UPDATE 8/4/22
The HEA and other home education stakeholders had a meeting with the EGPA Review team yesterday. It was quite a productive meeting and they requested to schedule another one with us all. The alignment amongst the various stakeholders was phenomenal despite a lack of prior discussion amongst us all. Despite our diversity, home educators really agree on the common issues!
HEA hopes to draft a position paper over the weekend with a view to being released next week.
Your submission directly (or anonymously via HEA) will be super important but we still request people to hold off a bit longer until the position paper is released. This will hopefully allow all the responses to be more targeted and thus effective.
Please feel free to share this update via other channels so the word gets out far and wide.
UPDATE: 6/4/22
This afternoon the HEA is meeting again with other key stakeholders to discuss the proposed changes to the Education Act. Please hold off sending in your response to the HEU until we release our response information pack next week.
The HEA received permission yesterday to share the Qld Education Dept's Consultation Paper -- so if you did not receive a copy, email contact@hea.edu.au and we will send it to you.
Further, if you are not on our email list and want to receive our email update on this Qld issue next week, email us at contact@hea.edu.au and we will add you as a one-off email recipient for this information. The HEA does not share contact information with third parties.
29/3/22: Registered Home Educators in Queensland will have received an email yesterday about the proposed changes to the Education (General Provisions) Act 2006 (EGPA).
It’s important that QLD Home Educators have their voices heard - here’s how you can best do that:
Read the consultation paper.
Have conversations with home educators in your community & start thinking about a possible response.
Hold off on responding directly to the HEU.
I know point #3 sounds strange – but here’s why we are asking you to do that:
This week members of the Home Education Association, Wirraglen Support Group and Dr Terry Harding (head of Australian Christian Home Schooling) will meet to discuss our response to the consultation paper and to seek to present a unified front to the HEU and the Government. We would like to be able to have the opportunity to advise parents about how to respond, based on our understanding of the potential implications of some of these proposals. This understanding is based on:
Having home education academics in our midst (Terry Harding and Rebecca English);
An awareness of what is working and not working in other states and territories; and
A history of meeting with the HEU management team and Education Minister and having a sense of where they are coming from and what they are really hoping to achieve.
We are also looking at ways to facilitate anonymous feedback from community members who are not comfortable identifying themselves to the HEU – this may also include unregistered home educators.
Parents, of course, are welcome to differ in their opinions from those that this working group may arrive at. But we'd love parents to consider the voices of those who have been labouring in the area of home education advocacy for multiple years now before they send in their response to the HEU.
We will be in touch with you about this again very soon, so keep an eye out for our updates on www.hea.edu.au/news
If you have any questions, you can reach out to heaq@hea.edu.au
We are stronger together.
Karen Chegwidden
HEA President
HEA Queensland Facebook group (new) - https://www.facebook.com/groups/hea.queensland
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