Ministry of Education approved Tom Phillips’ application to homeschool his family

“All three of the Phillips children had valid certificates of exemption for home education,” Marcus Freke, the director of education for Waikato, confirmed in a statement to the Herald on Monday.

“The certificates were applied for by their legal guardian, Tom Phillips, and were awarded prior to July 2021,” he said.

It’s information the ministry tried to keep secret, refusing the Herald’s Official Information Act (OIA) request for months, before the Ombudsman investigated and intervened – forcing the ministry to release the information this week.

Te Anga Rd, where Tom Phillips was killed in a shootout with police. Before disappearing into the bush with his children for years, he convinced the ministry to let him keep them out of school. Parents can apply online, and most never receive a monitoring visit.

“The release of this information would provide transparency and accountability around the ministry’s role in managing the homeschool applications and would clarify that the children’s absence from school was approved,” John Allen, Chief Ombudsman, wrote in his opinion.

“This goes towards the substantial public interest in this case as to whether government agencies had acted sufficiently in relation to the children’s disappearance.”

Tom Phillips disappeared with his three children – then aged 5, 7 and 8 – in December 2021, isolating them from society, family and peers for nearly four years, hiding in dense Waikato bush.

During that time, he defied a court order and engaged in various crimes, including bank robbery and stealing vehicles, before being shot dead in the early hours of September 8 in an altercation with police, during which he critically injured an officer.

Homeschooling was a family tradition: Tom Phillips himself was partially homeschooled as a young boy on the same Marokopa farm before later attending exclusive private boarding school St Paul’s Collegiate.

The revelation that Phillips was able to successfully apply for three certificates of exemption raises questions about the ministry’s screening processes at a time when homeschooling rates in New Zealand are at a record high. The numbers have nearly doubled since 2017 and continued to climb post-Covid.

In July 2025, New Zealand had 11,010 homeschooled children belonging to 6518 families – that’s roughly the same number of students as our three largest state schools combined: Rangitoto College, Mt Albert Grammar School, and Maclean’s College.

Despite 1.3% of New Zealand’s children receiving their schooling at home, there is no regular monitoring of their educations – or even whether they are receiving educations at all.

Homeschooled children in New Zealand are not required to follow the national curriculum, or do NCEA or any external assessments.

While the Ministry of Education grants the exemptions, the Education Review Office (ERO) has the power to visit and review homeschooling families.

But funding for reviews was cut in 2010 under then-Prime Minister John Key and Education Minister Anne Tolley, and ERO stopped its review cycle of homeschool programmes.

It now performs reviews only rarely – for example, on request from the Secretary of Education or if a member of the public raises a concern.

In a statement to the Herald, ERO said: “Pre-2010, ERO found good-quality homeschooling practices and committed caregivers based on approximately 500 reviews conducted and completed each year.

“Since 2010, following ministerial budgeting decisions, ERO withdrew from regular three-yearly reviews of homeschool programmes.”

ERO undertook just 16 reviews in 2023, 106 in 2024 and 111 in 2025. It never reviewed the Phillips family’s homeschool programme.

Professor Stuart McNaughton from the University of Auckland’s faculty of education told the Herald “you’d have to be worried” if ERO wasn’t monitoring homeschool programmes.

“How is the well-being of our children who are being homeschooled? Are these kids developing appropriately? That means learning the content – but also gaining social and emotional skills for life.”

Education expert Professor Stuart McNaughton said that without “regular and representative” ERO visits, we simply don’t know about the well-being of New Zealand’s 11,000 homeschooled children. Photo / Godfrey Boehnke

“I’ve never seen a systematic evaluation of homeschooling in New Zealand. If I had to guess, I’d say there would be huge variation in educational quality – from excellence all the way down.

“Without regular and representative ERO visits, we just don’t know.”

To be approved as his children’s teacher, Phillips would have completed a short application per child, downloaded from the ministry’s website, explaining how he planned to educate them as regularly and as well as a registered school.

Questions on the form include:

How will you meet the requirement to teach at least as well as a registered school?What resources do you intend to use?Are you delegating any teaching responsibility?What are your educational goals for the next 12 months of your child’s education and how will you know if you’ve met them?What is your vision and what are your goals for your child’s long-term educational achievement?Give a detailed description of a special project or topic plan you will do.How will you meet the requirement to teach at least as regularly as a registered school?In 2010 the Government cut three-yearly in-person reviews for homeschooling families, according to ERO. Now, parents can apply online and most never receive a monitoring visit. Photo / Maryana Garcia

On approval, Phillips would have become eligible for an annual allowance of $2030 – the rate for three children.

Under the current system, it’s unlikely the Phillips children and their educations would ever have been reviewed again.

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