Meet the global education ambassador and technology trailblazer working to ensure all children are seen and heard
Announced at a ceremony on 14 November 2024, MissingSchool co-founder and CEO Megan Gilmour is the 2025 Australian of the Year for the ACT. The award recognises her leadership of the first organisation in Australia to address chronic school absence for children facing medical-mental challenges serious enough to affect their education and wellbeing. Megan now goes into the running for the national accolade to be revealed on 25 January 2025.
- In Australia, up to one in three school children (1.2 million students) are at risk of school absence, spanning months to years, due to complex medical or mental health challenges.
- Today, hundreds of thousands of children may be missing school in a personal health crisis, with lifetime costs of lost productivity from incomplete education nudging $1M per student.
- MissingSchool is on a mission to see education’s Blockbuster moment met by mainstreaming “learn from anywhere” telepresence technology for school access just like wheelchair ramps.
Megan Gilmour says, “Amid the global and national school attendance crisis, this acknowledgement of my work in education continuity and student wellbeing through our schools – shining a light on the solutions we’ve been driving for more than a decade – is perfect timing.”
Her award also comes at a time when UNESCO reports that 250 million children worldwide are absent from school, with one child needing to return every two seconds until 2030 to achieve the UN sustainable development goal (SDG) of ‘quality education’.
For Megan Gilmour, it doesn’t feel that long ago that she almost lost her son to critical illness, when he needed a bone marrow transplant at the age of 10. Thankfully, it’s only a painful memory.
Fast forward 14 years, and the 2025 ACT Australian of the Year for the ACT counts herself lucky that Darcy, now 24, survived. But his trauma went beyond the two harrowing years of medical treatment to feeling forgotten and, ultimately, years of anxiety when he eventually returned to the classroom.
“In hindsight, I wish Darcy’s school knew what to do to keep him connected and reduce his trauma of missing school at that distressing time,” Megan says.
“Trauma also affected his sister Mia – a student, too. And it taught me a powerful lesson. We can’t wait until children are well to give them the same access to learning and socialisation as their ‘healthy’ peers. They need hope, now.”
In 2012, Megan co-founded MissingSchool, making good on a promise to herself to help young people isolated at home or in hospital to maintain a sense of belonging and normalcy by accessing classes in the familiarity of their school, with their teachers and sharing experiences with classmates.
Drawing on a unique combination of lived experience and work in government and global aid, she identified a blind spot in the education system that overlooks these children during absences, missing vital, easy-to-implement innovations.
Now as then, Megan takes the position that the only cure for absence is “presence” – and this can be virtual presence where “in person” is not possible.
In 2015, MissingSchool launched Australia’s first national report on the issue, leading to a Commonwealth-funded report in 2016. Then, Megan’s study in six countries, in 2017, set up the world’s first national telepresence robot service, gaining approval across states and territories and reconnecting around 7,050 classmates in collaboration with schools across sectors.
Megan says there’s no question MissingSchool’s world-class service data collected from 1,390 teacher and parent surveys demonstrates that assistive technology can provide safe and effective interventions to address school absence – including “school refusal” – before it becomes chronic.
In contrast, MissingSchool data reveals distressing side effects of school separation for kids facing complex medical-mental health and attendance challenges.
“At least 40 per cent of students who seek MissingSchool’s services have already missed four to 12 months of school, with 20 per cent missing over 12 months and predicted to miss much more,” Megan says.
The Churchill Policy Fellow, Deakin University Honorary Fellow and 2020 Alumna of Year (all honours awarded for her work), adds that parents helped by MissingSchool report:
- 71 per cent of their children endured disruptions to friendships;
- half said their children fell behind academically and experienced increased anxiety;
- 47 per cent experienced decreased social support as a result of lower school attendance; and
- 42 per cent reported reintegration difficulties and ‘school refusal’, entrenching already-extensive absences.
“What’s certain is that a child who misses just five days per school term – registering less than 90 per cent attendance – will pay penalties in academic and mental health outcomes.
“The problem is that education systems historically count attendance as physical presence, discounting students’ ability or desire to ‘be there’ when they physically can’t. It boils down to outdated policy framing which codes absences in a way that punishes children for physical absence.
“Today, it’s unthinkable that hundreds of thousands of Australian students, who briefly experienced a sense of belonging and normalcy during COVID lockdowns, when schools moved online – solving chronic school absence at scale for all students facing a health crisis – are again being left behind.”
Megan says now-ubiquitous telepresence technology can be switched back on, providing students with synchronous access to classrooms (in their schools of enrolment) during long medical absences.
In tandem with offering MissingSchool’s services to families and schools – relying on competitive grants and public donations – Megan is currently working closely with the Australian Government to implement policy-driven systems change.
In March 2022, the government adopted her policy proposal to introduce a specific “health condition” attendance measurement to improve national data. While progress stalled, it is back on the agenda in a better and fairer measurement framework.
Better attendance coding will help schools detect chronic absences early and trigger adjustments under the Disability Standards for Education, including mandated access to assistive telepresence. This will give children, isolated in hospital and at home, continuity of access to classes, curriculum, and support, and help address national data deficits and match advances in other countries.
MissingSchool is nor rolling out a suite of digital services following a pilot funded by a Commonwealth grant and seed funding from the TPG Telecom Foundation. This groundbreaking initiative, Seen&Heard, promotes the adoption of “teach once” telepresence in schools and manages 600 monthly family-school helpline interactions.
The initiative includes an Australia-first hub – National Insights for Education Directories – with vital information on health-education interplay, and links to 300+ health consumer organisations. It also features empathy-building animations for peers, a teacher support forum, and produces world-class data for research.
Megan says: “Everything I do through MissingSchool serves one goal: to end school isolation for good. When that day comes, we’ll step back, leaving the legacy to our schools to uphold.”
