Nicole Gazey has seen firsthand just how limiting the traditional school system is for young students developing niche talents, sparking the idea to start her own education centre.
Ms Gazey explained how her then-17-year-old son “struggled” with the mainstream education system before she launched IDEAcademy with Rebecca Loftus. “My child was struggling within the system but had all of these talents and qualities that I could see industry were asking for,” Ms Gazey said. “He was innovative, creative and an out-of-the-box thinker, and saw that the options (at school) were so, so limited.”
Ms Loftus made the same observations as a high school teacher, saying she immediately became “quite disillusioned” with the education process. “Seeing 150 kids a week in 50-minute slots, there’s just no time to do anything truly innovative and to care,” she said. The pair — who went through the WA startup accelerator program Plus Eight — launched IDEAcademy in 2020 to provide an alternative to mainstream senior-secondary education for students aged 15 to 18-years old.
“Our mission is to unlock the potential of 100,000 young innovators, entrepreneurs and creatives who are on a mission to make the world a better place,” Ms Loftus said. “What we want to do is make young people feel safe, feel seen . . . because that’s just what we saw in the system, there’s too many kids that feel like they’re not good enough.”
Ms Gazey, pictured, said the average attendance rate for its students this year was 92 percent. This was in comparison to an average attendance rate of 57 per cent before attending IDEAcademy. “If you look at the story of any of the great entrepreneurs and business people around the world, you’ll hear most of them say, ‘I hated school, I never did well at school’,” she said. “Our kids were not disengaged — we had students who were so high performing that they were just so bored, they stopped attending.”
More than 100 students have gone through its full-time and part-time programs driven out of the Flux Basement in the Perth CBD, with some students going into employment, apprenticeships and further studies. Nearly 100 students are enrolled this year. “We see the last two years of compulsory education as the first two years of a young person’s career,” Ms Gazey said. “We measure our success on the transition of each young person, whereas the traditional education system, there’s a real measurement against test scores, (Australian Tertiary Admission
Rank) scores and graduation rates.”
Ms Loftus says the day-to-day experience was similar to what you would see in a workplace, with morning meetings and briefings, masterclasses before students split off to work on their individual projects. “It is like a cool co-working space. There’s a hum of activity, some kids are thrown across bean bags and some kids are in meeting rooms working on a project together,” she said.
The pair are now eyeing to launch the second location at the Food Innovation Precinct WA campus just outside of Mandurah. Expansion into the east coast is also in the pipeline for 2025.
Written by Cheyanne Enciso
