Episode 27:How do I KNOW home education is working?

In this episode, I’m unpacking one of the biggest questions home educating families face: how do I know this whole thing is actually working?

I explore:

• Why the “gaps” in your child’s learning might be their greatest strength.
• How traditional benchmarks can (no, will) hold your child back.
• What real signs of growth and progress look like, and how to spot them.

If you’ve ever found yourself second-guessing your approach, or wondering if your child is learning enough without all the usual school structures, this episode will give you clarity, encouragement, and a completely new way of making sure you're on track.

Show Notes

You'll find all my weekly episodes right here (as of today, there's over 8 hours of listening that's not available anywhere else).

And here's the episode I mention on genuinely preparing your kids for adulthood (it's one of my favourites yet).

Transcript

INTRO

Helloooo and welcome to the Life Without School podcast - here to help you and your children live the life you want, not just the one you're told you should.

I'm Issy, a home educating dad from New Zealand. If you’re enjoying this podcast, and want weekly episodes just like this one, go to starkravingdadblog.com and make sure I have your email address. I share a new episode to my full Life Without School Collection every single week.

Thank you so much for tuning in today, let’s do this.

/INTRO

Hi there.

Good morning, afternoon, evening - wherever and whenever it is that you’ve found a quiet moment to tune in today.

If you’ve been home educating for a while - or even if you’ve just begun - I’m guessing you’ve probably asked yourself a question that most of us circle back to again and again:

How do I know this is actually working?

Because you’ve chosen a different path. One without the usual checkpoints. No school reports arriving in your inbox. No parent-teacher interviews. No standardised tests to tell you your child is on track.

So what do most of us do in those moments when we start to feel that worry, or doubt?

Well, we reach for the only measures we know:

• Are they reading and writing at the “right” level?
• Are they doing enough math, science, history?
• Are we keeping pace with where they “should” be?

But if you’ve ever tried to overlay those traditional benchmarks onto your home educating lifestyle, you’ll know it doesn’t feel quite right. These things feel clunky, limiting, a bit jarring when you’re living a life without school.

Which, of course, only deepens the worry, and makes the question grow even louder.

How do I know this is actually working?

So that’s what today’s episode is about.

It won’t be just fluffy reassurance.

And I want to give you something much more useful than ticking boxes or chasing benchmarks.

We’re going to explore how to tell—really tell—when learning and growth are happening, and when progress is being made in ways that actually matter.

You’ll come away with a much clearer sense of what to look for, what to notice, and what really counts, so you can feel more certain that you’re on the right track, even without all the usual measuring sticks.

We’re going to talk through and unpack three things, so there will be three main parts to this episode:

First, we’ll talk about the fear of gaps in our child’s learning - and why they’re not actually a weakness, but a strength.

Second, we’ll talk about the pressure to measure - and how that pressure, ironically, holds a child back.

And then third, we’ll talk about the need for a roadmap - and how to build one that’s clear, flexible, and tailored to your family.

By the end of this episode, you’ll have a whole new perspective on whether or not home education is actually working well for your child, and how to make sure it is.

<MUSIC>

Part one: Why the ‘gaps’ in your child’s education might just be their greatest advantage

Let’s get straight to the point here - these gaps we all worry about, that we hear so much about, that we see sensationalised in the media all the time - they’re not a flaw. They’re actually the whole point.

Let me show you what I mean. We’ve all been conditioned to think of education like building a wall.

Every brick is carefully laid in order - math, science, writing, history. Every gap filled. Every crack along the way nicely patched. Brick, by brick, until we have - at the end - this strong, impenetrable, unbreakable, wall of knowledge.

And when we step outside the formal system - when we start following a more natural rhythm - our wall starts to look quite different. There seem to be gaps and holes everywhere. And there’s a stack of bricks sitting on a pallet over that haven’t even been touched. When are we going to get those cemented in? And when we look forward, we picture a wall at the end that couldn’t be further from being strong and unbreakable. We picture something riddled with holes, ready to crumble down into a pile of dust in the slightest breeze.

And to be clear, this worry about learning gaps isn't just in your head - it's reinforced by nearly every conversation about education in our culture.

The truth is, though, that the deepest, most lasting learning - and the mastery that comes from that - never happens when we try to cover absolutely everything. It happens in the spaces where you’re free to be. Free to spend more time. Free to go all the way down into something meaningful.

The system calls that a gap.

I call it an opening.

