What does one of the world’s leading education organizations have to say about homeschooling? Our Pedagogical Research Director, Rosenrot Schülpke, reflects on what UNESCO’s recent report means from Clonlara’s perspective and explains how process-oriented documentation can make the authentic learning taking place across varied educational pathways visible and recognizable.
The UNESCO report, “Homeschooling through a Human Rights Lens” (2025), examines homeschooling from a human rights perspective. At its core is the question of how every child’s right to education can be ensured – including outside of traditional school settings.
What does this have to do with us?
Our Off-Campus Program has historical roots in what is commonly referred to as “homeschooling.” Until a few years ago, it was even called the “Home Based Education Program.” However, this term does not adequately describe the lived reality of our practice.
It places the focus on the home as the primary site of learning and often evokes the image of an isolated child learning at the kitchen table. Research, as well as our own experience, shows that in many cases learning takes place much differently: in social contexts, projects, encounters, travel, and in exchange with others. The term “homeschooling” therefore frames learning in a way that obscures or oversimplifies essential aspects of real learning processes.
At the same time, Clonlara School does not see itself as an alternative to school, but as a school in a different form. For many of our students, it is therefore important – also in terms of legal and social recognition – to understand themselves not as “homeschoolers,” but as students of an international Off-Campus Program. Nevertheless, they are often legally categorized as homeschoolers.
Central message of the UNESCO report
UNESCO emphasizes that all children have a right to free education, and that states are responsible for ensuring that this right is fulfilled. Homeschooling is not rejected as such but should be embedded within a framework that protects the educational rights of children.
At the same time, the report acknowledges that learning outside of traditional schools can enable individualized pathways and, in certain situations, represent a meaningful alternative.
A key challenge: How is education recognized without school attendance?
When states permit homeschooling, the report argues that they must establish ways to monitor and assess education. This raises a fundamental question: What counts as education, and how can it be meaningfully assessed?
Many systems rely on standardized testing and curriculum-based examinations, as is the case in Austria, where homeschooled students and also some of our enrolled students must take annual academic exams. These approaches are based on the assumption that learning is linear, content-based, and comparable. However, both our experience and our research show that learning processes can follow very different paths. A concrete example is language acquisition: one child learning English as a foreign language in a school context initially developed primarily explicit knowledge, such as grammar rules and written structures, while still showing uncertainty in practical language use. Another child, who acquired the language through everyday interaction, initially developed implicit, application-based knowledge – speaking fluently and appropriately without being able to articulate formal rules.
Both pathways led to competence but followed different developmental logics and timelines. Over time, the competencies of both learners converged. However, standardized assessments tended to capture primarily explicit, formalized knowledge and largely overlooked other forms of competence development.
What does this mean for us?
Ensuring the right to education, therefore, does not only mean monitoring learning, but also developing appropriate forms of recognition. This requires a broader understanding of education that takes different learning logics into account and is not limited to content-based standards.
Process-oriented forms of documentation that describe individual learning pathways and support reflection can serve as an important complement or alternative to traditional forms of assessment. Clonlara has been working successfully in this way for many years through its Full Circle Learning model.
Conclusion
It is an important step that UNESCO is engaging with this topic and situating homeschooling and out-of-school learning within the international education discourse in a more differentiated way. It is also understandable that states seek to take children’s right to education responsibly and therefore aim to establish forms of oversight.
However, what matters most is how these are designed. From our perspective, it is essential that diverse learning logics and educational pathways are seriously considered, and that alongside curriculum-based assessments, process-oriented and descriptive forms of recognition are also maintained and further developed.
Only in this way can we avoid reducing diverse educational pathways to a narrow understanding of learning. Instead, we need approaches that acknowledge the diversity of educational biographies and make different forms of competence development visible and recognizable.
We’d love to hear your thoughts: how should education systems recognize learning that happens beyond traditional classrooms?
