Travel Schooling: Everything you need to know | 33

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About this episode

Brett and Ellen delve into the concept of travel schooling, where education is seamlessly integrated with travel experiences. They explore the numerous benefits, practical strategies, and unique opportunities that travel schooling offers. This episode provides essential insights for families considering this flexible approach to education, covering how to incorporate travel into the curriculum, the importance of planning, and available support for families on this educational journey.

🎧 Tune into this episode on Apple Podcasts here. 

Key Points:

Definition of Travel Schooling:

  • Combining homeschooling with travelling, using the journey as an educational resource.

Benefits of Travel Schooling:

  • Learning about history, geography, and culture through direct experiences at travel destinations.

Practical Tips for Travel Schooling:

  • Prepare essential supplies and digital resources for times without internet access.

Planning and Preparation:

  • Regularly plan your week to balance travel and education effectively.

Compliance and Registration:

  • Understand registration requirements and compliance issues for homeschooling while travelling.

Social Aspects:

  • Connect with other travel schooling families to build a supportive network

Transcript

Brett (00:00)
Hello and welcome to another episode of Future Learners. I am your host, Brett Campbell, chairman and CEO of Euka Future Learning and I’m joined by my beautiful founder and head of education, Ellen Brown. How are you, Ellen?

Ellen (00:13)
Very well, thanks Brett.

Brett (00:15)
Excellent to hear. So we’re to be talking about a topic today that is certainly a very interesting one for your segment, a cohort of our families. But it’s one that I know when I’m speaking to lots of other families who don’t necessarily fit the specific cohort, they’re very attracted by the potentiality of it. And what I just realized then was I open pretty much all of these episodes with a bit of a riddle, don’t I?

Um, cause someone’s sitting there listening to this is going to go, what is he even talking about? It’ll all make sense when I say today, Ellen, we’re going to talk about travel schooling. Right. And what does that mean? What does that look like? Um, because circa six to 10 % of our families actually come to us with the desire and the want and or need, uh, to be able to educate their children whilst they are also traveling around, whether that’s nationally, whether that’s internationally, et cetera, et cetera. We’re going to talk about all things.

travel schooling. So I’m going to hand straight to you and say, let’s give, let’s start with the foundation of what is travel schooling. What’s, what’s the bit of the high, high level overview of that? What does that

Ellen (01:25)
Well, look, basically it means that you are a homeschooler, but that your home may have wheels or may have wings or it may have a rudder, but basically it means that you’ll be doing your homeschooling some other place than a fixed address.

Brett (01:41)
And what are some of the outside, obvious benefits that, you get to might be on a boat or you might be on a plane or you might be driving around the country in a motor home or at caravan, wherever it is for you. What are, what are some of the, benefits that people may not actually, initially derive at through your curve ball? What do you think some

Ellen (02:02)
let me at least start with the ones that are just the obvious ones. Like obviously people know that, you know, when you travel schooling, you’re learning about different places, the history of places, the geography of places. So one of the things people may not realize though, is that they can actually incorporate the places that they’re visiting, the history that they’re doing.

a lot of what they’re doing on the go, they’ll be able to incorporate into their education itself. And so that means that say, for example, you have a grade five student and the topic that’s in the history program is something like Egypt, think, no, I’m traveling. The topic is like one of the very smallest parts of the part of history that the child’s learning about. There’s skills to learn, there’s things about research and…

you know, first person and third person type research documents and things like that. So there’s lots of things that they’re learning. So when you look at a curriculum, the actual topic like ancient Egypt is only one of about 12 outcomes that you’ll be that you’ll be meeting during your history, you know, on the go or in a term.

And so just knowing then that you could hit all 11 without ever needing to worry about that Egypt part. And it may be that you just do a small glance over the Egypt part of the history for that term and really focus on where you’re going. So parents may not realize that you have to do one or the other. You can tick all the boxes.

Brett (03:34)
Yeah, I actually don’t think that’s an obvious one because you, you know, a lot of, a lot of parents that I speak to and a lot of parents who come through to us, obviously they have a perceived perception of what they believe the curriculum has to be. it’s sort of the set in stone, rigid, situation, whereas, know, you could be traveling around Australia and, you could incorporate the state or the town or the city in which you’re in to be able to lean into that. So that’s, that’s actually a, I would say a hidden benefit or an added benefit.

