Can I Start Homeschooling in the Middle of the School Year? | 44

Brett Campbell:
Hello! Welcome to another episode of Future Learners. I am your host, Brett Campbell, CEO and co-founder of Euka Future Learning. I’m joined by my amazing co-host today, our founder and Head of Education, Ellen Brown. How are you today, Ellen?

Ellen Brown:
Very well. Thanks, Brett.

Brett Campbell:
Very, very good to hear. So today we are going to be tackling a topic that is very timely. Again, depending on when you’re listening to this, I’m sure there’s going to be relevance to it. But we are currently in the timeline of where term two is sort of underway in the traditional schooling sense, and term three is nearing. And we want to, I guess, bust a handful of myths that a lot of families believe or assume, and probably better use of language. They assume that there’s a lot of obstacles that you need to jump through and to be able to start homeschooling in mid-year. So I want to talk about that. And it’s a very, very important topic. And it’s also a very serious topic as well, because the ability or inability to make the decision now can become a very regretful decision for many families, as we’ll sort of talk about as well. So let’s talk about Ellen. We’re talking here specifically to any of those family members who are out there. They’re considering homeschooling. They’ll have their own unique circumstances that’s occurring right now. Maybe it’s because they want to jump in an aeroplane and go travel around the world, or you want to go travel around Australia for the rest of the year, or maybe a life situation has occurred and it sort of now got you double thinking and double guessing. Or maybe there’s a situation as it relates to your learner themselves and, and maybe they’re just not doing the greatest or they’re, they’re sort of gearing towards that school refusal, resisting. And they might not be doing so well or fill in the blanks for a number of reasons, which we’ll talk about. So let’s look at this. Ellen, I want to talk because I quite often hear this. Parents, when they’re in the schooling system, they’re like, oh, we all look to move or we’ll look to change our life. We’ll look to make this major life decision when our kids finish school. Right. And they might have five, six, seven years of school left. It’s like, it’s amazing the impact that our children in the schooling system can possibly have as it relates to us looking at and designing our lives and so forth. So one thing that we’re very happy about is that that is not the actual case. You don’t have to do that. You don’t have to put all your eggs in the specific basket. So let’s talk through Ellen, the sort of key thinking steps that families need to go through. And they may be considering right now, as we’re a handful of weeks out from term three, middle of the year, quite a big moment in time.

Ellen Brown:
Yeah, well, one of the first things that I would say is if you think about a child before they even go to school, you don’t put learning into blocks. Yeah, sure, they might learn to walk, but you don’t say once they’ve learned to walk, then I’ll do such and such. Because quite often you think. Well, what about when they’re running, or helping, or skipping? Learning is something that just moves along in a natural trajectory. However, when it gets into the school system, we say, oh yes, but there’s years and there’s terms and we start to say, oh, well, I’ll wait till the end of this term or the end of this year. And I think it’s really important that parents understand that whether it’s the end of the year, beginning of the year, middle of the term, that learning is still progressing. So making a decision that you need to make a change is just as relevant in the middle of the year, in the middle of a term, in the middle of a week, as it is thinking that somehow there’s a magical thing to wait for January.

