You are not behind. Nobody taught you.

Digital skills are not a personal quality. They are something somebody shows you. Most people were never shown.

Around eight million UK adults cannot do all eight of the tasks that make up the basic level. The strongest predictor is not age. It is whether you have formal qualifications: 53% of adults with no qualifications reach that level, against 93% of graduates. That is not eight million personal failings. That is a teaching gap. Ipsos for Lloyds, Essential Digital Skills 2025, fieldwork 5 March to 2 April 2025, n=4,175.

So: free means free

No account. No email address. No sign-up to continue. No paywall, ever, on any lesson. If a lesson ever goes behind a wall, tell me I have broken my own rule.

One lesson, one thing you can do at the end of it

Not a module. Not a pathway. One page, one outcome, one honest time on the front of it, and one real task on your own machine before you close the tab. If a lesson does not end with something you actually did, it has not taught you anything yet.

I tell you when to skip

Every lesson says who should not read it. I would rather you spent twelve minutes on the right page than an hour on mine.

Honest times

I do the lesson myself with a stopwatch and publish the number I get. Not rounded down to look welcoming. Not rounded up to look thorough.

A person's name is on every page

Written by a person means a person did every step described on a real machine, checked every claim, timed it, and is accountable for it. AI helps with the writing and I say so plainly. Exactly what that means, in full.

Every number has a source you can click

Organisation, publication, date, link. If I cannot source it, I cut it. I also publish the numbers I chose not to use, and why — because the ones nobody can trace are the ones everybody repeats.

I am not going to frighten you into learning

69% of UK workers are already worried about what AI does to the economy, and 41% of the public say they are afraid of it. Adding to that is not teaching, it is selling. King's College London Policy Institute, fieldwork by Opinium 16 to 29 April 2026, n=4,508.

Play is allowed

You cannot learn a thing you are frightened of getting wrong. So part of this site has nothing at stake and no right answer. Make something ugly. Ask it something daft. That is not the soft option. It is the fastest way to find out what these tools are actually like. Play.

Print it, copy it, hand it out

Every lesson has a one-page sheet you can download without giving me anything, print at home, and pass to somebody who is not online yet. Use them in your library, your drop-in, your union branch. That is what they are for. The cards.

Organisations pay. People never do

Employers, councils, housing associations and charities pay me to teach their teams. That is what funds the free side. If this has helped you and you want to put something back you can, but you never have to, and nothing you can see changes if you do. How that works.

I will say when I do not know

There is no official UK measure of adults' AI skills. Nobody has good evidence that digital skills training works at scale. I will keep saying so, including when it is inconvenient for me.

What this is not trying to become

A platform. A catalogue. A charity chasing grants. A community with a forum to moderate. A company with staff. The point of this shape is that one person can hold it.

Craig Stanley · North East of England · hello@howtobedigital.com