Megan Gilmour, our MissingSchool CEO & Co-founder, had this Opinion Piece featured in the Herald Sun, on October 17, 2025, and NT Times, Townsville Bulletin, Toowoomba Chronicle, Geelong Advertiser, and Cairns Post published on October 18, 2025.
By Megan Gilmour
Australia’s school attendance crisis is now impossible to ignore. It’s debated in parliament, dissected in the media, and blamed on everything from mental health and family stress to the challenges of neurodiverse learning.
Forty per cent of students – around 1.65 million children – aren’t attending school full time. Yet what’s missing from the data, and from the debate, is what we’ve known for decades: children with chronic health conditions make up a significant part of this cohort, but remain invisible in policy and practice.
Up to 1.2 million school students are regularly missing vital school time due to chronic and complex health conditions like cancer, severe anxiety, juvenile arthritis, and pain. No government is tracking health condition absences, which can stretch for months to years. Nor are they keeping these students connected to their schools.
These invisible absences demand focused government attention. Not just because of the scale and social and educational harm it causes, but because we already have technology to bridge the gap between students and their schools once and for all.
Before the 2022 election, I recommended a national policy pathway to tackle this issue. Today, that opportunity remains unrealised, leaving our Better and Fairer Education agenda blind to these students and their devastating disadvantage.
Whether in school, hospital or at home, students must be able to access flexible education options through their schools — classes, curriculum, and assistive telepresence technology — ensuring they can learn from anywhere alongside peers.
We know it can be done. Millions of adults work and learn from anywhere every day.
While we applaud the endless parade of so-called “alternative provision”, we’re unconsciously consenting to a government-made market failure; one that’s allowed a largely unregulated sector to boom in the gaps where school systems step back.
Instead of carrying forward the problems of the pandemic and leaving its solutions behind, governments should act with the same urgency they did then by using existing legislation and school technology to keep students isolated in health crises connected.
Families, experts, and advocates have shared their stories of isolation, trauma and despair about missing school. It’s been 15 years since my son was diagnosed with a critical illness and missed years of school, triggering the creation of my charity MissingSchool. For 13 years, we’ve been trying to get our governments to act.
No amount of school funding can help a student who is not there, but the solution is not a bottomless budget. We already have school disability loading for accessibility adjustments, assistive devices, and support – the only thing standing in the way is a green light from governments.
Enough talk. It’s time to act. Schools must be at the heart of reform, with governments accountable for building future-fit systems that see every student, parent, and teacher. Otherwise, quality, equity, and child safety will be the collateral damage of inaction.
Education isn’t optional — it’s the backbone of our nation, our greatest investment, and the truest measure of who we become.
Megan Gilmour is 2025 ACT Australian of the Year, Deakin University Honorary Fellow, and co-founder of MissingSchool.
