Advice for Home Educators – Page 5 – Home Education Network

Advice for Home Educators

Partnered Home Educators & Centrelink

Partnered home educators may be eligible for: Family Tax Benefit Part A and Part B. Once your child reaches the minimum school starting age for your state, if you are geographically isolated, your child has specific learning needs or medical issues (including anxiety, depression, bullying, family trauma, ill parent), you may be eligible for Assistance for Isolated Children a substantial payment which is not income or assets tested

Starting Out

By Pavlina McMaster Home education is a foreign concept to most of us – it is outside our own, personal educational experience, and many people considering it do not know anyone who home educates their children. In Victoria, approximately 60% of home educators have come to it after withdrawing a child from school, often under traumatic or highly stressful circumstances. This cohort often make

Advice for Home Educators

Assistance for Isolated Children

Assistance for Isolated Children (AIC) FAQ What is the AIC payment? Assistance for Isolated Children (AIC) is a Centrelink group of payments for parents and carers of children who can’t go to a local government school because of geographical isolation, disability or other needs. It is a significant payment available to some home educators, but it is not a ‘homeschool payment’. There are

Advice for Home Educators

Help for Low Income Families

If you’re looking for help with managing your child’s education costs, the Saver Plus program could help. Saver Plus provides individuals and families on lower incomes the opportunity to have their savings matched dollar-for-dollar (up to $500) to pay for education costs. Find out more about your eligibility and how to apply by phoning 1300 610 355 or visit the Saver Plus website

Advice for Home Educators

Beyond Home

Home Ed Activities Around Victoria Home education doesn’t mean all learning happens in the home: the world really is your classroom! Victoria offers many free and low cost activities. You can plan your activities as a family or link up with a group of home educators to go along together. Many venues that cater to school groups also have education materials available on

Advice for Home Educators

Home Education Beyond Week Two

By Sue Wight Rachel Brady gave up on home education after two weeks and sent her children back to school. Her home education experience is not representational. Around 20,000 Australian kids are currently being home educated, thousands more already have been. For some families, home education provides a valuable short-term solution to an immediate problem, but many educate for a substantial time. The average

Advice for Home Educators

Registration and Learning Plans

This information applies to Victoria, for interstate legal information, visit our Legal page. Registration Victorian Home educators are required to register with: Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority (VRQA) Ph: 03 9637 2806 Email: home.schooling@education.vic.gov.au Registration requires an Application form (Word or PDF) together with a Learning Plan for each child. See our video on How to Register Learning Plans Learning plans do not have to be

Advice for Home Educators

Do Your Own Thing

By Sue Wight As you move into the home education world, you’ll have people ask what type of home educator you are. There will be those who make the question sound like some kind of test. Feel free to ignore any such pressure. There are many different ways to home educate but none is the ‘one true way’. You may not be familiar with

Guide to Reviews

Are you a Victorian home educator up for review this year? The Victorian Registration and Qualifications Authority (VRQA) is the government department that regulates home education by processing registrations and performing reviews. First, watch the VRQA videos on reviews and what to expect. Don’t stress, we’re here to help The HEN team has put in a lot of work liaising with the VRQA to

Advice for Home Educators

But what about Friends? What about Socialisation?

By Pavlina McMaster Whenever we tell people that we home educate our children, they almost invariably ask, “But what about socialisation?”. What they usually mean to ask is, “But how will they learn to be social?”. There is a difference, and home educated children are well-placed to be both, in a considered, thoughtful way. What is Socialisation? Socialisation is the process whereby children and

Advice for Home Educators

What is this home ed thing anyway?

By Cynthia McStephen If you are new to the whole idea of DIY education, you may be wondering what this home education stuff is all about. Of course, life varies wildly between different families anyway. So, by extension, home education, like every other aspect of family life, covers a huge spectrum. Instead of a catch-all definition, here’s a list of some of the things

Advice for Home Educators

Anything is Possible

How to Run Your Next Home Ed Camp or Excursion By Colita Scott Home education camps and events are all about giving your children an experience to remember. For me, the best parts of school were the school camps and excursions. A lot of home educated kids feel the same way. Too many new home educating families ask me ‘so what’s available for my

Advice for Home Educators

Guide to Home Education in Victoria

The updated Guide to Home Education in Victoria is now available in Word of PDF.

Advice for Home Educators

Dear New Home Educator

Dear New Home Educator, Congratulations on your decision to educate your children from home. You’ve borrowed a pile of books from the library and scoured the internet for advice; you may have bought some supplies already. Great…except that every ‘expert’ seems to recommend different things and now you feel overwhelmed by the choices. Right? Relax, you’ll be home educating YOUR children YOUR way and

Advice for Home Educators

Fulfilling the 8 Key Learning Areas

By Bekah Carman In Victoria we are required to provide “regular and efficient instruction that taken as a whole, substantially addresses the [8 key] learning areas”. I recently released a post that discussed the value of looking at the Victorian Curriculum in order to figure out how to fulfil the requirements of teaching to the Key Learning Areas (KLAs). As discussed in that post,

Advice for Home Educators

Should you look at the Victorian Curriculum?

By Bekah Carman In Victoria we are required to provide “regular and efficient instruction that taken as a whole, substantially addresses the [8 key] learning areas”. These learning areas, which we call the KLAs, are English, Maths, Science, Technology, Languages (other than English), Arts, Health and PE, and Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS). The problem with the requirement to instruct in the 8 KLAs

Advice for Home Educators

Unschooling is not Unparenting

By Sue Wight Something odd is happening in the world of unschooling. Sarah has heard that if her children want chocolate biscuits for breakfast, they will eat a balanced diet over time without well-meaning interference from her. Meanwhile, she’s struggling to buy enough chocolate biscuits to keep up with them and is torn between her concerns about nutrition and a reluctance to impose restrictions

Advice for Home Educators

Learning by Immersion

By Sue Wight We all learnt to speak via the immersion method. Babies become aware of vocal patterns and connect them with visual cues from facial expressions and body language and are on their way to cracking the code of their mother tongue. The process is driven by the desire to understand, to communicate, to be part of the group. Watching babies and toddlers

Advice for Home Educators

Missing the Milestones

By Susan Wight Towards the end of the year, I often catch up with old friends. Getting together always emphasises just how different our lives now are. They talk of meetings, workloads, changing policies, best-practice and so on. Their end-of-year display of cards and gifts from appreciative clients or students always takes me by surprise. Jealous? No, I’m happy with my life and don’t

Advice for Home Educators

Are you qualified?

By Susan Wight Somehow this question puts us on the back foot and we ﬁnd ourselves mumbling, “Umm, well no I’m not a teacher…” Why? Why do we give in to the assumption that we need some kind of certiﬁcate to ‘teach’ our own children? I don’t believe we should, but somehow many parents suddenly feel unable to defend home education when this question

Events