remote learning Archives

A labour of love: Recognising the dual identities of mothers as remote education tutors

03 February 2025, Canberra, ACT: The Isolated Children’s Parents’ Association (ICPA) Australia is
calling on the Federal Government to commit to critical funding increases and new support
measures to ensure equitable education access for geographically isolated students. ICPA Australia
says rural and remote families are being left behind by an outdated education support system that
fails to keep pace with rising costs and increasing needs.

Karen Peel and Patrick Danaher reveal what they have learned about distance schooling in Australia.

Thousands of children learn remotely in Australia.

And fundamental to the delivery of distance schooling is the commitment of what we call the remote education tutor (RET) who functions as a conduit between the distance schooling teacher and the student.

Our research shows that the requirement of providing a supervisor in the remote schoolrooms is creating a sense of educational marginalisation. This can particularly impact on mothers, who are often expected to be the support providers for their children with no remuneration.

The work of the RET is essential for quality and equitable education for children living in these distant locations.

But we treat RETs and say, for example, teachers’ aides, very differently.

The equivalent roles of RETs and teacher aides

Let’s compare the support offered to distance education students by the RET with the work of teacher aides employed to assist in general schooling classrooms in Australia. Over the past four decades, schools increased the number of teacher aides employed, to assist teachers in providing quality education for students.

That’s exactly what RETs do. Unlike RETs, teacher aides get paid.

There is the direct comparison which reveals the inequality in distance schooling and the significant cost, both personally and financially, to geographically isolated families.

So how did we get to this?

Who performs the role of the RET in Australian distance schooling?

Research tells us there are two distinct groups of RETs: governesses, who are employed as RETs in a paid position; and mothers, who facilitate their own children’s education in the home schoolroom.

Governesses cost a fortune and – often with limited or no training – they learn on the job.

For many geographically isolated families, meeting the cost of employing an RET is not a reality. As such, mothers are left with restricted rights and few choices. Moreover, they receive no income for completing the complex role of the RET, and limited acknowledgement for undertaking this essential and mandated educational position.

Acknowledgement and remuneration for the RET

The parents who attended the 2024 Queensland Isolated Children’s Parents’ Association (ICPA) conference conducted in Townsville, Australia unanimously voted for a proposal to provide suitable acknowledgement and remuneration for RETs. The same proposal was met with the same enthusiasm 50 years previously.

So why hasn’t the move for educational equality for families living in geographically isolated locations gained traction? Could it be that mothers are just expected to make sacrifices?

The mother as the RET

States and territories mandate that students 12 years and under must be supervised by an adult for the whole school day. And mothers do that while also juggling with other responsibilities and the management of this substantial and time-consuming task.

Compare that to the mothers of children beginning mainstream schooling. There are opportunities for them to return to paid employment and contribute to the family income. Mothers in geographically isolated locations don’t have that option. They have to undertake the role of the RET. These duties can extend for several years, depending on the number of children in the family.

Groups such as the ICPA repeatedly advocate for the role that rural women play in educating their children. But politicians – and the rest of us – should be forced to acknowledge how hard it is to access compulsory education for families living in geographically isolated locations.

Researching mothers as RETs in Australian distance schooling

We wanted to know how mothers felt about their roles as RETs.

Here’s what we found. They positioned themselves dutifully to meet the demands of their dual identities. They understood that where they lived created the need to educate their child/ren through distance schooling.

But they were all aware of the comparison between the equitable rights of mainstream schooling and those of distance education.

One mother/RET pointed out the inequities and financial burdens of being positioned to fulfil the RET role. She said, “Because we are geographically isolated, me doing this role is our only choice unless we want to send our kids to boarding school, which costs a lot of money.”

Another mother/RET was critical of the perceived inequity of financing the work of teacher aides in the mainstream schooling without there being an equivalent commitment to financing the work of the RET.

However, there was acceptance by the mothers of their duties as RETs, accompanied by a sense of responsibility. They recognised the significance of their role for their child/ren’s education.

This was clearly articulated in the statement: “I taught all my kids to read. A half an hour lesson with a teacher online isn’t going to teach a kid to read.” Much of the responsibility for teaching reading goes well beyond the limited time available in the online lessons with the school-based distance education teacher.

Another mother/RET made it clear that she “is not a teacher but is willing to learn how to provide the very best start for [her] child’s education”. She identified her RET position as a “duty of care”, and herself as a “volunteer” performing “a hugely underestimated role”.

What is the role of the RET?

Substantially, the lack of understanding and underestimation of what the RETs’ role entails are of concern.

One mother/RET proudly lamented, “I think I have done a pretty good job with the kids, but it’s that lack of value and recognition”.

What was especially significant in this research were the challenges for the mothers performing the dual roles of being the caregiver and the RET. This tension cannot be overestimated.

One mother/RET admitted, “I do struggle and think that, if you were just the teacher, you’d be a little bit more patient, whereas being the mother as well, it definitely blurs.”

Recognising the dual identities of mothers as RETs

Recognition of the dual identities of the mothers as RETs, who facilitate their child/ren’s successful learning outcomes, affirms this substantive position. Our research underscores the importance of establishing a system of government support for financial compensation so this work can extend to being more than a labour of love.

Karen Peel is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. She is an experienced classroom teacher having taught in Australian schools across decades of educational transformations. Her research interests include the implementation of practices for effective teaching and self-regulated learning, classrooms cultures that support positive behaviour and contemporary issues in education that impact outcomes for students and educators. She is on LinkedIn.