And to start, I want to use some real life examples to help illustrate what I mean. Obviously these examples are all at the extreme end of all this, but they should give you a really good feel for how we should be re-framing this gap nonsense.

When Ed Sheeran was a teenager, while most kids were rotating through math, science, and geography lessons, he was living music. He wasn’t dabbling; he was obsessed. He played every open mic night he could find, he wrote songs every day, he busked on street corners, he honed his craft in tiny pubs and played to empty rooms. He didn’t stop to make sure he was “keeping up” with algebra or history lessons. He went deep. And that depth is exactly why, years later, he could step onto a stage in front of 100,000 people, with just a guitar, and hold them there. Absolutely captivated. Ed Sheeran dropped out of school at 16 years old, because building that wall of knowledge was irrelevant to him. And in those gaps, he went deep into mastery.

Now take the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena.

When they were children, while most kids their age were sitting in a classroom, they were on a tennis court. Day after day, morning after morning. They didn’t follow a conventional school timetable - they were homeschooled so they could focus, fully and intentionally, on tennis. Their childhoods weren’t broad and balanced. They were laser-focused. Hours spent drilling serves, shots, mastering movement. The gaps this created in traditional academics would have horrified most education consultants. But those gaps were where greatness was literally built. That intense focus gave them the foundation to become two of the most dominant athletes in history. Not because everything was covered - but because the right thing was given space.

What about Simone Biles.

By the time most teenagers were learning the periodic table or writing book reports, Simone was training six to eight hours a day. Her life wasn’t structured around school bells - it was structured around discipline, repetition, and precision.

She was homeschooled from the age of 13, not because academics didn’t matter, but because something else was calling for deeper commitment from her. And in those hours most students were spending at desks, Simone was building strength, refining technique, mastering movement.

She didn’t follow a broad, balanced curriculum. She focused. Intensely. And that focus built the resilience, the control, the self-awareness it takes to become the most decorated gymnast of all time.

She didn’t just dabble in her passion, making a bit of space for it here and there, her family structured their life around it.

Or take James Dyson - when he was deep in his work, he wasn’t ticking off a curriculum. He wasn’t “covering all the subjects.” He was failing. Again and again. He built 5,126 vacuum cleaner prototypes over five years, and every single one of them failed. Until…one didn’t. That was his education. Not a course. Not a classroom. Five years of intense, focused iteration, learning through real-world consequences, pushing into the edge of what he didn’t yet understand. That experience didn’t just give him a successful invention, it built the creative resilience and technical depth that would fuel one of the world’s most innovative design companies. The world calls that perseverance, which it absolutely is. But I’d also call it deep, lived learning. And those five years? They were the “gap” that made all the difference.

And what about about Greta Thunberg.

When Greta was 15, while most teenagers were dividing their attention across half a dozen subjects every day, she was sitting alone in front of the Swedish parliament. One cardboard sign. One issue she was obsessed about bringing light to.

That protest wasn’t a snap moment of teenage rebellion - it was the product of deep, sustained learning. Greta had immersed herself in climate science. She read scientific papers, studied the data, and internalised the reality of what she was finding. She wasn’t chasing test scores. She was chasing truth.

During those years, she took significant time away from full-time schooling to focus on this one issue. But it wasn’t a break from learning, it was a redefinition of it. That depth became her superpower. It gave her the clarity and conviction to challenge world leaders and mobilise millions around a cause she was living for.

Eventually, she went back to formal education and completed high school. But her most powerful learning didn’t happen inside a classroom. It happened when she followed something all the way down.

Last example - José Andrés.

At 15 years old, he left school - he just knew he couldn’t do well there. In his own words, he was ‘never a very good student’. He didn’t want to keep memorising facts for subjects he didn’t care about. He wanted to cook.

So he enrolled in culinary school instead.

While his peers were still spending their days inside classrooms, José was in kitchens - studying flavour, experimenting with technique, learning from chefs who had made food their life’s work.

It wasn’t the conventional path. But it was absolutely the right one for him.

Because that early, focused depth didn’t just make him a great chef. It gave him the skill and vision to become a global leader in food innovation and humanitarian aid.

Today, he’s known just as much for feeding people in crisis zones as he is for fine dining.

Not because he “covered all the subjects.” But because he chased one thing, and used it to change the world.

This is six brief examples, we could spend weeks talking just about people who have made an impact on the world specifically because they went deep, not wide.

Ed, Venus, Serena, Simone, James, Greta, José - none of them were trying to cover all the bases. None of them were “balanced learners” in the way school would define that.

They left gaps everywhere.

