Otherways: Home Education Network

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 there is no specific cost of home education - it can cost very little or it can cost thousands of dollars - depending on what method and resources you choose to use. We advise families to look carefully at materials before making a large investment. It is unfortunate when families spend a lot of money on a resource and later find their money could have been better spent.  See our articles Home Education on a Budget and Less than a Dollar a Day Home Education.

There is no specific financial assistance to home educators in Australia and home educators are not generally eligible for the Education Maintenance Allowance. However, home educaton is recognised as a valid form of education and, as such:

• The government exempts registered home educators from the Welfare to Work laws
• Victorian home educators are entitled to the School Start Bonus
• Those with a health care card are entitled to free use of the School Dental Service
• Chidren enrolled in a state approved distance education programme and those being home educated for medical reasons may be entitled to the Isolated Children Allowance.
• Home educators can claim the Education Tax Refund.

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Home education is legal throughout Australia. Parents do not need to have teaching qualifications.

Home Education has always been legal in Victoria but the legal situation changed in 2007 when the The Education and Training Reform Act came into effect on 1st July.

Under its terms home educators are required to register with the Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority (VRQA). The VRQA website contains information on registration together with an application form and support materials or you can contact them on 9637 3386 to have a set sent out to you. We also have a copy available on this website vrqa-registration-form.pdf or you can request one by post by contacting HEN via Sue at robwight@optusnet.com.au or phone 54395134

Regulations for the Education Act are available here but this document is very large and includes all the regulations for schools. We have extracted the regulations pertinent to home education in the following pdf which contains details of the new legal situation for home educators complete with excerpts from both the legislation and regulations. The format of the registration form (schedule 6) is included.

victorian-legal-information-jul-07.pdf

For some other state laws see links to home education groups in each state (in no particular order):

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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 Centrelink on 131764

Victorians: You will need to be registered with the VRQA or the Distance Education Centre. You then give Centrelink a copy of your Registration letter to Centrelink and request that they list you as exempt from the Welfare to Work laws under the ‘registered homeschooler catgegory’.

We have known Centrelink to be reluctant to admit that this exemption category exists. We advise home educators who are having any difficulties to print the press release below and to take it, together with their registration letter from the VRQA (if Victorian or equivalent evidence if from another state) to their Centrelink office and firmly state that they are exempt under the homeschooling category. If you then experience any difficulties, contact the VRQA (or your state registration body) for support.

Quote from a government press release dated 8 November 2005:

Hon Kevin Andrews MP

Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations
Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for the Public Service

Hon Peter Dutton

Minister for Workforce Participation

08 November, 2005

Joint Media Release

Parents with exemptions to receive special income supplement

The Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Kevin Andrews and the Minister for Workforce Participation, Peter Dutton announced today automatic participation exemptions for principal carers who are registered and active foster carers and those providing home schooling or facilitating distance education.

In granting an automatic exemption to these parents, the Howard Government is recognizing the special contribution they are making in their community.

Sole parents in these categories will also receive a higher rate of Newstart Allowance/Youth Allowance payment, that tops up their income support payment to the equivalent of the Parenting Payment Single rate. This supplement recognises that these parents are not in a position to undertake paid work.

Exemptions will be reviewable at least every 52 weeks and parents will still be required to register with an employment service. If they wish to voluntarily seek work while exempt, they will be able to access the same assistance and employment services as other parents.

“The exemptions and supplement are in recognition of the fact that these single parents are choosing to perform ongoing and significantly valued tasks over and above those normally involved in parenting and caring”, the Ministers said.

Links to relevant Centrelink pages:  

Changes to Parenting payment page and this page for other languages which state:

For Parenting Payment (Single) customers - will I get less money if I go on to Newstart Allowance?

Newstart Allowance attracts a lower rate than Parenting Payment (Single), unless you have an exemption for being a registered and active foster carer, or undertaking home schooling, distance education or having a large family (four or more children aged under 16).

Looking for Work? A guide to your options and our services see pg 11 ‘Participation and Activity Test Requirements - exemptions.

