When our unschooler tried school

What actually happens when an unschooler decides they want to try school?

In this episode, I’m sharing the story of our 9-year-old daughter choosing to go to school. Before that day, she had never once stepped into a classroom. I talk about why we agreed to it. How we prepared. What the transition into a classroom was actually like. How she went socially. What happened academically. What sort of overall impact it had on her. And whether, in the end, it lasted.

If you’ve ever found yourself wondering whether school might be “worth a try”, or you have a child asking about it and no real sense of how that would play out, this episode will give you a grounded, objective, lived perspective from the inside.

Show Notes

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Transcript

INTRO

Helloooo and welcome to the Life Without School podcast, here to help you and your children live the life you want to, not just the one you’re told you should.

I’m Issy, a writer and home educating dad from New Zealand.

You can find my work at starkravingdadblog.com - all of my posts, podcast episodes and more, all designed to encourage, support and reassure anyone walking this road less travelled.

Thank you so much for tuning in to listen today. Alright, let’s get into this episode.

/INTRO

Hello!

Good morning, or afternoon, or evening - whenever it happens to be for you right now.

I asked for your thoughts on doing this episode some time back now, and had a massive response from so many of you saying you’d love to hear this talked about, and that you’d find it really useful. And today, we’re finally doing it - I am telling the story of our at the time 9 year old unschooler trying school for the very first time. To ground this in the right context, and in the right time, this all happened about two years ago. At the start of 2024. I’ve wanted to talk about it for a long time, but we felt that our daughter should be the one to decide whether her story is shared or not, and in what way. So, we’ve said very little about it since. But a few weeks ago, she piped up at the dinner table and said - hey, dad, I’ve got an episode idea for you. And voila, here we are.

Before we start, I want to be clear that this was not some experiment we ran with our daughter for the sake of a story. I am not that person, and neither is my wife Kate. Hopefully the fact we’ve waited almost two years to tell it is proof of that.

But I AM the kind of person who will take whatever learnings can be gleaned from the experiences we go through in life, and this was an extremely useful one, so I really wanted to lean into it and take whatever we could from it.

And that’s really the reason for sharing this experience with you. I know there are questions that rattle around in all of our heads relating to this, that I can probably now answer. At least, from our perspective. Questions like:

1. What was the actual transition experience like? What preparation did we put in as parents, how did Florence prepare, how did we get involved, and how did the actual experience of moving from home education to being in a classroom go in those early days?
2. Was she horribly behind her peers, academically? Was she ahead? If she was behind, how did that play out? Did we get in trouble? Was there tension? How did Florence feel about it? And did she stay behind, or catch up?
3. Did she find it hard to connect with the other kids? Was she - to put it in the term that’s often used - poorly socialised? How did the whole experience go from a social perspective?
4. In what ways did the experience have an impact on her - whether that was positively, negatively, or both?
5. And then, of course, is she still at school? If not, how long did it last, how did she transition back out of the system, and are things the same as they were before or are they a bit different now?

So that’s what we’ll explore here today. And then, as a follow-up to this episode, I have a lot of specific questions you have all asked me about this experience. I’ll be answering a number of those in an exclusive episode as part of my Life Without School Collection. And in that episode, I’ll also break down all of my advice to anyone who has a child asking about trying school, or is thinking of doing that for whatever reason. If you’re signed up to get my weekly episodes, that one will be available to you as soon as I release it, and if you’re not yet - what are you waiting for? Jump over to the show notes for this episode, and there’ll be a link for where you can sign up, get access to the full library of episodes I’ve released there, as well as a fresh new one every single week.

Right, we have a whole lot of interesting things to explore today, so - let’s get into it.

<BREAK>

Before anything else, we need to talk about WHY this happened. Which, of course, was one of the questions many of you asked. How on EARTH did our daughter end up in school? If you’re listening to this podcast then you’ll know how passionate I am about living life without school. My thoughts on the weaknesses of the formal education system are extremely well documented…so how did we get here?