Because most families don’t embark on travel to go, let’s travel with the intent of teaching you about all of these places. Although there are some, you know, I spoke on a few podcasts ago, friend of mine, yeah, they went to Europe and yeah, they were homeschooling. were looking at Rome. going through all the different things and yeah, he took a photo at the Coliseum and yeah, he’s doing history lesson is, is outside the steps of the Coliseum today. You know,

So there are those abilities, which is, think, a beautiful added bonus. I wouldn’t even it’s a bonus. It’s basically, it’s a built -in framework and really the flexibility that is provided. So I think that’s definitely an extra that a lot of families don’t know about because you generally don’t like the, the, the lure of homeschooling is that you can air quotes, you can school anywhere you want to, which is basically take your schoolwork with you.

But in this case is you’ve got the opportunity to immerse and merge your schoolwork in with your current environment, is a great thing. So what other benefits are there? What do reckon?

Ellen (05:13)
Well, obviously, well, look, there’s the relationship ones. There’s also the opportunity of having kids doing peer learning. So what you’ll find is if you’ve got more than one child and they’re all reading different books, but you’re in such a confined space, it means that the kids are actually having exposure to different grade levels and supporting each other in their learning. So some families might decide

read one novel if the kids are close together in grade level and say let’s read one novel but then let’s separate what we’re doing as far as the activities that go with that. But you know things like you know having the novel on in the car, listening to the novel as a family for each kid, that’s a really good thing because all of a sudden instead of you know the student doing their work and you know privately or independently it’s kind of fun to be part of that as well as you know it’s surprising how many kids books I enjoy.

Brett (06:04)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, geez, I’ll you what, right now I’m, I’m in the middle of, you know, the, the three year old TV shows and, and so forth. yeah. So an audio book would be brilliant. but no, that’s, that’s actually a really good one as well. And I think it’s that collaborative learning, right. And, and you, said the word at the start of it, and then you went into the next part, you said relationships. So not only that is, and look, this, this can go either way, obviously, like all of these can, you know,

the ability to build stronger relationships whilst learning and educating. You know, I mean, you’d be surprised how many parents put their hand up and go, my gosh, I’ve learned something now like, yeah, cause you’re actually involved in the learning of your child as well where you send them to school, you got no idea in many cases what your child’s actually even learning for the day, assuming they tell you what they actually learned and it was accurate or not. But that’s a really good one. Have we got any more before we move on to some next stages of travel schooling?

Ellen (07:03)
look, I’ve probably got heaps of them. Another one that I think is really important to know is that you have that flexibility when you’re traveling to make decisions about, I guess, planning ahead and saying, you know, on these particular days, we’re just going to see the world. On this day, we’re going to stop and have a day that we’re going to focus on our education or that we’re going to have a couple of days a week where we’re going to do it each morning. So working at a timetable that suits you as a family and really make it embracing that whole

education and life just intermingled together is a really good opportunity when you’re traveling.

Brett (07:39)
Yeah. I think that sort of leads into the next topic of, know, how do we plan and prepare for it? Right. It’s like everything. you need to make sure you prepare properly and look, we’ve done an entire episode on, you know, the, the entire, how would you plan your entire homeschooling year down through to the terms down through to the months, to the weeks, to the days, to the hour, to effectively the, the minute. So we’ve done that. So make sure you check out those episodes, but cause planning is planning as a, what would you say?

It’s utilized over all aspects, whether we’re planning to homeschool whilst traveling, or we’re planning to go on a trip somewhere just for the sake of going on a trip. You still need to have a plan around that. And this comes back to how do you plan and especially as it relates to, you know, finding the balance of getting enough of this main reason why you’re traveling in the first place, you know, whether it’s just to be living in a different area or whether it is to be traveling around the country.

what are some outside of the, you know, plan ahead? What, what are the other tips can we share as it relates to preparing and getting ready to plan for this upcoming endeavor that you’re about to embark

Ellen (08:53)
Yes, look, these days things are a little bit easier. The last thing you want to do is to have to cart around with your 500 books and art supplies of every kind and things like that. So it’s a little bit easier now with things like with you could being on a student portal, which means that, you know, planning ahead and saying, well, we know we’re to be in the nullable and there is going to be no internet in that particular time. So I might print off some lessons for that time. But then other times saying to yourself,

