Megan Gilmour On Transforming Education Access For Chronically Ill Students Through Technology

Megan Gilmour is the co-founder and CEO of MissingSchool, an innovative nonprofit addressing education and social isolation experienced by children with chronic health conditions.

Named the 2025 ACT Australian of the Year, Megan’s mission began following her son’s battle with a life-threatening illness, sparking her commitment to transforming educational access nationwide.

Through MissingSchool, Megan champions a national approach to flexible 21st-century solutions in schools, like ‘learn from anywhere’ telepresence technology, ensuring students remain connected to their classrooms and communities regardless of health challenges.

Her leadership and tenacity for reform have positioned the organisation at the forefront of education transformations, driving crucial practice conversations and policy change to support some of Australia’s most vulnerable and unseen students.

In 2015, Megan co-authored Australia’s first national report on school isolation, initiating a Commonwealth report in 2016. She is also a Churchill Policy Fellow, Deakin University Honorary Fellow and 2020 Alumna of the Year, and has delivered over 50 keynotes.

Megan discusses the urgent need for inclusive education systems that reconnect students with chronic medical and health conditions to their classrooms, how telepresence technology combats social isolation, and why policy-driven systems change is essential for creating equitable learning environments.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led you to work in education accessibility?

[Megan Gilmour] - I was just heading along in my career in international aid and development. I’d worked on social and economic development projects across 24 countries when my young son (who was 10 at the time) became critically ill out of the blue.

That changed the trajectory of my life. Fortunately, life-saving, incredible medical science saved his life. He’s 25 or 26 now, but it was a torrid and rough time. We were living in a hospital, being airlifted from Canberra to Sydney for life-saving treatment, and faced a very uncertain two-year period.

What we witnessed during that time, alongside all of the trauma of medical diagnoses and treatment, was that he was a young person who was desperately missing his school, his friends, and his life, actually. Let’s face it, that’s what we tell our kids about school and education. We tell them it’s important, and they go every day.

Even though we might see them complaining about it, which is natural, when that’s taken away from a child, it’s extraordinarily harmful and affects them. To summarise, those harsh treatments to save his life were terrible, but the next most terrible thing was missing school.

As the co-founder and CEO of MissingSchool, can you share a bit more about this nonprofit and how it ensures students with chronic health conditions are able to access education? Could you also share some of your achievements to date with MissingSchool?

As I said, we noticed this in our own child, but we also met other parents at the same time. In 2012, when we returned home from Sydney Children’s Hospital after those two years of treatment, myself and two other mums in Canberra (literally in a Canberra lounge room) started MissingSchool.

The reason we started MissingSchool was because we’d seen this in our own kids. We wanted to know: how many kids does this affect in Australia? How much school do they miss? What’s the evidence-based practice across Australia to support them to stay connected to school, which we all agree is the most important thing in a child’s life after their wellbeing.

Whose job is it to make that connection happen? We couldn’t find the answers, so we set out and formed the not-for-profit MissingSchool, and we tried to answer these questions ourselves. That led to Australian-first national reports and all sorts of other activities.

One of the major activities has been this two-way digital connection to the classroom through telepresence robots, and now we’re arguing for schools to have their own telepresence. If you can’t be physically present, and in this case your chronic health condition is physically keeping you out of school, then how do you maintain connection?

Of course, we turn to technology. It’s now being used ubiquitously to work from anywhere, so we started asking, “why can’t it be used to learn from anywhere?” That’s been the hub of our national work, alongside our policy drivers to get systemic change through governments in Australia.

All the evidence and data we’ve collected now drives our push forward to understand we’re now in Australia facing a school attendance crisis, which sits within a global attendance crisis. What we were warned of is here; and we’ve sharpened our focus to argue that schools as we know them are no longer fit for purpose. We need much more flexible, differently designed schools to cater for the the 21st century that we live in.

In terms of achievements, I can give you the upshot of all the data. We’ve identified up to 1.2 million children (that’s one in three school students in Australia) who are at risk of missing large amounts of school due to a chronic condition, whether physical or mental. Some of them miss months to years of schooling.

Through telepresence robots, we’ve been able to reconnect over 7,000 students to the classroom and train hundreds and hundreds of teachers. We’ve collected a lot of data (around 7,000 coded data points on this issue), so we are sitting on a world-class dataset. We’ve completed over 1,500 surveys and interviews with teachers and parents, leading to significant qualitative data achievements.

Put simply, our evidence shows that telepresence connection for these kids has three top outcomes. One is that it improves friendships and social connections, particularly to their own school community. It improves classroom connection and participation, and it supports better wellbeing. Hopefully, those things together lead to education equity, a good life today, and a productive and positive life in the future.

