Launched in February 2023, MissingSchool’s Seen&Heard initiative builds on a decade of success, fine-tuning its focus on scale-up of telepresence technology (including but not limited to robots), with the ultimate goal of getting nationally systemic support and solving school isolation for some of Australia’s most vulnerable students by 2025.

The initiative has been developed based on insights drawn from MissingSchool’s service evaluation data through over 1000 surveys and long-form interviews with teachers and parents since 2017. The University of Southern Queensland and Deakin University are partnering with MissingSchool to translate that evaluation data into world-first research.