Home-schooling

Until then, for many of Australia’s four million students, school is at home – but it’s not home-schooling per se. “Home-schooling is when you make, or buy, your own curriculum,” says Rebecca English, a professor at Queensland University of Technology’s faculty of education. “[These families] are simply facilitating their children’s learning at home.”

Home-schooling — an all-encompassing term that describes various forms of learning at home, in cooperative settings or online — is not exactly the same thing as distance learning.

Parish’s journey into home-schooling began in 2008, when she was pregnant with her second child and her eldest was entering kindergarten.

Many politically powerful conservatives promote home-schooling as a way to undercut or weaken the influence of public schools, and to shield their children from the liberalism they believe public schools foster.