But the key thing to understand is that those gaps weren’t empty. They were space, and they used that space to build mastery, resilience, and the kind of capability that most of us can only dream of.

But our education system - the one that so often follows us into our home educating environment - seems determined to prevent this kind of deep learning from happening. Instead, it pushes children to maintain that steady progress across every subject, every day. To spread their attention so thin that going deep just becomes impossible. We take children - natural specialists who will spend hours perfecting a single skill or investigating one thing that fascinates them - and we force them to become generalists. We interrupt them with bells and schedules and curriculum requirements. We pull them away from genuine learning experiences, and instead make them keep up with an extremely arbitrary set of milestones.

Please understand this: surface-level knowledge is almost useless in the real world. Knowing a little bit about a lot of things might help you complete a worksheet or pass a test or make you a good teammate on trivia night, but it very rarely leads to the kind of deep understanding that lets you solve real problems or create meaningful work.

And we see that pattern very clearly with our six examples.

None of these people became capable by making sure they ticked every box or touched every subject.

These people - and so many others like them - became capable - world-changingly capable - because they were given room to go deep.

Room to obsess.

Room to spend long, messy hours inside one craft, one idea, or one burning question.

And in the gaps where other subjects might have sat, and in the time those other things would have taken from them, they did incredible things.

And to be clear, I’m not talking about talent or luck or timing here. All three of those things absolutely would have been involved in the lives we’ve just heard about. But also, none of those things matter, or can make an impact, without first having depth. Depth is what gives human capability the chance to actually grow. Depth is what helps you make your own luck.

And as a home educating parent, that’s the bit that matters most. And, it’s the bit that so often trips us up.

We’ve left the system, but we’re still so influenced by it. That voice that says:

• “But are we covering enough?”
• “What if we’re leaving holes?”
• “Shouldn’t we be doing a bit of everything, just to be safe?”

We feel that pull to spread the learning out - to touch every base, just in case.

Because that’s what we were taught education should look like: a checklist, everything evenly covered. Everything in balance.

But usually, when we try to cover everything, we end up with very little depth.

We skim. We rush. We dilute.

And our children miss the gift of focus - the very thing that builds the muscles they’ll rely on for life:

• The patience to stay with something when it gets hard.
• The resilience that comes from wrestling with failure.

In trying to avoid gaps, we rob them of depth.

It’s really important to understand that, in formal education, that push to "cover everything" exists because school is built on managing groups, not developing individuals. It’s designed to move everyone along the same path at the same pace. There’s no time to dive deep into just one thing. And then, change our minds, and dive deep into just this one other thing.

But we are not managing a classroom.

We are raising individual human beings.

And human beings do not thrive under surface-level exposure to everything.

Let’s try an experiment now, to show you what I mean. Think back to your own thirteen years of schooling. Thirteen years of carefully structured curriculum. Thirteen years of making sure there were absolutely no gaps.

What do you actually remember?

How much algebra do you still use? How much of it could you still use, if you had to?

How many French verbs are still right there on the tip of your tongue?

What about the periodic table? No? Ok, just list out the noble gases then.

Can you take me through how the Russian Revolution started in 1917? Or the parts of a plant cell?

Can you remember what meiosis is - and how it’s different from mitosis?

Can you still label the water cycle diagram?

Can you still recite Shakespeare? Identify a subordinate clause? Explain the difference between igneous and metamorphic rock?

What about a protractor - you do remember what that’s for, right? And, umm, how often do you use one?

Can you still graph a parabola?

And how about the formula for calculating the area of a trapezium - is that still in there?

Thirteen years. More than 12,000 hours of instruction. All carefully planned to make sure you didn’t miss a thing.

And yet, what’s left?

For most of us - I know it is for me - it’s just fragments. Surface-level knowledge that barely stuck.

Now compare that to the things you chose to really dive into. The hobby you stuck with. The skill you learned because you needed it in real life.

The topic you learned on your own terms, because it mattered to you.

That kind of learning almost certainly went deeper. And has probably stayed with you.

It has probably grown into something quite useful that you have no problem at all remembering.

Because that’s how real learning works.

So let’s be clear - this isn’t a choice between “complete” and “incomplete” knowledge.

That’s the wrong way to look at all this.

It’s a choice between scattered exposure… and the confidence to dive deep and learn what matters, when it matters.

So when you see your child leaving gaps - ignoring certain things, going deep into one or two interests - you’re not looking at a problem. You’re looking at the space where mastery happens. You’re looking at the conditions that create someone who knows how to learn. Who knows how to stick with something. Who knows how to build something meaningful.

