Quoll

Ozlozz and her children are citizens so the visa isn't an issue for them. I hope you are using an agent who is on top of the medical issues because a child eligible for intervention is likely to lead to a rejection. It's not just the diagnosis which is the issue, it's the level of impairment due to the disability and how much that could potentially cost the tax payer. Some agents are better at medical advice than others.

That is, indeed, a downside!

Canberra, got it all except the ocean, but that's only 2 hours away, as is the snow if skiing is your thing in winter.

Apparently it'll be the MCG!!! Just what I wanted LOL!

Thanks! I think I had assumed they would be meeting up to go to a museum somewhere, hadnt thought of them going to VSV first!!! Have asked the gd for more info! This is turning into bigger than Ben Hur as it looks like we might have to hang around in Melbourne until the weekend because her mother and new man were taking them up to Melb for his daughters birthday that weekend anyway. Poor gd doesn't need to drive up and back, up and back over the week so we might have to hang around to hand her over later! Best option might be too wait until the next connection day!!!!

Might be taking the granddaughter to a VSV connect day which I assume will be relatively central Melbourne. Anyone have any recommendations for motels/airbnb not outrageously priced either sort of central with car parking or on a reasonable rail line (preferably on the East side as we will be driving up from East Gippy) ditto with the car parking. Cant believe that I said I would be happy to facilitate this - 7+hours each way and then back to Canberra. The things grandparents do, huh?! TIA

Are you past the point of no return financially? If you would struggle financially if you left Australia - no pension, taxed superannuation etc then i think you've possibly left it too late but if you still have some working years left, can take out your super as a lump sum before you go and will get a UK pension then I 'd say go for it. Once our kids get to be adults we have to let them fly solo, they can end up anywhere and we need to encourage them to live their own lives. I'd agree with FWP, don't let obligations to other independent adults hold you back from living your own life.

If you aren't PR at the birth of the child, ie on a bridging visa, the child won't be Australian anyway and you'll still have to go through the shenanigans of applying for their visa. And there are lots of potential pitfalls to delivering a baby in a foreign country when you are only a visitor, not to mention expense - the child visa would probably end up cheaper. You'll likely have to delay your wife's medicals until after the birth anyway because she's not going to want an xray while pegnant.

The usual requirement is that you spend 45 days in school and the rest of the time in Uni so you'd better ask AITSL if your certificate qualifies. I know that essentially school based training does not qualify. I've not heard of a PCE, only PGCE

Which country? The reason I ask is that I am not sure 1 day in Uni is going to be enough to cut it for teaching qualifications for Australia. The PGCE has more University content and the requirements for Australian teaching involve 4 years University training.

First, get your citizenship, you've been here long enough for that and it will make things a whole lot easier without having to bother with RRVs etc. I have one son in UK and one in Australia. Son #1 went to UK for a post Uni gap year - in 2002 and hasn't come back and nor will he, now married, own home, child and good career. DH and I went to UK in 2011 for an 8 week holiday and returned almost a decade later so I have been on different continents to one or other of my sons for the last 20 years. How easy is it? Quite easy really in this day and age - there is FaceTime, sms and a one stop airflight, albeit 24 hours + travelling door to door. However in some ways it was easier for me back in the day to leave my mum and dad and go to Australia - almost an out of sight out of mind thing with phone calls costing a fortune and airmail taking a week - 10 days. There is no telling what your son will decide to do - he could be like mine, go back for a holiday and not return or he could go anywhere else in the world from Arizona to Zambia, you never know - so will you be trekking around the country or world after him once he gets his adult wings? I am a firm believer in letting them fly once they have got to that stage and then you are free to do what you want to do with the rest of your life! For me, the near decade in UK was the best thing that has happened to me in a long time. My health - both physical and mental - improved out of sight, I belonged, made friends, saw my country and generally had a great time whilst doing the hard yards caring for my then very aged parents (now both dead). I think, had I known then what I know now, I would have pushed for a return to UK while we were still young enough to have established ourselves there and been comfortable in retirement. However, we went past the point of no return and we had to come back to Australia where our pensions and paid off home were. Give it a go and see what happens, it'll either work or it wont but, as I said, get your citizenship before you do it - so much less faffing about!!!