The driver for all of this boiled down to one main thing - sports. Where we were living at the time, if you wanted to play a team sport your only option was through the school system. And Florence very much wanted to play team sports. She was playing tennis, great, she was doing karate, great, but they’re individual pursuits. She wanted to pick up hockey, and football, and cricket, and get into those team spaces where you’re competing together. So at first, we set about doing everything we could outside the school system to make that happen. But the homeschooling community was relatively small, and there was zero chance we’d be able to pull together any consistent teams out of a group that size, and so the best we could do - after conversations with a few local sporting bodies - was slot her into a school’s team as an outsider if they needed to make up numbers. So not actually go to the school, but just show up to the games, pull their school sports uniform on, and join in. If they needed an extra. Which, understandably, she hated the idea of. Maybe some kids would be fine with that, and that’s great. But she was very clear in her opinion that she would not enjoy that at all. It wasn’t just about the actual sport for her - it was about connecting in with a team, and that didn’t feel like a great path to that goal.

So we had two options. Ask her show up to a random school team’s practices and games, put their school t-shirt on, play, then take it off, give it back, and not see any of them again until the game next week. And, miss out on some sports, because that wasn’t an option for all of them.

Or, give her a proper taste of being in a team by actually going to school.

A few years ago, we would never have entertained even the thought of this. And, obviously, this was not an easy decision for us to make. It flew in the face of everything I’ve been writing and speaking about since Florence was a baby. And here we were, walking through the school gates, for a visit. We REALLY wrestled with it. But at the core of all this there was a need. Our daughter had a need, and we could not fill that need for her. And as Kate and I talked it through, we realised that there were enough small things working in our favour that helped ease the tension we felt about it. The main one being that Florence was not a tiny little 5 year old poppit any more. She was 9, with years of developing a strong sense of who she was behind her. She was confident, she was aware of her limits and how to hold boundaries with people, and she’d be towards the older end of kids at the school. At 11, they all move on to intermediate. So there were a few things that mitigated the pain somewhat. And, like I say, our daughter had a very specific need that - in her journey to discovering who she is, what she’s good at, and what she wants to invest her life in - had to be explored.

After we’d made the decision together that we were going to do this, we came up with three conditions. We all agreed that this would be a test. And that, like all good tests, we needed to set some conditions and boundary lines to make sure we got a meaningful outcome and weren’t just left with more questions than answers. So these were our four conditions:

1. We had to meet who her teacher was going to be, and ALL agree that they would be a good mentor and guide for Florence while she was there.
2. We had to go all in. If Florence wanted the team experience, then it had to be done properly. No staying on the surface - we’d take every opportunity the school made available, and get involved as much as we could in whatever areas we could - including the summer camp for her school year, which was coming up.
3. We had to give it one full term, which is about 10 weeks. We knew there’d probably be a novelty period early on when everything felt new and fresh and fun, but that the shine would wear off. We wanted to make sure she experienced that full spectrum so she - and we - had all the data we needed to make longer term decisions around this.
4. And lastly, we had to go into this with an open mind. I, in particular, had to make sure I wasn’t painting everything that happened during those 10 weeks with a negative brush. We had to stay objective, stay positive, and embrace it.

And just to be super clear, Florence was 9 years old when this happened. It was in late January, 2024. Up until that point she had never been to school. The first time she had ever walked into a classroom was the day we first visited to meet the principal, and her teacher, and to see the space, before we enrolled her. So this is about as fresh as you could possibly come to a schooling environment for the first time.

Ok, so we’ve got our why. We’ve set the conditions for this test. Now, let’s get into those five blocks of questions that will take us through this experience end to end.

<BREAK>

I guess the first thing we should talk about, before we get into everything else, and for the sake of completeness, is how we chose what school she’d go to. In New Zealand you generally have zones based on where you live for primary school. So if your address is inside a school’s zone lines on a map, you get automatic entry, and if it’s not then you need to go through an application process. And generally most schools have a small bucket of slots available for out of zone applications.

We whittled our options down to three schools that were close enough to our house that we wouldn’t feel like we were adding crazy commute times to our life. Two of those we were in zone for, and one we weren’t. We visited all three of those schools. We met the principal’s, we asked them to show us around the classrooms, we met different teachers, we looked at the library spaces, we looked at the playgrounds, and - of course - we asked a lot of questions. Particularly about their sporting programs, because that was the driving force behind all of this. If they didn’t have strong sporting options then they weren’t going to be able to fill the need that all of this was about. We quickly struck one of the three schools off our list because of that very thing - it was the smallest of the three, with a role of about 80, and we could see the sporting options were going to be hit and miss depending on how many kids signed up to different things. They just weren’t going to have the numbers. So that left us with two options. Two schools that were about the same size - both with around 300 kids, and both covering the primary years of 1-6 (which is age 5 to 11). They both had the same kind of sporting programs, the same kind of physical spaces, very similar schools. But when we spoke to the principals, there was a key difference between the two that swung us one way.

