Goodbye to the classroom: Where and how home-educated students learn

Over 10,000 school students in New Zealand learn outside of school, but that doesn’t mean they’re always learning at home.

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On a ridge near Mount Eden, a brick and tile house looks out past spindly pohutukawa trees to the north. The road spools away, its banks divided into rectangles by fences and hedges. Inside, the walls of the house are covered. Some by paintings – unsure splotches on unprimed canvas, carefully rendered landscapes, gestural faces. Others by photos – sepia-toned portraits and groups of smiling people at the beach. One wall is entirely papered in a world map, the continents light green with soft spines of mountains and the sea a pale blue sliced by latitude and longitude lines. 

“It’s not actually correct because the equator is more than halfway down the wall,” says Rachel Guidera. She’s stirring honey from a five-litre bucket into her tea. She and her 13-year-old son Felix are both wearing warm hats; hers a knitted robot, his a fur-lined trapper hat. The map went up when Guidera was teaching Felix geography. Though it’s not perfect, the atlas wall has been a useful and much-used resource.

Guidera has been home educating Felix for four years, after realising he wasn’t happy at school, and trying a different one didn’t help. Felix is one of over 10,000 students who are being educated at home in New Zealand – just over 1% of pupils. In New Zealand, parents can choose to home educate children aged between five and 16 years, but must first get approval from the Ministry of Education. Teacher-parents are eligible for an allowance, but it’s tiny: $796 a year for the first child, and less for subsequent children. 

Home education is an umbrella term for when parents (or legal guardians) take responsibility for the education of their children, instead of enrolling them in a school. Under the umbrella, education can be, and is, done in endless different ways. Home educators usually build their approaches on established education philosophies like school-at-home, Montessori, Charlotte Mason, Unschooling and Waldorf. It’s not required that they teach the New Zealand Curriculum. Some choose to follow pre-set curriculums, like Te Kura, the state-funded correspondence school or Home Schooling NZ, a Christian education trust. Others prefer to make their own, sometimes by combining different sources and sometimes by following project-based learning. There’s over a hundred home educator associations split by region and philosophy across the motu, so parent-teachers have plenty of resources and opportunities to connect. 

It’s easy to imagine home-educated kids perpetually at home, contained in those fenced rectangles, buried in an exercise book or computer screen and alone bar a parent. But a new docuseries from The Spinoff, Home Education, follows six families and their many different learning places: a dahlia farm, the forest, a house bus, the beach, a farm, and the local stream, to name just a few. For home educators, a classroom is not something confined within four walls, it’s anywhere.  

On Thursdays, you’ll find Felix at The Forest School in Hatfields Bay, Waiwera. His classmates are kids of all different ages, and their classroom is an area of native bush by the coast. It’s a free-range learning school that focuses on positive social and self-management skills and respectful relationships with the environment and people. Felix, who has autism, found it difficult to get along with others at his previous schools, but at Forest School, “he’s got this little posse,” says Guidera. He’s learned how to get along with and collaborate with others at the Creation Station and through guided activities, a skill that wasn’t facilitated at traditional schools. 

You won’t find Felix at home on Fridays either. Guidera and Felix go to the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki every Friday. On the mezzanine floor, they join a cluster of people seated around a life model, and draw for an hour. Some poses are held for just a few seconds, so this observational drawing is an exercise in giving up some control, and opening yourself up to going with and enjoying the process rather than on getting a perfect end result. Guidera says she takes Felix there for him to learn to make mistakes in front of people: “I think it’s one of the big things in life. If you can learn to make mistakes in front of people, laugh it off, say ‘whatever’, and go, ‘that’s all right, I’m going to learn from this and keep going’”.

Once the drawing session is over, they find a place to sit down to write. They’re trying a different approach to writing, where Guidera encourages Felix to write freely and creatively, describing what he sees and what he feels. She’s been inspired by Ocean Vuong, the Vietnamese American poet, essayist, and novelist who writes from his own life, and also by the fact that Felix was getting “blocked” when trying to write formal essays. At the art gallery, there’s art to write about, perfect considering he loves art history. 

There are also other people, and social expectations to abide by. “Right now I’m trying to get him out more,” says Guidera. “I feel like he needs to have more things in his way. When you’re at home, you get everything your own way. And when you go out into the public, you have to deal with more people.” She’s worried that home educating can be too insular, and that Felix could get used to things being “too one way, too my way”.

Over 200km north, in Awarua, Kaikohe, half an acre of dahlias are set to start blooming next month. They’re planted in tight rows, different types and colours gathered together according to pre-drawn plans. In summer, the farm opens its gates to visitors who come to pick their own dahlias, learn about them through tours, or have a high tea. The dahlia farm – or classroom – is presided over by Gracie-Mae, Lexi-Rose and Milly, none of whom are over 15 years old. The learning project turned business began when their parent-teacher Jennifer Ives gave the eldest, Gracie, $100 to start a business and learn about money and entrepreneurial skills. Gracie saw photos of dahlias on the internet, and fell in love with them. She spent the entire sum on 10 potted dahlia cuttings. 

“It just took off and they loved it,” says Ives. “It got bigger and bigger because everyone was so happy doing it.” She follows Unschooling (sometimes called free schooling or self-directed learning), an approach to educating that, instead of following a curriculum, lets children lead the learning. The preference is to remove the traditional classroom and other hallmarks of conventional education like homework, lesson plans, tests and exams. Instead, projects are the vehicles for learning. “The key to being successful in it is that you’re prepared to follow the childrens’ lead,” Ives says.