Brett Campbell:
It’s that mindset that we all have as humans, right? You see it probably at its greatest impact when the concept of New Year’s resolutions comes around. So I’ll start this then. We’ve all heard it. I mean, I put my hand up here, I’ve done this a million times myself. I’ll start on Monday. I’ll just wait till Monday. But as we know, that’s often a coping mechanism for what I’m trying to do right now is to actually avoid the conversation that I really need to have, and it’s hard because society is set up in these blocks and chunks and times. And that’s why we have a second, a minute, a day, etc., because it allows us to sort of work within these confined spaces. But when it relates to our children, this is something, again, that we’re massive advocates on. And again, one of the primary reasons that Euka exists today is to be able to be the supporting backbone of those families who can’t wait anymore right there in a situation. And you said something that I think is important is you don’t even have to wait till the end of a term like we’ve got families joining us every single day of the year, throughout the year for whatever specific, unique case that they have themselves. And what we want to share in this episode is really, you don’t have to wait, right. You don’t have to wait to make a decision. And there’s a couple of other parts that we’ll talk about as well, and that is trying to remove the enormity of the decision. Right. We know that it’s a huge decision for a lot of families to go against what you would call, probably, the traditional system of how we believe education should be delivered, just because that was our exposure to it, our grandparents exposure, etc., etc. Right? So totally understand that there is a huge level of importance around this decision. But in order to make big decisions, what I often do is I try and actually look at the decision for what it is and I chunk around it meaning. So if I’m making a decision that today, I think it’s the best decision for my child and the family right now to remove my child from school, we’ll use the example of bullying, right? One in three of our families come to us for the specific use case, which saddens my heart to the nth degree. And you don’t really have a choice. You are put in a situation where it’s suck it up and figure it out and you’ll be okay. We’ll just wait till the end of the term and we’ll figure it out for you. Like, every day counts. Every hour counts when you’re in that specific situation? So what I often try to do is and I encourage anyone, whether it’s in making a decision around homeschooling or not, to look at the decision for what it is right now. It’s like moving my child or taking my child out of this arena, this environment right now, the best decision, most cases in bullying. Absolutely. It definitely is. And then look at the decision for what it is not bigger than what it is because a lot of people’s minds wander off and go, oh my God, if I take my kid out of school, they’re never going to be in school ever again. And I have to be their teacher for the rest of their life. Oh my gosh, I can’t do it. And then the bigger than what it is stops you from making the decision that’s most important right now. Right? So that’s very important to not try and amplify the decision’s meaning. And I’ll share some stats here because I think it’s always nice for parents and families to know that, look you’re not the only one going through this specific situation, right? 30% of our families actually come to us with the intent of going back to school, right? So they see homeschooling as a, let’s call it a part time, whether that’s part time for an entire term or whether it’s part time for a month or two months or nine months, whatever it needs to be to help you and your family make the decision that is most important now.

Ellen Brown:
Yeah, I’d love to jump in there and say, I think that’s one of the things I’m most proud about with the Euka program, because we are covering the same content that the kids in school are covering, that gives you, as a parent that confidence that if you pull them out for a while and they continue on with their learning, it gives us space to be able to deal with whatever challenge it was that caused them to have to come out of school. So if they are getting some mental health support or there’s some physical challenge or a learning challenge that you’re starting to work on, so that you’re not building on top of that, that your child is missing out on what’s happening in school. Because what we sometimes see is if they’ve exited school because of a bullying or a mental health kind of issue, then, you sort of think, oh, just take them away from that for a while. But then what happens is that on top of that is building this thing that somehow I’m behind now, I’m behind in my learning, and I want to go to university. I’m behind because I want to be learning the same things as my peers. So knowing that you’re moving out and into a program that is the same as what’s happening in school, but a lot more flexible is really a great help for parents and for students too.

Brett Campbell:
Yeah, one of the things we often quite find is it’s the opposite of I’ll get behind because you now remove your child from a specific environment. They will feel safer. They’ll feel like they can be more themselves in that specific environment. And again, this is not for every use case. So please bear with us when we’re talking about this. We’ve got tens of thousands of families that each have their very own unique path. But what we often find is that when you put in an environment, a different learning environment, a lot of children actually get further ahead. They complete more work than what they would do in that schooling environment anyway. Because if you’re in this position and we can use bullying as an example, if you’re being bullied in the schooling environment, you’re not going to be operating at your even average capacity, let alone above average capacity. You’re going to most likely be falling behind in your work anyway, right? Just simply due to you don’t care about your schoolwork when you’re being bullied. And there’s these situations happening. All you can focus on is that right? And it’s the you are a byproduct of your environment. So if you can remove that, even for a short period of time, in many cases can help uplift your view on things. It’s called the gap. Sometimes you just need it. And a parenting tip here. Something that I try and practice every single day is when you get to a level of possible frustration, instead of saying what you would like to say, take a gap, take a minute, go walk around the house, come back, and you’re probably most likely not going to want to say that. Now. That’s the concept of the gap, for our students and our children, to be able to remove them from that environment. For some people, just removing them from even for a week out of an environment can help reset to help them get composure. Because when you’re in a state of flux and with mental health and anxiety, etc. It just snowballs. It gets worse and worse and worse. And, I talk about the concept of don’t make it bigger than it is. You make it so big that you get paralysed to a point where you don’t even know how to think anymore. Right? And that’s the worst place for any of us to be, adults included. Like, think about the last time you stressed about something. The more you thought about it, did it help you or did it stress you out even more? Right. It’s just the amplification of the thing, right? So this is a really big use case. Again, for many families, it’s one of the most Google search terms in mid-year going can I start homeschooling now? Right. Because I get it. The belief in our mind is, oh, you started a year. You have to complete the year. I started a term, I have to complete the term. It’s like, no, the way in which Euka is designed, you could come today and you could start in term two, week four, lesson seven if you wanted to. Right. It’s got to be what fits you. Again, a lot of families, like I say, come to us. They’ll feel like they want to stay in parallel with the schooling timeline. And that’s totally fine as well. And they come in, they start at term two, week three, because that’s where they are currently. And then all of a sudden they get that term two completed in a few weeks ahead of time. And I’m going to go back and do term two, week one or term one, etc. So the flexibility there is amazing, because one thing I’d also consider is just because your child is being removed from the environment today in term two, week three, let’s say probably a high likelihood, the last six weeks, eight weeks, ten weeks, they probably haven’t been as effective anyway. So a good starting place. You could consider starting back there and just working through the lessons as well. So Ellen, let’s look at a handful of other reasons and so forth and things to consider in this sort of timing for families.