MissingSchool CEO and Co-Founder Megan Gilmour.png

What are some misconceptions around this space? Could you draw on some of your data to help our audience understand this problem?

I think the number one misconception people have is if you are sick, you don’t need to go to school. You can see where that comes from. A kid wakes up with a sniffle or a sore toe, and typically mum says, “I think you need to stay home from school.” She lets the school know, and the school says, “Great. That’s an approved absence. We’ll see you soon.”

But for kids with chronic conditions who miss months to years of school—some in large blocks, some across their whole school life if it’s a lifelong illness—applying that same principle is not helpful.

As I said in the example of my own son, you just see after a while that this person has been shockingly removed from their community. They’re now stuck in a hospital or, more often, at home with no learning and no connection to friends.

What this does over time is obviously affect their academic attainment or opportunity and their access to things. But it also fractures their relationships with their teachers, their peers, and their friends. This can lead to worsening mental health or even the onset of mental health issues. It leads to higher levels of bullying, which we know can have terrible consequences. There’s just a long list of risks and side effects.

What we say is: we can’t wait until they’re well. We need to act today to maintain connection and mitigate those risks by reaffirming the young person’s place and belonging in their community. We need to enable them to join and do their lessons in real time with their peers, alongside their peers. It’s important that they have the same opportunities as their peers to reach their potential.

All those important principles of access and participation apply here. The fact is, we live in the 21st century. We have technology in every school today that with the right policy and agreement from governments and education systems could work today. How do we know that? Because that’s exactly what happened overnight during COVID.

Are there other reasons why it’s crucial for Australia to move towards adopting a more inclusive national education system? What are the major barriers standing in the way?

It’s also true to say that education is the engine room of productivity in a national economy. This is incontrovertible. It comes from global organisations, and anybody working in these spaces would know that we just have to look at the Sustainable Development Goals.

After solving hunger and solving poverty, next comes health and healthcare, then education. Without those four, it’s impossible to live a good life in a modern economy. We know that these are foundational to living a good, productive life where families not only survive but improve their prospects. I can put a bit more data to support this.

An Australian study showed that the cost of incomplete education (in terms of lost productivity per student) is up to close to a million dollars per student. If you multiply that by 1.2 million (or really any number under that) we’re talking about billions of dollars in problems that we’re facing.

To come back to the barriers, we have the legislation, we have the technology. Now we just need the policy to join all the dots and make all the connections on this. I think the cultural problem in schools and education systems across the country is a significant barrier.

We talked about some of those misconceptions earlier, and if you add those into the mix, then you have this: children are expected to stay at home when they have a diagnosed critical condition or chronic illness. When they do, the school just says yes—and then the support stops, because that is the paradigmatic model in operation.

In fact, it’s not even the illness that is the root cause of this problem. If all schools were designed for kids who couldn’t physically attend, we’d have a completely different education model, wouldn’t we?

If you look at the root cause, it’s actually that school stops providing an education service to a child who has an approved medical condition when they can’t come to the classroom. The predominant school model is still based on a bum on a seat in a class. This comes from a post-industrial era model of producing factory workers and pumping them out of schools.

MissingSchool CEO and Co-Founder Megan Gilmour with son Darcy.JPG.png

Our world now is different in terms of the student demographic and the kinds of differences in the student population. The range of needs was probably always there, but now we’re recognising them, which is fantastic. But we just haven’t changed the school model. The school model is still to sit in a classroom.

As I said, we have the legislation. It states that children should have access to their classroom, that they should be able to use assistive devices to do so, that they should be able to learn alongside their peers, that they should be able to get additional support if they need it, and that they should be able to access the curriculum. That’s the Disability Standards for Education, which applies to every school in Australia.

It’s just that this standard isn’t being connected up to children with medical or mental conditions in the same way that it is for children with what’s typically understood as a disability. That’s the big barrier.

It’s the school model, and it’s the failure to use the available regulation that’s already there to provide what we would say is today’s equivalent of a wheelchair ramp in a school, a two-way digital connection to the classroom. It’s cost-effective and scalable, you name it, it’s there.

What recommendations would you make for education providers and the system to implement technological solutions to uplift vulnerable students?

To me, after doing this for so many years, my team and I just look at it like this: we’re a tiny charity that punches above its weight. We can do this because we’ve used automation and scalable technology, and we’ve been able to prove that this can operate at scale.

You could call it a private pilot we did at one point, but it was really a proof of concept. We’ve had the black swan moments. We’ve had the schools doing this, and once you put the technology in there, they know how to use it. They just do what a school does, and the beautiful thing is that it opens up access immediately to everything.

