A clearer, calmer site for parents: new information pages, real articles, and ads kept well away from children

If you visited learnCoreSkills today you may have noticed a few quiet changes at the bottom of every page, and a new section in the blog. Behind them is one decision: the parts of this site that children use should be completely free of advertising, and the parts that parents read should tell you plainly who we are, what we collect, and why. This post explains what changed and what it means for you.

Three new pages, linked from every page. At the bottom of each screen, in English and in French, you will now find Privacy, About and Contact. The privacy page says in plain language what the site does with information, and the answer is mostly "nothing": there are no accounts, and children's practice results stay in your own browser on your own device. It also names the few outside services involved, such as the host that serves the pages, the fonts, the measurement tool and the advertising, and explains what each does. The About page says who runs the site and how the articles are written. The Contact page gives a real address for questions, corrections and requests.

A new Articles section. The blog used to be a diary of what we shipped, which is useful to some readers but not what most parents are looking for. It now has two parts. Project news, where you are reading this, stays as it was. Articles is new, and it is written for parents and teachers: what a skill really means, what to look for, and how to practise it at home with things you already have, such as buttons, coins, a kitchen scale or a muffin tin. The first series covers counting, seeing small numbers at a glance, number bonds, place value, mental strategies, times tables, fractions, the clock, money, measuring, shapes and position, and word problems. Each topic is written separately in English and in French, not translated word for word, because the two languages have different quirks. Every article is drafted with the help of AI tools and then read, checked and edited by a person before it appears, and each one says who reviewed it and when.

Advertising, and where it will never be. To keep the site free we are applying to show a small amount of advertising, and the rules we set ourselves are strict. An ad can appear only beneath an article written for adults, or beneath the lists of skills and activities that parents browse, and only when the page has real reading on it. Never on the home page, never in the parent area, never in the documentation, and above all never inside an activity or on any screen where a child is answering questions. The ads are marked as advertisements, there is at most one per page, and they are of the plain, non-personalised kind that relates to the page rather than to you. In Europe, the United Kingdom and Switzerland you are first asked for your consent, and you can change your mind later from the Privacy choices link at the bottom of the page. If we ever decide advertising is not right for the site, a single switch turns every trace of it off.

Measurement kept away from children too. We use a standard tool to count which adult-facing pages are read, so that we know which articles help. It is switched off on the home page, in the skill and activity lists, and everywhere in practice.

A tidier map of the site for search engines. The site has thousands of pages, one for each skill in each subject, and most of them used to contain little more than a title. We have told search engines to leave those thin pages alone until they have something worth reading, and we are filling them in one subject at a time. This week the first six kindergarten counting skills gained a proper explanation in both languages: what the skill means, things to try at home, and the mistakes children typically make. More will follow.

Behind the scenes. The blog and documentation had stopped appearing on the live site because their publishing step had been failing silently. That has been repaired, and the live site is now checked automatically after every release so that it cannot happen unnoticed again.

If something here looks wrong, or you would like an article on a topic we have not covered, please write to us from the Contact page.