Auckland teacher couple Sean and Becki Patterson with their sons Donovan and Atlee who are entering into homeschooling. Photo / Annaleise Shortland
As students head back to school for 2026, more than 11,000 will be taking their lessons at home. The Herald on Sunday spoke to families about what modern homeschooling looks like.
Auckland couple Sean and Becki Patterson are teachers, and both have worked for the Ministry of Education, but they’re choosing not to send their kids to school. This might seem contradictory, but it’s a decision not made lightly.
At their home near Orewa Beach, the couple are creating a classroom and playground for their 5-year-old child Donovan. There is a music room full of scattered instruments and outside a garden, where Donovan has planted flowers and strawberries, as part of his lessons.
Throughout her career in education, Becki has focused on the emotional development of primary school age children, and for her it’s vital that learning is playful and joyful in its early stages.
That means being outdoors in nature and for Donovan to have an active role in choosing the direction of his learning through activities such as doing maths problem solving while baking a recipe in the kitchen.
Rich, music-filled lessons will also be a part of his education as Sean spent most of his youth touring in a band and is passionate about playing with Donovan and his younger brother Atlee and teaching them the drums.
“I think it’s so important that they grow their motivation and their belief in themselves before we start ticking boxes and standardising the process,” Becki says.
“Up until recently there was a huge focus on play-based learning even right through senior school ... then in the last couple of years structured literacy and prescribed programmes and textbooks have really come back, and it’s like this pendulum swing between the different styles over time.”
Sean says his drive to homeschool comes from wanting to spend more time with his children and because he and Becki have the skills and knowledge of the New Zealand curriculum to do it successfully.
Becki left fulltime primary school teaching in 2019 and has completed specialist study in holistic education and wellness while working for Massey University, supporting student teachers across the primary and tertiary sector. Sean has been a primary school teacher for more than four years but is now teaching part time as well as doing relief teaching.
Ministry of Education operations and integration leader Helen Hurst says anecdotally, families are choosing home education for a range of reasons such as aligning schooling with family values or to support a child’s wellbeing where school hasn’t been a positive environment. Another motivation is where a child has poor health, special circumstances or lives in a remote area.
Mental health occupational therapist and mum Dacia Davison says the decision to homeschool her three children came from a deep, niggling feeling she had during pregnancy about returning to work.
The idea of putting her kids into day care and primary school, being more strung out, and having to condense all their family time until after 5pm, seemed wrong.
She has two boys and a girl between the ages of 2 and 7.
“It felt so inauthentic to the life I want to live,” Dacia says.
“Learning about homeschooling, it felt like, okay there is another way. We decided we wanted to figure out how to make it work, to have our kids at home and have balance, and to have this lifestyle where we can be involved in our careers and in our kids’ education.
“It was about the freedom, the flexibility and the family time; we didn’t want to have to just squeeze that into weekends. So, for us it really started out as just following our intuition.”
Her husband, Quint Davison, also works part time for the Ministry of Education as a principal procurement specialist, and together they decided to juggle their careers while taking turns teaching the kids.
Seven years on, the family has been living in a caravan for six weeks while they finish building their home. The children’s lessons and education have been taking place while sightseeing around the North Island, going for swims and spending lots of time outdoors while both parents work remotely.
“The coolest thing is just the freedom to decide what you want to do each day, to be spontaneous,” Dacia says.
“A lot of the week is structured with activities but other times it can be just like, what do you want to do today? Do you want to go to the beach or the nature park? My son is really into remote control cars, and he’s been able to build and repair them to a depth he wouldn’t have if he’d been at school all day. So really diving into their interests.”
Sean says he is not against the public education system but has a vision of the curriculum he would like to teach his sons, and both he and Becki are concerned the strain teachers are under limits the time they have for students.
Donovan’s learning will include parts of structured literacy and maths, and Sean says they are trying to achieve a hybrid of the traditional curriculum and other activities such as writing lessons in the sand on the beach.
“We wouldn’t be working in the system if we thought there was no hope there,” Sean says.
“We’ll be doing things that would happen in the classroom, because we can see the merit in things like structured literacy.
“It’s just dangerous if there’s too much chalk and talk.”
Dacia says schools do not have enough resources or funding and are limited in what they can provide to each individual student.
“I don’t want to demonise the school system. I think it will always need to exist. However, I do think we have accepted a system that was created with efficiency and productivity at the forefront,” she says.
“I don’t think it’s inherently bad to have a school structure and a school system. We wanted to give our kids the opportunity to not have to fit into a structure, to be individuals and play as much as they want to play, to learn whatever they’re interested in and curious about.”
Homeschooling is often criticised for not giving children enough exposure to socialisation with peers.
Sean says he wants to make sure Donovan will be able to spend enough time gaining friendships through extracurricular activities and the network of homeschooling families in their area.
The couple are also looking to start up a business, Balance and Bloom – a holistic-style one-day-a-week class at their home to bridge a gap for children going into school or for the homeschooling community who might want more time in nature.
Dacia says over the years their family has been homeschooling they’ve built up a strong community of friends through activities such as taekwondo and dance class, but she also disputes the idea that children in classrooms are getting a deeper level of socialisation.
“The kids also live life with us, so they’re out in the community and the type of socialisation is much more real world. So, they might be talking to the teller at the grocery store and asking them questions,” Dacia says.
Senior child and adolescent clinical psychologist Sarah Watson says the heightened sensory levels of classroom environments can be too bright, loud and intense for neurodiverse students, and if they struggle with adjustments to structure having relievers or changes to their learning timetable can bring up feelings of distress or discomfort.
Homeschooling is an option Watson often discusses with families if their child has been struggling for a while in the mainstream system.
However, Watson says, it’s also tricky. For example, if an anxious child doesn’t learn how to cope with their anxiety by putting themselves out there and testing the anxiety’s truth, then they potentially can remain withdrawn and anxious and unable to extend themselves.
“We’ve had this big change from single-cell classrooms to modern learning environments which are huge, it is such a sensory overstimulating environment when there’s 70 children versus 28,” Watson says.
“With homeschooling there is just a lot more flexibility that can be afforded for a child and it can take the pressure off which can decrease distress.”
A Ministry of Education spokesperson said there was an increase in homeschooling applications in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2021, 1858 new students entered homeschooling, and the following year that number more than doubled to 4342 students.
Watson says the impact on children during the Covid period greatly varied because everyone coped differently with the change of not going to school each day, but some students did discover home was an ideal learning environment.
“During Covid, there were a number who loved being at home, just loved it. Not having any of those demands on them and having to get in the car or bus to go to school and to have to socialise, or be around all those people,” she says.
“And then coming back was so hard because it was a massive transition because our lockdown, especially in Auckland, was so long.”
The Ministry of Education is currently projecting there will be 11,179 students in homeschooling in 2026, with a slight increase from 11,010 students in 2025.
Parents who are committed to homeschooling see the benefits as outweighing the additional pressure being a fulltime teacher alongside parenting may add to their lives.
“You definitely have to like being around your kids all day,” Dacia says.
“Also, you must be willing to be highly self-reflective. It’s a very humbling experience because you’re constantly faced with, okay how could I do this better or plan for this to go more smoothly.”
Donovan is gleeful and brimming with excitement as he shows off his newly-planted garden and learning environment at home.
It’s the start of a fresh chapter for him as he begins his first day at school without stepping out of his backyard.
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