Ellen Brown:
Sure. So I think we’ll jump into senior. And the reason I say that is because this is where we are seeing as a company, a lot of senior students who are suffering from burnout. I like to try to help parents understand the analogy of a computer with a lot of pages open and how all of a sudden it’s just not working at its capacity anymore. And that’s what we’re seeing with students, senior students that are coming to us in grade 11, but also in grade 12, because that pressure that’s being put on about you need an ATAR, you need to have your, QCE or HSC, VCE, without these things your future is not bright. And so we’re seeing a lot of these senior students coming in and saying, is it even possible to start now? Of course it isn’t. In traditional school, you can’t walk in halfway through year 12 and say, I’m ready to get started, but you can homeschool and that fear around what happens with an ATAR. I know we’ve done a podcast on that, and I know we’ve got a lot of information on the website about the fact that we have partnerships with over 90 different university colleges, not just in Australia, but even internationally. If you want to study them, that’s really important to know that coming into homeschooling as a senior student is possible mid-year, even in grade 12, you can come in grade 12. We are happy to acknowledge what you’ve already done prior to coming in so that your academic transcript, if you’re needing an academic transcript, you’re wanting to go that way, that you won’t be disadvantaged. And that we can say, by all means can start in year 12, you can start in year 11, and you’ll still finish off with those pathways intact. That’s really important.

Brett Campbell:
Yeah. Another thing we often see is in those later years, in the senior years 11 and 12 is students might join us mid-year. And then all of a sudden we hear that they’ve now got a part time job. They’re working 15 hours a week. It’s a couple of days a week down at the panel beaters, or fill in the blank. And it actually helps you in many cases, especially when you get to those later years. And yeah, there’s no point trying to put a square peg into a round hole, right? Like example, I knew when I was in my final year of high school, I actually got asked to leave about two months, and not because I was a bad kid. I just talked too much. Go figure. And now I’m sitting here on a podcast. Can’t shut me up, Ellen. But for me, I was like, well, it’s clear and evident that whether I finish grade 12 this year, but it’s probably not going to change much. I love woodworking. It was the obvious choice for me to go. I went and got an apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker. Right? That was sort of my first hurrah out of school. And that’s also okay. Like, I didn’t have to finish school because of this concept of, oh, if you start it, you have to finish it type thing. That’s a very different mentality. I know, obviously I was in school many moons ago, but things have changed in this day and age. But it’s like you’re going to know at the end of that sort of senior timeline what your child has more of an interest in, and there’s so many opportunities for our teenagers to be able to advance into different things and not have to feel the burden of still finishing, to get an ATAR. Because who uses those numbers? Who, who even uses that now and hiring anyway? I can tell you, with over 100 people in our team, I’ve never looked at anyone’s ATAR or high school certificate or even how far you went through school. But, that aside, I think it’s a good sort of reframe for families and parents going, if your child is more interested in something else, there’s a possibility where, hey, look, you can still get them to continue on their learning because, look, there are still valuable things you could be learning. And subject selection is very different in high school as well. And they still might be trying to figure out what their interests are and what path they might want to go on. So that’s totally cool. But whilst doing that and possibly taking a part time role or even a full time role, one of our students was featured on channel nine or channel seven, I think maybe both of them. And he was working in his dad’s business earning $30,000 as a, as a 16 year old, so he got to advance and get sort of what we’d call an unfair head start on his career. Right? Because he fell in love with the business and being an entrepreneur and, all of those things, those are, I guess you’d say, the nice byproducts of knowing that if your child is no longer, destined or wants to finish high school, there are other options and in many cases, better options for them to be able to set them up for success. Because that’s why we do all of this, right? We want to set our children up for success after school, but it’s not about whether we need them to finish school. So yeah, let’s, Ellen, talk to the points of okay, we’ve got a family right now for whatever the reason they’re considering homeschooling, they’re like, oh, what do I do? Let’s talk about registration and what we need to do like that from a formality perspective as well. And let’s step them through the steps of this.