You know, you don’t need every art supply, making sure that you have some good quality basics, know, colored pencils, textures, pens.

paints, just some basics and then at being very adaptable. That’s one of the fun things about traveling. So you know, if you get to an activity that says build a volcano, you may not decide to build a volcano because you’re here in this in a caravan or something. But you can say, okay, well, we’ll watch a video of it or we’ll draw illustrations or a diagram of it. You know, be creative with the kids. You know, we had some kids who were traveling on the nullable.

and they had to do an activity like that. They were out in the sand and they built one out there with water and made this, and looked fantastic, just like a real volcano. So, you know, being adaptable will be fun and letting kids come up with ways of being adaptable. So when we talk about being, thinking about planning, resources is a big one. So if you can download audio books, that saves you a novel, you know, if you can have a nice sturdy box full of

your actual art supplies and say they’re going to be used by everyone. That’s another one. And thinking ahead about where you won’t have internet reception and printing off activity sheets for that particular time.

Brett (10:36)
Yeah. And, and as it goes with all planning is I would at the very least be, cause again, sometimes when you’re traveling, if you’re going for a long period of time, you certainly want to have a lot more, I would say rigidity in your, in your structure per se. Um, if you’re, if you’re traveling for a few weeks, several weeks or a couple of months or whatever it might be, or even like a 90 days, um,

you can have a little bit more flexibility within that. at the very least, I’d be planning ahead your week, the week ahead at the very least. It’s like, okay, what days are we gonna learn on? What hours are we planning on? Well, if we map this, and I would encourage sitting down with your children as well and planning the trip out itself, because you sit down on a Google map, know, okay, this is where we are, this is where we’re heading to, this is what we’re doing. we can stop here four hours in, we can do this, we can do that. And all of a sudden again,

This is the beauty of education in itself is we’re always learning, right? You don’t have to be following a, you know, a Yuka program per se or a, or a textbook or something to be, you know, learning your, just by incorporating yourself in everyday activities, all of a sudden, now your child has just gone through a lesson on planning a trip with timelines and deadlines and accountability. And at this stage, we’re going to do this. it’s so again, yeah.

You’re ticking a lot of boxes as one. I’d certainly recommend at least plan a week ahead. And especially the day of, like, or night before, if you, if you like to leave things the last minute, but I’ll tell you what, you’ll probably have less gray hair and stress if you plan a little bit ahead. I think that’s really, really important. I want to ask Alan, cause this is, this is a question that quite often gets brought up is understanding

know, compliance and so forth, like, as it relates to, you know, traveling and, learning and so forth and, and how that is seen, you know, by the departments and, and I know obviously every state has different considerations around everything, but talk to that element for a

Ellen (12:43)
All right, so that’s the tricky one. And I would always say to parents, one good source of information will be other parents on this. So for example, there’s a Facebook group traveling Australia with families, that kind of thing, where you can reach out to other parents and talk about what they have done as far as compliance. And the reason I say that is because

Where there’s a will, there’s a way for everything. I don’t believe there’s any state that wants to sit there and go, no, you’re not allowed to travel with your family. But what has happened is that some states have not yet got to the point where they’ve got the documentation in place or the box to tick that says that you’re actually going to be traveling. So it’s not that there’s a mean ogre sitting there going, no, everyone must stay in their own house. It’s just that progressiveness. Like our society’s moved to a point where doing the big

is becomes a rite of passage for families. know, there’s so many people doing the big lap these days. And it’s new for for a department that hasn’t had that as part of their process before. So if you’re in a state like Queensland, where traveling is has always been considered quite reasonable, and then that’s that’s something that you can. But just remember, you can add that to your information for registration, or you might decide not to. And either way is okay.

You know, I know you’re smiling there, but that’s the way I would frame it and say in some states, like New South Wales, for example, there isn’t a box to tick for traveling. So it puts you into a really tricky basket. So some people might decide to register and then decide to go on their big lap after they have registered and they make that decision. And there’s no one you need to inform about that necessarily.

