Back

Solving chronic school absence: MissingSchool's Megan Gilmour named 2025 Australian of the Year for the ACT

MissingSchool

Meet the global education ambassador and technology trailblazer working to ensure all children are seen and heard 

Announced at a ceremony last night (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’.

MissingSchool CEO/co-founder Megan Gilmour is available for interview

Download full bio and images here

___________________________________________________________________________

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."

Download images here

About MissingSchool CEO and Co-Founder Megan Gilmour
Global education ambassador and technology trailblazer, Megan Gilmour, co-founded MissingSchool in 2012 after watching her son, Darcy, struggle with a two-year period of school isolation due to a life-threatening illness. Since then, she has led the nonprofit, tirelessly advocating for the needs of students with complex medical and mental health conditions, their families, teachers and peers through awareness, resources, capacity building, activating human-centred technology, and world-leading research. Watch her inspiring TEDxCanberra talk, reaching close to 780K views.

Megan’s youth in Sydney’s western suburbs sparked an early drive for social justice. She became the NSW Finance Minister’s youngest staffer and later managed global development initiatives across 24 countries. Megan’s leadership at MissingSchool has been recognised nationally and internationally. She has been named one of AFR’s 100 Women of Influence; and, in 2019, was awarded the Telstra ACT Business Woman of the Year for Purpose and Social Enterprise. The same year, she was a finalist in the ACT Australian of the Year Awards – an accolade she was again nominated for, and won; named 2025 Australian of the Year for the ACT. Megan is a Churchill Policy Fellow, Deakin University Honorary Fellow and 2020 Alumna of Year, and has delivered over 50 keynotes.

Did you know? A donation of $75 or the cost of three adult movie tickets, will help one child with complex health challenges and absence to access school for one week from hospital or home. Much of the work of MissingSchool is possible thanks to public donations. More donations are needed to scale use of telepresence technology to all schools. Donate here.

MissingSchool – Key Achievements (2015-2024)

• Initiated an Australia-first report on school connection for kids with complex health conditions, with a Prime Minister’s statement of support and widespread media (2015)
• Led the activation and methodology for the first Commonwealth report auditing state and territory education practices for students with health conditions (2016; 2019)
• Conducted research on responses in six countries through Churchill Fellowship (2017)
• Launched world-first national school telepresence service (2017)
• Secured policy approval for school telepresence service in every state/territory (2018-22)
• Designed and ran a policy project to guide NSW Education on scaling telepresence (2020)
• Secured tri-partisan support for solving school isolation through meetings with MPs (2021-22)
• Developed and presented a policy impact paper with Centre for Policy Futures at University of Queensland and the Winston Churchill Trust (2020-21)
• Activated Ministerial trigger for Commonwealth policy implementation of a new “health condition” absence code for national implementation (2022)
• Provided expert testimony (picked up in media coverage) on Senate inquiry into the national trend of school refusal (2023). See MissingSchool submission #62
• Implemented Seen&Heard in an Australia-wide pilot for Emerging Priorities Program with Commonwealth small competitive grant funding (2023-24)
• Launched Seen&Heard Helpline managing ~600 monthly interactions and National Insights for Education Directories including 300+ health consumer organisations (2023-24)
• Released primary and secondary school empathetic peer animations, reaching 54,000 views in the first month (2024)
• Developed a 30-unit teacher training framework and digital forum for production (2023-24)
• Translated ~7,000 data points into a world-class dataset for research (2018-2024)
• Generated 370+ earned television, radio, print, and digital media articles (2015-24)
• Connected 7,050+ classmates, trained 700+ teachers, conducted 1,390+ teacher/parent surveys and interviews (2018-24)
• Invited to write thought leadership articles for international policy audiences (2024)
• Achieved $3 million in market-rate media pro bono, and a social advocacy campaign creating 4.6 billion impressions and reaching 14.1 million Australians (2024)

Contact details:

Shelley Thomas, 0416-377-444 or shelley.thomas@missingschool.org.au

For interview: Megan Gilmour, 0411-162-597