About Me
I'm Pete. I'm a home educating dad in Queensland, and I built everything on this site because of something that happened to my own family.
My daughter had been registered for home education for about four years when things got hard. My family went through a separation, and for eight months we lived in a camper in Melbourne, a long way from home. We tried to keep her learning going through all of that — worksheets at first, then a structured program, then something more self-directed — but none of it really stuck. Eventually she started coming to work with me instead, learning real, hands-on skills. It was genuine learning. It just wasn't in a form anyone outside our own home could recognise as evidence.
That gap is exactly what caught up with us. I got a Show Cause Notice from our registering authority. Twenty-eight days to prove my daughter should be allowed to keep being home schooled. It's one of the scariest letters I've ever opened, and I want to be honest about that rather than smooth it over — because I know some of you reading this have felt exactly the same fear, or are feeling it right now.
Here's the part that mattered most, once I got through it: the learning had genuinely been happening the whole time. I just didn't have it in a form I could show. I had notes on my phone, real memories of what she'd covered — it just needed structure around it. Once I built that structure, properly, against the actual curriculum, our registration was approved.
After that, my daughter and I built a real system — everything organised by curriculum, a weekly debrief every Friday, a genuine progress record kept going, not just assembled once under pressure. It worked. It still works.
I built Wattlewood because of what we went through, not to build a business. If I could give it away for free, I genuinely would — but building it properly, the way it deserved to be built, has taken real time and real work to get right. What I actually wanted was to build the thing that would have made those 28 days far less frightening, if it had already existed when I needed it.
If you're reading this because you're worried about your own evidence, or you've had your own scare, I want you to know two things: the fear is real, and you're not overreacting to it. And the evidence you need is probably already there, in some form, somewhere. It just needs the right structure around it. That's genuinely fixable — and it's the whole reason everything on this site exists.