How Sustenance works.

You do. The parent is the recorder. The child never touches the log.

A sceptical observer once put it to me like this: “If the child won’t engage with worksheets, how can they engage with a logging app?” It’s a fair question, and it rests on a wrong assumption. The child isn’t the one logging. You are.

There is nothing for the child to fill in, no prompt for them to answer, no streak for them to keep. You write down what you already noticed — the conversation in the car, the thing they built, the question they wouldn’t let go of. The app is for you.

Parent observation has always been how home education is assessed. This isn’t a workaround — it’s the normal way.

It’s how school works too. A school report is the teacher’s record of what a student did — not something the student wrote about themselves. The adult who was there describes the learning. At home, that adult is you.

A home education assessor wants to see that learning is happening. They don’t need it to look like school, and they don’t need the child to perform on demand. They need a credible, specific account from the person who watches it every day.

In my own AEARS reviews — Tusla’s Alternative Education Assessment and Registration Service — that is exactly what was wanted: a specific account of what actually happened, in our own words.

A moment. A few lines of plain text about something real that happened — a trip, a problem solved, a deep dive into a topic nobody asked them to study. Add a photo if you have one. Set the date it happened.

It’s built for how you actually live: short, on your phone, in the moment or later that evening. No timetable to fill in. No box that has to be ticked every day.

Because you capture moments as they happen, there’s no scramble to retrofit a year of evidence in the week before a review.

Each moment is tagged to one of the eight Junior Cycle Key Skills — being literate, being numerate, managing myself, staying well, managing information and thinking, being creative, working with others, communicating.

These are the organising structure for the report. They let you show breadth across a review period without forcing your family into a school subject timetable. The tagging is deliberately broad — eight skills, not a curriculum.

When a review approaches, Sustenance gathers your logged moments into review-ready output, grouped by Key Skill, with correct dates. You read it, adjust anything, and hand it over.

The work was done across the year, a moment at a time. The report is just those moments, organised. Entries can be edited or removed, the history is kept, and the dates stay accurate.

Sustenance also has an optional space for the child: a low-demand environment for life skills and self-chosen topics, with a companion creature. No streaks, no scores, no demand-loaded prompts.

It works entirely on its own, and so does the log. A family can use only the parent log and never open the child side. The log does not depend on the child doing anything.

If the child does use it, what they do can flow into your log as a draft you review before it counts — never automatically, never as surveillance. Only structured signals cross over; conversations and behaviour never do.