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.
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.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.
"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. It was, in many ways, the ultimate judgement of a school system that was currently failing some students, Warwick said.
In a 2023 survey of around 550 homeschooling parents, 20 percent were qualified teachers or educators. 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. "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."
"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. "It was a choice between teaching 26 children in the system or to teach my own three children," she said.
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