IDEA Perth co-founders Rebecca Loftus and Nicole Gazey.
By the time Kairi Bandiera had turned 14, she had given up on ever enjoying school.
Enrolled in a mainstream public school and battling crippling anxiety, Kairi said she felt “stupid”, and like she had already missed her chance at success.
In year 10 she enrolled in a smaller private school and studied online, but felt isolated.
While the option to leave school at 15 is available, there was no upper secondary homeschooling curriculum, with many students instead gaining full-time employment or heading to TAFE.
Kairi’s mother, desperate for another option, found IDEAcademy – an alternative option for students in years 10 to 12.
Instead of separate classes for subjects, students at Idea come up with their own creative projects to work on throughout the year.
Vocational qualifications are integrated into these projects, from a Certificate II up to Certificate IV.
Their work forms a portfolio which can be used to enter certain university pathways, TAFE courses or employment after they finish the equivalent of year 12.
IDEA has grown from 12 students when it first opened in 2020 to more than 100 this year. An evening course diploma for students aged 17 to 24 will also start from 2025.
“Everyone wants the best, but everyone speaks a slightly different language. The only way I felt like I could create the best was by stepping outside the system.”
Rebecca Loftus
Kairi, now 16, enrolled at the start of this year and said the difference was huge.
“The curriculum in mainstream school was really hard on me, and so I was hard on myself,” she said.
“Now I get to work on a project I love, I have more confidence and I think my opportunities are a lot better.”
IDEA co-founder Nicole Gazey described the program as “real life with training wheels”.
She formerly worked in education policy for the School Curriculum and Standards Authority, and also did a stint working for the federal government.
“In primary school, you can personalise student education a fair bit but once you get to high school, it’s all about the ATAR or getting to the WACE, and things have to become quite structured and standardised,” she said.
“I could see that we had lots of really good kids out there. There’s nothing wrong with them, they just need something different.”
Gazey said her son was one of them.
“He wanted to learn, he’s smart, and we could have afforded any education he needed. The problem was that no matter where we went, it was just the system was wrong for him,” she said.
“Being an insider of that system, it was difficult to watch young people not come out successfully. As taxpayers, we’ve paid for that, or paid for private schools.
“Some parents pay $30,000 for their child to leave and not know what they’re going to do, or be in a state of mental health disarray.”
Rebecca Loftus, IDEA’s other co-founder, worked as a science teacher at a socially disadvantaged high school for six years, and described the pressures of the job as “overwhelming.”
“[Students] were needing so much more from me than assessment and curriculum, but when you’re seeing 25 to 32 kids for 50 minutes, six classes a day, there’s absolutely no time,” she said.
“We rotate kids through different teachers for different subjects, and so there’s just no way to have a holistic picture of how these kids are going.”
Loftus said she had been angry she was unable to provide the best learning environment possible.
“I taught maths, and the biggest gripe is ‘when am I ever going to use this?’ For example, quadratic equations, most students don’t need to use that in the real world,” she said.
“Young people nowadays, they’re also calling bullshit on archaic systems … on rules for no particular reason.
“Everyone wants the best, but everyone speaks a slightly different language. The only way I felt like I could create the best was by stepping outside the system. It has to be done.”
Gazey said many young people – often those geared towards becoming future creators, entrepreneurs and problem solvers – were wired to question the mainstream system.
“They cannot get through 12 years of education like that. They can’t get out alive,” she said.
But she also said schools could not change on their own, which had formed part of the reason both herself and Loftus had broken away to look at different ways of schooling WA’s kids.
“Working in the department, it was about protecting the minister (for education) and making sure that we didn’t rock the boat – it was about being risk-adverse,” she said.
“We need to derisk change, and the department’s not got the capacity, and that’s not where their focus should be, either. They’re about servicing schools, they’re not necessarily about redesigning them, so the community needs to.”
Gazey said IDEA aimed to help inform and derisk change.
“We’ve teased out all the bugs, and now this is something that you could possibly start to scale within the system,” she said.
“Everything that education is aiming for – increased literacy, numeracy, increased youth employment – that will all naturally fall into place when we all take a shared responsibility.”
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