This isn’t a failing of your home education environment. It’s one of the greatest advantages your child could ever be handed.

And once you see it this way - once you realise those gaps aren’t cracks in a wall, but openings to deeper learning - you can start letting go of that worry about “missing pieces.”

Because you’ll start noticing what’s really being built instead.

<MUSIC>

Part 2: Why traditional measures of ‘success’ might (will) be holding your child back

Even when we step away from school, and choose a totally different path, all the traditional measures and benchmarks we know so well tend to follow us. Right? I know this was the case for Kate and I early on, and I’m quite sure it’s something you’ve felt to some degree.

We might not have progress reports landing in our inboxes anymore, or parent teacher interviews every couple of months, but we still find ourselves tracking the same old things. Either subconsciously or not.

Are they reading at the “right” level?

Are they doing enough math?

Have they mastered their times tables yet?

Are they writing full sentences? Paragraphs? Essays?

Do they know their parts of speech? How’s their spelling?

Are they keeping up with other kids their age?

Even when we’ve walked away from the system all of that pressure and all of those expectations come from, they stay with us. And it doesn’t seem to matter what we do to try and loosen our grip on them, something always seems to pull us back.

It might be a lingering worry you haven’t fully processed and dealt with yet that comes back strongly every now and then. Maybe from a passing comment. Or a well-meaning question from someone who doesn’t quite understand this path we’ve chosen.

I’m sure you’ve felt this yourself.

That almost visceral reaction in your stomach when someone asks,

“So, are they reading yet?”

Or when a family member says,

“Oh, that’s interesting, because their cousin is already doing x and y...”

And bam - just like that, we’re pulled back in to those measures. Back into the mindset that says progress is not an individual thing. Progress means keeping pace with someone else’s timeline.

And the real problem with this is that it becomes a mindset, and that mindset starts to shape how we see our kids. And, more importantly, how they start seeing themselves.

Because we start second-guessing them. We can’t help it. Because we can’t help wondering… is this enough?

Is this loose rhythm too loose?

Should we be adding more structure? More “rigour”?

Should we tighten everything up a bit, and get a bit more formal, just to be safe.

And that’s when our children feel it. Even when we don’t say it out loud, they can sense it.

The subtle pressure. The weight. The feeling that their natural pace might not be right.

And so, they start telling themselves a story. Probably not verbally, but internally.

• “I’m behind.”
• “I’m not good at this.”
• “I’m slow compared to other kids.”

And it’s even worse when we actually grade them.

"Below grade level" becomes "I’m not smart enough." "Working ahead" becomes "I’m better than other people." "Needs improvement" becomes "something is wrong with me."

And once these kinds of stories take hold, it doesn’t just affect how they learn. It changes how they see themselves.

It changes how they approach challenges. How willing they are to take risks. How confident they feel in their ability to adapt when things get uncertain, or uncomfortable.

Learning stops being about growing, and starts being about not getting it wrong.

Here’s the uncomfortable but unescapable truth:

You cannot nurture deep learning while constantly worrying about “keeping up.”

You cannot foster genuine creativity while measuring everything against grade-level expectations.

You cannot fully build a child’s confidence while comparing them to someone else’s timeline.

And you cannot fully trust natural development while still keeping one eye on artificial milestones.

Why?

Because these traditional measures were never designed to track real capability.

They’re not about individual learning. They’re about managing large groups of students inside a system.

They’re about efficiency and standardisation - not human development.

And every time we return to those kinds of benchmarks, even in our own minds, we do two things:

1. We shrink the space where deep, messy, authentic learning could have happened.
2. We start shaping our children’s identity around someone else’s metrics.

We teach them, “Your value is measured by someone else’s ruler.”

And once a child internalises that, they start learning for the sake of approval - not for personal growth.

It’s important to say that this isn’t just theoretical. It’s a proven psychological fact.

I see it all the time, and I’m sure you have at times in your life too:

• The child who can nail maths worksheets but panics when they don’t recognise the problem - because they’ve only learned how to follow steps, not how to think.
• The child who can read fluently when tested, but avoids reading at home because that activity has always felt so pressured to them.
• The child who memorises spelling lists for the test, but freezes when trying to write something personal because mistakes feel like failure. They’re worried about that red pen.
• The child who used to love drawing, but now avoids it because a teacher once told them the sky isn’t purple, or that houses or faces don’t look like that.

