About · a home educating family
A London Family,
building the app
we needed, for ourselves.
Willowfolio is built and run by two parents who home educate. This page is where you check we’re real, before you trust us with your records.
Who we are
Why this exists at all.
We home educate two children in London, and for two years we squeezed our records into whichever app sat at the top of the search results. Most were US tools with British spellings bolted on, still asking about grades, August school-year starts, and umbrella schools. The good ones were spreadsheets. None of them sounded like the way home education actually feels at our kitchen table.
So we started building Willowfolio for ourselves, then opened it up.
The company is a UK private limited company registered in England. Two parents, no investors, no growth team, no roadmap meetings about engagement metrics. The address, company number, and ICO registration sit on the privacy notice and the terms page, where someone might actually need them.
Why UK only
A UK home-ed app is a different shape from a US one.
The framing question
What would your council actually want to see, and how do you keep it without giving up your evenings?
Home education in the UK rests on Section 7 of the Education Act 1996. A parent must cause their child to receive an efficient, full-time education suitable to their age, ability, and aptitude, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise. Those two words, or otherwise, are the legal foundation of UK home education. No national curriculum requirement. No registration scheme. No standardised testing. No umbrella school to enrol with.
That is the question Willowfolio is built around. Not how do I prove curriculum coverage to a state inspector, which is the question every US homeschool app was built to answer. US tools default to a school year starting in August, with a thirteen-grade ladder from kindergarten to twelfth grade. UK families think in Reception, Year 1–11, Key Stages 1–4. The off-by-one errors are everywhere, and the kind of small wrongness that makes a parent stop trusting the app within a week.
The US homeschool market is roughly fifty times the size of the UK one. Building “for both” almost always means building for the US and giving the UK a settings checkbox. We did not want to be the British tab on someone else’s American app, even when we were the ones writing it.
A note on the four nations
Willowfoliois built around the England-and-Wales legal framework. Scottish and Northern Irish families are welcome, the activity log, reading log, and schedule work the same for any family, but the council-report flow is shaped around an English or Welsh Local Authority. We’d rather say so plainly than pretend the four nations are the same.
The principles
Five quiet rules.
The decisions a careful UK family would want, made out loud - and the reason some features are on the roadmap and others never will be.
- Calm, not urgent.
- Notifications stay off by default. No streaks, no badges, no “you haven’t opened the app since Tuesday” nudges. Shame is not a learning tool, and the app you bought to help with the pressure should not become another source of it.
- Inclusive, not prescriptive.
- Montessori, Charlotte Mason, classical, eclectic, unschooling, in roughly that order of how often we get asked. Approach-specific fields are optional, and the activity log, reading log, schedule and reports work the same way for any family.
- Parent-only, child-free.
- There is no child-facing side to Willowfolio, and there never will be. No child logins, no profiles, no leaderboards. The simplest way to protect a child’s data is to never give the child an account in the first place.
- Privacy by default.
- Signup asks for a first name and an email, and the bare minimum we need for billing. No phone, no SMS consents, no “tell us about your family” form. No third-party advertising trackers. Photos can stay in your own Dropbox if you’d prefer.
- UK home, European servers, UK law.
- Records sit on servers in the European region, governed by UK GDPR, under a UK private company you can write or complain to. We are not chasing the US market and we are not building a global product with a UK skin painted on.
What we will do
What we will do, in plain words.
European servers under UK GDPR. Council reports that read like a letter to the council, not a coursework portfolio. Photos kept in your own Dropbox if you’d rather we never saw them.
- Yes
Keep a working demo on the site.
Populated with real-feeling data, so you can see what the app actually looks like before you decide to pay us.
- Yes
Reply to your emails ourselves.
hey@ goes to one of us, not a ticket queue. We answer in the evenings, when the day's school is done.
- Yes
Quietly fix the small things.
The tab-out-and-lose-your-draft problem. The photo that won't attach. The small bugs that quietly ruin an app for the people actually using it.
- Yes
Build for UK GDPR by default.
European servers and service providers, ICO registration, only the personal information we genuinely need. The boring foundations done first.
Built around what you keep
not what we measure.
The features it ships. The features it never will. The small fixes that make a tool worth opening on a Tuesday morning.
Stay in touch
If you want to hear from us, quietly.
Two ways. One scheduled, one whenever something’s on your mind.
About / Newsletter
Quiet notes from the build.
Occasional notes from the build - what shipped, what we threw away, a small thing we noticed about UK home education.
See what’s in itAbout / Contact
Write to us directly.
[email protected]goes to one of us, not a ticket queue. We answer in the evenings, when the day’s school is done.
Open the formIf you’ve read this far
The most useful thing is to see the app yourself.
The demo is real. The data is fictional. The pricing is one page.