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A new web tool helps NSW families fight back as Labor targets homeschooling and parental rights.

Parents angered by New South Wales Labor signalling a ban on homeschooling and private education are being urged to petition their state representatives.

An interactive web tool called Homeschooling Families Need Genuine Consultation has been created to streamline that process. The app is designed to help NSW parents express their concerns through an easy-to-use MP and electorate locator.

There are two email templates. One letter template for homeschooling parents, and another for concerned citizens. Each carefully written letter is around 200 words long and asserts safeguarding school choice. Both letters end with a request for NSW MPs to:

Urge Education Minister Prue Car and the NSW Government to pause the transition and commit to genuine, transparent consultation with homeschooling families and the broader community before moving forward.

To participate in the petition, click here.

A New Tool to Defend Homeschooling

The parental rights web tool is powered by Netlify, a well-known 2014 web development interface celebrated for its multi-use applications, and comes with privacy protections.

Running under the name AdvocacyAU, this simple web tool was created by a Sydney-based parent of preschool-aged children who supports educational freedom and is actively considering homeschooling.

He told Caldron Pool that he built the tool to help parents and concerned citizens contact their local MPs and voice their concerns.

Like thousands of others, as a dad he is uneasy about increasing government pressure on private education and homeschooling—especially the recent decision to shift homeschooling oversight to the Department of Education.

The letter templates also voice concerns about bureaucratic increase and overreach, such as the government imposing rigid school-style requirements and mandatory testing.

These changes, the petition asserts, “would significantly limit our ability to provide personalised education tailored specifically to our children’s unique needs and our family’s values.”

Adding real weight to these concerns is how the NSW Labor government threw the NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) under a bus.

Labor unilaterally ended the consultation process by moving homeschooling from NESA to the Department of Education. It was a decision that slammed the door shut on a decade of delicate relationship-building between NESA and homeschoolers.

The incompetent waste of taxpayer money sets back parental rights, and foments misgivings about the government by reigniting the public’s distrust. What was a bridge based on trust and understanding is now a ruin haunted by salivating socialist bureaucrats and an overreaching — and ever-growing — bureaucratic state.

Labor’s Education Minister still hasn’t detailed reasons for the decision outside “aligning” NSW with other governments.

Prue Car’s wording is eerily similar to that of far-left State Education Secretary Murat Dizdar, who has strongly insinuated that alternatives to government education were unnecessary.

Dizdar expressed to the ABC a desire to “bring” NSW into line with other countries (presumably China) by only allowing “one provision for education.”

Homeschooling Advocates Push Back

Speaking with Caldron Pool, homeschool advocacy group VIGIL backed the parent-driven petition.

Spokeswoman Ally Chumley emphasised “the importance of pre-emptive action, as well as a unified effort to push back on these early changes.” This is because, she said, those changes “will be the thin end of the wedge.”

“Homeschoolers need to think for themselves and unite behind this campaign without fear of criticism.”

“People have been very quick to call us fear mongers for raising concerns, which is a sign of the times: Criticise, brand, then cancel anyone who calls attention to government overreach,” Ally Chumley explained.

To this, she added, “Bureaucratic threats to the independence of families and their values are precisely the motivating forces that have driven people out of the mainstream education system in the first place.”

“These latest actions have done nothing to allay our concerns.”

The petition is a vehicle for calling on the Labor government to reassert protections for parental rights.

By making all members of the NSW parliament aware of the Labor Party’s atrocious messaging to parents and educators, we can initiate change by seeking better transparency from the current political lineup.

Please consider participating in this important email campaign by clicking here.

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Republished with thanks to Caldron Pool. Image courtesy of Pexels.