All of this stems from one thing:

Learning being about performing for a measure, instead of building real capability.

And most of us lived this ourselves, right?

We know exactly what it feels like to be boxed in by grades, levels, pressure, and test scores. To perform, but not always understand. Or, in my case, hardly ever understand. To check the boxes, but not always build the confidence. Again, for me, to never build the confidence.

So why do we still carry it with us, even now?

Because this system has wired us to define success in this way. And the shift we have to make is not to find ourselves some better benchmarks.

It’s to step away from the idea that standardised markers of success can ever define learning at all. Because once you do, the whole landscape changes. You stop comparing, and you start watching for capability instead.

For confidence.

For grit.

For resourcefulness.

For deeper thinking.

Think about how children learn to walk. There’s no one timeline for it. Some take their first steps at nine months. Others, not until months later.

Some cruise along furniture for weeks, testing their balance.

Others just...go for it.

And what do we do as parents?

We watch, and we cheer them along. We trust that, barring any serious issues, they’ll walk when they’re ready. We don’t pull out a chart to check if they’re “on track” just because today they turned 12 months old. We don’t label a 13 month old as being behind in walking. We instinctively know there’s a wide window for this skill to unfold. Different children, different bodies, different brains, different timelines.

We trust that it will happen. We model, we encourage, we cheer them on…but we don’t panic. We don’t force it. We don’t chart daily progress against other kids.

Yet, walking is one of the most complex skills a human ever learns. It requires balance, coordination, strength, timing, and brain-body communication - all coming together in tiny, often very wobbly, attempts.

But somewhere along the way, when it comes to academic learning - reading, writing, maths, and so on - we’ve lost that trust in our instinct.

We reach for benchmarks. We start the stopwatch. We compare. We worry.

“They should be reading by now.”

“Are they doing fractions yet?”

“Maybe we’re behind.”

And the whole relationship shifts.

And this is where the fork in the road appears:

Because traditional measures aren't just incomplete - they're actively misleading. They give us a false sense of security while hiding or even hindering real development.

And to be clear, letting go of those measures is not about lowering our standards. It's about raising them. It's about shifting our attention to deeper, more meaningful indicators of growth and capability.

So you can trust natural development, and give your child the space to build something meaningful, and personal, and lasting.

Or you can stay tethered to the old measures, and severely limit what’s possible.

My challenge to you is to stop straddling two worlds. Stop trying to nurture natural learning while clinging to traditional measures "just in case."

And yes, I know that letting go can feel like stepping into the great unknown.

But those benchmarks you’re clinging to are coming at a cost. And so the question becomes - is that cost worth it?

Because once you really trust what’s happening beneath the surface, once you take off your benchmarking hat and put on a coaching, mentoring, cheering, guiding, supporting one, you’ll start seeing the signs of real growth.

And they look nothing like what school taught us to look for.

QUICK BREAK

If this episode is resonating, and you’re finding this podcast helpful, I release one like it every single week inside my Complete Life Without School Collection. These are highly focused, research-backed episodes that speak directly to the questions and challenges home educating families face. They’re designed to help you build an approach that actually works for your unique family.

It’s a paid subscription, because that’s what helps me keep doing this work — supporting families around the world through something grounded, well-researched, thoughtful, and genuinely useful every week. But it’s low cost, and it’s easy to cancel any time, so if this feels like the kind of support you could use every week - jump over to starkravingdadblog.com and make sure you’re signed up to get my emails. That’s where I send them out every week, and that’s where you’ll be able to join the complete collection. I’ll also link directly to it in the show notes for this episode, right there on my website.

Someone recently shared this about the Collection, and I just wanted to pass it along. They said:

“For anyone on the fence, Issy’s episodes are pure magic; he’s a huge reason that I had the courage to take the homeschool leap, and he’s the encouraging voice in my ear along the way…best thing I ever signed up for.”

Love hearing that so, so much. Ok, with that said, let’s get back to this episode.

/END BREAK

Part 3: How to develop a clear roadmap for your child's future

Let’s take a breath, because we’ve done some very heavy lifting.

We’ve talked about the power of going deep, instead of trying to cover everything, and that gaps in a child’s learning are actually more like spaces for opportunity.

We’ve seen how traditional measures - grades, benchmarks, test, comparisons - can really hold our children back.

So now, you’re probably wondering,

“Okay, this is all great, but what now? How do I actually move forward? What does this look like in real life? I believe in this, but I still need something to help me feel anchored - some way of knowing we’re growing, and getting what we really want out of this lifestyle.”