See, we were quite clear with them that Florence had been walking a very different path up until that point. That we had prioritised play, and imagination, and exploration, and experiences over desk work. That Florence had spent very little time doing the kind of academic work a school day is centered around. That we were confident she’d get up to speed with it all very quickly, but that they needed to know that this was not a kid moving from one school to another…this was a kid moving from one very different life paradigm to another.

The first of those school principals spoke to that in a way that felt like he would set about correcting that for us. Fixing it. He didn’t say those words specifically, but that was the clear impression both Kate and I independently took away from our conversation with him. That it would all be ok because they’d fix that for us.

The other principal, at the other school, spoke about it completely differently. She was so enthusiastic about how we’d approached life so far, so into it, and she thought that the experiences Florence had had - and the time she’d had soaking up her childhood - was a really positive thing, and that she had no doubt it would help her adjust to a different paradigm. That she’d be able to lean on her foundation. That it was a good thing.

So, obviously, those conversations made it very easy for us to pick that school. Because if the principal is talking that way, then that leadership would probably flow out to the teaching staff.

Which, of course, is the final thing we did - we asked to see what classroom Florence would be in, and meet who her teacher would be, and when we did she spoke about Florence’s journey and background in exactly the same kind of way. All very positive.

So there we have it - we started with three schools, and through a process whittled it down to one.

Now that we have a school, let’s talk about the preparation we put in, over what period of time. These discussions with Florence had started in late 2023, it would have been around October, and by the time we’d got to the point of visiting those different schools and locking in our final choice it would have been early December. So right at the end of the school year here in New Zealand. Which meant she wouldn’t be starting until after the Christmas break - which is quite long over here, because that’s our summer holiday period. Schools don’t start back up until the very end of January, even the start of February. So for Kate and I, that set a timer going for us - we had about 6 weeks to do whatever we decided we needed to do to help Florence prepare.

We broke that preparation down into a couple of areas:

1. Helping her get used to sitting at a desk, concentrating on traditional classroom style activities.
2. Making sure she felt confident enough with the formal side of reading and writing so that she didn’t feel like she was starting from zero there.

It’s worth saying that we didn’t really worry about preparing her for formal maths at all, our rationale being that - statistically - more than half her class, actually probably more than 60%, would be well behind where they were supposed to be anyway, with another decent block only just keeping up. Almost everyone in her new classroom would find maths a struggle, so, if she did, she’d just be part of the pack.

Some quick background on Florence’s reading and writing levels at this stage - where she had just turned 9. She was definitely not a fluent reader or writer back then. We had taken the same approach with her as we had with her older brothers, which was to steer clear of any formal reading and writing instruction until she was open and ready for it. Books have always been a huge part of our life, and I’m sure I’ve said it before in other episodes that reading to our younger kids every night is one of our non-negotiables. But we learned from our first two kids that you can very quickly suck the joy out of reading by trying to teach the mechanics of it too early. At the right time there are tools and techniques and things you can use to help a child develop the ability to de-code words, but the foundation for us has always been to just read to our kids as much as humanely possible. To model reading. To develop in them a love of stories, and words, and language first and foremost.

And so because of that, Florence had that massive love for books, and for stories. She just couldn’t sit down and read them herself yet. This tends to worry people. An 8 year old, turning 9, and still not able to read or write fluently. But I personally think we’ve got it around the wrong way. We obsess so much over getting kids reading and writing as early as we possibly can that it often takes the joy out of the experience. I think that if we were to help children find their way to reading and writing in their time, which is absolutely different from child to child, we’d help them build a more sustainable love for those things that stay with them throughout their life. In fact, among my episodes is a three part series on learning to read, and I share some statistics in there about the percentage of children who finish formal education with a true love for story. And those statistics are dire. So, we’ve always wanted to avoid that trap.

