Gloriavale Homeschooling U-Turn

| Greymouth Star |
Subscription Only

The Government has backtracked on a last-minute controversial change to homeschooling, which a New Zealand Home Education consultant says sprang from its recent audit of the Gloriavale Christian Community at Lake Haupiri.

Cynthia Hancox, who serves as government liaison for the National Council of Home Educators, says the Education Review Office (ERO) used Gloriavale “to create a false narrative about home education”.

Education Minister Erica Stanford recently announced the sudden introduction of new requirements on parents homeschooling their children, but quickly walked back on the decision following backlash.

Mrs Hancox revealed on her website the scope of the homeschooling audit that occurred at Gloriavale.

The 2023 ERO review at Gloriavale Christian School also included a few families who had begun homeschooling in 2022, Mrs Hancox revealed.

“They visited with a sampling of three families, did not do individual full reviews, and had positive comments in their report about the families visited, but recommended to themselves that they needed to do a full review process for each individual child,” she wrote.

Then in 2024, ERO reviewed every homeschooling child at Gloriavale, conducting 96 reviews across some 30 families, she said.

ERO found the “vast majority” were being “taught at least as regularly and well as”.

Eleven students from seven families did not completely meet the standard.

However, the Ministry of Education rejected the claims from Mrs Hancox.

“No decisions have been made about the outcome of these matters,” acting director of education Nelson, Marlborough West Coast, Carly Ave, told the Greymouth Star.

“The secretary’s focus has been on ensuring that home education within the Gloriavale community meets legislative requirements, with her actions directed at verifying compliance rather than predetermining outcomes,” Ms Ave said.

“After concerns were raised, she requested further reviews to be confident that the required standards were being maintained.”

Mrs Hancox was invited to visit Gloriavale to work with the homeschooling families in her role as a home education consultant and spent a week at the remote community.

These families later met with ministry staff and were able to satisfy them regarding the changes they were making or their learning programme in general and were permitted to continue homeschooling.

The ‘Special Review Report of Education Provision within the Gloriavale Community’, published by ERO last July, said the large majority of children receiving education through homeschooling are taught “at least as regularly and well” as in a registered school.

Yet, just two months later the Ministry’s head, Secretary of Education Ellen MacGregor-Reid, called for new reviews of home educators at Gloriavale, at a time when she was also considering closing the Gloriavale Christian School.

“It appears that the Secretary intended to consider revoking all the exemptions of home educated students at Gloriavale,” Mrs Hancox said. Legislation requires that in order to revoke them, Ms MacGregor-Reid needed to consider ERO reviews on the matter.

“The reviews concluded and reported on only a few months prior would not have supported revoking the exemptions,” Mrs Hancox said.

“In asking ERO to conduct new reviews, the Secretary stated in her letter to then-Chief Review Officer Nicholas Poole, ‘I have concerns about the quality of the home education for multiple home educating families in the Gloriavale community, specifically around the suitability of the learning environment in which home education occurs’.

Mrs Hancox revealed three teams of two people were sent to Gloriavale for the 2025 reviews, but only one had ever conducted a homeschooling review before.

“The others were completely unfamiliar with home education, and reportedly expressed how rushed and unprepared they felt to several families.

“These reviews also completely skipped three normal steps in homeschooling reviews — the Ministry did not first notify families of ‘concerns’ and provide them with an opportunity to comment;

ERO did not ask the families to complete their now-usual pre-review questionnaire and provide background information or other evidence they might choose to; and ERO refused to give families post-review feedback on what the outcomes were likely to be — all normal practice in usual home education reviews.”

The review included 104 children from 28 families, even though a good number of them do not even live within Gloriavale at Lake Haupiri. Some live at Lake Brunner. One family has lived outside of Gloriavale for about five years, and only occasionally visits the community because of family still there. That family told ERO this before the review date was confirmed, but were “treated the same as everyone else”.

“A major focus of these reviews was on the ‘learning environment,’ however this is outside of the scope of an ERO review of a homeschooling family,” Mrs Hancox said. “Within the context of a school review, the ERO does look at the learning environment — for example a private school is required to have “suitable premises.” However, for home educators, the legislative requirements are that they are ‘taught as regularly and well as’, and because this learning is based in private homes (which the law explicitly states the ERO does not have the right of entry to), subjective judgements about these homes is not an appropriate focus for an ERO review.

“Historically, the question in ERO reviews of home educators that asks about learning environment has had a broader context – enquiring as to how families use local resources such as museums, libraries, community activities etc to enhance learning, which aligns with what is asked about this within a homeschooling exemption application.

“The reviewers also asked questions about safety plans of people both in their own homes and wider community, including those of people unconnected to the family being reviewed — information that is again out of scope, and especially so because these are arrangements managed by Oranga Tamariki, who were satisfied with the situation. In addition, this means that the ERO was asking families to provide private information about other people, which they felt compelled to do.”

Mrs Hancox said when ERO sent families the draft reports in December, it found that every single child was ‘not being taught at least as regularly and well as’.

“Considering the opposite was true only a year earlier, this is statistically impossible,” Mrs Hancox said. She notes that a few of the children had only very newly begun homeschooling, and their reports were later amended to reflect that it was too early to judge as a result.

The evidence files released to the families were passed on to Mrs Hancox to review.

“It is clear in these files that if the families had been reviewed on an equitable basis to any other home educating family, or, indeed, in the same way as they were reviewed the prior year, most of the families should have passed the reviews. The findings by the reviewers in many cases were entirely positive, but the moderators have changed all findings to negative, in every case — with reasons that are often such as, in one case ‘report too positive’. Or by claiming that the evidence in the file doesn’t support the findings — which, if that is the case, it is a failure of the reviewers to include sufficient documentation to back up their clear and considered findings, not of the families, who it should be noted, were not asked to provide anything that was missing as would normally be the case in such as situation.”

Mrs Hancox said ERO added things to families’ files that had nothing to do with those families or their homeschool programmes, such as how many paper towels were in a public restroom not used by a family, or how clean the clothes were on a Gloriavale community member the review team had encountered within the complex.

“In some instances, based upon information shared with me, they recorded inaccurate information in the files which do not align with the facts of the family under review. In the case of one family, who use a former early childhood education centre as their personal classroom, the reviewers seem so hung up on the fact that there was a home-made bow with suction-cup arrows on a shelf, and a microwave at a level reachable by children, that they couldn’t seem to focus on much else, making a big deal of these ‘safety issues’ in the review notes.”

“Home education within the Gloriavale community takes place across hostels and surrounding areas, rather than within a single defined location, and the scope of the reviews reflected that context,” Ms Ave said in response.

“Decisions about reviewing individual families, and how those reviews are carried out, sit with the Chief Review Officer at ERO.”

Mrs Hancox notes, however, that even though the final ERO reports for 58 children state that “The home learning environment supports engagement and success in learning,” those families’ reports still concluded, regardless of often copious other evidence to the contrary, that they were “not taught as regularly and/or as well as,” leaving families awaiting the decision of the Secretary of Education as to whether or not their home education exemptions may be revoked.

“Any home educating family in the country, regardless of where they live, should be able to trust that they will be treated as individual families, reviewed on an equitable basis by reviewers who understand the varied valid approaches to home education, and limited in scope to the actual legislative requirements of home education — the teaching of their children as regularly and well as they would be in a registered school.”