An appeal to the Better Regulation Executive (BRE) about the injustice of this review and consultation.

 

note: This complaint was referred to the DCSF for response. (!)

 

Below is the consultation document within which AHEd members comments are inserted in blue to explain to the BRE why this consultation is inappropriate and should be withdrawn.

 

The BRE say

A cornerstone of the better regulation strategy and implementation, and key to BRE's work, is the five principles of good regulation. The principles state that any regulation should be:

• transparent
• accountable
• proportionate
• consistent
• targeted – only at cases where action is needed

 

They also have a code of practice and guidance which will be useful in completing this appeal.

 

________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

info@betterregulation.gov.uk

July 2009

 

Dear Better Regulation Executive,

 

Action for Home Education (AHEd) is an action group of home educating parents in England and Wales whose purpose is to defend and advance home education rights and liberties and to promote fair and equal treatment for all home educators. All members can take an equal part in the work produced by AHEd. AHEd is an affiliate of the Scottish home education association, Schoolhouse, which supports families in Scotland.

 

There has been a slow but steady escalation over the last five or so years of proposals to control and monitor our private provision for our children's education. On each occasion to date, the government have reluctantly accepted that current statute is adequate and the balance between public and private is proper and well protected.

 

The latest effort to infiltrate our private lives has come in a rather nasty form. It commenced with scurrilous attempts to discredit home educators by connecting home education with issues of child abuse, forced marriage and domestic servitude. Despite there being no evidence that home education is a significant factor in any of these issues, a government review of home education was launched by Baroness Delyth Morgan and conducted by Mr Graham Badman. Mr Badman reported on his review to the Secretary of State on June 11^th this year. The result is that there are now proposals for registering and monitoring home educated children and these proposals are supposed to be currently out to public consultation.

 

AHEd are concerned that in the first instance there is no evidence that the proposals are necessary and secondly that the Consultation has not followed proper procedures, is being run concurrently with implementation rather than waiting to see if a requirement for implementation is the outcome and is biased against home educators having fair input when they are the only stakeholders who are personally affected.

 

AHEd have appealed to the Better Regulation Executive regarding a previous consultation about home education, but we would like to reassure you that we are not habitual complainers.  Rather we are the reluctant target of habitual and unnecessary public consultation which is out of all proportion to our situation or any perceived risks to our children.

 

We have copied below the consultation document from the DCSF and have inserted our comments throughout. Many of our comments do not relate directly to the Code of Practice on Consultation, but are there to demonstrate the context and evidence necessary to understand the full picture.

 

We hope that you will agree that these proposals and this consultation are entirely inappropriate and disproportionate and support our calls to the Prime Minister to withdraw them both.

 

Yours

 

Barbara Stark

Chair 

Action for Home Education (AHEd).

 

 

__________________

 

From the consultation - with AHEd comment inserted in blue:

 

Home Education - registration and monitoring proposals

 

Launch Date: Thursday 11 June 2009

Closing Date: Monday 19 October 2009

 

Following the review of home education, the Government is proposing to introduce arrangements for the registration and monitoring of home educated children. 

 

The government is planning to introduce registration and monitoring of home education despite producing no evidence from Graham Badman's Review of home education to show that it is either necessary or desirable or that it would attain their stated aim of reducing risks of child abuse.  Such legislation would appear to contravene the BRE's  position which requires that legislation be proportionate and targeted effectively.  

 

http://www.berr.gov.uk/whatwedo/bre/index.html/index.html

 

Further, contrary to the DCSF Code of Practice on Consultation criterion 1,

 

"all DCSF public consultations are required to conform to the following criteria within the Government Code of Practice on Consultation: Criterion 1: Formal consultation should take place at a stage when there is scope to influence the policy outcome."

 

legislating for the monitoring of home education has already been mentioned as a foregone conclusion in the "Improving schools and safeguarding children bill" on June 29th,

 

http://www.commonsleader.gov.uk/output/Page2831.asp

 

and this, some four months before the public consultation on the subject of the monitoring of home education is due to end. (The closing date for responses 19th October 2009)

 

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/consultations/index.cfm?action=consultationDetails&consultationId=1643&external=no&menu=1

 

The government will produce a fuller response to the initial Review in September, with regard to how to implement the recommendations, which again appears to pre-empt the outcome of the consultation.  This again is contrary to the DCSF Code of practice Criterion 1, see above.

 

Home education has also been the subject of or indirectly affected by other consultations over the past few years and the responses to those consultations have been overwhelmingly against any form of registration or monitoring.

 

See

http://ahed.pbworks.com/BriefingPaperHEReview

 

Conclusions from those previous consultations have been that current legislation is adequate and DCSF Guidelines have been produced to help those people who did not understand how to make proper use the of current legislation.

 

It appears that DCSF have an agenda they are intent on fulfilling and are prepared to ignore the BRE Code of Practice on Consultation Criterion 5.1 regarding the burden of consultation, by producing yet another consultation in a very short period to try and produce the answers they want rather than the answers the real stakeholders have already given on numerous occasions.