Our two older boys are perfect examples of our approach. Our eldest wanted to read right from the get-go. And between his keenness to do that, and our help, he was reading novels as a 5 year old. And that love for books has never waned. He’s 18 now, and still just devours them. He even writes his own.

But his brother - no way, not interested. He just did not want to engage in the act of reading himself. He loved stories - we read to him every day - but for whatever reason he just wasn’t ready to invest in the process of learning how to do it himself yet. But eventually he did, and it probably wasn’t until he was 9 or 10 that he really started to lean into it. And now, as a 15 almost 16 year old, he reads almost every day. He takes a book with him when we go to the beach. He writes in his journal regularly, unprompted by us.

Two very different paths, and - knowing his personality - if we had pushed the formal side of reading and writing on our second child, and ignored the fact he was telling us he wasn’t ready or interested yet just for the sake of hitting some arbitrary timeline, I have no doubt that we would have had him reading sooner but that we’d have taken the shine off it. That we would have turned it into something that had to be done, not something to love, and enjoy.

So back to Florence, she was very much the same as our second son there. She loved hearing stories, loved telling her own, but had not been at all interested in the mechanics of reading and writing up until that point.

But we knew that two worlds were about to collide a little bit, because a recently turned 9 year old sitting in a classroom not being able to read wasn’t going to work. So much of what happens in formal education requires it.

So. We had 6 weeks to help Florence nail the mechanics of reading and writing. And, at the same time, prepare for a change to a formal, mostly sedentary learning experience.

So what did those six weeks of preparation actually look like?

First, the reading and writing. After years of allowing Florence's natural timeline to unfold, we needed to do something we'd been very deliberately avoiding - push the formal mechanics of it all. But, as with everything else about this experience, we were really clear with her about why.

This wasn't some arbitrary 'you have to learn this now' thing. It was preparation for a very specific experience she wanted to have.

And because of that, because there was real purpose behind it, she embraced what was essentially a crash course in reading and writing. We built on all those years of bedtime stories, all those hours spent developing her love of words and rhythm and language, with some very traditionally formal approaches. Phonetics. Flash cards. Early reader books that we'd never bothered with before. Writing out words that tripped her up and doing the kind of rote memorisation we'd spent years steering clear of.

It wasn't her favourite thing in the world, it wasn’t our favourite thing in the world, but she understood why we were doing it. And that made a huge difference to how she approached it. And, of course, what she got out of it. Which was…something. I’m not going to say she was suddenly reading fluently in the space of 6 weeks, but she put in the work and was making solid progress in recognising words, and was definitely able to smash her way through all the early readers we had. She was practicing her writing every day, putting together some creative little stories, without any real fear of being wrong with spelling, or neatness…which to us, was really cool to see. But we also weren’t kidding ourselves - against the normal school standards, she was going to look a long way behind.

When the first day of school arrived, I think Kate and I felt more nervous than Florence did. After so many years of choosing a different path, of building a life around natural learning, walking through those school gates just felt so odd. Suddenly we were part of this highly organised system. The email newsletters started flowing. The reminders. The notices about this event and that activity. The rules around drop offs and pick ups, and lunches, and food options. The administration of it all felt kind of overwhelming.

But Florence? She surprised us. She was definitely full of nerves that morning, and she wanted one of us to stay for part of the day. But once she got into the classroom she settled in remarkably quickly. She made friends pretty much immediately - she carries herself with a natural confidence, she’s smiley, she has bright shining eyes, and she has no problems walking up to someone and saying “Hey, I’m Florence, want to play?”

So by the time we picked her up on that first day, she was buzzing with excitement about it all.

And I would say that novelty carried her through about the first week. Everything was new, everything was interesting, everything was a bit of an adventure. But of course, like any new experience, that shine eventually wore off. And that's when the real learning about school life began.

QUICK BREAK

If this episode is resonating, and you’re finding this podcast helpful, I release one like it every single week inside my Complete Life Without School Collection. These are highly focused, research-backed episodes that speak directly to the questions and challenges home educating families face. They’re designed to help you build an approach that actually works for your unique family.

