I'm often asked which curriculum we use, and the honest answer is: several. I reach for trusted, established systems – the proven ones, built by people who understand their corner of this far better than I ever will. I use each for what it's genuinely good at, combined by a clear sense of what I want it to build.
We often think education is preparation for adulthood. I think it's closer to building a balance sheet. Every useful skill increases the value of every skill already there.
So the thing I actually care about is a short list of them – reading, writing, thinking, attention, connection, and the ability to get an idea out of your own head and into someone else's intact. The skills align with what I think will happen over the next twenty years. A child who reads well learns everything else faster. A child who can hold their attention on one hard thing can hold it on anything. I don't build curriculum from scratch, or schedules, or timetables. I build a system, and I organise it around the few skills that lift everything else.
Writing is the one skill on that list I know from the inside, which is why I lean on it as hard as I do. I still think with a pen. Most of what I write starts as handwritten outlines, post-it notes, cards in a Zettelkasten box – my hand moving before my head has quite caught up, the writing turning out to be where the thinking happens rather than the record of thinking that happened somewhere else. It would be a strange thing to build a system for my children that treated as optional the one skill I lean on hardest to have a mind at all. And it isn't only sentiment. Writing by hand engages the brain far more widely than typing does – high-density EEG studies show it produces markedly more connectivity across the regions tied to memory and learning – which is a good part of why handwriting, copywork and dictation stay in the mix long after a screen could do the job faster. And there's a gap of my own I'd like to close for them: I struggle to say out loud what I can create so swiftly on the page, and I'd rather narrow that in them than pass it on.
In practice, I'll admit, it still looks like subjects – Maths, STEM, Language Arts – because a real Tuesday morning has to be run by a human being, and you can't hand a nine-year-old "transferable skills" on a whiteboard. Those underlying skills are the operating system; the folders on the desktop are still, stubbornly, subjects.
Under each folder sits a small stack of things chosen deliberately, none a complete system, most borrowed from people who'd be surprised to share a shelf. Maths combines Singapore for mastery and number sense, Kumon for fluency and discipline, and Synthesis for collaborative problem-solving. Together they reinforce one another: fluency makes complex problems approachable, and problem-solving gives the arithmetic somewhere worth going.
Language Arts is even more eclectic. We split phonics, grammar, dictation, narration, copywork, reading, discussion and writing into their own jobs, borrowing the best tools we can find for each – from vintage spelling books to Cambridge English, carefully chosen literature and audiobooks. The list looks sprawling, but the aim is remarkably narrow: vocabulary, comprehension, attention, empathy and, above all, communication – the ability to get an idea out of your own head and into someone else's intact. Art belongs here too, as visual communication rather than decoration.
Every component has a purpose. I'm choosing for the skill, not the syllabus.
Two of those choices show how it actually runs. My son loathes Kumon – genuinely hates it, whines about it most days, would drop it tomorrow if I let him. We keep it, because nothing else I've found builds the executive-function muscles quite like it does: managing his own time, preparing, getting himself to the desk and through the pile without me standing over him. The whining isn't a reason to stop. It's the sound of the muscle working. My daughter loves the same box – she came to reading slowly, would happily have gone on inventing her own stories off the page forever, and Kumon was part of what met her there. Same tool, two different children, two different reasons it earns its place.
Music we run almost backwards to the usual order. We do it for the brain as much as the melody, but most theory is slow and joyless, and – I say this as someone who played three instruments as a child, sat the theory exams, and retained approximately none of it – it rarely survives into adult life anyway. So we skipped the grind and started by ear – piano, and violin for my daughter – playing for the sheer fun of it, letting the love of the thing arrive first and the scaffolding come later, if at all. That order doesn't trouble me in the slightest.
We hack the rest fairly shamelessly. I'm a sucker for a good adaptive learning system – the kind that meets a child at their exact edge and keeps nudging it forward – and where they exist for maths and science my son has used them to race through the material, and through a few odd subjects nobody planned on, far faster than any timetable would have let him. A surprising amount of the rest happens after lights-out: he'll take a bedtime story over almost anything, and I bless "Sleepy History" for wandering off into the origins of tea one night and Cleopatra the next. Half of what he knows seems to have arrived while he was meant to be falling asleep.
The part that makes the whole thing actually work, though, is pace. Nothing in the house moves at one speed. A child can be years ahead in one thing and taking their time in another, and nobody waits for the group, because there is no group. My son runs well ahead where he's ready, and the weight I put on communication suits him exactly – it gives his more advanced work somewhere to go, someone to explain itself to, a reason to become an argument and not just an answer. A year-group classroom, for all its real strengths, structurally cannot do this. Thirty children have to move together or the timetable falls over. One kitchen table can let two children move at four different speeds before breakfast.
None of this runs on vibes. I'm confident enough in how I build and navigate systems – but confidence isn't evidence, and I want to know how this one actually performs. So I benchmark. I run side-by-side comparisons against Cambridge, against international standards, against the private schools down the road I could be sending them to – partly to catch the gaps a homemade system will inevitably have, and partly because I'm suspicious of anyone clever enough to design their own curriculum and therefore clever enough to talk themselves into believing it's working when it isn't. The comparison isn't there to make me feel good. It's there to show me where I'm wrong while there's still time to do something about it.
A few things we lean on hard and don't apologise for. We aren't teaching programming at this age – I care far more that they can think in systems and use technology as leverage than that a nine-year-old can write a loop. We teach executive function on purpose rather than crossing our fingers that it turns up on its own. And the body gets real weight, not as a break from the thinking but as the thing that holds it up. Underneath all of it runs an idea my children have absorbed almost without noticing: that skills are collectable, that you stack them the way you'd hoard a favourite set of toys, and that the one with the biggest, oddest, best-fitting collection usually wins.
I should say the obvious thing. This is an operating system built for two particular children, and the component list is the least transferable part of it. Yours should look nothing like mine. Copy it and you've copied the answers without ever asking the question.
The question sits underneath every book on every shelf, every timetable, every activity and every decision: what kind of person am I trying to build?
For me, the answer has very little to do with school.
I'm trying to raise two people who can notice problems before other people do, teach themselves whatever comes next, communicate clearly enough to bring others with them, and keep collecting capabilities for the rest of their lives. Reading makes writing better. Writing sharpens thinking. Thinking improves judgment. Judgment helps you choose what to learn next. None of these grow alone; each quietly increases the return on the rest.
That's why I don't care whether an idea comes from Singapore, a Victorian spelling book, Cambridge, Kumon, a bedtime audiobook or something I found buried in an obscure paper. My loyalty isn't to any curriculum. It's to the person all those pieces are quietly building together.
Which is also why I stopped caring whether the books are beautiful.
There are exquisitely designed curricula that build very little, and ugly photocopied worksheets that quietly change a child's life. Beauty isn't capability. Capability becomes confidence. And confidence is what gives someone the courage to learn the next thing, solve the next problem, and eventually build a life that no curriculum could ever have fully prepared them for.
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