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About this Episode

Brett and Ellen explore the real motivations behind why families choose homeschooling. They dive into the evolving perceptions and diverse reasons that drive families to embrace this educational path, debunking old stereotypes and highlighting the flexibility and benefits that homeschooling offers today.

🎧 Tune into this episode on Apple Podcasts here. 

Key Points:

Evolving Perceptions of Homeschooling:

• Homeschooling is no longer just for religious or culturally motivated families; it has become a mainstream choice for a variety of reasons.

Flexibility for Traveling Families:

• Many families choose homeschooling to accommodate travel, providing children with a rich, experiential education on the road.

Support for Talented or Gifted Students:

• Homeschooling allows gifted or talented students to advance at their own pace, tailoring their education to their specific strengths.

Addressing Special Needs:

• Homeschooling offers individualised learning plans that better support students with special needs or learning challenges.

Escape from Bullying:

• A significant number of families turn to homeschooling to remove their children from harmful environments where bullying is prevalent.

Lifestyle and Philosophical Choices:

• For some, homeschooling is a proactive choice to align education with family values, health, and well-being.

🎧 Tune into this episode on Apple Podcasts here. 

transcript

Brett (00:01)
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 amazing host, as always, our founder and our head of education, Ellen Brown. How are you today, Ellen?

Ellen (00:14)
Very well, thanks, Brett.

Brett (00:16)
Excellent. What would make you extremely well? Would you say extremely is better than very well?

Ellen (00:23)
yeah, I guess so. sound more well.

Brett (00:27)
All right, I’m throwing your curveball out of the gate. So anyway, thank you very much, Alan, for jumping in today to have this conversation. This is a conversation I’ve been wanting to have for a little while. And funnily enough, interestingly, you were just on Saturday, a couple of days ago, you were on the Today Show, having a conversation about this specific topic. So it’s quite interesting how it all aligns. So maybe you want to…

Ellen (00:29)
Yeah

Brett (00:56)
Start us off by sharing what are we going to be talking about today?

Ellen (01:00)
We are going to be talking about who homeschools, why do they homeschool and I’m really unpacking that.

Brett (01:06)
Yeah. And that’s a very, it was an interesting foot for me per se. When I first ever met you a number of years ago and we sat down and we looked at it we go, okay, let’s build the future of education together here. You, you had already been in this realm of homeschooling for several years prior. And I came into it with a specific viewpoint on what I thought was homeschooling. and then also what I thought.

the type of families who were homeschooled. And my first ever introduction to homeschooling, homeschooling family was when I was living back in New Zealand and I used to live say about 500 meters away from my work. So I’d be able to walk home from for lunch and walk back to work, et cetera. And when I was walking home from lunch, I seen a family live down the road from me they had like six kids and they were all outside playing on the lawn. And I’m just like, why aren’t they at school?

And I ended up having to talk to my mom. I’m like, why aren’t they at school? Like what’s going on? She goes, they’re homeschooled. And they were a very religious family. And they were choosing it because of the, I guess, the philosophy education, what was being taught in the school. And it was very deep seeded from a religious belief. And I carried on from that, again, naive as I was of, well, it must be only religious people that homeschool, or the other element to that was,

bad kids who got kicked out of school and didn’t have a place to go. They were the only students who homeschooled. And it’s quite interesting now we sit here and I’ve got a whole heap of data here that we’ll share on this episode. It’s very, very different now. It looks extremely different as that, you know, what the perception, what I believed it to be versus now what it has transformed itself into. So before we start getting into some of the data and the cohorts and the

the actual types of families that homeschool. What can you share about from, let’s call it the olden years, many moons ago, how homeschool originated and what type of families was it originally for from your perspective? Because I know you got into it from a slightly different angle as well.

Ellen (03:17)
Sure.

