Simply Home School
Homeschooling in Australia is a growing trend. Over 20,000 Australian families currently homeschool their children. Karen Miller, the founder of Simply Homeschool, understands this. She was a primary school teacher and has homeschooled her own four kids over a 25-year period.
Through homeschooling, she found she had the opportunity to teach her own children at a pace more conducive to their learning abilities and needs. She recognises there is a real need for family-friendly, flexible curriculum, good support and connected homeschool community classes and activities.
Some families homeschool due to neurodiversity, health issues, mental health reasons and other struggles with the school system. Homeschool provides fabulous opportunities for real-life, integrated learning that really suits individual learning needs and interests.
Simply Homeschool provides family-friendly, flexible curriculum. Imagine you have four children all at different learning levels. The school system is based on a grade or age level curriculum and children may be strong in some subjects but not in others. From a homework perspective, the work is split into different subjects, at different levels, so helping them with their homework across up to 16 subjects simultaneously is just not viable for most parents.
Our lessons and activities are written using multiple levels so multiple children can be learning at different levels through the same lessons/activities, which saves time and is much more family friendly.
We experienced three reasons.
People who had always wished they could homeschool but hadn’t taken the leap. The first Covid lockdown got them started and helped them look for available resources.
During COVID, parents discovered that school education wasn’t actually working for their child. There were children who had been barely hanging on and found it very challenging due to learning difficulties and anxiety. Parents saw their kids move ahead in leaps and bounds. Lots of children told their parents they simply didn’t want to go back.
In late 2021 and early 2022, many parents decided to take control of their children’s education. They wanted to create a settled learning environment while school was on and off, multiple times.
Core Programs are designed to cater for children with learning needs that are at a different level to their age. This provides flexibility for children as most learn differently and at a different pace. It also caters for those who struggle in some subjects and excel in others.
Homeschooling provides enormous flexibility. You can focus on children’s interests and passions rather than rote learning.
Registration is different in each state, but homeschooling is available to everyone. The rules are different and what is expected varies. The registration process is something we can support parents with in most states.
Some do, but many continue to homeschool all the way through. One of my children started school in year nine, but that was mainly for social interaction. Many go on to TAFE, apprenticeships, or Open University. The school system isn’t designed for neurodiverse children, and they often move into the adult world more easily than the school system.
Students can do a Certificate 3 and 4 as part of their homeschool program, which generally gives them university entrance.
A large number of Australian universities offer university pathway courses, often free of charge. Homeschooled students can apply for these courses without any formal academic certificates. At the completion of the course, students will often receive an ATAR that will allow them to go on and study the course of their choice.
We currently have over 1500 active members across Australia.
I have ADHD and so I have hundreds of ideas, but I would never have gotten organised to doing everything that was required to grow this enterprise in the time we have so far. The Mill House provided structure. I learned an enormous amount.