And I couldn’t agree more with that sentiment.

Because it’s one thing to let go of all those old measures, but it’s a whole other thing to know how to live without them.

So let’s talk about what your new map might look like. Not a rigid plan. Not a set of milestones to tick off. But a framework - a way of seeing and supporting your child’s growth that feels natural, and real, and grounded.

The first shift we need to make is this:

Instead of asking, “Are we covering everything, are we missing anything, where are the gaps?”

We start asking, “What is taking root here?”

Instead of measuring success by what’s completed, we start watching for what’s developing.

This means shifting your focus to a few key things:

• Real-world capabilities - things that will serve your child in life, not just on paper.
• Their natural development patterns - so not forcing a timeline, but noticing what’s ready and what you might be able to help them draw out.
• Their genuine interests and strengths - where their curiosity naturally pulls them, things they seem naturally good at.
• And always, always choosing depth over surface-level.

Think about the most capable people you know - the ones who solve tough problems, create meaningful work, make a lasting impact in whatever it is that they do. They are who they are because they developed certain core capabilities - capabilities that traditional education often overlooks entirely, by the way:

• The ability to dive deep into challenging problems.
• The confidence to try something new and unfamiliar.
• The skill of learning how to learn.
• The resilience to keep going when things get hard.
• The creativity to find solutions others miss.

These are the kinds of things that matter. And the challenge is, they’re very hard to measure. They grow slowly, quietly, through things like passion projects, experiments, mistakes, and long stretches of self-directed exploration. The come from autonomy, and curiosity, and naturally built perseverance.

So if you stay stuck looking for evidence of learning in neat packages - worksheets, grades, finished reports, beautifully completed projects - you will probably miss these deeper signs of personal development entirely.

Real capability grows inside open-ended, imperfect work. It shows up in questions like:

• “What’s another way to solve this?”
• “Why isn’t this working yet?”
• “How could I figure this out on my own?”

That’s when you know learning is starting to move below the surface.

Think of it like this. Traditional education often builds pretty facades. From the outside, they look complete - even impressive - but there’s not much holding them together inside.

Real learning builds cathedrals. Quiet, layered, hyper-resilient structures that can carry real weight. That have real substance.

The building of a structure like that is very slow. But it lasts.

So how do you spot a cathedral in the making?

Well, you start by watching how your child approaches challenges:

• Do they begin breaking big problems into smaller, manageable parts?
• Are they moving from “What’s the answer?” to “What’s another way to look at this?”
• Are they starting to build their own problem-solving strategies instead of waiting for instructions?

Then, take careful note of how they relate to struggle and confusion:

• Do they stick with hard things a little longer than they used to?
• Are they starting to treat mistakes as part of the process, rather than signs of failure?
• Are they building confidence that they can figure things out, even if they don’t know how yet?

And finally, pay close attention to how they pursue understanding:

• Are their questions getting deeper, more curious?
• Are they connecting ideas from one area to another?
• Are they taking ownership of their learning, and setting personal goals or directions?
• Are they…embracing their autonomy, and starting to invest their time rather than just spend it?

These aren’t just nice side effects of self-directed learning. These are your new benchmarks.

Not for comparison. Not for performance. But for growth. For depth. For capability that grows and lasts.

Let me show you exactly what the difference between surface level learning and real development looks like in practice, so you can get a good tangible feel for what I’m talking about here:

Take maths. A child who has surface-level mathematical knowledge can no doubt confidently complete a worksheet of multiplication problems. They can answer it quickly, and show their working neatly. Tick, tick, tick.

A child who's developing real mathematical capability may not be able to do that as quickly, or as easily, or to show their working. Or actually, to even know what that means.

Instead, they start spotting patterns in numbers without being told to.

They start creating their own strategies to solve problems.

They start recognising that maths is something they can use - to build, to plan, to figure things out.

Like when they build a Lego structure and realise they need symmetry, so they count studs and mirror their design.

Or when they start budgeting pocket money to save for something big, and work out how many weeks it’ll take to get there.

Or when they’re baking and instinctively double a recipe in their head.

Or when they start comparing phone plans, breaking down the cost per gigabyte and factoring in extras to find the best value for what they need.

Or when they track the stats of their favourite sports team, analysing trends over time and predicting outcomes based on performance data.

Or when they learn to code and begin recognising the mathematical patterns behind loops, conditions, and algorithms, and how these apply to solving real problems.

No one’s worried about whether they remembered to carry the one.

Or whether they’ve memorised their times tables up to 12 yet.

