Lara Warwick had been working as a high school teacher for 18 years when she made the decision to quit her job last year so she could homeschool her own two children full time.
“When I made the decision to leave, I was exhausted,” she told 9news.com.au.
“I found the education system was becoming inflexible, the work-load increased exponentially and there was also a lot of politics happening behind the scenes.
“I left jaded and suffering from PTSD.”
In her time working in the profession, Warwick said she had seen the school system change to one where teachers were pulled in all directions trying to cater for so many students with different needs.
When Warwick’s “quirky and creative” daughter – who is now nine – was born, she also began to wonder how well that “inflexible” education system would suit her.
Warwick’s daughter also had some special needs, with a speech impediment. On a limited budget, Warwick and her husband couldn’t find a local school which they felt was right for her.
They decided to see if homeschooling would be a good fit.
Warwick’s daughter began her education by attending a small homeschool co-op with eight students part-time, with Warwick also doing some of her homeschooling on days off and weekends.
Encouraged by how well her daughter was thriving, Warwick resigned from her permanent teaching position at the beginning of 2023 to homeschool her daughter, and now also her four-year-old son, full time.
Warwick, who still does some relief teaching and casual work at a local university to help boost the family’s income, said she had no regrets.
“It has given me the space to de-school, and to recover from the stress of teaching,” she said.
Educating her children at home had also allowed her to re-discover her passion for teaching in a creative way, Warwick said.
“We love the flexibility and the fun, my kids are often finishing their work after a couple of hours and spending the afternoon climbing their trees, writing elaborate stories, playing shop or building amazing lego creations,” she said.
“I love that I can engage my kids, within their interests, and allow deep learning to occur in ways I couldn’t in the classroom.
Warwick said home learning did not suit all kids, with some needing the structure of school to learn, but it was proving to be a success with her family.
The high-school teacher said she also knew of many other educators who had followed a similar path to pull back from their jobs to homeschool their children.
It was, in many ways, the ultimate judgement of a school system that was currently failing some students, Warwick said.
“The fact that there are many teachers not just walking away from the school system as a whole, but who are then choosing to homeschool their own kids, gives us a very clear indication of what the system is like at the moment.”
Teachers riding the homeschooling wave
Rebecca English is a senior lecturer at Queensland University of Technology who has been researching the topic of homeschooling for the past 13 years.
English is currently writing a book about teachers choosing to homeschool their own children, a trend she has noticed growing for some time.
Queensland Department of Education data shows the proportion of teachers among homeschooling parents is high.
In a 2023 survey of around 550 homeschooling parents, 20 percent were qualified teachers or educators.
English said the increasing numbers of teachers quitting their jobs to homeschool their own kids was part of a surge in rates of children being homeschooled more generally in Australia.
There are now roughly 40,000 Australian children who are home schooled – double the rate of before the pandemic in 2019.
Queensland has seen the sharpest increase in home-schooling rates, with numbers ballooning by 19 percent in a single year in 2023, to more than 10,000 students.
New South Wales also has a record number of home-schooled students, with 12,400 enrolled at the end of 2022.
English said the make-up of the homeschooling community had shifted dramatically during the last decade, and particularly post-pandemic.
“In the beginning, it was the stereotypical homeschoolers; the Christians and libertarians, people who maybe because of their beliefs don’t want the government in their family life, with a few school refusers as well,” English said.
“Now, it’s increasingly the school-refuser families, those children, many of whom have extra needs which aren’t being met, and a lot more teachers who’ve been in schools and decided that is not for my kid.”
Around 80 percent of the growth in homeschooling in Australia could be seen as coming from parents who were “accidental” homeschoolers, English said.
“They’re people who never really set out to homeschool. But, for whatever reason, an experience in that child’s or that parent’s life led them to this choice,” English said.
While teacher burnout could be seen as one driving factor behind those leaving the profession to homeschool their own children, so too could other reasons, such as their kids’ needs not being met in the current system, she said.
“It’s all interconnected, and I think people are just really unhappy with how schools are currently run, because if the schools worked, people would use them.
“Teachers are showing they are prepared to sacrifice – and what a sacrifice – they are sacrificing career advancement, they’re sacrificing superannuation and all sorts of things, stability in their financial situation, to look after their kid and that is better than sending the child to school and going back to school yourself.”
‘I didn’t want that for my kids’
Northern Rivers mum-of-three Catherine Chamberlain was a primary school teacher for 15 years, working in the public, private and religious sectors, before she quit teaching seven years ago.
Like Warwick, Chamberlain felt stressed and dissatisfied with the growing bureaucratic demands of teaching.
“In the 15 years I was teaching, the paperwork probably quadrupled,” she said.
“I’m a teacher that loves my students, and I love teaching but to actually achieve what I wanted in the classroom, which is to have good lessons and a connection with the children, I couldn’t attain that because my energy and my time had to go towards all the assessments and paperwork and politics.”
Chamberlain now homeschools her eldest two children, who are aged seven and six.
The former teacher said choosing to homeschool her children over going back to school herself was an easy decision.
“It was a choice between teaching 26 children in the system or to teach my own three children,” she said.
“Teachers see the everyday nitty gritty (of the school system) and over the years I just saw a decline in the positive fruit from it and I didn’t want that for my kids,” Chamberlain said.
Chamberlain said she and her children regularly met with a group of other homeschooled families. The group allows the students to socialise and parents to support each other.
The former teacher said she could not see herself going back to work as a teacher within the school system, but would more likely explore mentoring opportunities within the home-schooling sector in the future.
Former Montessori teacher Rachel Gibson now homeschools her 13-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son after quitting teaching in 2018.
The mother-of-four, who also has two adult children, said she knew of many other teachers who had made the move into homeschooling.
For Gibson, deciding to homeschool her children, rather than paying private school fees, made financial sense.
“We were in an alternative system and I couldn’t imagine putting them into a mainstream system, but just the cost of sending my children to school was pretty much my entire wage,” she said.
“I was working with other homeschool children at the time. So I thought, ‘We’ll give this a go.'”
While Gibson’s children did go back to school for a time before COVID, the pandemic brought with it new anxiety issues which made homeschooling a better once more.
Gibson said putting her traditional teaching career on hold had opened up a new career path in helping the growing number of parents homeschooling their children.
“I write curriculum now for homeschool. I have an online platform where parents can go in and get their weekly lessons and materials,” she said.
Homeschooling is legal in all Australian states and territories. Families are required to register their children for homeschooling, with reporting rules differing according to each state or territory government.