The rise of home-schooling in Australia
Apparently, over 45,000 Australian students are being home-schooled in 2025, more than double the number of home-schoolers 5 years ago. To be fair, this is probably in no small part due to COVID, but given that COVID is no longer an issue today, why has this number not gone back down?
Is it even a problem?
In this video by the ABC 1, Prof. Anna Sullivan, Director of the Research Centre in Educational Social Inclusion at the University of South Australia, says that when children start home school, they often find it difficult to integrate back into regular school afterwards.
And that’s fair — it probably is.
But is that a bad thing?
I mean, she certainly seems to frame it as a bit of a negative, but if I spent a year on holiday I wouldn’t want to go back to work either, and that’s not exactly a reflection of how bad the holiday was.
Home-schooling isn’t easy in many ways. It’s generally seen as unconventional, and families usually have to make considerable sacrifices to make it work for their lifestyle. Parents who didn’t care about their kids generally wouldn’t home school them; it’s much easier to send them to the local public school and complain about the school, teachers or government when things don’t go well.
So the fact that so many families are resorting to it should be an alarm bell that many Australians no longer find mainstream education options good enough for their children.
I've taught many kids who are home-schooled. Many of them are so bright it feels like you're talking to an adult rather than a child. Many of them are so creative and seem unconstrained by the rules that mainstream students take for granted.
The Babylon Bee had a satirical piece 2 about home-schooling that seems apt here:
