About Ella

Unschool your mind. Lead with honesty. Educate for real life.

I'm Ella Rose Roussel a historian, home‑educating parent, and educator.

I help adults heal from school conditioning, lead with honest parenting, and give their children an education that prepares them for the real world, not just exams.

I write, teach, and build community for people who know that school didn’t tell the whole truth and are ready to do something different for themselves and their families.

I was told I’d always struggle

I’ve always loved history and writing, but as a child I struggled to read.

I was labelled dyslexic, put in the slow readers group, and told I’d always find it difficult to read and get good grades. The message was clear: I was not “academic”.

Everything shifted when my friend (now my husband) told me something radically simple:
I could read. The only thing really holding me back was what I believed about myself.

Fast forward, and I hold a degree in history. I spend my days reading dense academic books and papers I could never have imagined tackling as a kid.

The label was wrong. My belief was the prison.

That experience sits at the core of my work:

The stories we’re given about ourselves are not the truth.
They’re scripts. And they can be rewritten.

The day I realised authority can be wrong

My first experience of teaching was gentle: mentoring younger children in primary school through a school program.

My second experience changed how I saw school and the role of “teacher” forever.

In Year 8 (2006), in a mid‑level maths class, I was the only one to solve a particular equation correctly. The teacher marked me wrong. I was confused but convinced I was right, so I took the problem home and asked my dad, a carpenter who was good with numbers, to check it.

He looked at it and said,
“You’ve already solved it. Your teacher is wrong.”

I went back and told my teacher. Before long, he was sending students to me for feedback on their work and extra explanations when they didn’t understand. I became the go‑to person. Some students stopped going to the teacher all together, coming straight to me instead.

This went on for weeks, then months.

Students started going home with “well done” and smiley faces in their books, written by a peer, not a teacher. Parents began to ask questions. Eventually, I lost my unofficial position. So did the teacher.

I was moved into the top‑level maths group mid‑term and, honestly, I didn’t thrive there. I’d missed the foundations. But back in my old class, many of the kids I’d helped did well. Some thanked me personally.

That experience cracked something open in me:

• Authority can be wrong.
• Titles don’t guarantee truth.
• Young people are far more capable of leading and teaching than systems usually allow.