This episode is a delightful doubleheader with Holly & Gemma, sisters who live 6 minutes apart in Queensland’s capital city where they homeschool three girls between them. You may already know their cheery voices from their podcast Sisters Who Homeschool, of which I had the pleasure of being a guest on earlier this year. I loved reconnecting with these ladies and diving deeper into their stories of how and why they came to choose home education for their families. You will also hear us discuss Canaries in the Coalmine - Teachers who Choose to Homeschool, Gemma’s new book which is due out next year, creating a micro village, prioritising mental wellbeing and connection, why none of us like the word ‘resilient’, granny hobbies, interest based learning and busting homeschool myths.
This is Episode 36 of Australian Homeschool Stories - Holly & Gemma’s Stories.
Summary:
Gemma & Holly’s family migrated from the UK to Australia when they were young children. They grew up in South Australia, attending the same mainstream school as one another but not at the same time due to their age gap as sisters.
They recall that their fairly typical 90s/00s schooling experience went something along the lines of…
“You go to school and you get a good job and your learning starts and ends at school.” They weren’t encouraged to explore their interests and passions outside of that.
Gemma remembers the big careers book they were presented with towards the pinnacle of their high school education and feeling daunted by it.
“I’m not allowed to drive and you are asking me to pick out what I want to do with the rest of my life?”
Holly came out lost and confused from the education system and only found her passions and interests as an adult. Gemma followed in other family members footsteps and went into teaching.
She recalls how the system has changed a lot for teachers since she began her career. She loved teaching, up until a point and then started to feel the burn out.
There is a movement of teachers leaving the profession and taking their children with them to homeschool.
“While I might have felt like the only one doing it at the time, it was a big leap of faith, leaving what you'd studied and what you believed in with your child to homeschool. Turns out I'm not the only one and it's happening quite a lot. And there's enough data there to write a book about it.”
Canaries in the Coal Mine: Teachers Who Choose to Homeschool will be published in 2025.
“And we've called it that because we think the teachers who are choosing to do that, to leave their career with their child to homeschool, are the early warning indicators, much like a canary, that something deeply rooted is wrong with the current education system.”
Holly’s eldest daughter completed prep and year one in South Australia. She always thought her daughter would do well in school but she struggled trying to fit into the rigid structure and environment. She could see that she had a passion to learn but it wasn't being nurtured.
They decided to move closer to family in Queensland and to give her daughter a 6 month break from school while they resettled in a new state. They joined their local Wildlings Forest School group and found beautiful community to connect with instantly. Seeing her daughter’s creativity squashed and her stress levels soar, to watching her children play for hours in the natural world, ignited something within Holly and she knew they could never go back.
“Instead of trying to find a way for it to work for our family, I just stood back and went, no, this is actually where we're supposed to be at. This is the community we're supposed to be a part of. Everything else will hopefully work itself out.”
“It took a lot of trust and a lot of time for me to really develop confidence in saying, we're actually not sending her back. We've actually decided to continue homeschooling. But it was the best decision we ever made. And here we are six years later and my daughters are just thriving in this homeschooling environment.”
When Holly first told Gemma she was going to homeschool, she was really supportive of it, and watching the effect it had on her nieces and how they blossomed in this lifestyle gave her confidence when the time came for her to make a similar leap with her daughter.
Together their families have become a micro-village. They carpool to co-ops and activities and if one of them has to work, the other can step in.
There's so much flexibility in homeschooling. We can take days out to rest our bodies and our spirits.
Holly’s why = emotional health and wellbeing.
“Often, if we've got a big day, we'll plan to have a rest day afterwards to really go with the flow of my girls and their emotional needs”
Gemma’s why = connection
"Now that we homeschool, that connection is so much deeper than it could ever possibly be.”
“One of the things I've grown to hate is the saying ‘children are resilient’. I actually don't believe it to be true. I wholeheartedly do not believe children are resilient. I believe children learn to mask, children learn to tuck it away, children hold onto that, whether it's a tiny little bit of trauma that slowly builds up, other little things get added to the bucket or it's something that stays with them long term and it comes out at some point in their life later on.”
Gemma felt confident taking the leap of faith into homeschooling having already seen the success that Holly had had with her girls.
“We said, I don't know if it's forever. I don't know if it's temporary. But we're making a change. Now we say we'll never go back.”
“We have this really deep, deep connection that I'm sorry to say, I don't think parents who don't homeschool have.”
Why Holly & Gemma started their own podcast:
“We wanted to continue to connect and create a space for community and telling stories, as well as a space for people to connect and really ground themselves in knowing this is absolutely something that you can do. We're here to be that voice in your corner saying that you can absolutely do this and then just share our experiences, in all honesty and all its gloriousness, all the sides of homeschooling so that other people hopefully feel validated in their experience as well and feel like they've got someone who's also going through this experience.”
Holly’s favourite self care practices are granny hobbies - sewing, gardening, a good book and a cup of tea. Gemma is a fan of infrared saunas, early nights and audiobooks.
They’ve found that interest-based learning works well for both of their families. It allows the children to have autonomy and they can follow their lead on finding an idea or topic to focus their learning around each term.
“I can authentically say that my child has a true, authentic, child-led educational experience.”
“It's really not hard to find things to focus on because I think you'll find as things naturally occur, conversations you have in day-to-day life, you'll see those little interests get sparked and ignited. And that's the best part of it. It's such a privilege to be part of that journey.”
My favourite question Gemma & Holly put to me when I was on their podcast was, what’s one myth about homeschooling you’d like to bust? So I thought it would be fun to turn this question back on them.
“Schooling does not have to happen nine till three, Monday to Friday. That is what we have been fed for years and that has been made by the system and that is not how children learn. We can learn early in the morning. We can learn in the afternoon. We can learn on the couch. We have done learning from bed when we haven't felt like much but we wanted to do something. And so learning can happen any day of the week for as little or as long as we want to.”
“In homeschooling they are exposed to so many different people of different ages, of community, of everything around them. And my girls are so confident in approaching all ages and interacting with all ages. I know that that’s, again, an experience that would not have happened in the mainstream system when they are in classrooms grouped by age.”
Gemma & Holly share their best advice for those curious about or just beginning their own homeschooling journeys:
“Allow yourself time. It takes time to unlearn and relearn all that you know to take this path. It will not be this beautiful, picture perfect, homeschool life straight away, especially if you're leaving the mainstream system. It will be a very different experience. I think honestly just taking time out to really connect again is the most important step of the homeschooling process and not jumping into curriculums or jumping onto Pinterest to see what beautiful setups other people have.”
“It doesn't have to be permanent. Nothing in life is permanent. If you want to give homeschooling a go, do it. You can return to mainstream school. … but I will say you need to give it at least six months to truly decide if it’s for you, not five weeks and then return, it really needs to be a good chunk of time to allow for that de-schooling process which is so incredibly important.”
Recommendations
I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest with You by Miranda Hart
Bread Song by
Unschooling: Exploring Learning Beyond the Classroom by Gina Riley
The Homeschooling Starter Guide by Gina Riley
Harbor and Sprout - Homeschool Curriculum and Unit Studies
Sisters Who Homeschool - Episode 21: Steph’s Story
Connect
Sisters Who Homeschool podcast
Instagram - @sisterswhohomeschool
hello.sisterswhohomeschool@gmail.com
This podcast is recorded on the lands of the Bunurong people of the Kulin nation. I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge that sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be aboriginal land.
Original Music by Daniel Garrood @garroodcomposer
Listen on Spotify here
Australian Homeschool Stories the podcast can be heard on all major podcast streaming platforms.
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