It’s a paid subscription, because that’s what helps me keep doing this work — supporting families around the world through something grounded, well-researched, thoughtful, and genuinely useful every week. But it’s low cost, and it’s easy to cancel any time, so if this feels like the kind of support you could use every week - jump over to starkravingdadblog.com and make sure you’re signed up to get my emails. That’s where I send them out every week, and that’s where you’ll be able to join the complete collection. I’ll also link directly to it in the show notes for this episode, right there on my website.

I had an email from Jessica recently about the Collection, that really made me smile, so I want to share that quickly. She said:

“Thanks for all your content, it is SO helpful to me. You seem to strike that perfect balance between freedom and structure. I find that so difficult myself, so everything you share is just such a goldmine. I recently became a paying subscriber and, well, it's like running around in a candy store, stuffing my face.“

That is so, so good. Thanks Jessica, I’m glad you’re enjoying yourself in there. Right, let’s get back to this episode shall we?

/END BREAK

The first bump in the road was actually a social one. A small group of boys had decided they’d go out of their way to tease Florence, and call her a name. You know, being the new kid and all. They came up with the awful idea that she looked like a rat, and they made that as clear as they possibly could to her whenever they got the chance. Which, based on her tears the night of when it first started happening, was quite often. I know she held herself together in the moment, when it was happening, because she has this fierce determination in her, but the release would come every evening. Right on cue, at bedtime, tears and questions about why this would be happening and how she could make it stop.

At that stage, Kate and I were quite willing to throw out our rule of doing the whole term, because it was just awful, but Florence was insistent that she wanted to push through it. So she started employing some strategies that we’d talked about. To start with, she told her teacher, and the principal, and whatever teacher was on duty during lunchtimes when it happened. And, of course, those boys were always pulled aside and told off. But you know as well as I do that the impact of that telling off never lasts long. I mean, what’s the actual consequence? Nothing serious. Nothing very real. And besides, teachers can’t be everywhere, at all times.

So it kept happening.

In the end, after about a week of trying to ignore it, and trying to tell adults about it, she just took matters into her own hands. She stood up to them physically.

They just pushed her too far, I think - they were waiting for her to snap by running off and crying, but her version of snapping was squaring her body up to them, walking toward them, staring them down with her piercing blue eyes, and saying through gritted teeth and balled up fists, “You boys better back off and stay away from me”.

Florence is quite tall for her age, quite strong, and I think her karate journey has given her some confidence in her physicality. Not that she wanted a fight, and we wouldn’t have wanted her to take it to that, but that act of stepping forward to them exposed those boys for what they were. Which is just scared, insecure children trying to find a way to feel in control of something. And unfortunately, for some, that’s how that manifests.

Anyway, it had the effect she wanted - they stammered, and stuttered, and tried to say some big things as they walked away, but that was the end of it. Totally diffused. From then on, whenever she saw them, she stared them down with an icy look. And she never got any trouble from them again.

Now…we have to pause here a second. We can celebrate this as a win - and, for sure, Kate and I were extremely proud of our daughter for standing up against what she felt was an awful injustice. We were extremely proud of her taking matters into her own hands and just dealing with it. But the elephant in the room is…should our children really be having to go through these experiences. And do we believe - really believe - that this kind of thing is a positive in a child’s life? I know a lot of people would say that our daughter became more resilient through that experience. But, having watched it all play out, I would disagree. Even after the situation had cooled off, she was affected by it. She carried the impact of it for a long time. Even months later, she occasionally still brought it up. And none of it feels like it’s added something to her life in a good way. It’s trauma that she’s had to process and reconcile and compartmentalise. No one will ever convince me that that’s a healthy, necessary part of a child’s development. It felt like some kind of awful prison initiation you see in a movie, where the new inmate isn’t respected until they fight back. And for the rest of my life I will feel awful knowing that she had to go through that, whenever I think about it.

Now, while we’re talking about the social side, we need to talk about her friend groups. Because she just couldn’t get her head around why they shifted and changed so much. Why such and such would never be friends with so and so, until three days later, when actually, such and such WAS now friends with so and so. Oh, but we can’t be friends with HER any more…actually, wait, we ARE friends with HER now, but not HER…it drove her crazy. She just couldn’t understand why all the kids couldn’t get along, or if they didn’t, just leave each other be. We could see that she was processing an incredibly jarring experience. A very unnatural social environment. And that theme just continued all the way through.