Yes, yes, in the olden days, when I first, when I first found out about homeschooling, mine was it was a sort of a similar story. I met a couple that had some teenage girls. And those girls were homeschooled. And I was so shocked and impressed. had teenagers or a bit older and then some little ones. And when I met these young women, really, they were so articulate, they were so

easy to speak to and they had their head screwed on they knew what they were doing they were just really lovely and and I ended up finding out that they were homeschooling and so I went with them to a homeschooling day like a picnic day because I was interested in it with my young ones coming along and and met so many families there and I suppose it was the teenagers that impressed me the most because I know you know there’s teenagers there’s a whole heap of different teenagers but when you meet some that are happy to look you in the eye and

you know, they’ve got that experience about the world and they’re not in their own little bubble of, you know, what did so and so say about so and so, you know, none of that was was part of their lives. And so it was very impressive. But certainly back in the day, it was very different to how it was today. So back in the day, you know, even what you were expecting to teach your kids was different how the government or the department related to you and what you were sharing and

what you had to show all those things have changed a lot over the years. But I think the thing that hasn’t changed is the community, just that the warmth of the community. think when you’re going to do something that’s a bit different to what everybody else is doing, sometimes you do find that the community is very supportive and certainly homeschooling is known to have a very supportive community that

have things going all the time. even back then we used to go to sports days on Fridays and they put together a play, a drama where they went and they practiced a couple of days a week. So just knowing that that’s the thing that hasn’t changed after all these years is a really good one.

Brett (05:26)
Yeah, it’s that similarity and commonality, right? It’s when you have likeness and likeness based off interests, but also morals and values, I think is a real sticky level of community. So what I’ll do is I’ll start by sharing. we, every time a student comes to us, we obviously ask the question is, you know, what is your main reason for homeschooling? Now, a lot of families can have multiple reasons, of course.

But from a primary reason, these are the statistics that we have shared about several thousands of students here that, or families that have actually participated in answering the question. Obviously there’s a handful of families who choose not to select their reason why, which is absolutely fine as well. But I’ll go through and I’ll share a handful of these and then we’ll dig into a couple of them, especially probably the main primary ones as well.

I’ll start with when I thought homeschooling existed, well, when I first got it, guess introduced to it was it was based under religious and cultural beliefs. That was my understanding of it. But today as it stands, only 1 .26 % of the UCAS student cohort use homeschooling for that specific belief now. So it’s the other end of the spectrum, which is quite interesting and quite an interesting finding as well from my perspective.

we have a traveling family, traveling families are starting to increase quite considerably. Families that come to us and they might want to travel for a few months. They might want to travel for a few weeks. They might want to travel for a whole year or they might just want to travel until they no longer want to travel. whether it’s nationally, internationally, you name it. that cohort of students and families is picking up quite considerably. Circus 6 % of families are utilizing homeschooling.

for that specific need. We have a set of families who require a very flexible schedule for their child who may be in sports or dancing or athletics, you name it, or extracurricular music, passion, so to speak, something along those lines. We’ve got a number of our students who are actually professional athletes. We’ve got some of our students training for the Winter Olympics and X Games and you name it. We’ve got some very talented

children there and that sits at circa 5%. So that’s quite a growing audience as well. we have, and I’ll just share that the, the cohorts that are lowest and then we’ll get into the larger ones where we can have a bigger conversation around as well. we have families who have selected just lifestyle choices right now. That’s just out of, know, for their health, for their family, for their wellbeing, et cetera. And again, this could be a compilation of, you know,

sporting, traveling, lots of different things, but this is their primary reason is for their lifestyle choice. And that sits at 6 % as well, which is quite interesting. And then we move into the larger cohorts and our top four special needs or individualized learning. So we will talk about that, which sits at 12 and a half percent. then have philosophy of education, which is a massive one that’s starting to

We’re noticing a big increase in that especially. Again, families who are looking for a better approach to schooling. I definitely want to touch on that one as well. I know you’ve got some important things to share around that. Then we have schools not working for academic reasons, which is 22%. And our largest cohort as it sits right now over several thousands of families who have participated is schools not working due to social reasons, bullying, et cetera.

And that’s 24%, circa 24%. And that in itself as well over the last few years has absolutely risen. And unfortunately it keeps rising. And we’ve talked in past episodes about, you know, the rise of mental health. And we look at all the data that’s out from 2010 to 2020, which was sort of the latest cohort of, you know, 510 % increase in anxiety and young boys from age nine to 14. And we’ve got suicide rates up, depression rates up, hospitalization rates up like,

unbelievably high as it relates to our children. And it’s, very, very concerning. And you can see there circa one out of four children still, you know, put into homeschooling or take up homeschooling due to that sort of mental health, the bullying aspect to it, which is obviously a super sad thing to see. so as you can see, there are a number of different reasons as to why families are attracted to, and

utilize homeschooling as solution for their family. So, Ellen, there’s obviously a lot of different cohorts there. Where did you want to start off? What cohort do you want to speak about first? Because I know it’d be nice to sort of unpack some of these and give some more perspective around.

