Queensland families are increasingly ditching mainstream classrooms to teach their children at home, blaming a bullying scourge and a shortage of resources in schools.
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There were 3232 students registered for home education in 2018, a huge 192 per cent increase on five years ago.
Gympie, Toowoomba and Caboolture were the top areas for home-schooling in the state last year.
Queensland University of Technology education lecturer Rebecca English said Christians and "hippies" who were "always going to home educate" were not behind the increase.
Instead, Dr English said the rise was being fuelled by "accidental home educators" who had intended to send their child to traditional schooling but it had not worked out.
"Usually it comes down to some kind of diagnosis," she said.
"The kids might be ADHD, ASD, ODD. The child mightn't quite fit in at school, the child might have been bullied or the school may not be able to deal with that.
"Or maybe they're gender non-binary."
Logan mum Susan, speaking under a pseudonym as she wished to remain anonymous, said she began to home-school her two sons, now aged 11 and 13 and on the autism spectrum, as they were not being adequately supported at school.
"[Schools] are under-funded and teachers are overworked; they're inexperienced," she said.
Susan said her children had been coming home from school "emotionally wrecked".
"If it had been a system they were thriving in, then they would go back," she said.
"But I would never put them back. They're never going back into that system."
Susan said her boys were thriving with a "smorgasbord of education rather than this cookie-cutter one-meal-recipe menu".
She said there were plenty of groups and opportunities for home-schooled children to engage with other young people.
Susan said thousands more children were likely being home-schooled but were not registered with Education Queensland.
Parents can be prosecuted for failing to register their child.
However, home education is a legal alternative to enrolling a child in school.
Parents must plan and implement their child's education program, provide all resources required, and submit an annual report demonstrating their child's progress.
Home education children can sit the Queensland Core Skills test and NAPLAN tests.
But they must be enrolled in year 11 and year 12 at a state school, non-state school or a school of distance education to gain an OP score.
The Department of Education does not collect information on why parents choose to home educate their children.
A spokeswoman for the department said parents may choose home-schooling because of philosophical or religious beliefs, a belief attending a state or non-state school exposed their child to experiences not consistent with their set of beliefs and values, or that home education was able to cater to their child's particular educational needs.
The spokeswoman said the government was tackling bullying, including through its Anti-Cyberbullying Taskforce.
"It is a community-wide problem that requires the co-operation and collaboration of students, parents and other stakeholders to effect the cultural change of attitudes needed," she said.
"All state schools make reasonable adjustments to enable students with disability to access and participate in learning."
