2025 ACT Australian of the Year Megan Gilmour

Meet your Australians - 2025 ACT Australian of the Year Megan Gilmour. ACM is proud to be media partner for the 2025 Australian of the Year Awards.

Transcript

00:00My son, Darcy, had three rare blood disorders and a bone marrow transplant in 2010. I could

00:10see how his hope was dwindling. And so I turned to his school connections to try and show

00:20him that he could survive. And I know the medical treatment saved him. But I also know

00:28that the hope of a future, that he was remembered and important in his school community, was

00:34also life-saving. I started a charity called Missing School along with two other mothers

00:40in a Canberra lounge room in 2012. Our three sons had life-threatening illnesses. We knew

00:49that School Connection was the ingredient missing in their return to health. We set

00:57out to solve school isolation for children with medical and mental health conditions.

01:04We have worked on policy, provision of technology and critical research to find solutions for

01:12students who physically can't be in the classroom. We have reconnected over 7,000 classmates.

01:21We've trained hundreds and hundreds of teachers. We have produced national reports. We have

01:28lobbied politically. But one of the most fundamental things that we've done is to put telepresence

01:36robots into the classrooms of students who are in hospital or at home to enable them

01:41to connect into their classrooms real time, to receive their lessons alongside their peers

01:48with their teachers in their own school community. We know this works. We know that it helps

01:54these students identify as kids and as learners and as students, not as patients, not as their

02:02illness or their condition. We've proven it as a tiny not-for-profit operating on less

02:09than a few hundred thousand dollars a year to put telepresence robots into schools across

02:14Australia, all states and territories. If we can do it, I know we can do it as a nation.

02:21We cannot wait until children are well for them to return to school. And we have everything

02:27we need already to make this happen.