The question
Home education needs a curriculum, a plan, and a way to see whether anything actually happened this week. Those three things usually live in three different places: a public lesson library, a spreadsheet, and a parent’s memory.
Oak National Academy already publishes high-quality lessons under an Open Government Licence. The experiment was not to rewrite the curriculum. It was to wrap it in a space that a family can actually use.
What I built
HomeSchool Hub is a Rails 8 app. Parents sign up, invite a child, pick school years, and assign Oak units to the months of the academic year. Children see this month’s work, sit quizzes, and mark lessons complete. Parents open Insights for completions, quiz success, and time on lessons.
The curriculum is synced from Oak’s Open API, then hydrated with summaries, assets, quizzes, and transcripts. I asked Oak’s developers for that access. They gave me a token for my family. Lessons stay inside the hub instead of bouncing the child out to another site.
There is also a checkpoint test: when a child has finished enough lessons in one subject, a parent can generate a longer paper with an answer key. That is the closest the hub gets to “are they actually learning this?”
What I am testing
Whether a family product can stay calm. Themes, badges, and streaks are easy to add. The harder problem is the weekly shape of the work: enough structure that a child knows what to do today, not so much structure that the parent is managing a second school.
The live site is the test, and it is for my family. The source is public. If you want a copy, the landing page has the setup steps. Ask Oak for your own token. They will issue one.
Related reading
- HomeSchool Hub: a family learning space — Why wrap Oak instead of building another lesson library
- A school day that stays at home — Why the hub exists, and how the week and lesson path are designed for one learner