Dear Members of Parliament,
I am writing as a constituent, a home educating parent, and as someone who works closely with a large community of home educating families, to express serious concern about the proposed changes to home education contained in Amendment Paper 583 to the Education and Training (System Reform) Amendment Bill. Particularly the proposed home education provisions in new Part 5F and clause 51A.
I oppose these provisions, strongly urge you to oppose them in Parliament, and ask that you give me three minutes of your time to explain why.
My concern is not with the idea that children should receive a proper education. Of course they should. Nor is it with appropriate safeguards where there are genuine concerns about a child’s education or welfare. My concern is that these amendments would create broad regulation-making powers around reporting and assessment for home educating families, without proper consultation with the sector, and without clear evidence that the current framework is failing at a systemic level.
As I understand it, the proposed amendment would allow future regulations to specify what parents must report to the Ministry, how often they must report, the form those reports must take, and any assessment requirements for children exempted from school attendance. Compliance with those future requirements would become part of maintaining the exemption itself.
That represents a significant shift in the relationship between the state and home educating families.
The exact reporting and assessment requirements have not yet been defined. That is part of the concern. Families are being asked to accept broad future powers before knowing what those requirements would look like in practice, how frequently reporting would be required, what kind of assessment might be expected, how educational diversity would be protected, what privacy safeguards would apply, and what review or appeal rights families would have.
I also object to the way these provisions have been introduced. Home educating families did not have a proper opportunity to submit on these specific home education changes through the Select Committee process. Introducing significant new powers by Amendment Paper at this stage bypasses the ordinary consultation pathway and leaves affected families responding after the main public submission process has already closed.
That is deeply concerning.
Home education is not simply school moved into the home. Many families choose home education precisely because their child’s learning, development, wellbeing, neurodivergence, interests, family circumstances, or educational philosophy do not fit well within a standardised school model. To assess home education primarily through school-style reporting, prescribed curriculum coverage, age-based benchmarks, or standardised academic outputs risks misunderstanding what is actually happening in these families.
The danger is not paperwork in itself. The danger is that paperwork becomes the lens through which a child’s education is judged.
If reporting and assessment requirements are designed around narrow, measurable outputs, families will inevitably feel pressured to shape their children’s education around producing those outputs. That would undermine some of the greatest strengths of home education: flexibility, responsiveness, deep interest-led learning, real-world learning, developmentally appropriate pacing, and the ability to build an education around the individual child rather than an institutional timeline.
This is important, because a growing body of educational research points toward the importance of agency, intrinsic motivation, autonomy, creativity, critical thinking, self-regulation, and wellbeing in children’s long-term development. These are not soft extras. They are central to the kind of capability children will need in a rapidly changing world.
The OECD’s Future of Education and Skills 2030 project, for example, places student agency, wellbeing, skills, attitudes, and values at the centre of future-ready education. It argues that children will need to apply knowledge in unfamiliar and evolving circumstances, and develop capacities such as critical thinking, creative thinking, collaboration, learning to learn, self-regulation, empathy, and self-efficacy. These are precisely the kinds of capacities many home educating families are intentionally trying to protect and develop.
Research on motivation also raises serious questions about highly controlled, externally driven models of education. Children are more likely to engage deeply with learning when they experience a sense of agency, growing competence, and strong relational support. Many home educating families build their approach around those conditions: meaningful choice, close relationships, real-world competence, and learning that connects to a child’s genuine interests, strengths, and goals. A poorly designed reporting or assessment framework could easily work against those conditions by shifting the focus from learning itself to producing evidence for external approval.
This does not mean every home educating family looks the same. Some use structured curriculum. Some use a more child-led or unschooling approach. Many sit somewhere in between. That diversity is not a weakness of home education. It is one of its core strengths. It allows children with different developmental timelines, learning profiles, needs, strengths, interests, and family contexts to receive an education that is genuinely fitted to them.
Standardised reporting and assessment frameworks can easily flatten that diversity. They tend to privilege what is easy to measure over what is most meaningful.
Internationally, the research picture does not support the idea that home education is inherently deficient, risky, or socially limiting. On the contrary, the available evidence shows that home educated children and adults can and do achieve strong outcomes across academic learning, social development, tertiary pathways, employment, civic contribution, wellbeing, and adult life satisfaction. And in New Zealand, no clear evidence has been presented that home education is failing at a systemic level that would justify such broad new powers.
Of course, no educational pathway is perfect. There will be children in school who thrive, children in school who suffer, home educated children who thrive, and home educated children whose needs are not properly met. That is exactly why policy should be careful, evidence-based, proportionate, and developed in consultation with the people most affected by it.
A sweeping regulatory power is not a careful response. Especially not when the details of future reporting and assessment requirements are left to regulation rather than being clearly debated in primary legislation.
I respectfully ask that you oppose the home education provisions in Amendment Paper 583, particularly new Part 5F and clause 51A, and any provisions enabling broad future reporting and assessment requirements as a condition of maintaining an exemption.
If the Government believes changes to home education accountability are needed, those changes should be developed through proper consultation with home educators, educational researchers, neurodiversity-informed practitioners, and families whose children have not been well served by the conventional system. Any framework should be evidence-based, proportionate, appealable, and designed to respect educational diversity rather than pressure home educators to replicate school.
All children have a right to an education. But education should not be reduced to what can be easily reported, benchmarked, or tested.
Yours sincerely,
Israel Butson.