Changes coming to homeschooling regulation
You may remember that in May this year, PILLAR stood up against undemocratic changes to homeschooling legislation.
The proposed changes would have imposed significant regulatory barriers on homeschoolers and expanded state power into Kiwi homes without appropriate limits.
Following extensive campaigning, a sneaky move to amend the Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill without democratic consultation was scrapped.
However, headlines from this week suggest that the fight for parental rights is not entirely over.
Plans to amend homeschooling regulations have been reignited further following the recent inquiry into the disappearance of the Phillips children which found serious failures across multiple government agencies.
The report concluded that the Ministry of Education should have sought more information, reviewed the children’s homeschooling exemptions and acted on the exceptional warning signs already known to authorities.
Those findings deserve a serious response. Children have a right to safety and a genuine education.
But the Phillips case should not be used to place every responsible homeschooling family under permanent suspicion from the state.
That was not an ordinary homeschooling situation. It involved disappearances, family court proceedings, parental exclusion, firearms concerns and repeated opportunities for government agencies to intervene.
Our assessment is that renewed legislation or regulation is now likely...
The danger is that three distinct questions become blurred together:
Is a child receiving an adequate education?
Is a child at risk of abuse or neglect?
Does the state approve of the family’s curriculum, values or educational philosophy?
The first two are legitimate public concerns. The third is where parental freedom can be steadily lost.
The state’s education sector does not have a monopoly on teaching competence, good care or desireable educational outcomes. Government institutions can play a role in protecting children, but they can also fail them as they have in the past.
Home education should never itself be treated as evidence that a child is unsafe.
Intervention should follow credible evidence of harm or serious educational neglect, not a presumption that families outside the state system are inherently suspect.
This issue matters beyond homeschooling.
A free society needs educational choice. When the state moves from setting reasonable minimum standards to becoming the sole acceptable provider or director of education, it gains enormous influence over how the next generation thinks, understands society and forms its values.
Over time, that concentration of power threatens individual choice, freedom of conscience and democratic government.
Parents must remain free to pursue different educational approaches, provided their children are safe and genuinely educated.
Educational freedom and choice, therefore, is not only a parental right, it is a safeguard for democracy.
A government powerful enough to determine how every child must learn, what they must learn, and which values may shape that learning holds too much influence over the next generation.
PILLAR will work to ensure that any changes target genuine risks without placing responsible families under suspicion or undermining parental freedom.
Thank you for standing with us.