 

It is no exaggeration to say that home educating families are being adversely affected by these repeated consultations that are neither necessary nor proportionate to the 'perceived' (unproven) risks, yet are taking up disproportionate amounts of individual's time and energy.

 

It is also reducing the stakeholder's "buy-in" to the consultation process in general when government adopt this "if at first you don't succeed" process with consultations, rather than respecting what the public have said they want. So many home educators are asking what is the point of telling DCSF what we want and spending hours producing strong evidence, when they have already made up their minds to do whatever it takes to get around our valid arguments. Minority groups such as home educators consequently have no voice and no power and feel utterly betrayed by the consultation process which appears to be window dressing to allow the government to be economical with the truth as they say "we consulted the people", whilst omitting to add "and then ignored their wishes".

 

 

The consultation document sets out our proposals for a registration scheme and arrangements for the monitoring of provision to ensure that children are receiving the education they are entitled to.

 

 

Government has a duty to monitor the provision it provides to parents as a service in the form of state schools but it does not have a duty or right to monitor private provision by parents. It is the legal responsibility of parents (see Education Act 1996, section 7), not of the state, to ensure that children receive a suitable education. It is totally inappropriate for a government department to consult on proposals that will produce Regulation, statutory guidance or new legislation that is contradictory to current Statute. These proposals will cause conflict with this section of the Education Act 1996. 

 

The proposals are also contradictory to the ECHR Article 8 – Right to respect for private and family life

1. Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

2. There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

 

It is also morally unacceptable that the state, whose failure to provide suitable education to all in its charge is well documented, should take the moral high ground and assume to be able to judge a system of which they have little education or understanding and which is proven in research (eg Rothermel) to be efficient.

 

There is also a proposal that where there are serious concerns about the ability of the parent to provide their child with a suitable education in a safe environment then they should not be permitted to educate their child at home.

 

Current statute already allows for a School Attendance Order to be issued where a parent fails to cause a child to receive a suitable education otherwise than at school. It also allows for Supervision or Care Orders to be issued where a child is at risk. It is frankly incredible to say that if a child's home is unsafe the remedy is not to allow home education there, when the child will be there at all other times than school hours. If it is the education which is not suitable there is already a remedy in Section 437 of the Education Act 1996. Consulting on this issue is thereforea waste of public funds.

 

It is also inappropriate to consult on an issue which contradicts statute, case law and legal principles:

 

This proposal is in conflict with the Education Act 1996, Section 7 which provides that the parent is responsible for deciding where a child's education takes place.

 

It is also in conflict with the Education (Pupil Registration) Regulations 2006 which provide that a parent may remove a child from the school register to educate the child otherwise than at school and that deregistration must take place with immediate effect.

 

It is also in conflict with a fundamental principle of English law - that of the presumption of innocence - it cannot be just for a local authority to prejudge, without a parent having access to justice, whether that parent may, at some future time, fail in their legal duty to provide a suitable education in accordance with the Education Act 1996. It allows for LA personnel, on the vague grounds of  "any other concern", to circumvent the legal priciple of audi alterem partem, leaving the parent with no recourse to due legal process.

 

The consultation seeks the views of home educating families, groups representing home educating families, local authorities, other agencies involved in the provision of services for children, and the public, on our proposals.

 

This consultation is in breach of BRE Code of Practice on Consultation Criterion 4 as it has not been announced to any of the hundreds of individual home educators or home education networks for which DCSF has contact details from previous consultations and who have asked to be kept informed; it has not been notified to the parents of the 20,000 home educated children of whom the LAs have records; it has not been notified to home educators in any direct manner.

 

It has not been advertised widely, it has not been announced to Gypsy Roma or Traveler communities or to ethnic minority home education communities.

 

The DCSF have made no attempt whatsoever to notify other hard to reach home educators.

 

The consultation document is only available online and not in any other languages or formats.

 

The Home Education Review around which it is based is only available online or from TSO at a prohibitively expensive cost of £19.15.

 

When asked what effort they had made to ensure that all stakeholders were aware of the consultation and able to participate, the DCSF were defiantly arrogant. They wrote:

 

"The consultation was announced in the Secretary of State's letter of 11 June to Graham Badman.  This letter is included in the documents about the review on the Every Child Matters website. 

During the Review, a number of Home Education Organisations, including Home Education Groups, SEN and Traveller Groups, were consulted. 

These groups were also informed of the consultation and have disseminated the information out to interested parties.

The consultation is available as a word document, which can either be downloaded from the consultation website, or if someone does not have access to a computer, they can request a hard copy from our Public Enquiry  Unit's national helpline number which is 0870 000 2288.  We will provide copies of the consultation in other formats, such as in a

large font or a Braille version if requested."

 

This ignores the fact that none of our members has heard directly from the DCSF, despite them having hundreds of individual home educator's contact details and they failed to indicate how they had tried to reach any but those who had taken part in the pre-consulation review. Every day AHEd members become aware of more home educators who had no idea there had been a review or of the on-going consultation. It is not our job to disseminate this information and it is disgusting that the DCSF appear to be relying totally on others to do this job for them.

 

DCSF also refuse to extend the consultation period claiming that it is already longer than the minumum 12 weeks so covers holidays and recess, but do not take account of the poor accessibility created by their lack of notification.