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Registered Victorian home educators are eligible for the School Start Bonus. The concept is that 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:

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By Lyn Loxton

There has always been a lot of confusion with the public’s perception of what homeschooling is. As the name implies, people expect to do schooling in the home and therefore expect to be able to purchase homeschooling as a package for their children.

Many are often quite confused and even alarmed when they find out that homeschooling is in fact all about choices - choices that they have to make and new ideas they have to think about.

People consider homeschooling their children for many reasons - philosophical, religious, travel and for many these days, the total frustration of seeing them hurt and unhappy in school. Until these reasons force us to explore new ways, we have never really given much thought to our children’s education - education happens in schools, it happened to us, therefore it will happen to our children - full stop.

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I always say my kids were homeschooled from birth, because they never went to school and they were learning from the day they were born. Yet I didn’t “school” them during the years from birth to age 5; we certainly did a lot - played inside and outside, made crafts, painted, colored, I read to them - but I never considered that homeschooling.

That’s why I was bewildered when I first noticed the trend of mums joining homeschool support groups even though their children were under five years old. I wondered, ‘what’s their hurry?’

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By Dindy Vaughan, Ringwood Victoria

Not every child is happy at school.

Some struggle along grudgingly, some fight the system, some opt out and refuse to achieve; and mostly their parents worry.

In many cases it comes down to ’school refusal’. The state of Victoria currently has not hundreds, but thousands of school-age children who are simply refusing to go. The majority are not rabble-rousers and delinquents; they tend to be quiet, somewhat withdrawn and, one guesses, depressed. They sit at home, they play computer games, they socialize a little with a few friends; and again; mostly their parents worry.

A child who is not happy at school is not necessarily a ‘misfit’. Schools are full of excellent dedicated teachers doing all they can to present the best programs available, but not all children can fit the pattern.

So what do you do with a child who is not happy?

When my five-year-old daughter exhibited extreme distress after one term of school I acted swiftly. I took her out.

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Homeschooling is an increasingly popular educational alternative in which children learn outside of conventional schools under the general supervision of their parents.Homeschooling means different things to different people. For some families, homeschooling means duplicating school at home, complete with textbooks, report cards and regularly scheduled field trips. For others, homeschooling is simply the way they live their lives - children and adults living and learning together in a seamlessness that would challenge an observer to determine which was ‘home’ and which was ’school’.

If you think of a kind of homeschooling continuum, with ’school at home’ at one end, and ‘learning and living completely integrated’ on the other - you would find homeschoolers scattered along that line with every possible variation of what homeschooling could mean.

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by Alan Thomas

Infants start learning informally from (or before?) birth, mainly through interaction with the mother or other caregivers. Part of this is learning how to behave in culturally appropriate ways, e.g., how to deal with emotions, how to interact with others in the family and wider community, and the acquisition of cultural values and attitudes. This alone requires a vast amount of knowledge and know-how.

Even more impressive are the cognitive understandings and skills that are learned informally, including language, basic literacy and numeracy, the beginnings of scientific understanding, a sense of humour, game rules and the beginnings of moral understanding. How are these learned? Apart from language, there has been little interest in the processes through which this learning actually occurs.

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by Lyn Loxton

When the notion of home educating our children first enters our thoughts, most of us instantly dismiss the idea that we could ever do such a thing. After all, there is this huge infrastructure in place costing millions of dollars per year, employing thousands of highly qualified people, using curriculums designed by trained minds using the latest researched and up-to-date techniques. We have been part of that as children and have come up through its ranks, survived its idiosyncrasies and have been spewed out into society like a little army of newly qualified members of an indoctrinated public ready to take our place in this very well ordered and controlled society. Who are we to compete with this? It is not possible.

This is the way we have been trained to think and it is so ingrained into the very depths of our being that most people will never in a lifetime be able to grasp the fact that you don’t need schools to learn. It is an inconceivable thought to most of the population, so when we do start to entertain thoughts of stepping out of this mould and teaching our own children, before we even publicly announce our ideas, our very own minds start to put up barriers and hurdles of doubt.

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