Ellen (10:37)
well.

Yeah, why don’t we start with that top one that you were just talking about with the bullying aspect. I mean, obviously, these days, we all know it, you don’t just have a mean person at school and then go home and that’s the end of it. You know, they can, that continues when you get home because you’ve got a phone and social media and even if you get off your phone, the idea that everybody else is still talking about you and

So that is definitely a big one and we see a lot of kids come through UCA. I always want to be able to shed light on the positive side of that. So what we do see is that kids that have come out of that kind of situation might take a little while. What’s happened is with their education, when you’re emotionally traumatized about something, you’re not in any kind of capable state to learn some.

So you might be sitting in the classroom and you may have been sitting there for six months but you may not have learned a thing in six months because while you’re sitting there all that turmoil is going on in your head and you’re completely elsewhere. And so not only is there that bullying and that might be the reason that they say I just don’t want to be there anymore but behind that is also the fact that they’re getting behind in their education and that

provides another sense of stress because everybody understands something. If you’ve had days off, you haven’t been there, you didn’t see it, something’s due and you didn’t even know. All those things just compound. I would want to say that once you’re out of that system and all of a sudden you’re out of the limelight of the bullying part, being able to catch up again, not just in your education, which is very possible, even if you have to go back

a little bit further for maths and then catch up or get anything you want to done. You can start from where you are so that the one thing that we want to make sure is that if possible, a student doesn’t say, I was in year nine and I was in term three, but now because of this, I’ve got to go back to term one because I had a really tough year. You might start at term three and do a bit of revision to catch up so that you don’t have that added feeling of being behind. But the other thing that we’ve seen happen is that once the family joins,

Brett (12:47)
Hmm.

Ellen (12:51)
other communities or they’re getting into sport or hobbies and things like that. The friendships that they’re making are friendships that are built on real connection with others, not because we’re the same age or not because we’re at the same school or not because nobody’s talking to you either so we’ll be friends. They’re starting to make friends that are really authentic and based on similar interests and people that they’re choosing to spend time with and so

you know, bullying and being a victim of bullying or having a really difficult time at school, it doesn’t have to be the end. It actually can be a really fantastic beginning. And we’ve seen that over and over where, where students have come to us and they’re behind and they’re and they’ve got anxiety and all these things. And that they might need some help with mental health expert in some cases. But otherwise, once they get their education back up, and they make those new friendships and new connections,

we’ve seen them thrive and go on to university and do things they didn’t even think they were possible of doing. So there is a really positive outcome for those students.

Brett (13:59)
Yeah. And, and it’s such a large cohort as well. And it also is such a large cohort of the ability to turn it around as you’re talking about, because you are a byproduct of your environment. And yeah, I even remember myself at school was whilst I would say I was brought up with a pretty strong moral compass of having manners and being kind to others and treat others how you would want to be treated essentially. Right. Which is, which is one of the best.

saying you could try and grab onto. And whilst I lived through that, felt at times when there were certain cohorts of students at school that I’d, I’d naturally be grip, like I’d, I’d get pulled into or I’d pull myself into it. And I knew that I didn’t want to be there. And, and I was finding myself acting in ways that wasn’t me. And I was doing it to try and be cool with the other kids. And yeah, I’ve spoken about this on the podcast before. was like smoking, right?

when I was at school, smoking was the, you’re a cook. you got, if you could wag class, like leave, you know, not turn up the class and you’re smoking behind the pool sheds or you get like, smoking was disgusting. My mother used to smoke when I was a look, when I was younger and I’d, I’d steal some of this, I’d steal a cigarette and I was like, my God, this is so disgusting. It was like, yeah, I’d never wanted to smoke ever again, but you’re a byproduct of your environment. It’s not until you can pull yourself out of it. And sometimes for a lot of children, they can’t pull themselves out. They don’t know.

