The home education collective where dependants' data stays private
The Henderson household home educates three offspring. When they started looking for a community, they found groups fragmented across Facebook, WhatsApp, and email — with their offspring's routines, locations, and learning discussed on platforms built to harvest data for advertisers. This is what they built instead.
Teaching critical thinking while handing data to Meta
Claire Henderson has been home educating her three offspring — aged 7, 11, and 14 — for six years. She is part of a wider network of home educating households in her area, a loose community that has grown over the years from a handful of households to more than forty.
The community existed across a patchwork of platforms. The main coordination group was on Facebook — which meant that every discussion about dependants' learning, every photo shared from a group field trip, every mention of where they would be and when, was being processed by Meta's advertising algorithms. There was a WhatsApp group for urgent messages, but it had become a wall of noise. There were email threads for curriculum sharing that had become unmanageable.
"I teach my offspring to think carefully about who they give information to," Claire said. "I tell them to ask: what will they do with what I've told them? And then I go and share their entire daily routine on Facebook. The hypocrisy was becoming untenable."
There was also a practical problem that had nothing to do with privacy. The community had no real memory. When a new household joined, there was no way for them to find the curriculum resources that had been shared two years ago, or the notes from the legal workshop on home education rights, or the list of local activities that households had recommended. Everything was scattered, searched for repeatedly, and often lost.
An encrypted, ad-free home for their community
Claire spent three months building out the ETC community before inviting the wider network. She started with the households she knew best — the ones who would be most willing to move, and most rigorous about the setup being right. Each household was vouched in personally. Each set up their offspring's accounts under guardianship.
The dependants' accounts were a particular focus. Dependants join ETC under guardianship, with age-appropriate restrictions that both mum and dad can configure. Young offspring have no messaging with anyone outside their household unless a mum or dad approves each connection. Older offspring have progressively more access. The 14-year-old could use the community groups and take courses; the 7-year-old's account was essentially a learning profile visible only to the household and their approved tutors.
At 18, accounts convert automatically to full individual membership — with the mum or dad's vouch counting as the young adult's first community vouch. "My eldest will be 18 in four years," Claire said. "When that happens, she'll already be a known and trusted member of this community. That feels exactly right."
The curriculum became the backbone
The Education tools became the backbone of what they built. Claire created the first three courses herself: an introduction to the community's approach to self-directed learning, a guide to local resources, and a compendium of field trip recommendations with notes from previous visits. Other households contributed their own — a mum who was a former teacher created a maths curriculum for ages 8–12; a dad who was a musician created a music theory course for beginners.
Courses could be taken for free within the community using LETS credits — mums and dads who contributed curriculum materials earned credits they could spend on other households' courses. A household strong in science and weak in languages could swap directly with a household whose strengths ran the other way. "We've processed hundreds of pounds of curriculum exchanges in LETS credits," Claire said. "Not a penny went to a platform."
The marketplace filled in the gaps. Households listed curriculum materials, educational resources, and tutoring services. The marketplace's integration with community currencies meant that a household with tight finances could participate fully — offering their own skills and time in exchange for others'.
The community's shared memory
The problem of institutional memory — the knowledge that kept getting lost — was solved by the combination of courses, guides, and the community forum. Resources shared in the forum were pinned and categorised. Courses were permanent and searchable. A household joining the community today can find everything that has been contributed over the past two years, organised and accessible.
Eight households now run a shared curriculum through the platform, meeting weekly in a combination of face-to-face sessions (organised through the events tools) and online sessions (through the encrypted group video calls). The scheduling tools handle the rota; the projects tools track curriculum progress across the group's offspring.
We run three home ed groups across 40+ households. Having a private space without ads targeting our offspring makes a real difference. But the thing that surprised me most was how much richer the community became when we had somewhere to build it properly.— Claire Henderson, home educator
What changed — concretely
What this collective runs on
Messaging, groups, courses & a shared library
Encrypted messaging, groups, an education and courses layer, events, marketplace, forum and storage — all composed on one membership. The tools that let mums and dads create and sell courses unlock at the Trusted level, earned through vouches and positive karma. Modular pricing starts from £4/month.
Other communities using ETC
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