Most parents end up with a learning-app graveyard on the family iPad. One app for letters, another for phonics, a third for times tables, a maths-trainer the school recommended, an 11+ subscription that costs more than Netflix, plus whatever the YouTube algorithm has currently convinced your child they need. None of them talk to each other. Each charges its own subscription. By Year 5 you've spent more than a year of in-person tutoring would have cost, and the apps don't agree on what your child has learned.
There is a calmer way. A single, joined-up stack of apps that covers the actual UK primary journey — early handwriting through KS1, KS2 maths fluency, the 11+ if you're going that route, plus creative play to balance the screen time. This guide is one parent's case for picking a small set of apps that fit together, sticking with them, and letting the rest go.
UK primary school covers seven years — Reception through Year 6 — and the skills children build in those years stack in a fairly predictable order. Letter formation in Reception. Phonics and number bonds in Year 1. Times tables and longer writing in Years 3 and 4. Reasoning, comprehension, and exam technique in Years 5 and 6 if the family is considering grammar school or an independent at 11+.
The apps that help most are the ones aligned to that progression. A maths app that only covers Year 3 is useful for one year. A maths app that runs Reception through Year 6 in one place is useful for seven. The same principle holds for handwriting (the early years are critical, but the curriculum continues), reasoning skills (which only become relevant in Year 4 onwards), and creative work (which is age-flexible by design).
Apps in this guide use a single Apple Account purchase rather than ongoing subscriptions, store all data on the device rather than uploading it to a server, and contain no advertising. This is a deliberate set of constraints — they rule out most of the loud-and-cheerful kids' app market — but the apps that meet them are calmer, last longer, and feel more like a real piece of educational software than a hype machine.
The single most under-rated skill in early primary is correct letter formation. Children who learn to write each letter in the right direction, starting from the right point, can produce neat work later without thinking about it. Children who don't develop bad habits that become very hard to undo around Year 3 when writing volume jumps and speed matters.
This is the foundational layer of the stack. Pen Licence is BFG's handwriting practice app, designed for iPad with Apple Pencil. It guides children through stroke-by-stroke letter formation using the same cursive style taught in most UK primary schools, with immediate visual feedback when a stroke starts in the wrong place or moves in the wrong direction. There's no scoring, no time pressure, no rewards system trying to manipulate the child into longer sessions — just a clear path through the alphabet, then through joined writing, with the child working at their own pace.
The competitive set here is small. Letterland is well-established but uses a character-driven phonics system that not every school follows. Writing Wizard is good for tracing but lighter on the structured progression. Pen Licence sits in between: stricter on form, more flexible on what the child practises next.
For phonics specifically, most UK schools use a synthetic phonics scheme (Read Write Inc, Letters and Sounds, or similar). It's worth using whatever the school uses rather than a competing system; mixing two approaches at home and school is the most common reason early readers stall.
Maths is where most families end up with the longest app graveyard. The UK National Curriculum is densely sequenced — number bonds, place value, addition with regrouping, fractions, decimals, two-step word problems, percentages, ratio — and almost every commercial app picks a slice of it.
The stack-friendly choice is one app that covers the whole curriculum from Reception to Year 6 and gets out of the way. Arithmetix is BFG's primary maths app. It covers thirty-plus topics across the year groups, with practice generated on the device (no server, no ads), and adapts difficulty based on the child's recent accuracy rather than locking them into a fixed track. There's a parent dashboard showing which topics need more work and a small virtual pet the child earns through practice — present enough to motivate, restrained enough not to become the point.
The honest comparison: DoodleMaths covers similar curriculum ground but charges around £6–8 per month per child, ongoing. Atom Learning is more comprehensive but priced for the 11+ market (£30+ per month) and overkill for KS1 fluency work. Komodo Maths is well-regarded for parents who want short daily sessions and don't mind a subscription. White Rose Maths' workbooks are excellent but paper-based. Arithmetix's wedge is the combination of full-curriculum coverage with no monthly fee — a one-time purchase that lasts from Reception to Year 6.
Whichever you choose, the key is to pick one and stick with it. Switching maths apps every year is the same as switching maths schemes every year — the child loses the rhythm of what to expect, and the app loses the data it had on what they find easy.
Not every family is doing the 11+, and the families that are often start later than they should. The exam covers English, verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, and (in some areas) the LAT — a different skill set from what KS2 maths and English alone develop. Verbal reasoning is largely vocabulary and word-logic; non-verbal reasoning is shape rotation, sequence recognition, and spatial work that no other part of the curriculum touches.
