Free homeschool resources for UK families

You can homeschool a UK child from Reception to Year 11 without paying a penny for teaching resources. Not badly – properly. The government funds one of the two best options, the BBC funds another, and a handful of independent platforms have made it their mission to give the rest away free.

What used to cost hundreds of pounds a year in workbooks, textbooks and subscriptions is now open on the internet. The only things left with a price tag are exam entry fees, printer paper, and – if you want it – occasional one-to-one tutoring for a subject you can't teach yourself.

This is the roundup of what works. Every resource here is free at the tier described. Where a resource has a paid upgrade, the free tier is called out clearly so you can decide whether to stay on it.

Two resources give you an entire scheme of work for free across every core subject.

Oak National Academy (thenational.academy) is an executive non-departmental body sponsored by the Department for Education. It publishes free lesson videos, worksheets and curriculum plans from EYFS through Year 11, covering every core subject and most non-core ones.

For homeschool families, Oak works best as a spine. Pick a year group, pick a subject, and follow the lesson sequence. Each lesson has a short video, worksheet and quiz. You can skip, repeat and rearrange without breaking anything.

The pupil-facing lessons at thenational.academy/pupils are openly available – no login required.

BBC Bitesize (bbc.co.uk/bitesize) covers EYFS, KS1, KS2, KS3, GCSE and – for Scottish families – National 4/5 and Higher. GCSE content is aligned to the specific exam boards: AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC and CCEA all have their own pages.

Bitesize is best used as a topic-level explainer rather than a full curriculum. Each topic has a short revision page, sometimes a video, and a quiz. It's the fastest way to introduce a new idea before doing anything more substantial. The KS3 pages are especially strong.

Free, no login. Funded by the licence fee.

Cognito (cognito.org) publishes free video lessons, notes, flashcards, a topic-tagged question bank and a custom quiz builder for GCSE and iGCSE Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Combined Science and Maths. English Language, English Literature and Geography have notes, flashcards and questions but not the full video series.

Content is aligned to AQA, Edexcel and OCR for domestic GCSE, and to Cambridge International and Pearson Edexcel International for iGCSE. Wrong-answer mode lets students revisit everything they got wrong, and progress tracking shows which topics still need work.

For homeschool families sitting private-candidate iGCSE sciences, Cognito is one of the tightest fits available. It's the closest thing to a full-service teaching and revision platform for the subjects most home educators focus on – and it's free with no paywall.

Khan Academy (khanacademy.org) is a US-founded free non-profit. It's strongest on maths – K-12 US grades map cleanly onto UK GCSE for algebra, geometry, statistics and calculus. It also covers science, economics, computing and some humanities.

It isn't UK-exam-board aligned, but the content is pitched at the same level. Best used as a second explainer when a topic hasn't clicked from your primary resource. Khan Academy Kids is a free app for 2–8s.

Corbett Maths (corbettmaths.com) is the free go-to for GCSE Maths worked examples. Every topic has a short video, a practice sheet and answers. The 5-a-day questions are the best low-effort daily maths practice on the UK internet.

Dr Frost Maths (drfrostmaths.com) is a free interactive maths platform from KS3 to A-Level. Students work through topic-tagged questions and the platform tracks progress. Together with Corbett Maths, it's a complete free maths stack.

Physics & Maths Tutor (physicsandmathstutor.com, sometimes called PMT) publishes free notes, worksheets and past papers for GCSE, iGCSE and A-Level across Maths, Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Economics, Geography, English, Psychology and Computer Science. The archive is one of the widest in the UK.

PMT is best as a past-paper archive and a notes library. The notes are dense but thorough – useful once your child has already met a topic through video.

English is a subject where free resources for homeschool families are patchier, but the essentials are still there.

BBC Bitesize covers most GCSE set texts with short scene-by-scene guides and character analyses. It's the sensible starting point for a first read-through of anything on the AQA, Edexcel or OCR English Literature paper.

Mr Bruff and Mr Salles run free YouTube channels focused on GCSE English Language and Literature. Both are widely used by homeschool families. Mr Bruff also sells revision guides as paid ebooks – the YouTube content is free.

