Heidi and Will Schmidt made the decision to homeschool their children, Archie, 14, Isla, 12, Corban, 5, Honor, 10 and Gigi, 8.
When Heidi Schmidt’s eldest turned 5 she didn’t think he was ready for school so she started homeschooling.
“I thought, no, we’ll just play it by ear for the first year. By the time he was 6 it was a no-brainer,” the Riverhead mum said.
“He was well into reading and writing. At 6 he read The Hobbit. He was really into it and he was already taking learning by the horns and going for it himself.”
Now Schmidt, a trained teacher, homeschools all five of her children, aged 5 to 14, while her husband, Will, works from home as an app developer.
The Schmidt children are among 10,817 Kiwi kids who were being homeschooled at the start of June.
The number of families choosing to educate their own children has skyrocketed over the last few years - only 6573 children were being homeschooled on July 1, 2019.
While the number of homeschoolers has been slowly rising since 2006 the biggest increase came during the Covid pandemic when the number jumped from 7613 in June 2021 to 10,704 a year later.
In November 2021 alone, there were 784 homeschool applications approved by the Ministry of Education.
The number of homeschooled children has continued to increase this year but the number of new approvals is headed back to pre-Covid levels.
Those in the homeschool community say, for many, Covid lockdowns were simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Cynthia Hancox, home education consultant and National Council of Home Educators of NZ government liaison, said surveys over the last three years revealed families were choosing to homeschool to create a closer family unit, keep family values central, provide a higher quality tailored education and to avoid problems like bullying and peer pressure.
“Some want to provide a faith-based education and some have had special needs not being met at school. When we asked them, ‘Did Covid and the Covid response play a factor in the decision to homeschool?’ 13 per cent said yes and all the rest said no.”
A lot of the families she had spoken to had been considering homeschooling for years and lockdown showed them it was possible.
“Those lockdown periods gave them an up-close look at what their child’s education looked like and it also gave some families an opportunity to see that learning at home with their children had many positives as well.
“Stepping into home education, it’s a big thing. There’s quite a lot involved in it and families don’t do it lightly.”
Hancox said many parents had “big concerns” with the current school system including declining academic achievement; the ideology being promoted through topics like relationships and sexuality education; the changes coming through in the new NCEA assessments, curriculum refresh and common practice model; and their child’s own experience of school.
Home Schooling NZ principal Todd Roughton described Covid as a “blip” and said many families who only made the change to get through the restrictions had already gone back to traditional schools.
He agreed there was a group of parents who had continued homeschooling because they “had no idea how low standards were” until lockdown.
For others, their children were reluctant to go back to the school environment, while some found their children learned better without the distractions at school. Others enjoyed the time together as a family and wanted to continue that, he said.
But, Roughton believed the three main reasons for making the swap had not changed: “appalling academics”, “socialisation issues” and “the social engineering agenda”.
Ironically, the first thing people raised when homeschooling came up was the supposed lack of socialisation and the stereotype of awkward children who could not relate to their peers, he said.
Roughton said home-educated students often had the best social skills and were used to interacting with people of all ages, not just their peer group.
Schmidt - whose school day runs from 9am to 2pm most days - says her kids told her the best thing about homeschooling was the number of groups you could join, although that luxury was not always available in smaller towns, she said.
“We have co-ops everywhere. Parents get together and they teach science classes, they teach extra maths classes, writing, art, sports - there’s so much available.”
With those groups came plenty of socialisation opportunities where any anti-social behaviour was dealt with quickly by parents.
“You get a sense of the village raising the child,” she said.
Being able to be flexible in your schedule and avoid the morning rush of school drop-offs and traffic was another benefit, said Schmidt, who was homeschooled herself.
“I have some extremely creative people who kind of get the creative juices flowing late and so they’ll be up late creating craft and making things and then they need to sleep in,” she said.
“There’s a huge range of benefits but the thing the kids have all said is there’s freedom to pursue passions and time to pursue interests and you’re not necessarily boxed in by age.”
The downside to homeschooling was the need to survive on a single income, the extra effort required to seek out extracurricular activities that are often offered at schools and the cost of both activities and curriculums, Schmidt said.
“And your house is always a mess.”
Schmidt admitted it was not always easy but said it paid off in the end.
“Having grown up being homeschooled and having siblings being homeschooled - we’re all really close.
Her kids were the same, she said, although being together all the time came with its challenges too.
“You have that chance to see each other at your best and worst, but also to apologise and seek forgiveness. You don’t have the option of just avoiding.”
“There are hundreds of thousands of curriculum options and every family’s approach and flavour is a little bit different,” Hancox said.
Some families used an all-in-one curriculum, others would pick and choose for different subjects while some didn’t follow any curriculum at all.
Roughton said when families signed up as part of HSNZ children did a diagnostic test to see what age level they were at for core subjects.
They then helped families select the right courses, which often involved a “mix and match” of different providers.
Schmidt follows a curriculum for maths but otherwise relies on the Charlotte Mason philosophy, which sees the family spend a good part of the day reading aloud.
The family will read widely on a topic and then the kids will write about what they’ve read, she said.
“I don’t think it matters so much what’s directly in the curriculum as long as there’s engagement and a love for learning.”
With their eldest reaching his senior years, the family are starting to think about life after school.
Students can study towards NCEA, Cambridge, the American SATs or use the Christian Education New Zealand Certificate, which can accredit a range of courses and provide students with University Entrance.
In Archie’s case, he wants to pursue a trade and is already doing work experience so is unlikely to work towards a formal academic qualification.
Hancox said the majority of students would work towards one of those formal qualifications but it was important to remember they were a means to an end, not an end in itself.
Others chose to just do a bridging course before university or get a trades apprenticeship instead, she said.
It was that ability to tailor qualifications to meet the goals of students that was another benefit of home education, she said.
Roughton said the New Zealand homeschooling community had been growing long before Covid hit and he believed the rate of acceleration was increasing as it became “common knowledge that there was such a thing as viable homeschooling”.
He believed the problems with the country’s school system were systemic and said the whole system needed to be restructured.
Hancox believed that homeschooling was becoming more normal as people were more exposed to it and aware of it as an option.
“The more people actually get to know people who are homeschooling, the more they see the benefits of it. It’s like anything that’s sort of newish or different - people question or have doubts about what they don’t understand.”
Schmidt had already noticed an increase in those interested in homeschooling among those she knew.
“It’s just sort of a circle of influence. If all the people you meet do a certain thing, you become the next one.
“Popularity is inspirational.”
Amy Wiggins is an Auckland-based reporter who covers education. She joined the Herald in 2017 and has worked as a journalist for 12 years.
Firefighters remain at the scene two days later dealing with flare-ups.