Ives encounters much misunderstanding about home education. “There’s all those myths about home education that people bring up – everyone has always met one person who’s homeschooled and their children have been, you know, a bit weird,” she says. “I’ve met plenty of kids who go to school who have been a bit weird too.” There’s also a misunderstanding about what home educating means. Ives says people think of it as being “school at home,” whereas what she and many other home educators are doing, through unschooling and other alternative approaches, is completely different. She says at first the approach was “just doing whatever we felt like on the day”, then as the children have gotten older, “they’ve created their own projects which lead on to different learning.”

For three years, the big project has been the dahlias. Within the dahlia farm, there’s many smaller projects. Scientific experiments answer questions like: how can cut dahlias be made to last longer? What happens when these two types of dahlias are cross pollinated? The practical experiments, repeated for robustness, lead onto data analysis, where the kids make graphs or charts on the computer and write reports. There’s an art side which has the girls learning photography and creating art prints to sell, and when the girls decided they wanted to write a book about their journey with dahlias, they dug into history. 

Maths is a constant, though not through worksheets, textbooks or whiteboards. The dahlia kids have to draw out their garden plans to scale, figure out how much to price their high teas and dahlia experiences, and manage the till. “Every aspect of school, every subject in school, is studied,” says Ives. Learning is “a natural thing that happens” as part of life.

Even the bounds of their large rural section don’t enclose the dahlia kids’ learning. The National Dahlia Society of New Zealand president Dennis Rodgers, who started growing dahlias when he was their age, got in touch and became a mentor. He has over 70 years of dahlia-growing experience and taught the girls about breeding, classifying and exhibiting the flowers. When Gracie became interested in photography, she reached out and then was mentored by working photographers. “As a home-ed kid, people are really interested in sharing their knowledge with you and helping you, because you’ve got such a good attitude,” Ives says. She thinks that attitude comes from being encouraged to be curious, being supported to follow your own interests, and being unafraid of new knowledge. “These girls have got heaps of time, and they’re really wanting to connect with people, to get info from them,” she says. “We sort of think of it as skills for life.”

On the east coast, just eight kilometres from Ruatoria and to the east of the Raukūmara forest, there’s a rural community called Hiruhārama. The Baker whānau live on a farm there, which is a “sort of a big mess at the moment” since it took “a mean beating” last year from Cyclone Hale, says Israel Baker. He and his wife Petrina run the farm with their nine children, mustering horses, cultivating kūmara and cleaning up flooded and stilted paddocks.

The children had been going to local schools, but it didn’t always fit so well. “We live across a river that swells a lot of the time,” says Petrina. “We had to get them walking across a swing bridge and all of that – so, yeah, too hazardous.” The kids were also needed at home during school hours for whānau and cultural reasons. Their grandparents are ministers that once travelled a lot, and now, “all sorts of people come to the coast – probably more often than you could probably imagine – and then they come over to see us,” says Petrina. The children would be pulled from school to host visitors. “We wanted to be able to do all those sorts of things, be gallivanting and doing things in our culture.”

The final straw came when a whale washed up on Tokomaru Bay, 30 minutes away by car and home to Israel’s brother. Israel and Petrina Baker decided it was important to take time out of school so that their tamariki could learn how to harvest the taonga, especially the bone. It took a few weeks, and the truancy officers were not too pleased. Home education was not new to the Bakers – Israel had been educated at home and so had his dad and Petrina’s parents. “I enjoyed the liberties that I had access to as a homeschooled child,” says Israel. To be able to put whānau and their cultural priorities first, they decided to home educate their kids through Te Kura.

Te Kura (once known as the correspondence school) offers a mix of online, face-to-face, and community-based activities to guide learning up to NCEA Level 3. It offers the opportunity for ākonga to personalise their learning, choosing programmes and courses that are mostly taught online, and importantly, a heap of flexibility. While ākonga are required to have a learning supervisor at home (usually a whānau member) they are also assigned a kaiako and have access to kaimanaaki (support person). 

Home education has allowed the Baker whānau more time to teach beyond a traditional curriculum. “We prepare our children for the different times of the year, when different foods are plentiful, so if they’re out of a job or whatever, they can always rely on the land to feed them,” says Israel. They describe it as a holistic style of teaching, where the days depend on the season, the weather, and what’s going on in life. A typical day might include the older kids helping out and learning on the farm during the day, while kaiako Tracy Henderson teaches the younger kids through video calls and interactive online learning in the lounge. Then in the afternoons, the older kids come in from the farm and connect with “kaiako Trace”. Sometimes, Henderson will teach them through to 9pm. “That’s the kind of flexibility she gives us,” says Israel gratefully. 

Henderson has also been instrumental in finding ways to accredit different types of learning in the curriculum. Skills learned on the farm, like using a chainsaw, riding a quad bike and fencing, can be given formal accreditations and NCEA credits through Enviroskills camps. Learning traditional dances, and performing them, has also gained the Baker whānau credits. Henderson has had the kids attend learning opportunities beyond the farm: barista courses, trips on the Spirit of Adventure, and a visit to Hobbiton. “It’s all part of their education,” says Israel. 

Back in Mount Eden, there are books stacked on every edge of the couch, and exercise sheets covering the desk nearby. Felix is learning about the English sculptor Henry Moore on his laptop, with a dachshund cuddled up to his leg. Rachel Guidera is next to him, looking on and thinking about neural pathways.  

Guidera never thought she’d be home educating: she had a career in video production that’s been put on hold, and no experience teaching. “I was so scared of it,” she says. “But I just did it step by step. My mom always says, ‘How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.’” Though she still second guesses herself at times, she’s learning to trust herself and enjoy it too: “it’s actually an amazing time with your child”. Even though she approaches Felix’s education with flexibility, an open mind, playfulness and a bit of intuition, it’s not a responsibility she takes lightly. “This is my child, and that’s his future.”