From the end of July 08 this website will no longer be updated but will remain online as an archive.
For current information about home education in Australia please visit the Home Education Association of Australia.
While there, please consider joining this vital support network that works hard to promote home education in Australia.

Home education is a legal alternative to school education in Australia. State governments are responsible for regulating home education.
Different states have different requirements, however homeschooling families are able to develop curriculum and learning programs
to suit the individual needs of their children.

© Beverley Paine

The number of research studies demonstrating the effectiveness of home learning for academic and social success increase each year. For many families the unintended outcomes far outweigh perceived academic benefits. These following homeschooling outcomes, combined from national and international research including John Peacock's major Australian study, The Why and How of Home Education in Australia , have been consistently listed:

• closer family relationships, with children playing a more positive and significant role in family life, and an emphasis on family making skills;
• parental personal fulfilment and increased learning opportunities for parents as well as children;
• greater understanding of personal responsibility;
• natural fostering of co-operative and team behaviours;
• an empowering process for both parents and children;
• greater freedom from arbitrary time limits such as terms and year levels to pursue educational activities and interests;
• increased opportunity for one to one interaction with more skilled peers or parents, which lead to cognitive challenges and gains;
• children are able to ask more questions, with more time allowed for answers to be found, leading to increased motivation for learning;
• children and parents engage in more complex language in the home learning environment compared with classroom settings, and this improves the intellectual and language development of children;
• children have been consistently shown to rate equal to or higher than average on standardised achievement tests in the USA;
• home educated children's self concept has been shown to be significantly higher than schooled children, indicating that home education does not socially deprive children but produces socially well adjusted young people;
• children are less peer oriented;
• increased involvement in community activities;
• greater attainment of independent learning skills, self-motivation and organisational abilities.

Schools promise of these outcomes but fail to guarantees achievement for all students. Schools continue to fail students, citing many excuses - family problems, individual learning difficulties, lack of adequate resourcing, under-financing by funding bodies. Homeschooling families find failure an unacceptable outcome. The drive to succeed in the homeschooling endeavour is very high, with parents continuously searching for better and more successful methods, resources and outcomes. Unlike teachers, parents are directly accountable to the homeschooled student, in an immediate way, every day. Problems with education are not left to fester indefinitely. Homeschooling allows considerable flexibility in delivering excellence in education - flexibility schools can't match.

See the following articles for additional information :

• Australian and Overseas Research Links
• Solid Evidence to Support Home Schooling Michael Farris

You may like to read a couple of frequently asked question responses Beverley wrote in reply to some emailed questions:

• FAQ: What is your homeschooling life like?
• FAQ: Does this stuff work? I don't dig this homeschooling idea at all and reckon that homeschooling leads to socially retarded kids...

If you want to know more about how Beverley and Robin homeschooled their children their book, Learning in the Absence of Education (a title picked by their then ten year old son) contains many essays on how their children learned to read, write, spell, how the family managed daily life, dealt with socialisation issues, etc.

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