The Difference Between a Curriculum and a Personalised Learning Plan

Most home educators start with a curriculum. The ones who stick with it usually end up with something else entirely. Here's the distinction that changes how you approach everything.

Most home educating parents start with a curriculum. It makes sense - you want something structured, something that’s been designed by professionals, something that tells you what to cover and roughly when.

A significant number of those parents quietly abandon it within a term.

This isn’t a failure of commitment. It’s a structural problem. And understanding the structural problem is what changes how you approach everything that follows.

What a curriculum is

A curriculum is a body of content organised into a sequence. It tells you what to teach, in what order, across a defined period of time. It’s designed around a typical child at a typical developmental stage, covering a typical range of subjects.

For that typical child, it can work reasonably well. The content is appropriate, the sequence makes sense, the pacing is manageable.

For a child with ADHD, autism, PDA, dyslexia, or any combination of additional needs, there are several problems with this model. The working level may be years different from the year group the curriculum targets. The interests assumed by the curriculum may bear no resemblance to what actually engages your child. The demand style - sustained focus, written output, linear progression through content - may directly conflict with how your child’s brain works best.

You can adapt a curriculum to address some of this. But adapting a generic curriculum for a specific child is a significant amount of work, and it’s work that sits with you rather than with the tool you bought to make things easier.

What a learning plan is

A learning plan starts with the child, not the content.

It asks: where is this child working right now? What are their areas of strength? Where are the gaps? How do they learn best? What are they interested in? What does their specific profile of needs mean for how instruction should be structured?

The answers to those questions determine the content, the pace, the format, and the approach. The curriculum - if you use one at all - becomes a tool in service of the plan, rather than the plan itself.

This is how specialist SEND provision has always operated. The Individual Education Plan, the EHCP, the detailed provision map - these are all learning plans. They start with the child, describe what that child needs, and organise everything else around that.

Home education is the one context outside specialist provision where you have enough control to do this properly. The challenge is that most of the resources marketed at home educators are curricula, not learning plans. The planning itself has been left to the parent.

What this means for PDA families specifically

For children with a PDA profile, the curriculum model is almost always the wrong shape. The intrinsic demand structure of a curriculum - you will cover these topics, in this order, by this point - activates the anxiety-driven avoidance that defines PDA.

A learning plan for a PDA child looks different. Autonomy is built in at every point. Content is framed as invitation rather than instruction. The child has genuine choice - not performed choice, but real influence over what they’re doing and when. Progress is measured differently, and celebrated differently.

This is achievable. But it requires starting from the child’s profile, not from a pre-existing content structure.

How to shift from curriculum to plan

The first step is the working level assessment - understanding where your child actually is across the skills that matter, rather than assuming year group equivalence.

The second is an honest account of how your child learns best. Not how you’d like them to learn, not how the curriculum assumes they’ll learn - how they actually function when the conditions are right.

The third is building activities and content around both. This is the point where most parents feel stuck, because it requires more thought than following a curriculum does. It’s also where myHomeEdPlan is intended to help.

myHomeEdPlan generates a learning plan rather than a curriculum - built from your child’s working level, profile, and interests. See the difference at myhomeedplan.com.