A trusted education companion for parents
School doesn’t come with a handbook for parents.
InStep helps you understand where your child is in the English education system, what school information actually means, what comes next — and what may be worth asking next.
Trusted guidance, your school’s own context, and your child’s stage — brought together in one place.
Explore the demo uses a fictional family
You can speak fluent English and still feel like everyone else got the handbook.
Book bands. Phonics phases. Standardised scores. Entrance exams. GCSE options. Mock exams. Predicted grades.
The information exists — but it lives across school emails, government guidance, assessment providers, exam boards and school websites.
And parents are often expected to already know which information applies, what it means, and what they should think about next.
The difficult part isn’t always the language. It’s the context.
This is a communication problem, not simply a language problem.
Research on school-family communication shows that what schools intend to communicate is not always what families receive and understand, particularly when information is fragmented or uses professional terminology.
Source: Education Endowment Foundation
More families are navigating an education system they didn’t grow up in.
40.4%
of babies born in England in 2024 had at least one parent born outside the UK.
For many families, raising a child here also means learning an unfamiliar education system alongside them.
Source: Office for National Statistics — Births in England and Wales, 2024
InStep puts the pieces together around your child.
Know where they are
See the stage your child is in now, what’s coming up and what matters later.
Ask what you need to understand
From reading levels to GCSE options, ask InStep in everyday language and get an answer grounded in your child’s context.
Add what your school knows
Add information from your school and InStep connects dates, processes and expectations to the right part of your child’s journey, and suggests questions worth asking.
Because the answer isn’t the same for every child.
A Year 4 curriculum question means something different at an independent school.
A reading level only makes sense if you know which reading scheme the school uses.
A standardised score only makes sense if you know the assessment behind it.
A GCSE deadline belongs to your child’s school — not to a generic national timetable.
That’s why InStep keeps four kinds of context distinct:
- 1National guidance
- 2Your school
- 3Assessment, scheme or qualification providers
- 4Your child’s stage
Then it helps you understand what the available context means for your family. Not every layer is available for every answer.
InStep grows with your family.
Explore our demo family across four different stages of the English education journey — from early reading to post-16 planning.
PRIMARY
Maya · Year 1
Phonics & early reading
PRIMARY
Hannah · Year 4
Learning, assessment & progress
SECONDARY
Theo · Year 9
GCSE preparation & options
POST-16
Leo · Year 12
Post-16 study & what comes next
Different stage. Different questions. The same clear view of what matters now and what comes next.
Clear about what it knows — and what it doesn’t.
InStep uses trusted education information and keeps national guidance separate from school-specific information. If important context is missing, it won’t guess. Instead, it tells you what’s missing and why it matters.
Official guidance · Your school · Providers · Sources you can see
How InStep uses information
Why I built InStep
“The language wasn’t the difficult part. The context was.”
I moved from Romania to the UK and have spent years raising my children within an education system I didn’t grow up in myself.
Even after living here for years and speaking English fluently, there were always new things to decode — reading levels, assessments, entrance exams, GCSE choices and the countless school processes parents somehow seem expected to already understand.
I built InStep around a simple idea:
Parents shouldn’t have to piece the education system together alone.
A few things worth knowing
Understand where they are.Know what comes next.
Explore the InStep demo and see how one familiar companion can support a family from the first years of school through GCSEs, post-16 study and beyond.
Explore the demoBy your side through every stage.