Patrick Danaher is Professor in the School of Education at Excelsia University College, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern Queensland, Australia. Patrick has continuing research interests in rural education, including the educational aspirations and outcomes of occupationally mobile families such as circus and show people who travel through regional, rural and remote communities. More broadly, he is interested in formal education’s ambivalent capacity to perpetuate sociocultural marginalisation and to contribute to sociocultural transformation. He is on LinkedIn.

The shock of dealing with Covid-19 has made teachers even stronger and better at their craft

Cast your mind back to the end of the first school term for 2020: Australian states and territories were rapidly moving into lockdown because of COVID-19. Political leaders were signaling – often using mixed signals – the likelihood and need to close schools and transition to distance learning. Here in New South Wales schools switched to distance learning for about six weeks, forcing teachers to adapt their programs very rapidly to support students and their parents with learning from home.

Currently around Australia we now have the whole range from fully face-to -face schooling, to partially remote learning, to fully (with some essential worker exceptions) remote learning. Random schools are thrown into immediate lockdown whenever a teacher or student tests positive to the viral infection. Teachers pivot their programs very rapidly between the different ways of delivery depending on the advice from health officials to their education authorities.

My doctoral research explores the way policy is enacted in teacher practice, and I seem to have landed in the middle of a system where policy has flown into flux.

My fieldwork actually started in the midst of one crisis – the Black Summer bushfires – and ended during another – COVID-19. I was fortunately able to modify the shape of my research to allow for interviews with teachers to find out how they experienced the rapidly changing work environment during the virus response.

I’m sure some of the findings are familiar to many teachers and researchers out there, and they aren’t specific to schools. For many people, the switch to working from home was sudden and required quick thinking and adaptation.

The teachers who participated in my research reported a number of interesting, and not all negative, experiences.

Workload increased dramatically

Teachers already faced significant workload demands going into the crisis, an issue plainly described in a partnership study between the NSW Teachers Federation and the University of Sydney. The teachers I interviewed explained how the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated this big time.

Teachers spend a huge amount of time planning and programming a school term, and much of that planning is premised on the physical environment in which they work. Educators take for granted the material contexts of their work – it helps them to improvise when necessary, to draw on a repertoire of skills and capabilities built up through experience.

In the Sydney school where I did my research the staff made a very rapid shift to online learning. This led to late nights preparing lessons, in some cases over-planning work for students in order to compensate for the lack of face-to-face interaction.

Some students felt more comfortable online

A number of teachers reported some students coming out of their shells in the online space. Otherwise shy students felt more empowered to contribute to lessons. Students with strong digital literacy skills were able to support teachers and fellow students in creating dynamic and interesting contributions to online learning.

While there has rightly been some attention paid to students who missed out because of inequitable access, there are also lessons that can be learned about engaging students who are less confident about speaking up in front of a classroom of peers. The digital world is here to stay: being confident learners in digital communities is an important life skill, virus or not.

Professional communities were more important than ever

The staff at the school scheduled an impromptu staff development day focused entirely on delivering learning remotely. Colleagues ran sessions on platforms like Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Faculty members headed to different classrooms to practice running Zoom lessons with each other. The New South Wales Department of Education also facilitated a ‘virtual staff room’ on Teams, and many teachers reported the value in sharing ideas with their colleagues both within the school and further afield.

When I spoke with the Deputy Principal of this school, he suggested that their quick response to COVID-19 was possible because of the school’s proactive approach to professional learning. The school saw the Professional Development Planning (PDP) process not as a ‘tick-the-box’ exercise, but rather a way to learn about the strengths and opportunities facing the school. He explained:

“What professional learning is about is foreseeing what obstacles might lie ahead, so that you can be properly prepared for when they do happen and you couldn’t get a better case in point than COVID.”

A year-round professional learning calendar helps staff at this school see the connection between their own Professional Development Planning and the whole school plan. Qualitative analysis of Professional Development Planning goals and professional learning needs helps inform the school planning process. And the teachers I interviewed were consistently engaged in improving their classroom practice.

Teachers felt their practice had improved because of the crisis

Each teacher I spoke with said that they had learned something during the crisis and that their practice going forward would improve as a result, sentiment echoed in a survey conducted by researchers Rachel Wilson and William Mude. This included their ability to incorporate Information and Communication Technology (ICT) into their lessons, the different ways they can engage with their students, and their professional knowledge in the domain of online teaching and learning. As one teacher explained:

“I think there will be good development in our skills that will make us better teachers going forward. It’s been a baptism of fire, but I think we’ll all be better practitioners and have a wider repertoire of skills.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has turned a lot of things on their heads: it is a black swan event, something gigantic and unexpected that shifts the way we understand the world. Nassim Taleb, who wrote the book, The Black Swan, followed that with another book, Antifragile. He explains that the opposite of fragility is not resilience, but antifragility: where something responds to a shock by getting stronger.

The teachers I worked with pre and post COVID-19 (as far as we can say that we are ‘post’ this virus) are a perfect example of antifragility. So far, 2020 has delivered some of the biggest shocks imaginable. And out of it the teachers in my study have become even better at their craft thanks to the strength of their professional communities and their school’s meaningful approach to professional learning.

Pat Norman is a doctoral candidate at the University of Sydney, looking at the way politics and political events shape the rationalities of policy and practice. He is particularly interested in the way neoliberalism and globalisation impact professional work. His current research in schools looks at the way teachers experience and enact policy, and how an understanding of good practice is produced in real-world contexts. He tweets as @pat_norman.