Education re-designed with heart
🌿 A Little About Me
Designing something different , not just from theory, but from lived experience.
Hi, I’m Kelly.
I’m a former mainstream teacher, a registered alternative provision mentor and designer of alternative education and a mum navigating the unpredictable, emotional, deeply personal world of home education — side by side with my teen.
The Create Approach wasn’t born from a business plan. It was born from a very real moment of reckoning: My teen wasn’t going back to school and they didn’t want me to teach them either.
Not worksheets. Not lectures. Not hovering or correcting or trying to manage every moment. What they needed was space, and what I needed was a whole new way of thinking about education. One that honoured their needs and helped me at the same time.
So I started building.
But this story really began decades ago…
I trained as a business teacher and spent years in mainstream education. Over time I found myself drawn again and again to the learners who were misunderstood and were not having their needs met by the system.
Creative. Sensitive. Overwhelmed. Brilliant in ways that didn’t show up as marks on a spreadsheet.
That calling eventually led me to leave the classroom and step into the world of alternative education, working across a range of non-traditional learning environments and mentoring teens who needed education to feel safer, slower and more human.
I became a registered alternative provision mentor and supported an alternative provision designing emotionally supportive learning experiences that worked with a young person’s rhythm not against it.
I didn’t know then that I was preparing for something much closer to home.
When it became personal, everything changed
Suddenly, I wasn’t the mentor. I was the mum and no amount of training prepared me for what it feels like when your own child needs something you’re not sure how to give.
They didn’t want my structure. They didn’t want to be taught.
But I couldn’t just do nothing.
So I began designing gentle, flexible, creative study tools, the kind I would’ve, and have sort of over the years, built for another family… only now, I was building them for mine.
Not school at home. Not pressure dressed up as productivity.
Just quiet scaffolding. Soft structure. Support without smothering.
That’s what The Create Approach is
It’s a growing ecosystem of resources and real talk for families navigating education outside the system, especially those supporting neurodivergent teens or young people with SEMH needs.
It’s designed for:
- Teens who want to learn, but not be taught at
- Parents trying to hold space without hovering
- Families who are done trying to replicate school — and ready to create something different
This isn’t about fixing what’s broken.
It’s about honouring what’s real.
And offering another way. One that blends learning with healing, structure with softness and education with emotional safety.
We’re still figuring it out.
Still building it as we go.
But if you're here too, maybe that’s all the sign you need that you’re not alone.
A human approach to home education, built as we go.
The Create Approach is the space I’m building, with my teens, in real time as we walk our own alternative education journey. We’re in the middle of this path personally, but in truth, the roots go back over 20 years.
I started as a business teacher in mainstream education. Over time, I was drawn more and more to young people who needed something different. A more flexible, creative, emotionally aware way to learn. That pull led me to leave traditional teaching and step into the world of alternative education.
Since then, I’ve worked across a variety of alternative provision systems and now support families as a registered alternative provision social, emotional, mental health and learning mentor. I design learning pathways that are structured, but also kind, creative and aligned with how teens grow and heal, and now I’m doing the same for my own children.
The Create Approach brings together everything I’ve learned, professionally and personally, into one growing ecosystem of support for families educating differently.
It’s not a polished programme. It’s not a one-size-fits-all curriculum. It’s a co-created journey.
If you’re figuring it out as you go too, welcome.
This space was made for you and us.