It’s a roundabout way of saying where there’s a will, there’s a way. If you’re unsure, know, chat with other parents, you will meet parents from every state. And you know, really, there should be no there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be traveling. The big problem will be for states where say for example, in New South Wales, they have an authorized person and AP come to visit after you’ve registered plan ahead, because that person can come and visit.

they can or it might be a zoom visit that is often the case too they can come and visit you can get your registration organized and then you won’t see that person then for another 12 months. So work it out yourself is the best way but we have had parents that and lots of parents I think well of course it’s reasonable I take my child on a trip and they go and they’ll register in a state where that’s actually not something where there’s a boxer tick and they’ll get denied their registration because

put in there, why are you homeschooling? we’re going to go and travel. So just remember, you don’t have to share everything about what you’re doing. You might decide not, you might get registered and then decide to go on a trip and so be it. just know how, know how the registration process works. You know, if there’s going to be an AP visit,

Brett (15:42)
Yes, so to interpret exactly what Alan just said.

Ellen (15:49)
Make sure you’re there for that and make sure that there’s somewhere there to pick up mail. But these days, everything’s done on email anyway. So you don’t necessarily need a post box where your mail is going to go to. You’re not going to miss anything. Everything’s emailed. So does that get me out of the tricky situation?

Brett (16:05)
Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, look, I mean, this is the thing of being involved in, you know, it’s a shifting tide, right? Like it’s for the government, it’s a shock enough that families are leaving in droves from a schooling situation to work at home, right? Which is why it’s called home schooling. It’s not called travel schooling.

Travel schooling in itself is well, I we just coined that term ourselves. So you heard it here first, but the reality is, is that there are multi different ways of how we can reach the same result. But to Alan’s point is, if you are unsure, of the process and how, how to go about it, you know, you can obviously, you know, speak to any of our enrollment specialists to help initiate, yeah, have a conversation with you about that, but also

Yeah, there’s lots of other families. There’s several thousand families traveling around doing this. So that is certainly a probability for you. So Ellen, what else do we need to know about travel schooling?

Ellen (17:23)
One thing that just, I guess, comes on from what we were just saying is, never like to hear when families say, we wanted to travel, but we’ve been told no. And so it makes me feel really upset for them also when they’re in that situation. my suggestion in that situation is perhaps,

re -register, like do your application again and perhaps leave out some of your plans or make your plans after you’ve registered if you have that problem. Where there’s a will there’s a way. Don’t take no for an answer. know, make sure that you prioritize the plan that you’ve got for your family.

There will be a way and it isn’t just people being nasty. Like you said, the department is a slow moving machine and there will eventually be a box to tick to say you travel schooling. Look these days, who’s to say a house hasn’t got wheels? Like what does a house, what is a home for homeschooling anyway? Lots of people live in caravans and so there are all those kinds of options. What else is there to know about homeschooling?

I think one of the things when we often get a lot of families that are coming out of mainstream school to do a year to do that lap around Australia and to go back into mainstream school. So that that’s a situation where you want to make sure that if that is your plan, I mean, you might get addicted to homeschooling, I wouldn’t be surprised because it’s such a fantastic way of having your family operate. But if you are planning to go back into school, you want to make sure that you’ve covered the curriculum so that when they go back into school,

they’re not feeling like they’re behind because it’s so hard to catch up if you’re far behind in things. So you don’t want your kids to be in that situation. Now that doesn’t mean that five days a week, nine to three, you have to do schooling to cover the curriculum. We already know that and we talked a little bit about how you can incorporate things like ancient Egypt into your travels and the history program.

Brett (18:59)
Yeah. Yep.

Ellen (19:19)
Lots of people decide to make a scrapbook for history and a scrapbook for geography, that kind of thing, so that kids can put in pictures and photos and things that they’ve done along the way or even brochures and things of places they’ve visited. That will be your history or geography document that you can show. But when you’ve got to cover the curriculum, just take an hour or two to flick through parts of the curriculum that you may not be covering, like the ancient Egypt example.

so that your child still got that exposure to the information without having to have spent just that whole term on that topic. So you can certainly cover the whole curriculum without having to do it intensively. You can certainly be very flexible and know that your child can walk back into school and feel really confident about where they’re

Brett (20:11)
And that, that is the, the main point of this entire conversation as well as, is travel schooling is you still, and ideally must complete the, you know, the actual education, the lessons themselves, tick the boxes because this isn’t about just take a holiday and not educate your child, obviously. and.

