In December last year, I posted THIS article about the big spike in homeschooling exemption application numbers, which continued through until March this year (I added Feb updates to that article). This post is to provide some further data about numbers of applications since, from what is currently available. 

The next official statistics (to end of June 2022) won't be released on Education Counts until later this year - likely December - so any data in the meantime comes from OIA request results that have been shared, often by journalists who have been following this situation with interest. 

May 2022: The chart below was provided by a BOP reporter, who received it from the MoE as part of an information release.
In the complete document, they said that in 2021, they had received 3,833 applications, of which 3,440 had been approved (that year - some were not yet processed), and in 2022 from 1/2-30/4 they had received 2,328 applications, of which 1,500 had been approved so far when the data was extracted on 5th May 2022. 

June 2022: An article was published under the headline "Homeschool requests dip now COVID, mask rules have relaxed."
It essentially quotes the same data above, finishing with: "Nationally there were 781 applications in January, 744 in February, 548 in March and 255 in April." 

While this is a dip from those big numbers in Oct-Feb, that still places applications at about "twice normal" compared to previous years, a trend that doesn't look likely to end any time soon. 

Since the above, there have not been further articles so far with useful data in them - the focus in the media has turned to the huge absenteeism situation etc. Should more come in, I will add them to this post as updates.

Anecdotally, though, comments from Ministry staff indicate that application numbers, while more settled, are still consistently above previous norms. One region, which would normally average about 70 applications per month, told me recently they'd received 70 applications in the previous fortnight, which is consistent with the "twice average" indicators. I don't know for certain all regions are still seeing higher then normal numbers, but it seems likely, though there will be small dips and surges. 

An article in the news today reads, in part: 

Source/full article HERE

Here is a graph from another article published recently that shows the trend in applications over the past couple of years, to Oct 2021

Further stats added 9th Feb 2022:
The Ministry reported receiving a total of 867 applications in November, 800 in December, and 735 in January. 
"The ministry said it last year [2021] approved 2655 applications for home-schooling, declined 78 and was still deliberating over 983.
​The figures also show the ministry received more than 900 applications for Auckland in 2021, nearly double the previous year's figure, about 500 applications in Canterbury and more than 400 in Waikato."
​Source HERE

For comparison, total applications received by the Ministry for:
July 2018-June 2019 = 1,553 
July 2019-June 2020 = 2,005
July 2020-June 2021 = 2,087

Note that in the first half of 2021, total applications received = 1,019. In the article quoted above, the Ministry state they have received 3225 applications this year to 8th December, which means that in the second half of this year, they have received 2,206 so far - more than all of the applications in the previous 12 months. We can add about a further 600 to that with the release of December's numbers above, for a total of about 3825 for the year, or about 2806 in the second half of the year. 

Between 1 July 2020 and 1 July 2021 there was an overall net increase of 557 students; 1,858 students entered into homeschooling and 1,301 students finished homeschooling.

The average age of the 1,858 students entering into homeschooling was 8 years old, 81.5% were aged 12 or under and 0.8% were age 16 or above. 

Source for the above: Education Counts

At the same time, we know that the Ministry is receiving record numbers of applications in the latter part of 2021; it will be interesting to see what next year's stats look like! 

Image above extracted from THIS news article. 

However, we also know that every year there are a lot of folk who leave homeschooling, for various reasons. Some of those (and it's especially true currently) never really wanted to homeschool, but felt it necessary due to circumstances. When those circumstances change, or if they find homeschooling doesn't suit their family, they send the kids back to school. 

For some of those families, though, it could have been different - perhaps they just needed more connections, more support, from within the homeschooling world, to keep them going. After all, the first year of homeschooling is the hardest - after that it gets easier in many ways. Each homeschooling parent is, of course, self-responsible to seek out connections with others - and NCHENZ maintains a list of known regional homeschooling groups HERE. But we who are homeschooling already can also do our best to offer encouragement and support to those who choose, however briefly, to enter our world. Many, many of you already do this, which is great. I wonder, are there any new or additional ways we can encourage new folks who are past the exemption stage, but may be feeling a bit like they aren't on an even keel yet? What helped you when you were a homeschooler in  your first year or so?

