Otherways: Home Education Network

Home Education Information Days

[ 18 October 2009; 11:00 am to 2:00 pm. 25 October 2009; 11:00 am to 2:00 pm. 15 November 2009; 11:00 am to 2:00 pm. 22 November 2009; 11:00 am to 2:00 pm. 24 November 2009; 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm. ] HEN is conducting a series of information days over the next couple of months. Each day will consist of a home ed picnic for both existing home educators and enquiring families. Whether you are a veteran or a newcomer, these days will have something for you so come along and help us distribute information and [...]

Home Education and the Law

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 2006 came into effect on 1st July.
Under its terms home educators are required to register with the Victorian Registration [...]

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 [...]

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: A Choice for Life

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 [...]

Preschool Pressure

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 [...]

Other Ways

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 [...]

What does it mean to Homeschool?

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 [...]

Informal Learning

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 [...]

Beginning Home Education

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 [...]