QLD Home Education Program: How to Write the HEU Plan

Most Queensland families hit the same wall at the same moment: they open the Home Education Unit portal, see the educational program requirement, and feel immediately out of their depth. The templates look bureaucratic. The language is unfamiliar. Nobody told them they were signing up to write a curriculum document.

Here is the reality. The educational program is the centrepiece of your Queensland home education registration. The Home Education Unit (HEU) is not asking you to adopt a commercial curriculum or align your teaching to government school scope-and-sequence documents. They are asking you to demonstrate that your child will receive a high-quality, broad education at home. Those are different things — and understanding that distinction is what separates a confident, approved application from a month of back-and-forth with the department.

This post explains what the program document must do, which template type suits your situation, and what a well-written example actually looks like in practice.

What the Law Requires

Home education in Queensland is governed by Chapter 9, Part 5 of the Education (General Provisions) Act 2006 (EGPA). The legislation does not require you to follow the Australian Curriculum. It requires you to provide a "high-quality education" that covers a broad range of learning areas. The HEU interprets this through the lens of the eight learning areas from the Australian Curriculum — English, Mathematics, Science, Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS), The Arts, Technologies, Health and Physical Education, and Languages — but your actual teaching methods, resources, and pacing are your own to determine.

This matters practically. You do not need to buy a boxed curriculum or map every week of the year to a set of curriculum descriptors. You need to satisfy an assessor reading your plan that your child will encounter all of these learning areas in a meaningful way over the registration period.

A weak application says: "We will follow our child's interests across all learning areas."

A strong application says: "For English, our child will read two novels per term selected from a booklist we maintain, narrate orally and in written summaries, and write two structured pieces per month in a range of text types. Assessment will be through dated writing samples and a reading journal."

The specificity is the whole point.

The Three Template Types

The QHE (Queensland Home Education) portal offers three template types. Understanding which one fits your situation prevents a lot of wasted effort.

Australian Curriculum Template

This template is structured around the eight learning areas with descriptions of how you will address each one. It is the most familiar to HEU assessors and the easiest to get through first review if you are following a structured commercial curriculum (Euka, My Homeschool, Memoria Press, and similar). You map your resources to the learning areas and describe your approach for each.

Families who use this template but do not follow a commercial curriculum find it workable provided they describe their activities concretely. Vague statements tied to Australian Curriculum language still raise queries. Specific ones — named books, described projects, explained assessment methods — do not.

Goal-Directed Plan Template

This template organises the program around goals rather than learning areas. You identify several overarching educational goals for your child for the registration period and describe the activities, resources, and methods that will serve each goal. Learning areas are addressed implicitly through the goals rather than explicitly mapped.

This template suits families with a more child-led or interest-led approach — structured unschooling, Montessori-influenced programs, or eclectic approaches where the same activity covers several subjects simultaneously. It requires more care in drafting because the assessor needs to be able to see that all learning areas are represented somewhere across your goals, even if the goals are not labelled by subject.

Thematic Template

The thematic template is organised around themes or units of study. A family might describe a term-long unit on ancient civilisations that simultaneously addresses History (HASS), English (primary sources, writing), Art (cultural artefacts), and Geography. Subsequent themes cover different areas.

Unschooling families and project-based learners often find this template more honest to what they actually do. The risk is gaps: if your themes naturally cluster around certain subjects, you need to explicitly account for Mathematics, HPE, and Technologies, which tend to get thin treatment in thematic plans.

What a Good Program Summary Looks Like

The HEU requires an educational program summary — a plain-language document that describes your overall approach before you get into the detail of each area or goal. Think of it as a one-page statement of educational philosophy and intent.

A strong program summary typically covers:

Your educational approach. Are you subject-based? Project-based? Child-led? Eclectic? Name it plainly and describe it in a sentence or two.

Your child's current stage and learning needs. You do not need a diagnosis or a formal assessment — but noting that your child is working at approximately Year 4 level in Maths and Year 5 in Literacy, or that they have a particular strength or challenge that informs your approach, helps the assessor contextualise the plan.

Your general daily or weekly structure. You do not need to submit a timetable, but a rough description — "core subjects in the morning, project work and enrichment in the afternoon, with two co-op sessions per week" — helps the assessor visualise the program in operation.

Your assessment and progress-tracking method. The HEU will ask about this at the ten-month review. Stating it upfront in the summary signals that you have thought about it. Portfolio, learning journal, dated work samples, or a combination all qualify.

The program summary does not need to be long. One to two pages is standard. Bureaucratic language is not necessary — clear, direct, parent-written prose is fine.

Common Reasons Applications Come Back for Revision

After watching hundreds of Queensland families go through this process, a handful of failure modes come up repeatedly:

Too vague on specific learning areas. "We will cover Science through nature study and interest-led projects" is not enough. "We will cover Science through weekly nature journaling, two hands-on experiments per month using the Science Sparks resource library, and a term-long inquiry unit on local ecosystems" is enough.

Missing learning areas entirely. Languages is the most commonly omitted learning area. It does not need to be formal — describing your child's existing language background, a weekly language exposure practice, or even explaining that you are temporarily deferring Languages with a plan to introduce it in the next registration period — all work. Simply not mentioning it does not.

No assessment method described. The HEU asks how you will know your child is progressing. If you do not address this in the program, the assessor will ask. Save yourself a round-trip by including it from the start.

Philosophy without translation. Saying "we follow Charlotte Mason principles" means nothing to an HEU assessor unless you also explain what that looks like in your home. Living books — name them. Narration as assessment — describe what it looks like and how you'll document it. Nature journaling for Science — note the frequency and how the journals are kept.

The Annual Review

Queensland requires a ten-month review as a condition of continued registration. This is desk-based — no home visits. At that point you will typically need to submit a signed HEU document, a written overview of what was covered during the year, annotated work samples, and an updated program summary for the next period.

The educational program you submit at registration is the baseline against which the review is conducted. If you described portfolio-based assessment in your program and show up to the review with nothing documented, that creates a problem. If you described a project-based Science approach and bring a folder of completed projects, the review is straightforward.

The program document is not a cage — it does not bind you to do exactly what you said you would do. Life changes, children change, approaches evolve. But the broader description of your method and the learning areas you will cover should broadly match your actual year.

What Queensland Families Often Get Wrong About "High-Quality Education"

The phrase "high-quality education" in the EGPA is not defined by the legislation. In practice, the HEU interprets it to mean: a deliberate, well-considered program that covers the full range of learning areas, is appropriate to the child's stage of development, and includes some means of assessing progress. It does not mean academic intensity, structured schooling replicated at home, or commercial curriculum adherence.

Only about one in five Queensland home educators who reference the Australian Curriculum in their application actually follows a commercial package. The majority design bespoke programs that reference the curriculum framework loosely while actually teaching in ways that suit their family. What makes those applications succeed is specificity and completeness — the assessor can read the plan and picture the education happening.

If drafting your HEU educational program is the piece of Queensland registration that has you stalled, the Queensland Legal Withdrawal Blueprint includes a worked example program document alongside the legal templates and step-by-step guidance — written specifically for families going through Queensland's process.

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