As at 1st July 2020, there were 7,192 (exempt) homeschooled students from 4,003 families*. This represents 0.9% of total school enrolments. Out of the 7,192 home educated students, 65.0% were aged 12 or under, 70.2% had been homeschooled for less than 5 years, and only 4.2% had been homeschooled for 10 years or more. 

By comparison, as of 1st July 2019 there were 6,573 homeschooled children from 3,597 families, representing 0.8% of the total primary/secondary student population. 

We know that the COVID situation of 2020 has driven an increased interest in homeschooling, but the above statistics will not fully reflect that, as many families made a decision to pursue an exemption after the first lockdowns ended in around May, and their applications would not have necessarily been processed before the end of June, the cut off for the 2020 statistical data. It won't be until late 2021 when the next set of data is published that we get a clearer picture. However, we do know this is so far the greatest number, and proportion of overall students, being home educated since the data began being recorded in 1998. 

Lots of data and statistics on home education can be found at Education Counts HERE. There is also much on the website that may be of interest to some related to school data, spending etc.

* This year for the first time the statisticians did not publish the number of families on the website; I contacted them and asked, and requested they revert to including it in the future, as this figure is important for various reasons, including planning and resourcing. 

Homeschooling turnover

Between 1 July 2019 and 1 July 2020 there was an overall net increase of 619 students; 1,607 students entered into homeschooling and 988 students finished homeschooling.
There were 1,347 students entering into homeschooling in the year ending 1 July 2020, 82.2% were aged 12 or under and 0.9% were age 16 or above. Of the students entering homeschooling during the year ending 1 July 20, 70.9% identified as European/Pākehā, 14.8% identified as Māori, 3.4% identified as Pacific, 4.2% identified as Asian, and for 0.7% of homeschoolers ethnicity is unknown.
There were 1,005 students finishing homeschooling in the year ending 1 July 2020, 43.5% were aged 12 or under, and 22.7% were 16-years old or above. Of the students finishing homeschooling during the year ending 1 July 2020, 25.5% had been in homeschooling less than a year, 43.2% had been in homeschooling for 1 – 5 years, and 10.9% had been in homeschooling for 10 years or more.

ERO (the Education Review Office) is charged under law with conducting review of home educating families, when requested to do so by the Ministry of Education. Under current government policy, up to 35 reviews per year are funded, and these are only requested on a complaints basis. 

This means that if someone (it could be anonymous) complains to the MoE that your child is not being suitably educated, then they may request an ERO review. For a while that was the automatic result, but now the MoE first investigates the complaint, by contacting the family concerned, letting them know of the complaint, and giving them the opportunity to respond. If the response is such that the MoE decides that there is no real reason to be concerned, they don't request an ERO review. Otherwise, they will. However, if this is a second complaint, and the first one did not result in and ERO review, the Ministry is inclined to go straight to ERO the second time.

The only other time that an ERO review is called for is if a declined exemption application is appealed, but that is quite a different process, not involving visiting the family, which I will address in another post.

I will also post separately about responding to complaints and preparing for reviews -  here, a brief look at the history and statistics of ERO reviews for home educators.

In 1989, under Lange's Labour Government, the Tomorrow's Schools education reform happened, and from it the 1989 Education Act was born. There was also a report known as the Picot Report (proper name "Administering for Excellence") which contained recommendations for what should be carried out. For our purposes here, the results were:

• 1989 introduction of the law requiring families who wished to home educate to apply for a long term exemption from enrolment from the Secretary of Education (Prior to this, parents approached their local school principal and asked for an exemption. The MoE had no idea of how many children were being home educated)
• Routine reviews of home educators by ERO began
• The supervision allowance was introduced

In 1994, National's then Minister of Education, Lockwood Smith, stopped routine reviews of home educators. Quoting from Craig Smith's "A Brief History of Home Education in NZ":
"In July 1994 Lockwood Smith stopped the regular reviews of HEs by the ERO. He stated that he could not justify the expense of Review Officers travelling all over the country to review one or two children, virtually all of whom were doing excellently. All ERO annual reports have stated that HEs are a very low-risk group. Lockwood may have had another motive for dropping the reviews: the regular reviews were actually being conducted outside the parametres of the Education Act, which only provided for two occasions when reviews could take place on HEs: when a problem with a specific HE family came to the MoE’s attention; and when the MoE turned down a parent’s application for exemption, and the parent requested a review."