Or whether they know when to use sine, cosine, or tangent.

Or whether they know that x = minus b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus 4ac over 2a - which, I’m sure every one of you listening remembers is the quadratic formula, which each and every one of you uses extensively in your day to day.

Or take writing. Surface learning looks like being able to follow a writing template or story prompt or spell a list of words correctly. Real development shows up as working out what their own voice is, starting to understand how different types of writing serve different purposes, recognising when something they've written isn't working and being able to figure out why.

Like when they start leaving little notes around the house - funny ones, loving ones, bossy ones - just because they’ve realised that writing can do something.

Like when they label their Lego creations or draw comics with speech bubbles, and suddenly you see how much thought they’re putting into how words and pictures work together.

Or when they write a birthday card and spend a surprisingly long time choosing the right words,, because they care about how it will feel to the person reading it.

Or when they analyse the lyrics of a favourite song, then try writing their own, grappling with rhythm, metaphor, and emotional tone.

Or when they draft a letter to a local council or organisation because they care about an issue - and they revise it three times to strike just the right balance of respectful and persuasive.

Or when they write a story, and halfway through realise the pacing feels off… so they restructure the whole thing, because they know it can be better.

None of this is about perfect spelling or capitalisation or letter formation. It’s all about using writing to express, to connect, to play, to think.

In science, surface learning is memorising facts about photosynthesis. It’s reciting the periodic table - which, we all agreed earlier, we’ve mostly forgotten. It’s being able to label a diagram, but not really explain what any of it means or why it matters.

The development of real capability is starting to ask deeper questions about how things work. It’s testing theories and watching what happens.

Like when they ask, “Why do leaves fall off trees?”, and then an interesting conversation happens.

Or when they mix dirt and water and soap and say, “I’m making potions,” then test what happens when they change the ingredients and ratios.

Or when they notice that the moon isn’t always the same shape.

Or when they plant seeds and realise some sprout faster than others, and start wondering if it’s the water, the sunlight, or something else.

Or when they build a dam at the beach or river, and adjust it over and over, testing how the water moves.

Or when they start designing a more efficient chicken coop, because they’ve been thinking about airflow, sunlight, and how to keep the water from freezing in the winter.

Or when they try to build a better slingshot and start reading about tension, velocity, and parabolic flight paths, without being asked to.

Or when they notice how differently their body responds to sugar versus protein vs carbs, and start researching the biochemistry behind energy systems and insulin response and muscle development.

And I use that last one as an example, because that’s a space my two older boys have been knee deep in together this week. They’ve started going to the gym, and - because they’re really interested in it - of course they’ve heard, and read about how important nutrition is going to be for their muscle development. And I can promise you - that is not a topic they have stayed surface level on. Of course, if you sat them down in a highschool classroom to take a biology test I’m quite sure they’d both fail badly. The questions would all seem so random and disconnected to them. What they’re learning instead is real, and applied, and tangible, genuinely useful to them in their lives. What they’re learning is meaningful.

Surface learning depends a lot on external guidance. It relies on someone else setting the question, providing the steps, and confirming the answer.

Real capability shows up as independence.

It’s when a child starts setting their own direction, building their own strategies, and trusting their own thinking. Just in small ways, to start with, but growing over time.

Now, I want to be very clear that we don’t need to start validating every activity as “deep learning.” That’s the measurement trap. Let’s stay well clear of that.

But we do need to learn to recognise the signs. The specific, observable markers that tell us something solid is developing beneath the surface.

Because that’s what we should be watching for, and coaching for, and drawing out.

Not completion.

Not correctness.

But capability.

And this is exactly where so many parents get stuck. Because so much of this kind of learning looks nothing like the education we grew up with.

There aren’t as many tidy outputs. There are no worksheets to collect, and glance down, and put ticks on. There are no tests to confirm something’s been “learned.”

Just a child asking questions. Following a thread. Dabbling. Exploring. Getting stuck. Coming back. Wandering off. Circling around again.

And even when we know this is how real learning happens, it still triggers that internal panic:

“Shouldn’t they be doing more formal work?”

“Shouldn’t this be a bit more structured?”

So as you ask yourself:

“How do I know this is working?”

