While the COVID-19 lockdowns caused a surge in home school numbers, it has been growing in popularity for some time, Catherine Lewis reports.
The days of remote learning may be behind us, but those trying times translated into record numbers opting to home educate long-term. Just 5,096 children in New South Wales were registered in 2019. This soared to 12,359 by 2022, found the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA), with a nationwide rise of 80 per cent kicking off the curve in the five years prior to 2017. COVID-19 gave parents a front row seat to what – and how – their children were learning, plus the chance to try risk-free home education, shifting the rise in homeschooling from steady to stratospheric.
Families are forgoing the classroom due to religion, values, a desire for flexibility, or special learning needs such as anxiety or autism, said 25.8 per cent in a NESA survey. Throw in bullying, a mismatch with teachers, or a ‘bright but bored’ child, and homeschooling is shifting the dynamics of education. Rebecca English is a non-mainstream education expert and senior lecturer in the School of Teacher Education and leadership at Queensland University of Technology. Rebecca tells Peninsula Living that the majority of families are doing so ‘not because they are ideologically opposed’ to school, but rather because ‘school is not working’ for their children.
Lions Education’s Zane Ryder and son, Jaxon.
“There are the ‘deliberates,’ who always intended to home school, but most are ‘accidentals,’” Rebecca explains. “They tried school, or a number of schools, before realising that home educating was their only choice.”
Zane Ryder, a Manly-based mother-of-three and co-founder of ‘modern homeschooling’ resource, Lions Education, says that lockdown learning made her realise that ‘homeschooling and education in general could be done better’.
“I never imagined homeschooling my nine-year-old son, Jaxon, she says. “The forced home learning confirmed my thoughts that it was not workable with my job.” However, a conversation with a friend sparked an idea, and, while it wasn’t possible to teach full-time, what was possible was to hire some of the qualified teachers that had lost jobs due to COVID-19 to teach them.
Enter Lions Education, which offers families three hours of online Zoom lessons via qualified educators. “In those hours, my son is getting through more solid learning and making more progress than when he was at school and it leaves time for him, an avid surfer, to do what he loves most,” Zane adds.
Jaxon is one of 353 children registered for homeschooling across the Sydney North area, NESA found.
The highest proportion, 2,874, is in Western Sydney, possibly due to an ‘underinvestment in education’ in the ‘rapidly growing outer western suburbs,’ says Education Minister, Prue Car. Children aged 13 to 14 were most likely to be homeschooled, with that number falling from 1,269 to 60 by the age of 18.
NESA’s Home Schooling Unit offers free registration for families, who must submit an ‘education plan,’ covering six subjects from mathematics to creative arts, along with ongoing goals and progress plans. Approval usually is granted within 90 days. A helpline run by the Home Education Association (HEA) helps to debunk fears that children will fall behind peers. HEA support worker and homeschooling parent, Sally Farrelly, tells Peninsula Living that home education allows ‘each child to work at their own level,’ and enables a ‘relaxed learning environment’.
Far from falling behind, the Board of Studies, Teaching and Educational Standards NSW (BOSTES) found that home educated children scored ‘significantly above’ the overall NSW average in ‘nearly every’ National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) test, carried out in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. While not compulsory for homeschooled students, those that did sit, scored ‘70 marks higher’ than the NSW average across reading, grammar, punctuation and numeracy, while in writing and spelling, scores were ‘not significantly different’ from average.
Throw in Australia’s chronic teacher shortage – with the Department of Education warning that demand for high school teachers will outstrip graduates by over 4,000 by 2025 – and one-on-one, personalised success at home seems unsurprising. “If teachers were better supported, more people would join the profession and less parents would feel disaffected and resort to home education,” agrees Rebecca English.
Question marks remain around socialisation. How can children learn those on-the-asphalt life skills – the losing, sharing, fighting, forgiveness – without Crunch n’ Sip and tip in the playground? Enter weekly home-school meet-ups, workshops and sports clubs and ‘children who are homeschooled are as socially developed as children who attend school,’ found NSW Parliament’s Inquiry into Homeschooling 2014. Mixed-age interactions, away from mainstream impacts such as bullying or peer pressure, help to make children ‘less peer dependent and more independent,’ the report added.
Homeschooled children lack the opportunity for group work, opponents argue.
Lions’ Zane says that her family is part of a ‘large homeschooling community who are all so supportive.’ “We meet weekly and have made lifelong friends who have become like family.”
It is not a lifestyle that appeals to all, with Seaforth-based auditor and father-of-one Jacob, sharing the sentiments of many who ‘breathed a sigh of relief’ when schools reopened post- pandemic. “Expecting our home and ourselves to provide the stimulation and socialisation so crucial to a growing child is not realistic,” he says. Jacob adds that he and his wife, Tiffany, would feel ‘cruel’ depriving their 11-year-old son the chance to ‘become his own person’ outside the remit of their home. “It wouldn’t work for him and it wouldn’t work for us around our jobs.”
It’s the career aspect that is the ‘biggest downside’ to homeschooling, education expert Rebecca English agrees, with one parent – usually the mother – ‘often having to give up their job’.
“There is a time and financial impact. In the short-term, where women may work part-time or casually while home educating, and in the long-term, as it impacts the capacity to save for retirement and contribute to superannuation,” she says.
Homeschooling carries implications far beyond a child’s education and it is a decision that needs to be made with this family-wide impact in mind. Red flags around socialisation may fly for some, but, as Zane Ryder tells us, far from isolating and narrowing down her son’s horizons, homeschooling has ‘given him confidence to succeed academically, to talk and mix with many different people plus the time to do what he loves’.
And what parent could ask for more than that?
By Catherine Lewis