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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 that the education system was becoming inflexible, the workload was increasing exponentially and there was a lot of politics going on behind the scenes.
“I left exhausted and suffering from PTSD.”
During her time in the profession, Warwick said she saw the school system change to one where teachers were pulled in all directions trying to cater to so many students with different needs.
When Warwick’s “quirky and creative” daughter – now nine – was born, she too began to wonder how well this “inflexible” education system would suit her.
Warwick’s daughter also had some special needs, with a speech impediment. On a tight budget, Warwick and her husband couldn’t find a local school that they felt was a good fit 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 weekends and holidays.
Encouraged by how well her daughter was progressing, Warwick left her permanent teaching position in early 2023 to educate her daughter, and now her four-year-old son, full-time.
Warwick, who still works adjunct teaching and odd jobs at a local university to help supplement the family’s income, said she has no regrets.
“It gave me an opportunity to drop out of school and recover from the stress of teaching,” she said.
Homeschooling her children also allowed her to rediscover her passion for teaching in a creative way, Warwick said.
“We love flexibility and fun, my kids often finish work after a few hours and spend the afternoon climbing 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 happen in ways that I couldn’t in the classroom.
Warwick said homeschooling isn’t right for all kids, with some needing the structure of school to learn, but it’s proving successful in her family.
The high school teacher said he knows many other educators who have followed a similar path to retire from their jobs and homeschool their children.
In many ways, it was the ultimate judgment of a school system that was currently failing some students, Warwick said.
“The fact that there are many teachers who are not just walking away from the school system as a whole, but then choosing to educate their own children at home gives us a very clear indication of what the system is like now.”
The teachers riding the homeschooling wave
Rebecca English is a Senior Lecturer at the 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 who choose to homeschool their own children, a trend she has noticed growing for some time.
Figures from the Queensland Department of Education show the proportion of teachers among homeschooling parents is high.
In a 2023 survey of about 550 homeschooling parents, 20 percent were qualified teachers or educators.
English said the increasing number of teachers leaving their jobs to educate their own children was part of a rise in the number of children being homeschooled in Australia overall.
There are now approximately 40,000 Australian children being homeschooled – double the number before the 2019 pandemic.
Queensland has seen the sharpest rise in home schooling rates, with numbers increasing by 19 per cent in one 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 makeup of the homeschooling community has changed dramatically over the past decade, and especially since the pandemic.
“In the beginning it was the stereotypical homeschoolers; Christians and libertarians, people who maybe because of their beliefs don’t want the government in their family life, and a few people who refuse school,” English said.
“Increasingly now, families refusing school, these children, many of whom have additional needs that are not being met, and many more teachers have been to school and decided this is not for my child.”
About 80 per cent of the growth in home-schooling in Australia can be seen as coming from parents who were “accidental” home-schoolers, English said.
“They are people who have never homeschooled. But for whatever reason, an experience in the life of that child or that parent has led them to that choice,” English said.
While teacher burnout can be seen as one of the driving factors behind those leaving the profession to educate their own children, there may also be other reasons, such as their children’s needs not being met in the current system , she said.
“It’s all interconnected and I think people are really unhappy with how schools are run at the moment because if the schools were working people would be using them.
“Teachers show that they are willing to sacrifice – and what a sacrifice – they sacrifice career advancement, they sacrifice retirement pensions and all kinds of things, financial stability, to take care of their child, and that’s better than sending child to school and you to go back to school.”
“I didn’t want this for my kids”
Catherine Chamberlain, a mother of three from Northern Rivers, was a primary school teacher for 15 years, working in the public, private and faith sectors, before leaving teaching seven years ago.
Like Warwick, Chamberlain felt stressed and dissatisfied by the increasing bureaucratic demands on teaching.
“In the 15 years I’ve been teaching, the paperwork has probably quadrupled,” she said.
“I’m a teacher who loves my students and I love teaching, but actually achieving what I wanted in the classroom, which was to have good lessons and connect with the children, I couldn’t achieve because my energy and my time had to to go for all assessments, documents and policy.”
Chamberlain now homeschools her two oldest children, who are seven and six.
The former teacher said choosing to homeschool her children over going back to school was an easy decision.
“It was a choice between teaching 26 kids in the system or teaching my own three kids,” she said.
“Teachers see the day-to-day little things (of the school system) and over the years I just saw a decline in the positive results of that and I didn’t want that for my kids,” Chamberlain said.
Chamberlain said she and her children regularly meet with a group of other homeschooling families. The group allows students to socialize and parents to support each other.
The former teacher said she could not return to work as a teacher in the school system, but would more likely explore mentoring opportunities in the homeschooling sector in the future.
Former Montessori teacher Rachel Gibson is now homeschooling her 13-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son after leaving teaching in 2018.
The mother of four, who also has two grown children, said she knows many other teachers who have made the transition to homeschooling.
For Gibson, the decision to homeschool her children instead of 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 kids to school was almost my entire salary,” she said.
“At the time, I was working with other kids in a home school. So I thought, ‘We’re going to try this.'”
Although the Gibson children returned to school for a while before COVID, the pandemic brought with it new anxiety issues that made homeschooling once again better.
Gibson said putting her traditional teaching career on hold has opened up a new career path to help the growing number of homeschooling parents.
“Now I’m writing a homeschool curriculum. I have an online platform where parents can log 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 home education, with reporting rules varying by state or territory government.
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