The wedge here is starting in Year 4, not Year 5 or 6. There's a wide consensus among tutors that the children who pass comfortably are the ones who started practising verbal reasoning and non-verbal reasoning question types two years before the exam, not six months before.
This is where Cognithix sits in the stack. It's BFG's 11+ practice app, covering all four subject areas — English, verbal reasoning, non-verbal reasoning, and the LAT — with question generation on the device so the child never runs out of practice. Difficulty adapts to accuracy, and the parent dashboard surfaces per-topic mastery. As with Arithmetix, it's a one-time purchase rather than a monthly subscription, which matters when 11+ preparation realistically spans 18–24 months.
For a fair competitive read: Atom Learning is the established market leader and arguably the more polished product overall — but the £40–70 monthly fee adds up to over £1,000 across a two-year prep window, which is a real consideration for many families. Bond 11+ workbooks remain a strong paper-based option, and many tutors still recommend them as the primary practice source. The case for an app like Cognithix is volume and feedback: an adaptive app generates unlimited practice and tells you which question types are weak, faster than a workbook.
If your child wants to learn an instrument and you don't want to commit to lessons immediately, a piano app on the iPad is the cheapest test of interest. Three to four months of self-paced practice tells you whether the interest is real before you start paying for a teacher.
Keystrike is BFG's piano-coaching app, designed to work with a MIDI keyboard or — when one isn't available — with an on-screen keyboard so the child can still progress. It's structured as a graded curriculum (Grade 00 through Grade 8), starting with posture, hand shape, finger numbers, and the keyboard's geography before introducing notation. The pedagogy follows the same broad shape a real piano teacher uses in the first weeks, which means the habits children build are the same habits a teacher would reinforce later.
Simply Piano and Flowkey are the established competitors and both have substantial song libraries — Keystrike trades song-library breadth for a sharper graded curriculum and a one-time purchase price point. Which you prefer depends on whether your child wants to play recognisable pop melodies quickly or build a foundation that maps onto real exam grades.
A learning stack made entirely of structured practice apps is a stack that will burn the child out by Year 4. The counter-weight is open-ended creative play — drawing, storytelling, music-making — without scoring or progression.
BFG's contribution to this layer is Sparks Studio. It runs everything on the device (drawings, stories, and music are all generated and stored locally — nothing is uploaded), has no advertising, and is age-adapted across three modes for ages 4 to 12. The competitive set is wider here — Toca Boca's apps remain the gold standard for unstructured imaginative play, and Procreate Pocket is excellent for older children who are getting serious about drawing — but most of the kid-creative category is subscription-funded and behaviourally optimised. The one-time-purchase, on-device alternative is rare.
The point isn't that you should buy every BFG app. The point is that an education stack is a system, and a system has structure:
A family using the full BFG stack pays a fixed one-time cost per app and never sees a subscription renewal. A family using subscription competitors for the same coverage typically pays £40–100 per month while the children are primary-aged, which compounds to more than a private tutor over the same period. That's not an argument that the BFG apps are better — it's an argument that the long-term economics of the family-app market are worth examining honestly.
One thing that ties the BFG education apps together, and that's worth being explicit about: every one of them stores the child's data on the device. There are no accounts to create, no logins to manage, no cloud sync, no servers holding records of what your child has practised. If you delete the app, the data is gone with it.
This is unusual for a category that has generally moved towards cloud-first, account-based models. The trade-off is real: there's no easy way to share progress across multiple devices, and a lost iPad means starting over. The trade-off is also chosen — children's practice data is one of the more sensitive categories of personal information you can collect, and the cleanest solution to "what if it leaks" is "the data was never uploaded in the first place."
That principle applies whether you're building a stack from BFG apps, from competitors, or from a mix. The question to ask any kids' app, before installing it, is: where does the data go? If the answer is "to our servers", that's not automatically disqualifying, but it's a question worth being able to answer.
If you're starting fresh: buy one app at the layer your child is currently in, and use it for a month before adding anything else. The most common mistake parents make is stacking up four learning apps the same weekend, none of which the child uses for more than a week.
If you already have a graveyard: pick the one app at each layer that the child has actually opened in the last fortnight, and delete the rest. The mental cost of "I should be using all of these" is more expensive than the apps were.
And whichever stack you build — BFG, competitors, or a hybrid — the structure matters more than the brand. Foundation, practice spine, optional branches, creative counter-weight, and a clear answer to where the data lives. That's the system.