This is one of the first questions almost every new home educator asks, and it's a genuinely reasonable one — the National Curriculum is such a fixture of how we think about "school" that its absence can feel disorienting at first.
The short answer
No. In England, home educating parents are not legally required to follow the National Curriculum, sit SATs, or replicate what happens in a classroom. The legal requirement is simply that a child receives an education "suitable to their age, ability and aptitude" — which leaves a lot of room for different approaches.
So why does the curriculum still come up so much?
Because it's useful as a reference point, not because it's compulsory. Even families who don't follow it formally often use it loosely to check they're covering similar ground to schooled children of the same age — particularly for maths and literacy, where skills build on each other in a fairly predictable order. Our plain-English guide to what Key Stage 1 actually covers is exactly this kind of loose reference, not a syllabus you need to tick off.
What families actually do instead
- Loosely curriculum-informed — using it as a rough map without following it exactly, which is probably the most common approach
- Fully autonomous / child-led — following the child's own interests rather than a set structure at all
- A structured alternative curriculum — some families use a different formal or semi-formal scheme by choice, not obligation
None of these is "more correct" than the others — what matters legally is the outcome (a suitable education), not the method used to get there.
A practical middle ground
If total freedom feels overwhelming but a rigid curriculum feels unnecessary, most families land somewhere in the middle: rough coverage of literacy and numeracy at a pace that suits the child, plus whatever else genuinely interests them. Our Numbers for Kids and Reading, Writing & Literacy categories are organized by skill level rather than school year, so you can pick up wherever your child actually is rather than where a syllabus says they should be.
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