In 1996, the MoE asked home educators to write a self-evaluation report in lieu of reviews. Some did, some refused. There was a huge national mobilisation of home educators against this idea (one of the few times the majority have managed to agree enough to move together), and it was short-lived.

In 1997, the National goverment was in coalition with NZ First (after the first ever MMP election). NZ First wanted greater accountability for home educators, and pushed for an amendment to the Education Act which made routine review of home educators legal, and then reintroduced routine reviews. 

In 2009, under the National government (no longer in coalition with NZF), routine reviews of home educators were again scrapped. Craig and Barbara Smith wrote:
Echoing then Minister of Education Dr Lockwood Smith in 1994, that he could not justify the expense of regular reviews on such a low-risk group as home educators, Chief Review Officer Graham Stoop wrote in February this year that reviews of home educators are not efficient or effective. Posted on the ERO website is the following: “From 1 July 2009 ERO will carry out reviews only when requested by the Secretary for Education, or in other particular circumstances.”
This is in line with the present central government’s drive to cut bureaucratic costs. Minister in charge of the ERO, Anne Tolley, said in February: “I have asked ERO to identify schools that are performing consistently well and, accordingly, from March 1, these schools will be exempt from the current three-yearly ERO reviews and will instead be reviewed every four to five years.”
In December 2008, the Finance Minister advised Cabinet to do a line-byline review of expenditure. Home Education reviews were found to account for $283,000 out of a total budget of $28,675,000 or 0.987% (less than 1%). Graham Stoop wrote: “This programme is considered to be low risk to the education priorities of the Government. In 2007/08 ERO completed 644 homeschooling reviews from a total of 6,169 homeschooled students [at an average cost of $439.44 per review]. ERO could not provide assurance that the terms of exemption were being met in only 35 of the 644 reviews [a 5.4% “failure” rate]. This has been the pattern over many years.”

Since that time, funding for up to 35 reviews per year has remained in place. The number of actual reviews conducted per year has varied. ERO's year runs 1st July-30th June, and the stats kept are on that basis. Number of reviews per year are shown in the table below. The funding is for the review of individual students, so a family with, say, 3 exempt students, if reviewed, would account for funding and statistics reflecting this number. Therefore, 4 reviews does not necessarily mean 4 families were reviewed. In the 2016/2017 year, 9 students were reviewed from 5 families.

Note that in early 2014, the National Council of Home Educators (NCHENZ) took up with the MoE the issue of automatically referring to ERO any complaint recieved, when the complaint may be completely baseless. As a result, they instituted the current practice of giving families an opportunity to address the complaint, and not automatically referring on. You can see this reflected in the drop in numbers of reviews subsequently.

Keep in mind that there are currently around 5,800 exempt students in NZ. On the most recent statistic, that means the chances of your child being reviewed in any given year are 9:5800, or about 0.1%, and half that if you use the previous 2 year's stats. Of course, if you happen to know you have family or "friends" who are opposed to homeschooling and are the sort to complain about you to the MoE, your odds would go up.

So, while it is valuable to know you have sufficient material to put together what you need if you do have an ERO review one day, this should not be the primary focus of your home education program, and should not be burdensome. 

Families are often afraid of the idea of an ERO review, and of course, if it happens, preparing for one does inevitably add stress. However, overall, most families report that it turned out to be a mostly positive experience, and it can be quite affirming to have a report that confirms your children "are being taught at least as regularly and well as in a registered school."

One more thing to note: ERO do NOT decide whether an exemption is to be revoked or not. They simply review and write a report which they send to the MoE. It is up to the MoE to then make decisions. If the review states the children ARE being taught as regularly and well, then the exemption continues with no further action. If it states that they are NOT, then the Ministry can choose either to revoke the exemptions, or to allow the family a period of time in which to address the areas of concern, after which another review may be conducted. 

I will be posting more articles about these things, but for now, if you would like to know your rights and how to prepare for an ERO review, see the excellent information on the NCHENZ website HERE.