Why Fayferz exists
Fayferz started because of a pattern we kept seeing in homeschooling groups: families who had chosen home education for good reasons, who were clearly capable, and who quietly stopped within the first year.
The reason was almost never academic. It was that the days had no shape, the marking piled up, the record-keeping crept up on them at renewal time, and at some point a Tuesday morning arrived where nobody could face it.
So we built the opposite of a content library. Fayferz tells you what to teach next, marks the practice itself, and generates the paperwork from what actually happened. The aim is a school day short enough to survive a bad week.
What we believe
One-to-one teaching is much faster than school, and pretending otherwise causes harm. A focused thirty-minute maths lesson at home covers what a school lesson covers in an hour. Parents who try to fill six hours burn out, and their children learn that school is something to endure.
Fluency is not the enemy of understanding — it is the prerequisite. A child counting on fingers for 7 + 3 has no working memory left for the problem the 7 + 3 was part of. We drill number bonds without apology, and then spend the rest of the time on reasoning.
Decodable books, not levelled readers. If a book makes a child look at the picture and guess, it is the wrong book. This is one of the few genuinely settled questions in education and we follow the evidence.
Coverage is a vanity metric. Ten thousand activities in no particular order is worse than twelve hundred in the right sequence. We would rather ship fewer courses that finish.
Records should be a by-product, not a project. Attendance, learning plans, work samples and assessment results all exist as side effects of teaching. Assembling them retrospectively is what makes compliance stressful.
Who writes the courses
The curriculum team has classroom and home-education experience in roughly equal measure, which matters more than it sounds. Teachers know sequence and assessment; home educators know that the lesson has to work with a toddler in the room.
- Amara Reid, Head of Curriculum — former primary lead, synthetic phonics specialist, home-educated three children through to secondary.
- Priya Nandakumar, Mathematics Lead — thirteen years teaching primary and lower secondary maths, bar-model trainer.
- Daniel Osei, Academic Director — secondary science and curriculum design, responsible for the Grade 6–8 sequence.
- Lena Whitfield, Family Support Lead — handles registration and records questions across twelve jurisdictions.
Two things we are blunt about
We are not an accredited school. Fayferz is a curriculum and course provider. We do not issue recognised diplomas. Families who need accreditation pair our courses with an umbrella school, a DepEd-recognised provider in the Philippines, or an external examination board such as Cambridge or NIOS. Anyone who tells you a subscription is equivalent to accreditation is selling you something.
We are not affiliated with Oxford. We describe courses as Oxford-aligned because their sequence and teaching approach follow the tradition of Oxford University Press primary materials and the England National Curriculum they are written to. We are not a publisher, a licensee, or endorsed by Oxford University Press or the University of Oxford.
What we are working on next
Grade 9 is the most requested thing we do not have. It is also the hardest, because at that point the right answer stops being "a good sequence" and starts being "a specific examination syllabus". We would rather do it properly than ship something that leaves families stranded in the exam years.