Look - the social side of school has some positives. You do get to hang out with other kids all day, and go and play in the playground every lunchtime…but overall it felt extremely forced and unhealthy. Kate and I both had constant flashbacks to our own childhoods. And Florence - who was old enough, and conditioned enough to natural, organic social interactions, never found a way to reconcile all those dynamics in her mind.

<BREAK>

Ok, so that’s the social piece. And, honestly, having lived through it alongside Florence the less said about it the better. But what about academics? What about that visceral fear that, oh no, she is going to be so, so far behind her peers, and it’s going to disadvantage her big time.

Well, yes, her reading was most definitely behind the standard. As we knew. And she was pulled into a remedial catchup stream so they could work with her to try and close the gap. But the interesting thing was - that remedial stream wasn’t a very small group. There were a lot of kids getting extra help with their reading. And it was Florence who came home with an extremely interesting observation. She said, and I quote pretty verbatim here:

“No one else seems to want to learn. We’re there to get better at reading, which I know I need to do to be able to read the worksheets and project books and stuff, so why is everyone in my group just mucking around? Don’t they want to learn?”

And if that’s not the most insightful takedown of the idea of benchmarks, and pushing children to them and beyond them before they’re ready, I don’t know what is.

See, Florence has a pretty good handle on autonomy and agency and internal motivation. If she’s not inspired to do something, it’s going to be hard work. But if she is - if she decides that she needs to put her mind to something for some good reason, then she’s into it. She’s underway. She’s focused, and present, and progress happens. But these other kids - there was nothing internally driven about why they were being caught up. They’d been in the system since day one, and most of their purpose - to them, at least - seemed to be external. So, ironically, they made barely any progress at all. Florence, sitting alongside them, raced along. And then she was done, and out of that remedial group. Back into the pack.

On the math side, even without any formal lessons at all, Florence was probably in about the middle of her class in terms of comprehension and ability. These other kids had had three or four years of formal math tuition, week after week, and she was in the middle of the pack. Sure, there were some absolute math whizzes at the top. But they were the ones who wanted to be. Spot the trend - you can’t force learning. If a child is interested, they’ll move forward. If they’re not, it’s going to be a real struggle.

Interestingly, Florence’s summary of the desk work she had to do was…boring. That part of school drove her crazy. She’d come home and say uggghhh, I feel like I’ve just been sitting all day. And so she was hardly ever tired at bedtime. Way, way too much energy still in the tank yet to be burned. But it was more manic energy. She was no longer burning it as and when her natural rhythms suggested she should, she was bottling it up against a schedule…and only opening the lid at certain times. Again, she found that aspect jarring, and unnatural. And like all things, it’s SO interesting to look at this experience through the eyes of a child. Because they tend to see things pretty fresh. They don’t come at it with all the preconceptions and assumptions and bias that we as adults do. And so I’ll say it again - she felt that SO much of her schooling experience was jarring, and unnatural.

So to summarise on the academic side - and there really isn’t much more to go into there, she did math, and reading, and writing, and some fun little projects, and some projects she found really boring - but otherwise, that was kind of it. She wasn’t impossibly behind, she wasn’t way ahead, she was just…somewhere in the middle.

But socially, and as a person who knows themself, she was way ahead. In her first week, she volunteered to help in the library. She made friends with a girl in a wheelchair, someone the other kids often avoided, and helped her out in whatever way she could. She made friends with the teachers. She connected with the principal, who thought she was great. She went on a three day school camp not long after walking into that classroom for the first time. She got stuck into every opportunity she could, connected with everyone she could.

But in the end, she just couldn’t reconcile what real life had been like with this scheduled, curated, artificial space. It didn’t feel natural, it didn’t feel real, and it didn’t feel authentic to how she wanted to spend her time, and to grow.

So, at the end of our agreed term of school, 10 weeks, she told us over that school holiday break that she was done. She’d given it a really good shot, and had enjoyed aspects of it here and there, but overall just felt that it was not a type of lifestyle she was enjoying. And, as parents having walked the path with her for a few months, with our hearts feeling like they were outside of our own bodies the whole time, we 100% agreed. She genuinely was not thriving like she was before. We knew it, and most importantly, she knew it.

