Sandy has continued her advocacy on behalf of home schooling parents and students, with our last update in May 2024 outlining that a Home School Advisory Group, now known as the Home Education Expert Group, was established to advise government on changes to improve outcomes for home schooled children. We monitored the progress of this, considering the concerns raised regarding the original draft of the Education (General Provisions) and Other Legislation Bill 2024.

The group conducted a review, which is now complete and has outlined the following recommendations.

  1. Transformation of the Home Education Unit to include both regulatory oversight and practical support to assist participating families. To reflect this enhanced scope, the unit will be renamed Queensland Home Education (QHE). An education leader will be engaged to guide the implementation of all recommendations and ensure effective communication with families.
  2. Extension of the existing Home Education Expert Group by 6 months to 31 December 2025 to allow the establishment of an ongoing Queensland Home Education Consultative Group, thus maintaining momentum and continued parent engagement.
  3. More and better resources to support parents in meeting regulatory requirements, including improved program templates, exemplar annual reports, and publication of clear and transparent information about how compliance is determined for educational programs and written reports.
  4. Consider a trial of a new reporting option where parents can submit a short, standard written report and attend an online interview to demonstrate educational progress.
  5. Designing more user-friendly IT resources by enhancing the home education website so parents can easily navigate and access support and resources; creating a social media presence to connect with the home educating community and provide timely information; and, developing an efficient online portal for tasks such as registration and reporting.
  6. Ensuring the language used in communications with families is clear, supportive and family-centred.
  7. Establishing a home education support and advisory response platform for families, where parents can access information regarding onboarding, senior pathways, NAPLAN, services and student opportunities such as regional sport, Premier’s Reading Challenge, Premier’s Anzac Prize, student leadership forums and regional community liaisons.
  8. Facilitate and expand access to educational resources, including a review of student identification cards to ensure they have access to all discounts and services available to them; access to curriculum support materials as they are developed and updated; and liaising with relevant commercial providers to promote home educators and their children for education or teacher discounts.

The Queensland Government has accepted these recommendations and released an implementation plan, which can be found at https://education.qld.gov.au/schools-educators/other-education/home-education along with further information.

We welcome any feedback on the above information including the recommendations from Noosa electorate residents to inform our ongoing advocacy via noosa@parliament.qld.gov.au.

Further Information

For those who wish to directly advocate, email the Queensland Minister for Education via education@ministerial.qld.gov.au. Please copy our office in via noosa@parliament.qld.gov.au and forward us any response you receive.

For our previous Noosa 360 updates regarding this, please visit www.sandybolton.com/?s=home+schooling.