They don’t know how to pull themselves out and they are in there for the ride. Right. I personally, you know, I’ll say I’m lucky enough, but somewhere along the line, I had to take sort of control of my own destiny. And I was like, okay, I’m pulling myself out of this. Like, I just don’t want to be around these types of kids. I need to find other friends. But again, lots of children cannot pull themselves out of groups. mean, adults can’t pull themselves out of groups.

at times. So it’s that ability to be able to go, well, if I’m going down this road of self -destruction potentially, or I’m going down this road that I just know I don’t want to be heading down, what can I do? And you know, up until before homeschooling was really now mainstream, lots of parents would be like, I’m going to have to pull you out of that school and I have to put you in this school. And that in itself is you’re pulling a child out of an environment of 30, 40 kids in a class, and you’re putting them into another environment with 30 to 40 kids in a class.

Now think of it as not, they’re not 30 to 40 kids. You’ve got 30 to 40 different personalities of human beings who are all governed by their own set of morals and values and how they’ve been brought up. And it’s very, very hard for a kid to try and really, you know, fit in and find their place, so to speak. Right. You end up having to, you end up making concessions because you’re like, okay, well, I don’t really like that about that person, but I’ll do that. That’s why you see so much bickering and, and yes.

especially young and young females, right? It’s like the five of them, they’re all best friends. then three of them get together and then they’re shitting on the other two friends is like, what’s this even where why is why are we even talking about this? But it’s because you make concessions when you’re in your groups, but the ability to be able to remove someone from their environment, and then to be able to work and help to build their confidence back, because that’s, that’s essentially what is what is a requirement. And we see this as well, where, you know, families do come out of the mainstream schooling.

And for, for, you know, let’s talk about it from a bullying perspective. They can then re -enter the environment, but only when they are capable and confident to be able to do that. Right. and we talk about how do you create confidence is confidence is simply created by having the courage to take the first step. Once you take the courage of understanding, you create that capability. And when you create the capability, you end up getting more confidence again. So it’s really an opportunity for parents. You know, you are.

You do have children who are being bullied and not just physically either. Cause again, back in my day, it’d just be a fist fight and that would be it. There really wasn’t much mental warfare. Now it is all mental warfare, most of it. And that’s far more destructive. So your ability as a parent to one, be able to recognize that as well. And you’ll see that in your child. Your child just won’t change overnight. It’ll slowly, slowly morph into this different child. And you’ll be sitting there going, my child is completely different.

they used to act different. They used to have a smile on their face when they’re doing X, Y, Z. And now that’s, now you have to, you know, you can see it. So it’s an opportunity for parents to be very aware of that and be checking in on our children. Cause one out of four children who come to homeschooling is as an example. Now that doesn’t mean it’s only one out of four children get bullied either. It’s like there’ll be children who are still at school who are getting bullied. They’re just putting up with them. They can take it or they they’re able to, to, handle that, so to speak. So

It’s unbelievably prevalent and it’s, it’s such a, and again, I was talking about stats earlier. I’ve got a few here that I just want to share again, just to provide perspective as a parent, you know, as a parent. So I’m going to share some stats here. Again, none of this will probably surprise you, but it will surprise you because you’d be like, my goodness. Like it’s not a surprise that you know that it’s there. And, and this is the hard part as a parent, because we’re so busy. You’ve got so much on you’re trying to, trying to raise children, which is again, I believe the hardest job on the planet.

It’s the hardest job on the planet. You don’t have a rule book and the rule book sometimes that you are given is a rule book for someone else’s family and it’s not your family. And you’re trying to figure this out as you’re going on. Right. and then to compound that with, my God, I can’t even really handle my own emotional baggage right now, let alone trying to help my child through it. But it’s, it’s maybe not a surprise, but we just need to be. And again, I talk about this at Nausium because yeah, ever, ever since becoming a parent, it’s just,

Yeah, our children are our most important things that we need to be focusing on, I believe. So some stats here. Public hospital discharges for intentional self -harm from females 10 to 14, 242 .6 % increase. That’s from 2010 to 2019. We’ve got overnight psychiatric emergency department visits. We have females 82 % aged 12 to 24.

anxiety diagnosis of students, teenagers 15 to 24 is 260 % increase. We’ve got depression in teens in America, 170 % increase in boys, 150 % increase in girls. mean, the sad part is you don’t need to look too far to find out where and how this has sort of originated.