I want to read part of a note Florence’s teacher gave us on her last day. And I quote completely verbatim this time:

“It has been such a pleasure to get to know Florence. She is a delight to have in the classroom and we will all miss her so much. I am in awe of her and how she has adapted to our noisy classroom. She was amazing at school camp. To have only just met these children and adults, to come away with us and try all those activities and give everything a go. Nothing has been a bother to her. If she is keen, we would love to have her as a pen pal to the class, she can send us updates and we can write back to her.

Florence has such a fabulous attitude, and she will do great things. I’m really going to miss having her in the classroom.”

It needs to be said that Florence absolutely ADORED her teacher. And so did we. She was the best possible teacher you could imagine. She was kind, and patient, but firm when she needed to be. She didn’t fuss over small things, she was fun to be around, and she made the kids laugh. And, most importantly from our perspective as parents, she definitely had never drunk the formal education benchmark koolaid. She very clearly saw Florence for who she was, for the strengths she had, not as gaps to be filled in.

And I guess that makes our experience even more conclusive. If this is the experience in a good school, with good funding, a good principal, and good teachers…then that’s the gold standard. And it fell far, far short of Florence’s expectations.

One more thing, before we wrap up, because I’m sure you’re wondering about it because it was the whole driver for trying school in the first place, and I haven’t mentioned once it since. Sports. What happened? How did that all go? Well, it was a bit of let down actually. She played a term of futsal, which is like indoor soccer, and I coached her team which was a fun experience. But that was 40 minutes, once a week. No practices, because - yep, you guessed it - that would interfere with the children’s learning time. But her real goal was to play hockey in the winter. I played it at a representative level as a teenager, and she was excited to give it a shot. But, after registering for a team, paying our season subs, saying that I would help out as a coach or however I could be useful, and getting all excited…we got an email one week out from when the first game should have been saying there weren’t enough numbers to fill a whole team. That anyone wanting to play would have to combine with another school. How ironic that, after all of this, we would come full circle right back to the problem we faced in the very beginning.

<CLOSING MUSIC>

Walking through those school gates with Florence that first morning, I felt this heavy, heavy weight. A huge amount of uncertainty. Not just about whether this was the right decision for her, but about everything we believed about learning and childhood. Because it's one thing to look at the school system from the outside and see its flaws. It's another thing entirely to live it from the inside.

I had attended school as a child. So had Kate. We’d then had another time of immersion in it before we had kids, when Kate was a primary school teacher. And then we’d had another go when our boys were young, and spent some time at school. But prior to Florence trying things out, it had been many, many years since we’d stepped foot on a school ground. So it was actually a really valuable experience to get a refresher, an up to date look at things. And I guess, predictably, unsurprisingly, some surface level things were different, but really, everything was still the same.

What we saw, what we went through, didn't just confirm our thoughts and feelings and beliefs about choosing a life without school. It deepened them. Strengthened them. Because through Florence's eyes, we got to see just how unnatural that environment really is for most children. And I really do mean most. How it asks them to suppress their natural rhythms, their curiosity and interests, their need for movement and freedom and authentic connection and agency and autonomy.

We met wonderful teachers doing their absolute best within a system that constrains them as much as it does the children. But watching Florence try and work with those constraints - watching her try to fit her bright, curious spirit into those rigid boxes - it was just so, so clear that this is not how children are meant to learn and grow. It is ok as a backup option if you really need it, but I cannot understand how we could ever see it as a first choice, or as a gold standard. Certainly not any more, in the day and age we’re now living in.

For those of you wrestling with doubts about your decision to home educate, I hope sharing our experience helps you feel more secure in your choice. Your instincts about what your children need? Trust them. That desire to protect their natural love of learning? Honour it. The work you're doing to create a different kind of childhood for your kids matters so much, and it really is a massive contrast to the formal path.

Because what we're really protecting isn't our children's education. It’s their spirit. Their true being. Their sense of self. Their natural connection to learning and living and growing in ways that are true to who they are.

And that is worth protecting with everything we've got.

Thank you so much for tuning in to listen today, and - if you’re ready to sign up to those weekly episodes - I’ll see you over there to dig into all the things you folks have asked us about Florence’s experience.

Take care, ok - bye for now.