That is when we’re talking about the previous point around traveling and the potentials, know, a couple of hurdles that you may or may not need to jump over. At the end of the day, the ultimate outcome is educating our children and setting them up for whether or not they’re going to return to school, if that be the case, or if they just fall in love with homeschooling and absolutely refuse to go back, which is highly probable. But you said something there that is we want to prep them. if they did go back to school,

they had at least been in alignment with the curriculum. The other benefit and another advantage that we haven’t talked about, I think, which is amazing is they could also get ahead of the curriculum as well, right? They don’t necessarily have to just work at the rate of what the schooling system is, because once you start to uncover that it’s not a nine to three, you’re not incorporating all these different subject changes and, you know,

interval and lunch and all of these extra, you know, time to get ready for school, go to school, all of those, you know, three, four hours a day. That’s pretty much just wasted up in all these other time spent initiatives. When you are in an environment and you’ve set your schedule, you can get so much more done in such a small fraction of the time as well. So that’s always an opportunity there as well. And we have a lot of students who, you know, once you get stuck into something, they just want to keep going and going through and then they want to, and this is a side note. Yes, you

If your child does finish the grade earlier, you can move into the next grade, which is again, such an amazing opportunity. So that sort of again, set your child up for even greater success. So, Ellen, it’s a great little topic. know we’ve got a lot of listeners who’ll be going, okay, maybe I might look and dig around into this. That could be a good idea. And whether it’s a three month, six month, nine month, even something that I would love

And again, it’s, you’re not talking about you have to travel the world here or you’re traveling the entire country. You know, it might just be traveling for a week or two going, you know what? We’re going to go on our, let’s call it travel school camp. And part of that is we’re going to create this experience for our entire family. And you’re going to be very intentional about it. and yes, let’s say you’re learning about volcanoes. You travel to a volcano and you fully immerse yourself

that environment and in the learning experience. So there’s so many amazing flexibility options that many of our families have and that you can have as you are looking to potentially prepare into that travel schooling realm. Ellen, what are some final thoughts before we wrap this one up? It’s a nice and short one today, but nice and to the point.

Ellen(23:25)
Look, one of the things that I loved that you said, sorry Brett, one of the things that I really loved that you said was about

Sometimes parents will think, my child’s already struggling at school. So what’s going to happen if I pull them out and I go on a holiday? Well, we saw that in COVID where people said, what? I had a kid that was really struggling in maths. And then we had this one -on -one time and all of a sudden they’re doing really well. We went back to school and the teacher’s surprised. So don’t let that be saying that holds you back. In actual fact, that intensive time together will be really beneficial for the education. And the other thing that I thought I’ll just throw out there that’s a little bit interesting,

We’re starting to see Yuka families meeting Yuka families out on the road in caravans and caravan parks post on the Yuka Facebook group. Have a Yuka crawl, you know where you go from Yuka Yuka family to Yuka family and get in touch with some of those people that you’ve been seeing posting on Facebook and develop those friendships. It’s really wonderful for the kids to meet people from all around Australia that are doing exactly the same as what they are doing.

Brett (24:11)
a

Yeah, absolutely. With that being said, Alan, thank you very much. if you’ve gotten value out of this and you’re a traveling family, we’d love to hear your traveling story. Make sure that you do jump into our Facebook community and share your traveling story with us as well. and if you’re considering traveling, I mean, considering looking at, an alternate way of schooling, go and check out Yuka. We’ll, point you in the right direction and who knows this could be the next best.

gap year that you take for you and your family as you travel around the globe and learning. So thank you so much. Appreciate you tuning into this and we will see you on the next

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Brett Campbell, CEO Euka Future Learning

Brett Campbell is a leader in education, serving as the CEO of Euka, an innovative company building the future of education. He’s a successful entrepreneur and author with a passion for lifelong learning. Beyond his professional achievements, Brett is a devoted family man and the host of the Future Learners Podcast, where he shares his ideas about education’s potential to empower people and create a brighter future.

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Ellen Brown, Founder Euka Future Learning

Ellen Brown is the founder and driving force behind Euka’s educational philosophy. With over 25 years of teaching experience, she designed Euka’s curriculum for grades 1-12, emphasizing individualized and practical learning. Her expertise is recognized by major media outlets, and she is frequently sought after for her insights on the future of education.