HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

Some (slightly) out-of-date stats proclaim a problem in education in the UK. I seriously doubt that the situation has improved, nor that the situation in Australia is indeed much better.
Hence the explosion in homeschooling.

An official report in 1999 claimed one in five adults could not find the entry for “plumbers” in a telephone directory and that innumeracy was even more widespread. A 1998 Gallup Poll indicated only 56 per cent of the adult population could identify the Queen as the British head of state.[2] A Basic Skills Agency report calculated 24 per cent of the population was functionally illiterate and innumerate. Showing how seriously the government took this, the Minister for Schools, Jim Knight, responsible for class-room standards, published a short letter on his website in 2009, claiming “there is [sic] also a lot of positive things going on in our schools”, which contained several basic spelling and grammatical errors, including “archealogical”, “acheiving” and “maintainence”.

I was at a homeschooling 'collective excursion' yesterday and learned that homeschoolers in South Australia make up the biggest 'school group' in the state. And that reflects only the ones who have registered...many do not. A few of the non-registered parents/caregivers are loons, others just old-fashioned rebels, but most homeschooling parents are dedicated to good education and spare no effort in obtaining both the materials and the opportunities to provide the very best for their children. When one reflects on the above statistics, it becomes difficult to argue for the alternative.

Fortunately there remains a significant cohort of dedicated, moral teachers who treat teaching as a calling rather than a mere job, and if your family has no options but schooling, send them to schools where these teachers are the norm. They exist, you just have to do your homework and pay the price.