the kind of curiosity that spills out way beyond the screen and into dinner table conversations that go on longer than you planned.

Then there's Creative Space. Because creativity isn't a nice-to-have, it's a thinking skill. This is where children write, imagine, and express themselves freely, without the pressure of being marked on it. It's one of the parts of the platform I'm most proud of, because it gives learners permission to just make something without it needing to be perfect.

Together, these three areas mean that no two learning days on HGS look exactly the same. Which matters, because nothing kills a child's motivation faster than predictable sameness.

The bits for parents — the Memory Wall and Parent Dashboard

Here's where HGS starts to feel genuinely different.

The Memory Wall is where real-world moments get logged. When a child completes an offline task, cooks something, earns something, figures something out in the actual world, that goes up on the wall. It's a living record of what they've actually done, not just what they've clicked through. Families can react to each other's moments, which makes learning feel like something that belongs to the whole family, not just the child sitting at the screen.

And for parents who want a clearer picture of what their child is getting out of it, the parent dashboard gives you exactly that. Progress, streaks, what subjects they've been exploring, where they're flying and where they might need a nudge. No more vague "it was fine" when you ask how the learning went, you can actually see it!

This matters especially for home educators who carry the full weight of knowing whether their child is progressing. Having that visibility, without it feeling like surveillance, was something we thought about carefully.

Not just for home educators

We built HomeGrownSkills for families like ours, families who've decided that school isn't the only place learning happens, or that it isn't the right place for their child at all.

But it's equally built for parents who just want something better for the hours their child isn't in school. The evenings. The weekends. The long stretches of holiday time when screens tend to fill the gap.

If you've ever felt like your child is learning plenty but not quite the right things, HGS is probably what you've been looking for.

We've been building this from the inside

Everything on the platform has been shaped by us using it with our own kids. Not in a theoretical "this should work" way, in a "hang on, that's not quite right, let's redo it" way. The content is calibrated because we've sat with it, tested it, argued about it, and rebuilt it when it wasn't good enough.

It's a homegrown platform, built by home educators, for families who believe that real life is the best classroom there is.

Ready to try it?

HomeGrownSkills is available at £5.99/month or £50/year — less than a weekly coffee habit for something that'll run alongside your family's learning all year.

Head over to [homegrownskills.net] and take a look. We think you'll feel it immediately- this was made by people who actually get it.