Questions parents ask

This is the first question almost every parent asks, and it’s a fair one.

LifeHub is a cooperative, not a child learning alone at a kitchen table. Your child spends their days with other children — but across a range of ages rather than penned into a single year group. Older children help younger ones. Younger ones watch and copy. Disagreements happen and get worked through with an adult nearby rather than a bell interrupting.

Most parents tell us their child ends up talking more comfortably to adults and to children of other ages than they did before.

Yes. India’s Right to Education Act sets obligations on the State to provide schooling; it does not compel parents to send a child to a conventional school, and homeschooling is practised openly across the country.

Children are certified through boards such as NIOS, which is run under the Ministry of Education and designed for exactly this kind of learner. See our academic pathways for detail.

Registration with a board is done by you as the family, not by us. We will help you understand the options.

Children here are not measured against a grade-level timetable, so “behind” is not quite the right frame. Some children race ahead in mathematics and take longer with writing; a year later it reverses.

What we watch for is whether a child is progressing, concentrating, and willing to work at something difficult. Those turn out to matter far more over ten years than whether a particular topic arrived at a particular age.

If your child needs to sit a board examination at a certain point, we will work backwards from that date with you.

Then we tell you, early and plainly, and we work on it together.

Self-directed learning suits many children but not automatically all of them, and a child arriving from a highly structured school often needs months to stop waiting to be told what to do. That period can be uncomfortable to watch.

What we will not do is pretend everything is fine when it isn’t.

Mornings hold the longest uninterrupted work period — this is when the deepest concentration happens, and we protect it carefully. Afternoons lean more towards projects, making, outdoor time and community responsibilities.

The rhythm differs by stage. You can read more on our about page, but the honest answer is that a description on a website will not capture it. Come and watch a morning.

Adults are present throughout the day, and the community is small enough that every child is known personally by every guide — which is itself the most effective safeguard.

We are glad to talk through our safeguarding practices, adult-to-child ratios and how we handle medical situations in detail during your visit. Please ask.

There are clear boundaries, and children are involved in setting many of them. When something goes wrong, the response is a conversation about the effect on other people and on the community — not a punishment designed to shame.

This takes longer than issuing a consequence. It also tends to work for longer.

Screens are a tool here, not a default. Younger children work almost entirely with physical materials — their hands are how they think at that age.

Older learners use technology purposefully: research, making, writing, and specific skills they have chosen to pursue. What we avoid is the screen as a way of filling time.

Usually yes. Because children are not moving in lockstep through a syllabus, there is no single moment in the year when joining becomes disruptive.

The limit is space rather than timing. Get in touch and we will tell you honestly what is available.

Yes, and mixed ages across a family often work particularly well here, since siblings are not separated into different buildings and timetables.

LifeHub is a cooperative, and it works because families participate rather than simply drop off and collect. That might mean sharing a skill, helping with an outing, or taking a turn with something practical.

We will be clear about what is expected before you join, so it is never a surprise afterwards.

Because certification runs through NIOS or Cambridge rather than through us, a child’s academic pathway travels with the family. That is one of the quieter advantages of these routes.

We will help you hand over whatever records are useful.