Ellen Brown:
Yeah. You probably saw my face get all excited there. I got excited because if you are going to register to homeschool, the middle of the year is the absolute best time. You are not waiting as long to have your registration approved. You get everything done really quickly and it’s a nice time of year instead of, I’ve got to say January, February, poor people in the Department of Education and Home Education units and are doing approvals. They are in overtime. So this is a great time of year to get the time you need for advice and to be able to move through that process quite quickly. So obviously, if you’re coming out of school, you need to let the principal know that that’s what you’re planning to do. Just let me mention you don’t have to ask permission. That’s a big one. Parents think they’ve got to get the principal to say yes. You don’t. You as a parent have the absolute authority to make that decision. And you can let the principal know that that’s what you’re planning to do, and then you can put your application in. So I’m talking generally here because of course we’ve got students and parents listening from across Australia. But generally speaking what happens is you’ll let the principal know you’ll get online, you’ll get your application to homeschool, you’ll get onto Euka and get your education plan organised. And so you’ll put your plan together with your application and you’ll send that in. And then it won’t take so long because it’s the middle of the year. And they’ll get back to you and let you know that you have your approval. You’ll let the school know. So their timing on it will depend on your situation. If you’ve got a situation that’s very important that you immediately withdraw from the school system, you might need a medical certificate, a psychologist kind of certificate to say it isn’t in your best interest for your child to be back in school while waiting for your approval. Most principals are absolutely fantastic. Once you give them your educational plan, they can see that you’re covering the curriculum. So even though you’re still enrolled with them, technically they can see that you are getting on with your education. And until that approval comes through, they’re comfortable with just a check in on that. So that’s basically the way it works.

Brett Campbell:
Yeah. Let me just touch on a couple of points there because I know this often comes up. And again, it acts as a hesitation almost for many families, as if you’re in a situation where it’s in your child’s best interest and safety, you can remove them immediately. Right now, you don’t have to wait for a psychologist review or a note to give to your principal, etc. Obviously, you have to go through those steps – let your principal know. They have a duty of care, so they’ll want to know where the student is. But you can remove your child whilst working out all the other pieces. One thing and a shameless plug for Euka obviously is again having helped tens of thousands of families. We know the journey. We know the obstacles that you face and the roadblocks that you can come up against. So yeah, first step. The easiest step is head over to our Euka website and then you can look to start to enrol. And through that process we offer a service called Registration Service which effectively just fill out a short questionnaire. Then the documentation is given to you. And then you submit that that’s effectively how easy it is. Other alternatives, as you actually go to the department website and, unfortunately, you’re going to have to navigate through a lot of rigmarole and create your own working plan and what you’re going to submit and so on and so forth. So that is one beauty of looking at Euka and selecting Euka. What I would also say is, I’m going to put it out here because I’m just so pumped about it. Ellen, as we have just recently created A Complete Guide to Confident Homeschooling course. And by the time this episode goes out, I’m hoping that that course is already out and available. And if it isn’t, make sure you bookmark to go back and check it out. But you’re going to be able to find that on our website as well. And you can go to the resources tab and it should be setting up there. Click it, enrol in the program. We cover nine modules and we talk about a lot of these things in a lot more detail. Like how do you set your day up. How do you set yourself up for success? These are all important things, no matter when you’re starting, whether you start at the start of the year or August 26th. Right. So anything else, Ellen, that we need to touch on that sort of any words of advice that you could have for any families now considering the switch into term three?

Ellen Brown:
Yes, I would just say if your child was needing some individualised learning planning in school, the chances are they may still need that when they’re homeschooling. Euka does offer that where we can adjust the level for maths and English and things like that, so that you can still have that support that you might need. Sometimes you don’t know until you get started. Our team is able to help you and adjust those things for you as you go. So, don’t let that be a roadblock. We can work that one out as we go.

Brett Campbell:
Yeah, yeah. If we work off the premise that everything is figurative, then we are all good to go. So with that said, hopefully this has been a value to you too. If you are a Euka family, thank you for joining us and being a part of our community and allowing us to assist in the development of your child and also the success of your family, because that’s really where this leads to. So, Ellen, let’s, we’ll say our goodbyes and we’ll see you all in the next episode.