Home Education Apps in Ireland: An Honest Comparison
Almost every home education app is built for US families following a curriculum. Here is what the main options do well, what they miss, and the gap none of them fill.
There is no home education app built for Irish families. The tools that come up when you search are almost all American, built around a structured curriculum, graded assignments, and US state reporting. They work well if your week looks like school. If it doesn't, especially with a neurodivergent child, most of them fight you.
This is a plain comparison of the main options: what each does well, what it misses, and who it actually suits. I went looking for a home education app for years before I gave up and built my own, so this is written from inside that search, not from a product page.
What should a home education app actually do?
For an Irish home educator, three things matter. Record what actually happened. Organise it against the curriculum areas an assessor recognises. Produce something you can hand over at a review without a week of preparation.
Most apps do a fourth thing instead. They plan what should happen. That is a different job, and it assumes you are working from a plan in the first place.
The mismatch is structural. Home education in Ireland does not have to follow the school curriculum. Tusla looks for evidence of "a certain minimum education", not proof that you taught Tuesday's maths lesson. A tool built to schedule and grade lessons is solving a problem most Irish families don't have.
For a neurodivergent child the mismatch is sharper. Anything that puts a demand on the child directly, a streak to keep up or a lesson to finish, is a non-starter for a PDA or burnt-out kid. The recording has to happen on the parent's side, quietly, after the fact.
Homeschool Tracker: what it does well, what it misses
Homeschool Tracker is built for record-keeping around a structured curriculum. If you run a US-style programme and need transcripts, it is thorough. It handles lesson plans, assignments, grades, attendance, and report cards in one place.
The whole tool is organised around work you assign and then grade, plus attendance hours. For a family doing school-at-home with several children, that structure is genuinely useful, and the reporting is detailed.
What it misses is everything that isn't a graded assignment. There is no natural place to record an afternoon that turned into three hours on volcanoes, or a conversation in the car that did more than any worksheet. It is built for American reporting requirements, not the Irish curriculum's focus areas, so even a full record comes out in the wrong shape for a Tusla review.
Homeschool Planet: strengths and weaknesses
Homeschool Planet is a planner first. It is calendar-centric: you schedule lessons across multiple children, set to-do lists and reminders, and it links up with curricula you have bought.
Its strength is a busy family running a defined curriculum with several kids. If your job each morning is to keep everyone moving through a plan, a shared schedule that resets weekly is a real help, and few tools do that part better.
The weakness is the same as its strength. It plans forward, and the record is a by-product of ticking a plan off. If you don't work from a plan, there is almost nothing to tick. For interest-led or low-demand families, you end up maintaining a schedule you never follow, which is worse than no app at all.
Homeschool Manager: who it suits
Homeschool Manager is the simplest of the three. The interface is cleaner, and it focuses on planning, tracking, attendance, and reports built around US state requirements without the complexity of the bigger tools.
It suits a family that wants a straightforward tracker, follows at least some curriculum, and needs tidy compliance reports without a steep setup. If you find the larger apps overwhelming, this is the gentler one.
The core assumption hasn't changed. You assign structured work and track its completion. It is not built for Ireland, and it is not built for learning that happens off-plan, which is most of what an interest-led day actually contains.
Do spreadsheets and free apps work?
Yes, up to a point, and they are where most Irish home educators actually start. A Google Sheet with a column per focus area and a row per day costs nothing and bends to any shape you need. Notes, Notion, and a folder of phone photos are all free and flexible too.
The catch is that you build and maintain the structure yourself. Apple Notes could hold everything, but it couldn't organise it the way I needed, and a long list of undated notes is not a record you can show anyone.
The deeper problem shows up under pressure. The careful system you set up in September is the first thing to collapse during a hard week, and hard weeks are common when you are home-educating a neurodivergent child.
Free tools also produce no report. At review time you reconstruct the whole year by hand, which is exactly the job an app should be saving you. If you want the no-app version done well, building a home education portfolio without worksheets covers it.
What no current home education app does well
None of them are built for Irish home education with a neurodivergent child. They record school. They do not record real life and map it to the focus areas an assessor uses.
I know this because I needed one and couldn't find it. We were in burnout, and my kids refused anything that looked like school.
We tried homeschool.ie, but it needed the kids to do the work themselves, and with a PDA child anything that asks for action from them is a wall. That ruled out the trackers too.
I needed to log the ad-hoc learning that was actually happening, the stuff that doesn't fit a lesson slot. Notes couldn't hold it in a way I could use. Underneath it all sat the constant worry: am I doing enough, and are they missing key skills the school system would have covered?
I am a web developer, so in the end I designed the app I had been looking for. It started as Actually and became Sustenance.
You log a moment as it happens, a photo and a couple of sentences, and tag it against the curriculum's key focus areas. Over a year that becomes a clear picture of which areas are developing and which need more attention, and it generates a report an assessor recognises. The same idea, captured from the parent's side, runs through evidencing self-directed learning without a curriculum.
When I showed an early version to home education assessors, they liked it, which mattered more to me than any feature. The child-facing side stays low-demand on purpose. The recording lives with the parent, away from the child.
If that sounds like the tool you have been looking for, you can join the early list at sustenance.family.
Frequently asked questions
- No. The main home education apps, Homeschool Tracker, Homeschool Planet, and Homeschool Manager, are American, built around US curricula and state reporting. The Irish-facing options I tried, like homeschool.ie, still expected the child to do the work directly, which rules them out for a PDA child. HEN Ireland is a community resource rather than a record-keeping tool. Sustenance is being built specifically for Irish home educators, around the curriculum focus areas an assessor recognises.
- A notebook works, especially if you write in it consistently. Plenty of families keep a paper log and present it at a Tusla review with no trouble. The limits show up later: paper is hard to search, hard to organise by focus area, and easy to abandon during a hard week. An app helps only if it lowers the effort of recording, not if it adds steps.
- A planner records what you intend to do. A record-keeper records what actually happened. Most homeschool apps are planners: you schedule lessons in advance and tick them off, which suits families following a curriculum. If your learning is interest-led or unpredictable, a planner has little to tick, and a record-keeper that captures moments after the fact fits far better.
- Yes. A Google Sheet or a notes app costs nothing and bends to any shape. A column per focus area, a row per day, and a folder of photos will get you through a review. The cost is your time: you design and maintain the structure yourself, and you build the report by hand at the end. Free works until burnout, when the system you made is the first thing to go.
- Almost none exist. Most apps assume a child who will sit and complete assigned work, which rules them out for many autistic, PDA, or burnt-out children. The thing to avoid is any app that puts demands on the child directly, through streaks, schedules, or prompts. The recording should sit on the parent's side, away from the child entirely.