Hunters → The Orchard
What school could look like
You don't grade an orchard. You tend it.
The front page of this site made an accusation: school, as built, is a grading line running someone else's spec. Fair enough — but an accusation isn't a plan. This page is the plan. What would education look like if it were built for hunter-type kids from the ground up?
Not a fantasy. Every principle below is drawn from research or from schools that already exist — several of them Australian. Nothing here is graded. Everything here is fed.
Part one — the principles
Seven things a hunter's school would do.
None of this is exotic. Each principle below is either established in research, running today in real schools, or both. What's rare is finding them assembled in one place — because assembling them means admitting the conveyor was a choice.
Aim the attention, don't ration it
Hunter attention is interest-fired: nearly impossible to summon on command, nearly impossible to exhaust once lit. So a hunter's school starts from the child's real questions and builds the curriculum through them — reading, maths and writing arriving as tools for a hunt that's already underway, not as pre-hunt paperwork. This is the whole architecture of Big Picture Learning's “one student at a time” schools: passion first, projects around it, an exhibition of real work instead of an exam at the end.
Treat movement as fuel, not misbehaviour
Exercise reliably sharpens attention and executive function in kids with ADHD — meta-analyses of dozens of trials make this one of the strongest results in the field. Stranger and better: studies of boys with ADHD found that the ones who moved more during thinking tasks performed better — the wriggling isn't the interruption, sometimes the wriggling is the thinking. So a hunter's school schedules movement into learning rather than confiscating it: lessons that happen walking, movement breaks with actual evidence behind them, real physical work — and never, ever, taking away recess as a punishment. Benching a hunter for restlessness is removing the medicine and billing the patient.
Hold class where hunters evolved
Time in green settings measurably settles attention — the “green time” studies found children's ADHD symptoms milder after activity in parks and leafy spaces than after the same activity indoors. Australia already has the infrastructure and the movement: bush kinders, nature pedagogy, outdoor classrooms. A hunter's school treats the paddock and the creek as rooms on the timetable, not as rewards for surviving the indoor ones.
Sprint, rest, repeat — and progress by mastery
Hunter energy comes in bursts with real recovery in between; the conveyor demands identical output every period of every day, then calls the mismatch a deficit. A hunter's school runs on rhythm — deep-dive immersion blocks, then genuine rest — and lets kids progress when they've mastered a thing rather than when the age-cohort calendar says so. Ferguson's whole guidebook for adult hunters is energy management; there is no reason to wait until adulthood to be taught your own operating rhythm.
Make real things for real people
Hunters famously can't fake engagement with pretend work — and why should they? The fix is stakes: internships with actual tradespeople and scientists and shopkeepers (Big Picture students spend two days a week out in one), businesses run from the school gate, food grown and sold, work exhibited to a real audience that isn't holding a rubric. A child who “can't concentrate” on a worksheet will hold a masterclass in concentration the day the thing they're building has to actually work.
More structure for the hard parts, not less
Here's where this page refuses to be romantic: freedom is not the whole answer. A dyslexic child does not learn to read by being left alone with lovely books — the evidence is emphatic that they need more explicit, systematic teaching of the code (structured literacy, the science-of-reading lineage), delivered early and unapologetically, with audiobooks and text-to-speech as ramps in the meantime (a meta-analysis puts real numbers behind the ramps: read-aloud tools measurably lift comprehension for kids with reading disabilities). Australian systems are finally turning this way — phonics checks and explicit-instruction mandates are rolling through the states. The hunter's school is choosy about where structure goes: heavy scaffolding on the skills that don't come free, wide-open country everywhere else. The conveyor does exactly the opposite.
Design for full-volume perception
For autistic kids, the standard classroom is a stress test nobody graded: fluorescent hum, thirty bodies, surprise timetable changes. A hunter's school makes the day predictable and the environment adjustable — quiet rooms that aren't punishment rooms, headphones without commentary, warning before transitions — and then uses the child's deep interests as the front door to everything else — in one systematic review, every single study that built classroom work around autistic children's intense interests reported gains in learning or engagement. Regulation isn't a distraction from learning. It's the prerequisite.
Part two — not utopia
This isn't hypothetical. It's just unevenly distributed.
New Hampshire, USA · 1997–2023
The Hunter School
Thom Hartmann didn't just write the hunter books — he and his wife Louise founded a school on them: small classes, woods on the doorstep, ADHD kids taught as a perceptual style to harness rather than a defect. It ran for a quarter of a century. The lens became a timetable, and it worked.
Across Australia
Big Picture schools
More than 45 Australian schools — mostly ordinary public ones — run the Big Picture design: passion-based projects, two days a week in real internships, exhibitions instead of exams. Its final-year credential is warranted by the University of Melbourne, and Big Picture says 17 Australian universities now accept it in place of an ATAR.
Melbourne
Templestowe College
An ordinary government secondary school that abolished year levels: students progress by readiness, choose from 150-plus subjects, and finish early, on time or late. It went from near-closure to a national model.
Brisbane
The Sycamore School
Queensland's first school built for autistic kids, founded by parents in 2017 — one teacher to five students, strengths-based, therapy on site. In 2026 the state government signed a 25-year lease to secure it.
Everywhere, quietly
Bush kinders & home education
Bush kinder has put Australian early learning back outdoors. And about 45,000 Australian kids are now registered home learners — roughly double the number in 2020 — with neurodivergent kids heavily represented among the families who walked off the conveyor and report their kids breathing again.
The orchard exists.
It's just not where most kids are standing.
Part three — meanwhile, in the school you actually have
What a parent can do this term.
Most hunter-kids will spend tomorrow on the conveyor, so here is the practical version. Know what you're owed: under Australia's Disability Standards for Education, schools must make reasonable adjustments for how your child learns — no formal diagnosis required — and through the NCCD they're audited on it. This is not exotic: the latest national count shows over a quarter of all Australian students already receive documented adjustments. Asking isn't special treatment; it's the system working as written. Put requests in writing; ask for movement breaks, assistive tech, quiet space, and instructions delivered the way your kid can actually receive them.
Steer the plan toward strengths: when the school writes a learning plan, insist it lists what your child is brilliant at with the same seriousness as what they find hard — then push for goals that use the strengths instead of endlessly remediating the gaps. And guard the after-school hours like the treasure they are: the obsession with lizards or drum kits or Minecraft redstone is not a distraction from your child's education. For a hunter, it may be the main campus.
Most of all — and this outranks everything a school does — mind the mirror at home. How you frame the wiring when you talk to your child is the strongest schooling they'll ever receive. That's the whole previous page: The Bruise.
An honest note
A hunter's school is not a school without hard things. Hunters still need to learn the boring-but-load-bearing skills — the reading code, the times tables, the waiting — and “built for hunters” means building the ramps that get them there, not excusing them from the climb. The difference between a ramp and an excuse is that a ramp goes somewhere. Structure done right is how you show a child their mountain is real.