Otherways: Home Education Network

School Start Bonus 2010

Registered Victorian home educators are eligible for the School Start Bonus. Parents are granted this money to assist with the costs (books, equipment etc) involved with starting school or starting secondary school.
The bonus applies to grade prep and year seven levels or, in ungraded situations, as follows:

Prep equivalent payments are for children aged five before [...]

Youth Allowance

At the end of 2007, home education students who were receiving the Youth Allowance received letters from Centrelink stating that their registration with the VRQA was now deemed insufficient evidence of study in a suitable course. Consequently their payments ceased.
The problem is one of two different levels of government – the VRQA is a state [...]

Welfare Payments Linked to School Attendance

The federal government has introduced a controversial bill to link welfare payments to school attendance. They intend to trial this system in WA and NT before rolling it out in other states.
Home education is not truancy so this should have no effect at all on registered home educators but will be a problem for [...]

Money Matters

Home education need not be expensive. You can home educate with a library card, the resources you already have at home and free resources in your community. An Internet connection is also extremely useful if you can afford it. Many commercial homeschooling supplies are available if families choose to use them and prices vary. So [...]

Education Tax Refund (all States)

Home educators are eligible for the Education Tax Refund if they are also entitled to Family Tax Benefit (FTB) Part A for the relevant financial year and are registered with the relevant state organisation (e.g. The VRQA in Victoria).
Eligibility for the rebate will also be extended to families in which a child would be eligible [...]

HEN Insurance

HEN has Public Liability Insurance to $10,000,000. Members can access this insurance for the purposes of:

Venue or camp hire ($10,000,000 is the usual amount required by most venues)
Small group activities involving up to 150 people
Volunteers working on behalf of HEN

There are exclusion clauses for adventure activities; volunteers who are drunk and disorderly; and so on. Members [...]

Centrelink Parenting Payments – All States

Registered home educators are exempt from the Welfare to Work laws which apply to parents with children over the age of six.
Registered homeschooling is one of the exemption categories along with large families (four or more children aged between 6 and 16), parents caring for foster children and children with significant disabilities.
For more information contact [...]

Home Education on a Budget

By Susan Wight
So you’ve decided to home educate but now you are worried about how you will ever afford all of those flashy curriculum resources, especially if home education means living on one income as it does for most families.
The good news is that home education does not have to be expensive.
You don’t really need [...]

Less than a Dollar a Day Home Education

By John Peacock
1. Flip an encyclopaedia
Encyclopaedias are so cheap from Op. shops these days that you could probably get a few for nothing. They have one feature that I like and that is even better than Google. Because there is so much knowledge these days encyclopaedias tend to edit old stuff out to make room [...]

Isolated Children’s Allowance – all states

This assistance is paid to all families who have children in boarding school or living away from home in order to attend school. It is also paid for children who are enrolled in a state approved Distance Education programme. If you are home educating your child for medical reasons you may also be eligible for [...]