The Key Skills Framework
Eight key skills, noticed as they happen.
The backbone of E Squared. The same eight skills the curriculum already names. Only here, you spot them in the ordinary run of a day at home, not on a timetable.
01The eight skills
Plain names for things your child already does. You jot down a real moment against the skill it shows, and over time those notes become your report for review.
These are the assessor’s categories, not a curriculum. You do not aim at them. They are how what already happened gets described to someone who needs it described.
Being Creative
Imagining, making, trying things out. The everyday inventiveness that rarely looks like school.
Managing Information & Thinking
Finding things out, sorting what matters, and working a problem through.
Working with Others
Cooperating, sharing, and sorting out a disagreement. Getting along is a skill.
Communicating
Saying what they mean, listening, telling a story, writing it down.
Being Numerate
Numbers in real use: money, measuring, time, and noticing pattern.
Being Literate
Reading, writing, and following or telling a story. Words in daily life.
Staying Well
Looking after body and mind: rest, food, feelings, knowing what helps.
Managing Myself
Getting started, keeping going, making a plan, knowing yourself.
02Where this comes from
We didn’t invent these. The framework is loosely modelled on Ireland’s Junior Cycle, the curriculum for ages 12 to 15, which sets out eight key skills it expects every young person to build. It’s a calm, well-considered list, and it already carries weight with the people who review home education.
Using the same language on purpose: when you show a report built around these eight skills, an assessor recognises the shape of it straight away. You’re not translating your family’s life into school. You’re pointing out where the skills the curriculum names were already there.
The original
Junior Cycle Key Skills poster, from Ireland’s National Council for Curriculum and Assessment. The eight skills, as the curriculum states them.
03What each skill page shows you
Every skill walks the same short loop, so there’s nothing new to learn each time. It’s how E Squared quietly builds your evidence in the background.
A moment happens
Your child builds, argues, cooks, asks a question. You jot a line about it. A sentence is enough.
It's tagged to a skill
E Squared suggests which of the eight key skills the moment shows. You keep it, change it, or add another.
It becomes a report
Months of small moments gather under each skill and become a review-ready report. No scramble the week before.