You just need to look at the rise of social media in 2008, nine, 10, et cetera. And this thing’s just taken off. And the reality of it is, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Right. So we need to really try and stop and pay attention to that. But Alan, let’s, I went on my little ramp box there.

Ellen (21:05)
Yeah, I have something else I have something else, Brett, that I wanted to say about that. I what I do hear sometimes from parents is they’ll say something like, if I if I remove my child from that, and we go into homeschooling, then they won’t have grit and determination or backbone, you know, and the concern is that you’re then raising a child that when they come up against something that’s really difficult that they just exit that rather than working through. And I think that that’s really, I just don’t think that shows a real

depth of knowledge of the toxic situation that the child is in. By the time you find out about it, they’ve probably been working through this for a long time. And the options at school for working through things are really limited. You know, it’s a it is a hard job being a teacher. It’s a very hard job, you know, running a running a school and there’s only a limited number of things you can do. And as soon as certainly as soon as a teenager gets a school teacher involved or the principal involved,

that doesn’t fix the bullying, it just spreads it, you know, to that person’s friends who are angry at that kid because they’ve dogged on that person, you know. And so I think it’s more about understanding if you were in a workplace that was really toxic and you had, you just felt like your whole, everybody around you was just on you with everything and didn’t like you and would you stay? No. Would it mean that you’re not capable of handling hard things in your life? No, it’d actually be

able to say about yourself, when something isn’t right for me, I’m allowed to say this is not right for me. And I think that can be an empowering thing. So I guess, you know, there’s no reason why just because you’ve decided that the school playground isn’t the place for you and you’re going to do into homeschooling doesn’t mean they’re not going to be working part time or working through hard things or having friendships where they have disagreements, all those things still happen. So don’t think that they’re that

your child somehow is going to lose that ability to be able to withstand tricky things because life is tricky everywhere that they are.

Brett (23:04)
Yeah. Yeah. You’ll have a lot of opportunities to handle adversity. That is for sure. every day that, every, every day that ends and, what is it? What’s the, what’s the saying there?

Ellen (23:09)
Yes. Yes.

think it’s every day that ends in Y, is it?

Brett (23:20)
Why? That’ll do. That’s us. So, but which is basically every day. Some days are not so bad than others, but let’s change tack and let’s talk about, and this is another really big one, the 22 % cohort of schools not working for academic reasons. So let’s unpack it a little bit. It’s my new language.

Ellen (23:27)
Yeah.

Yes. And look, that that can be, you know, that can be a child that is gifted, you know, people sometimes go academic reasons, it must be a child that’s struggling in their learning. But often it’s the other extreme as well, where kids are gifted, or they’re talented. So there’s a different there. So gifted is a student that is just way ahead of the curve in all areas, whereas a talented child be one that has

Brett (23:58)
Hmm.

Ellen (24:08)
one or two areas that they’re really particularly, you know, ahead in. So that’s it. So gifted or talented, sometimes those kids can find that the classroom is a very frustrating space. Sometimes you find they’re actually the kids that cause the most disruption because they’re bored, you know, and it’s a really tricky thing because no kid can put their hand up and say, well, look, I finished 20 seconds later. So what are they going to do, you know, and

And again, it’s hard for a school to be able to facilitate, okay, well, that child can go two classes up. It’s also embarrassing and it’s also socially difficult to do that. So we do have a lot of gifted students that find homeschooling works wonderfully because they can work at a pace that suits those. Or if they’re talented, they can work two or three years ahead in science because that’s something that they’re really talented in. So there’s that area. Then there’s the kids that are having some learning.

difficulties. Now we’re not talking about actual learning challenges necessarily like dyslexia but maybe they might be in that group. I think there was another one further back in those stats that you mentioned about learning challenges. Yeah learning challenges. So these kids are there can be lots of different reasons but if you’ve had a bit of time off or if you’re not caught on to a concept or if you’re just unlucky enough

Brett (25:11)
Yeah, that’s 12%, % is special needs and individualized learning. Yeah.