The level of scale doesn’t just apply to the technology itself. It’s the support that gets scaled. When you are present in an environment, even virtually, you can access the many things that environment provides. Whether that’s counselling services, going to the school ball, being at the school assembly, engaging in play, or joining in music class, it all becomes accessible.

The amazing stuff comes out in conversations with parents and teachers, not so much in the data. Sometimes our questions, even though they’re open-ended, can frame the conversation. But when we just listen, we hear remarkable stories. One example recently was a student who, for 17 years, had been in a school for special purposes.

This student had an extraordinary disability and was nonverbal, but fought his way into mainstream school. He then used the telepresence robot and, for the first time, was there interacting with his peers. But it went further than that. This student is now teaching his peers music.

I love this example because sometimes in social innovation and with the work we do in the social sector, we talk about helping people and supporting beneficiaries. We use all of these kinds of terms to describe our work, and that’s true. What’s most important to me is that these children are making their contribution to us by being present. It’s not just us helping them. What we are doing is providing a way for them to make their contribution to their community and to the world, to bring their gifts, talents, and skills into the room.

The technology itself is really simple. Zoom, Teams, the robots are not scalable; we used them as a demonstration, and of course, it’s a sexy technology, and that change mechanic worked. We got extensive media, but really, it’s just an A-frame with wheels, a screen three or four times the size of a laptop, and a camera that moves and captures the room, even following the teacher. Multiple kids can dial in on that screen, and they are in the room.

We could have this in every school today. Or at least next week, if not today.

Do you have any advice for individuals operating a nonprofit, social enterprise, or impact organisation?

There has to be a theory of change underpinning anything that you do to capture the complexity of what’s causing the problem. I gave you an example earlier: we could have said the illness was causing the problem and that we couldn’t do anything about it. We could just help the kids at home, send them some care bears or something like that, but that’s not the root cause.

You’ve really got to go rock bottom with your root causes in the theory of change and build into it as much complexity as the problem deserves and needs. Then you get these clear intervention pathways that are measurable, so you can accurately measure your impact. You can also find inflection points for your innovations along those pathways when you know them deeply, allowing you to innovate and disrupt yourself.

The biggest piece of advice I’d give to any charity (and people probably get a bit cross when they hear me say this) is to ask: what would the world look like if the problem you are trying to solve doesn’t exist anymore? If that’s the case, you shouldn’t need to be doing your work on that problem. Start from there. For me, the idea of charities being sustainable is flawed if it means the problem needs to be sustained.

I’ve sat in rooms where charities map out their trajectory like businesses d, how they’ll get more funding, how they’ll grow their KPIs, and so on. That makes sense because it’s good business practice, but business is built for exponential growth forever and relies on the customer always being there. That’s the wrong model for a charity.

Our number one KPI is that we don’t have to exist anymore because the problem is solved. It’s back with the system that should be responsible for it, schools and education systems. We’re not running a parallel model of support here; we’re not upholding the problem with our initiative.

My number one KPI is that I don’t need to do this anymore, and I think about that every day. That’s the advice I’d give, and it’s challenging because we get attached to what we do, but it’s a great place to innovate from if you ask yourself that question.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently creating positive change?

It’s controversial and we won’t have enough time to talk about it fully, but I’m essentially an optimistic person. I think even for not-for-profits right now, AI is offering a level of support that has been unseen before. It can level the playing field. I’m thinking of organisations that find it really hard to write grant applications because they can’t write well. Even at that level, AI can help them be in the mix stronger than they were before.

That’s it on a basic level. I won’t go deeper into the complexities and inequities it can cause, but I think we’re living in an interesting time.

To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend for our audience?

My number one book recommendation is Good to Great for the Social Sectors by Jim Collins. It’s a monograph, so quite a quick read, but his concept of catalytic mechanisms in social change and the flywheel is absolute gold for any not-for-profit.

I gave an example earlier of the telepresence robot being a catalytic mechanism. It was sexy technology that attracted attention, got the media interested, and prompted education systems to incorporate it into their policy, breaking through firewalls to implement it and even sparking competition between states and territories. That was by design; the technology was chosen to do exactly what it has done.

The second thing I’d leave you with is Airtable. We run our whole operation on Airtable. It’s extensible, you could call it Excel on steroids, but that wouldn’t quite capture it.

We wouldn’t be having the conversation we’re having now if we didn’t have this incredible technology, which also offers more effective rates for not-for-profits. I have no financial connection to the organisation, but we’ve been able to access it at better rates as a charity, and it’s been absolutely game-changing.