Let me say it again:

Do not try and reframe everything your child does as “educational”, or you will fall right back into the comparison trap. Learn about, and understand, exactly what capabilities matter in the real world, and learn to spot whether those capabilities are actually developing. If you’re not part of my complete collection, and haven’t been listening to my weekly episodes, there’s a recent one you really should jump in on - and I’ll link directly to it from the show notes - it’s called “What REALLY prepares your child for adulthood (because academics won’t). It’s a 45 minute breakdown of the proven, real-world skills that robust psychological research show actually prepare children for adulthood. In other words, it’s a playbook for real-world preparation. No guesswork. No stress. Just total clarity on how you can KNOW your child is truly ready to live a fulfilling life as they grow up. Which is very tied into what we’re talking about it. So if you haven’t heard that episode from my library yet, jump over to the link in the show notes because it is only available on my website.

The key capabilities that determine long-term success are specific and observable. And when you know what to look for, you can see them developing - or not developing - in clear, tangible ways. These things never grow in a neat, linear way. But when you know what to look for, the signs are there. And when they’re not, that’s your cue - not to panic, but to thoughtfully adjust your environment and support.

Because when we’ve been trained to see progress as steady, visible output, it’s easy to miss the kind of growth that builds in different ways. It doesn't mean nothing is happening. It just means we need to shift what we're looking for.

Instead of asking, “Are they producing enough?” we start asking,

“How are they approaching this differently to what they would have a month ago?”

Instead of, “Have they mastered this skill yet?”

We ask, “Are they more willing to wrestle with this thing?”

Instead of waiting and wishing and hoping for polished outcomes, we start watching for stronger processes:

• More thoughtful questions
• More creative problem-solving
• More initiative in how they approach their day

It’s getting curious about what’s blocking growth.

If your child is avoiding challenges, for example, giving up easily, or struggling to stay engaged, the answer usually isn’t more content - it’s better support.

That might mean asking:

• Are the challenges they’re facing too big right now? Could we break them down into smaller parts?
• Have they seen enough examples of productive struggle around them, where failure is just part of figuring things out? Has that been modelled? Has passion and a bit of obsession been modelled?
• Are they being supported in a way that empowers them, not just rescues them?

And sometimes, you’ll need to zoom out even further:

• Is their day too full to leave space for deep, self-directed learning? I’ve talked a lot about balanced autonomy, and how important that is.
• And on the other side of that coin, are their days too open and loose? That can also backfire.
• Is passive entertainment draining the energy they’d otherwise put into discovering things? Are they spending too much time consuming content on a device?
• Have they had the chance to follow a curiosity far enough to really ignite that spark? Do they know how to go deeper into something they’re interested in right now, or do they need some help and guidance, and - yep - more modelling?
• Have they had the opportunity to interact with someone that’s very good, or very experienced, at whatever they’re learning to do or finding interesting?

This is what real course correction looks like.

Not the adding of worksheets. Or pressure. or a curriculum you’ve pulled off the shelf.

You’re not asking, “What do they need to know?”

You’re asking, “What kind of thinker, problem-solver, and learner are they becoming?”

This is your compass.

You don’t need external benchmarks to tell you if growth is happening - you’ll see it in how your child thinks, how they solve problems, and how they respond when they don’t know what to do.

And your role is not to sit back and hope all this happens on its own. It’s to create the conditions where this kind of growth can actually happen.

This kind of roadmap, this way of watching for progress, it isn’t a set of steps - it’s an entirely different way of seeing life. It’s noticing where capability is building and making thoughtful and intentional choices to support it.

And here’s the last thing I’ll leave you with:

Don’t ever forget that, just like a garden, so much growth happens quietly under the surface. You can’t always see it right there in front of you. But when you create the right conditions - and when you trust the process - you will know the roots are growing deeper.

And that’s what will last.

<CLOSING MUSIC>

So...how do you know home education is working?

You’ll know when your child starts thinking more independently.

When their questions get deeper. When they try something hard, get it wrong, and still go back for another shot.

You’ll know when they take ownership - of a project, a problem, a plan - because it matters to them.

You’ll see it in the way they start breaking down challenges instead of backing away from them. In how they connect ideas across different parts of their world. In how they recover from mistakes with just a little more calm and confidence than they used to.

You won’t always see it in neat packages.

There won’t always be something to photograph or check off.

But you’ll start recognising it in the way they move through the world.

That’s your compass.

That’s how you know it’s working.

Thanks so much for spending this time with me today. If you’d like more episodes like this - ones that give you real tools, grounded encouragement, and true confidence in this choice - you’ll find a new one waiting every week in the full Life Without School Collection on my website.

I really hope this episode gave you a new way to see a child’s journey through their younger years. And the confidence to trust it.

I’ll see you back here soon.

Bye for now.