Ellen (25:27)
to not get a great teacher who you gel with because we’re all human beings and some teachers are the best teacher for you and not necessarily like you’ve got 28 kids in the class. They’re not all going to, your personalities are not always going to gel. And if you end up having a teacher where you’re not gelling and you’re not finding that their teaching style is suiting your learning style, you can fall a bit behind and then a self -image problem happens. And you start to say, you hear adults all the time. They say, I’m hopeless at maths.

And I think, actually, I’m hopeless at speaking Japanese, but it’s because I haven’t been taught. And often that’s the reason behind parents or adults saying I’m hopeless at maths. It’s because there was a few steps they didn’t have a teacher that was able to share in a way that they could understand. And then they may have been very good at maths had they had the right learning opportunity. So that’s where we find that sometimes that self -image of a learner and they start to feel bad about themselves and then it just snowballs. They find themselves behind and…

And that can be a real learning challenge too. And that’s one of the reasons, you know, during COVID that parents were just like, what, when they sat down with their child and said, I thought my child was here. And now that I’m sitting beside them, I realized they’re not at that level at all. And how come nobody saw that? Because this child is very good and quiet and happily looking onto the next person’s work. And those kind of really great, quiet kids are the ones that can often fall behind. So.

There’s some of the reasons in that group of people that would come to UK.

Brett (26:59)
A couple of others there as well, just to add on is you might have a child who just excels in a specific subject because they love it. They like it. Right. And so, you know, I put myself back in the scenario is I got asked to leave high school in my final year because I, in high school, you, you were forced to, you had to pick a certain amount of subjects. So, you know, I only enjoyed sort of circa three of them. Right.

And I was turning up these other ones just because I had to, to be able to pass and I had zero interest in it. and that was the main reason why I got, I, you know, I got kicked out. I got asked to leave school because I was becoming a disturbance to my friends and yeah, to their credit was probably a good idea. I probably was disturbing my friends to be fair. well, no, I take that back. I absolutely was disturbing my friends. I, I know. but,

That was because I didn’t have the interest because I hadn’t been able to connect to it. And you know what happens and we look at you as an example, and we look at grade nine and 10, where we’ve got over 120 courses over 32 different types of electives that students can choose from. And they get in and let’s say they’re doing one and let’s say they do photography and they’re like, you know, I actually thought photography was cool. actually don’t like it now and I want to try something else.

Like I was stuck in my physics class. I couldn’t get out of it. I didn’t like it. I didn’t have a connection to it, but no, you’re to do the whole year of it. And then at the end of the year, you have to sit an exam. And this is another one of the reasons that I want to talk about as it relates to academic reasons is not all, personally don’t believe in, I’d love to see some data out about this, but I just don’t believe having to cram for exams to put all your works, your years worth of work into a

totality of a couple of exams to determine whether or not you pass a subject or not, which can then determine where you go on in your career. And in many cases, it’s not the greatest way to learn. just happened to be able to cheat the code. And I was able to cram very quickly a night before and retain as much as I could. And then forget it two days later, right? Which is not how you learn. It’s how you pass an exam, but the pressure that you would put yourself under. Like I’d had friends turning up to school sick.

on the mornings of exams. I loved it because it was like on that. So I have a pretty high risk tolerance and I like sort of that sort of stuff. But I have friends who are literally sick morning of exams because the pressure that put on themselves and you you do that now and in today’s age, even more, you know, that the pressure that’s been put on exams and you know, the beautiful thing about UCR is in homeschooling and how we offer it is there are no exams. We do assessments. You get an opportunity to submit some work.

based off what you’ve learned. And if you don’t get it right, we’ll put you back on path and you’ll be able to resubmit it and get it right. mean, that is how you diminish. I mean, that in itself, right, is one of the answers to reducing the number of students leaving school. And this isn’t to the school system to keep them in there, but it’s not for everyone, right? Sitting exams is not for everyone. It’s a very, very high risk. I’d say, yeah.

low outcome reward for a lot of students who have to put themselves through that. What are your thoughts on that one, when it relates to exams and assessments?