What does that actually entail? University based or school based? Significant teacher training hours? Is it a post graduate certificate? AFAIK the PGCE doesnt necessarily have credit towards a masters.

You may be able to niche pick. Mathematics, IT and engineering departments are full of people with ASD so it may be a matter of choosing something that fits your skills and there are job finding services which can help you with that. I assume you are a citizen because if you are not, then you could have difficulty returning. I wouldn't be banking too much on the NDIS - it isn't so much a matter of having a diagnosis as how much that diagnosis impairs your functioning within society. Disability funding isn't a bottomless pit by any means and when there is a limited budget it is shared on a needs basis. The other thing, of course, with the NDIS is, especially in early intervention, the funding may be there but the services to spend it on arent.

He's not going to do it - he can't even bear to get a UK passport. He will come up with sequential excuses, all of which will delay anything beyond the point of no return. Get the passports ASAP, (cheaper than the Australian ones!) find your NI numbers, if you've still got the paper part of your UK licence, change the address on it and you should be good to go. Get your name on the electoral roll and don't tell the GP practice that you're only temporary. I'd have said 12 months would be a better option than 6 months - employers aren't going to beat a path to your door if you're only prepared to give them 6 months and if you're not really resident things like the NHS might be problematic. If you enter on your Australian passport then you'll be stamped with a visa and the machinery will think you've overstayed if you dont leave before it expires - and they aren't going to know you're British citizens!

It's not about whether you are in the Commonwealth or not, heck, some states dont even trust the assessments of other states!!! Always bring all the objective assessments with you - they are pretty much universal but they may need to be updated, other tests may need to be added to the battery etc. The qualifications of the assessors should be explicit eg registered psychologist, consultant paediatrician, registered speech pathologist. The best thing to do is to contact the special Ed section of the Dept of Ed you are going to and they will walk you through their process. They may say - "bring what you've got but we need to do the rest" or they may say "get these extra tests done". The states are all different as to what they accept and what their process is and also what options are available for support.

A handy rule of thumb is to go where you find a job. You make the assumption that you will get work as a teacher - may not be quite so simple - you may find that the jobs you are offered are in place like Echuca or Bairnsdale, quite a way from Melbourne. First get your job then work out where you could live. The further out you go, the better your cash will stretch when it comes to buying a home.

Bottom line, $600k isn't going to get you much in Sydney in a place you will actually want to live (would be lucky to get a rabbit hutch here in Canberra LOL). Personally I think you will struggle on $100kpa especially if that is inclusive of superannuation - and do you actually have a job offer or do you "hope" to get a job. I'd be looking somewhere else, maybe one of the places that have already been mentioned but of course, if you have a job in the bag then you are going to be stymied.

Check out the cat regulations for where you propose to live, some areas are now essentially cat free zones in that they are required to be inside or contained all the time. If they're moggies that venture out their lifestyle may be changed significantly.

Good to know, a lot of people are caught out by that one. Nobody knows what chance you have until you do it. There are stories about teacher shortages but who knows how that translates into actually getting a job once you've landed. Usually the jobs are in places where people don't actually want to live but they lost a lot of staff with the mandates and general lack of enthusiasm about the job so there may be more vacancies around. They do like the cheaper options though, where there are self managing schools, so that older more experienced teachers cost them more than a newly minted young thing and are often at a disadvantage because of that but if you're prepared to go wherever the department may put you and do your time in rural /remote areas then you're more likely to get a decent school down the track. If course if he has other skills like a nominated second language, music, special Ed then he will be more in demand.

When you say fully qualified, what do you mean? If you mean a 3 year degree plus a university based PGCE then yes he may be qualified for Australian purposes. If he has a 3 year BEd or a train on the job in schools qualification then he isn't qualified by Australian standards. Just be aware that fully qualified UK doesn't necessarily equal fully qualified Australia. At 43 your time is limited but I second what Marisawright had said - put in your application and see what happens but dont put your life on hold "just in case"

You would be sensible to have travel insurance for the whole of your visit tbh. Assuming you are from UK, the reciprocal agreement will cover necessary medical care but that's not comprehensive and there are some little worst case nasties covered by your travel insurance like repatriation which isn't covered by Medicare.