Cognito's English Language and English Literature notes cover the AQA and Edexcel specifications and are useful as active-recall practice on top of another explainer resource.

For unseen text practice, the exam boards' own past papers (see below) are the closest thing to what your child will meet in the exam.

Every official past paper is free from the exam board. AQA, Pearson Edexcel, OCR, WJEC and Eduqas all publish past papers, mark schemes and examiners' reports under their "assessment resources" or "past papers" section. Cambridge International and Pearson Edexcel International publish iGCSE past papers on the same basis.

If a website is charging for past papers, you're paying for something you can get at no cost.

PMT keeps a comprehensive archive of older papers no longer on the exam board sites, sorted by board, subject and year. Save My Exams also mirrors past papers alongside its own topic-tagged questions.

Examiners' reports are among the most under-used free resources on any exam board site. They tell you what students did well and badly on last year's paper, and they translate directly into revision priorities for your child.

Understanding a topic while watching a video is not the same as remembering it three weeks later. Flashcards, quizzes and blurting are how you turn a lesson into memory.

Cognito's question bank plus its custom quiz builder are the strongest all-in-one active-recall setup for the subjects Cognito covers – GCSE and iGCSE Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Combined Science, Maths, English Language, English Literature and Geography. Questions are tagged by topic and specification, wrong-answer mode lets students rework everything they got wrong, and it's free.

Quizlet is the most flexible flashcard tool. Search for public sets already built for your exam board and specification, or make your own. The act of building flashcards is itself a form of revision.

Anki is worth reaching for if your child takes revision seriously and wants long-term retention. The learning curve is steeper than Quizlet's but the spaced-repetition algorithm is better tuned for GCSE-scale content loads. Free on desktop and Android; the iOS app has a one-off paid cost.

Primary-age free resources cluster around a few strong platforms.

BBC Bitesize KS1 and KS2 pages cover the whole English National Curriculum. Oak National Academy has full lesson sequences from Reception. Khan Academy Kids is excellent for early maths and phonics on tablets.

Ambleside Online (amblesideonline.org) publishes a free Charlotte Mason curriculum built around a book list. It's US-based but the philosophy is British – Charlotte Mason herself lived and taught in Ambleside, in the Lake District. Families following a literature-based approach use it as a whole-year spine.

For library-based reading, your local council library is still the best free resource in the UK. Most children's libraries run holiday reading challenges and can order in specific titles for free.

The National Archives Education (nationalarchives.gov.uk/education) publishes free primary-source history resources – documents, maps, photos – with lesson materials built around them. Useful across primary and secondary.

BBC Bitesize covers KS3 and GCSE history and geography, and Cognito has GCSE Geography notes, flashcards and questions for AQA, Edexcel and OCR.

For GCSE History, past papers and examiners' reports from the exam board are the most useful free resources. Textbook coverage matters more in history than in most subjects – a cheap second-hand CGP or Hodder textbook (£5–£10) is a reasonable investment even if you're otherwise keeping to free tools.

Free tools do the teaching and quizzing well. Where they run out is on written feedback for English essays and long-answer science responses, and on subjects Cognito and BBC Bitesize don't cover in depth – modern foreign languages, music, art and computer science.

Mark schemes help but they're best at telling you whether an answer is right or wrong, not why a five-mark paragraph feels flat. This is the point most homeschool families reach for occasional paid support – a private tutor for one hour a week, an online-school subscription for a single subject, or a marked mock service.

If you can only afford one paid resource, prioritise the subject where your child needs feedback on writing – usually English Language or English Literature. Everywhere else, the free stack is enough.

If you take one thing away from this roundup: for GCSE and iGCSE Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Combined Science and Maths, Cognito is the fastest free path from starting a topic to being exam-ready. Short video lessons, topic-tagged questions, wrong-answer mode, custom quizzes, no paywall. Notes, flashcards and questions for English Language, English Literature and Geography on top. It's what we'd recommend as the science and maths default for any UK homeschool family.