Ellen (30:23)
yeah, I absolutely agree and I think that’s one of the things that I feel most proud about UCAR in that I see our role as one to support and equip students to be successful, not to judge students. So the difference is like you said, if our year 11 and 12 students who are preparing to go off to university, if they submit an assessment to us and they’re, you know, no matter what assessment, even if they’re doing really well,

Brett (30:39)
Hmm.

Ellen (30:51)
But if they’re off course or whatever, the teachers can put in a comment there that says these are the areas that you that you’re a bit weaker on and that you need to improve on. These are the areas that you’ve done well in. And they give that feedback back to the student who can then go, yes, I see that. Okay, good. And they can make those changes and resubmit it and people go, you know, is that fair? Well, of course, our job should be to educate, to educate and have an

a success that when we look at our students and when we think about ourselves as being successful as educators, it would be that the students have been able to get to a level of learning that they’re happy with and that they can understand what they’ve been taught. so yes, totally agree.

Brett (31:33)
Like where in the real world does taking an exam really apply? You know, like when you go into the workforce, I mean, outside of some sort of life or death jobs, know, doctors probably important that you really do know what you’re doing. you know, the reality is, if someone makes a mistake in the workplace,

Ellen (31:40)
No.

Brett (31:56)
you then get an opportunity to rectify it and fix it and just try not to make that mistake again. I mean, that’s the real world. And that’s how we should be teaching our children from the, you know, the inception of learning so that they can take that along and, you know, realize that the, our lives are all about improvement and learning and evolving. And it’s okay to make mistakes. In fact, it’s imperative that you make mistakes. Cause if you don’t make any mistakes, you’ll create a God complex and you’ll think you’re the best thing since sliced bread.

right, but we know that that ends very bad for most people. So your ability to harness and, you know, be okay with and almost seeking out mistakes and errors and learning so you can improve is where you will start to build that grit and build that courage and confidence for us, for you moving forward into your everyday life and building your career. So, Ellen, yep.

Ellen (32:52)
I’d also just say, Brett, that in those younger years, that is why when our students have work samples, as we call them, that we give parents a piece of paper that says, these are the things you should be looking at in a work sample with your child so that right from the beginning, they learn to assess how they’re going themselves. know, have I been able to label the states of Australia? Have I been able to put the states in the right place? know, whatever it is,

can sit with them and go, okay, let’s have a look at this together. And okay, let’s see if there’s anything. So it’s it’s about that self evaluation, which is really valuable as you’re getting older, because it means you’re taking accountability for what you’re doing. So helpful.

Brett (33:35)
Yeah. Yeah. The real learning is in the learning and we’ll, we’ll leave it on, that riddle. But look, Alan, that’s a, that’s pretty much all I, I wanted us to get through on this, this session. Again, just another really good eye opener for a lot of families out there who are thinking that homeschooling is only for a specific type of person. Essentially, you know, we don’t have a bar graph there that says everyone, but if we did, it would say everyone.

Ellen (33:40)
Yes.

Brett (34:04)
because homeschooling is an opportunity for a wide array of different families, different children. We’re living in a world now where flexibility and freedom are far more prevalent. I’ll take the freedom slightly, but definitely flexibility that you have with inside of your schooling and then how you develop your child’s learning for the future.

Any final words before we wrap this one up, Ellen?

Ellen (34:36)
I would just say, I guess the biggest one is, you know, people are coming to homeschooling these days for lots of reasons where mainstream may not have been the best option for them. But also lots of people are coming to homeschooling now because it’s actually something that they’re really excited about being part of in their children’s education. So it’s not that their child would have had a problem in mainstream school. It’s just that as a family, this is something they really want to embark on. So that’s an exciting group of people that have definitely grown since COVID.

Brett (35:06)
Yeah, absolutely. And on that note, thank you very much for tuning in. If you’ve gotten value out of this episode, please share the episode with someone that you also think may get value out of it. And if you haven’t yet, please jump over, give future learners the podcast, a five -star review on Spotify and Apple. Make sure you subscribe on YouTube. If you want to see me and Alan talking on these episodes, you can head over to YouTube. Make sure you hit all the buttons that are there as well. And until the next one, will see you soon.

Thank you, Ellen.

Ellen (35:37)
Thank you.