LOL, mine wouldn't even go for visits. He had to go in 2011 because our son was getting married! Before that, I think the time before was for my parents golden wedding. On this last trip, my son, his family and I were all staying for 8 weeks, the DH compromised at 5 weeks and he was cross about that, he thought he should only have to stay for 2 or 3!!! So he left before the sh!t really hit the fan in parent land! To give him his due though, he actually took one look at my olds and said "we can't leave them alone here like this" and spent the time from when he got back, tying up some lose ends and he returned to U.K 6 weeks later. I think the DH did regret not making a couple of trips and thus missing important milestones in our son's life but he couldn't face the thought of being away for several weeks at a time. He's over that now I think!!! How about you and the kids go and he pops over for the odd visit say every 3 months to spend a couple of weeks with you while you are away? Or how would it be if the family budget flexed to accommodate you and the kids going back for the summer holidays each year - I know I felt much better knowing that our family budget could cover me going whenever I wanted to go. One thing both my now adult sons said was though they loved their childhood in Australia, both were sad that they didn't have the experience of being part of the large extended family network - we were physically isolated from both DH and my families and though we made visits, it wasn't the same as being in the same town or street - unlike the women that my sons Hooked up with who had extensive close family - probably a bit too much "in your pocket" for either of their liking though. I think they would have liked a happy medium. One thing my DH did notice almost immediately was that in UK he got his wife back! I belonged and I was happy to my core and it showed. Here I have to work hard to appear to be happy, I don't belong despite all logic and rational thought!

Good luck! When you are on different pages it is incredibly hard. My DH absolutely hated the thought of living in UK - his response to my very evident depression at being stuck in Australia with ageing parents in UK was that if he had to live there then he would be depressed! (He has since apologised!!!!) He really enjoyed being in UK for the 9 years that accidentally unfolded when we didn't return to Australia from our intended 6 week holiday. Both of us were offered jobs we never applied for even though we couldn't work because we were caring for two nonagenarian parents and a couple of octogenarian relatives as well. Cost of living has shot up everywhere so I'm guessing that's going to be much the same, relatively. We were older though and able to retire on our Aussie super. I'm not sure that Peterborough would float my boat but there are lots of nice places in the surrounding area as I'm sure you know (I'm Cambridge myself). Can't help with rentals, we squatted in my parents' back bedroom but I have a friend who visits for 3 months at a time and gets an airbnb for that period without hassle so it may be possible to get FF. I would imagine you'd get a school place somewhere but if you didn't then you'd probably find that SA has a distance Ed program they could do though you'd probably need to register them as being home schooled in UK. From an Australian point of view, I don't think the kids would miss a thing of they didn't get back for the beginning of HS so that timing perhaps isn't imperative. Neither of us regrets giving 9 years of our lives to support my frail elderly folks and, for me, despite the task of caring for them 24/7 it was the best 9 years of my recent life and I don't begrudge them one minute and I have no guilt that I could have done more for them. At least you're in the situation where you actually like living in Australia, that's a bonus, I hate it, so coming back after spending time with your family shouldn't be too hard. Good luck. Not sure that I fancy your chances of getting him to agree but compromise is key to all relationships so you both have to give and take!

In the scheme of things, $8k is going to be a drop in the ocean and more than compensation for the run around you will get trying to live there on temporary visas (career work on WHV can be hard to come by and if you can manage on a hospitality type income it wont be lush). I agree with Marisawright, get your partner's UK citizenship sorted before you think about moving on if you can, because for her to return could be impossible which would certainly stymie your chances of returning if you find you dont like it.

If she's your partner why would you not apply for a partner visa? Then you could stay where you want and work where you want. Seems silly to faff about with WHV and hope you might one day be allowed to stay. All the other stuff is irrelevant until you get a visa.