How to build a home education portfolio

A portfolio is a curated selection of work that shows what your child has done and how they have progressed. The important word is curated. A portfolio is not everything.

How much to keep

Most people keep far too much, then cannot find anything and stop maintaining it. A few pieces per subject per term is plenty. Choose deliberately.

• One piece that shows a typical standard.
• One that shows the edge of what they can do.
• Occasionally, one that shows a struggle and how it was worked through. This demonstrates learning better than a clean success does.

Capturing work that leaves no paper

A great deal of home education produces nothing to file: conversations, building, cooking, experiments, performance, care of animals, repairs.

1. Photograph it, and write one line of context on the same day. A photo with no note is meaningless in six months.
2. Record short voice or video clips for verbal work, particularly for children who do not write.
3. Write a two-line description of the activity and what it involved.
4. Keep tickets, programmes and trip leaflets. They are dated evidence and take no effort.

Organising it

By date within subject is the most useful arrangement, because progression is what you want to be able to show. A pile organised by subject alone hides the fact that things got better.

Digital is easier to search and impossible to lose in a house move, but back it up in two places. Physical work can be photographed and then, mostly, recycled. You do not need to keep every original.

How Different Drums helps here

Work done in the app is dated and stored automatically, which covers a slice of the portfolio without effort. Worksheets, tutor sessions and curriculum progress are all timestamped.

For everything that happens away from a screen, which is most of home education, the learning log takes a line and a photo, so the offline work sits alongside the online work in one place rather than in a separate box.