 

 

Consultation document

 

1. Background and Context

1.1

The Review of Home Education in England published on 11 June (click here) took evidence from a large number of home educators, many local authorities and other groups who work with home educating families.

 

This is disingenuous because that evidence was very selectively reported and a large amount of it completely ignored. A very biased selection of information has been used, along with manipulative misuse of statistics, to put together a very skewed report.

 

Also, despite reporting that home education has not been found to be a risk of being a cover for abuse (the main pretext for the review), recommendations were still made and these proposals based upon a claim that the risk must be eliminated.

Please refer to this letter to the parliamentary ombudsman for further detail of this skewed reporting:

http://maire-staffordshire.blogspot.com/2009/07/our-letter-to-parliamentary-ombudsman.html

 

 

The terms of reference recognised that parents have a well established right to educate their children at home and that the government respects that right, and has no plans to change that position.

 

The DCSF have failed to comply with BRE Code of Practice on Consultation Criterion 3 regarding clarity about the proposals. The consultation document declares that home education is recognised and respected and will not be changed, yet the proposals therein would bring an abrupt end to the latitude currently available in developing an education suitable to the individual child, free from artificial restraints of testing and monitoring. Autonomous education, currently practiced by thousands of home educated children would effectively be curtailed. In this respect the consultation document is misleading if not deceitful.

 

AHEd have already complained to DCSF, with no response, that the terms of Reference for the Review were illegitimate.

Please read our submission:

http://ahed.pbworks.com/ReviewToR

 

They also set out the Department's commitment to ensuring that systems for keeping children safe and receiving a suitable education, are as robust as possible. They recognised that where local authorities have concerns about the safety and welfare, or education, of a home educated child, effective systems must be in place to deal with those concerns.

 

Lord Laming's recent review of Children's Services reported that effective systems are in place - they just aren't being used effectively. This consultation is unnecessarily repeating safe-guarding questions where Badman's and Laming's reviews have already answered that there is no need for further interventions to be created, especially where this will be at great expense to the public purse and great loss to those children really in need.

 

 

1.2

 The review's recommendations set out specific proposals for improving the capacity of local authorities and other public services to support home educators. The government, in its initial response (click here), is considering carefully the best way to implement them: a significant amount of further development work will be needed with local authorities, home educators and other organisations. We will publish a full response to the review's recommendations by the end of September.

 

AHEd believe that the DCSF are rushing this consultation in order to make the changes they want in time to include them in the Education and Inspections Bill with as little opposition as possible. Therefore, even though they had not had time to properly consider the Home Education Review, or to produce a Regulatory Impact Assessment, or to clearly target the true stakeholders (not even easy to reach stakeholders never mind those who are hard to reach), they set up this consultation on the same day the Home Education Review was reported to the public. This gives stakeholders that have become aware of the consultation little time to give proper consideration to the 75 page report, its 28 main recommendations, their correlation with the proposals in this consultation and how they might wish to address them in their response to the 12 questions of this consultation; all at the same time as providing their children with a suitable education otherwise than at school. It gives the majority of stakeholders no chance at all to engage with these proposals that affect them directly.

 

It also appears to have given the DCSF an ideal opportunity to immediately push to include those review recommendations which increase the controlling intervention against which so many home educators are opposed, whilst delaying, possibly interminably, implementation of any of the more supportive proposals of which many home educators would approve.

 

1.3

The review found no evidence that home education was used to cover forced marriage, servitude, or trafficking other than in isolated cases. However, the reviewer was provided with evidence showing that the number of home educated children known to Children's Social Services in some LAs was disproportionately high relative to the size of their home educating population.

 

This is clear indication that this consultation and the proposals therein are an enormously disproportionate response to the disproven hypothesis at the core of the Review of Home Education.

 

AHEd members are furious that Mr Badman has so little respect for home educators that he is willing to make such defamatory announcements in a public document rather than use his time to make a proper analysis of these figures. AHEd are confident that any such analysis would reveal that home educated children are reported to Children's Services in disproportionate numbers merely by virtue of the fact that they are home educated - not because of any real or found concerns.

 

There is evidence that some LAs routinely report all home educated children to Children's Services for investigation. Mr Badman has however chosen this selective type of reporting to further the aim of attaining support for monitoring and registration which is so strongly opposed by those giving due respect to the statistics and to the experience of home educators.

 

It is also extremely misleading to use the term "known to Children's Social Services" as a euphamism for "at risk" because many children are known to social services for benign reasons such as having special educational needs, their parent having a requirement for "benign" services, referral that led to case being dismissed, etc..c

 

There is also evidence that at least one LA chose to furnish Mr Badman with individual case histories to support the review claims, despite those individual cases representing an extremely tiny proportion of the number of home educated children in that area and a percentage of that cohort very, very much lower than that in the school cohort.

 

 

There are well established procedures for supporting children known to a local authority where there are safeguarding concerns. However, the review notes that without knowledge of, or access to a child, such powers are meaningless.

 

 

This makes the assumption that all parents are potential abusers of their children. Such an assumption is not only demeaning but goes against a core principle of our legal system: innocent until proven guilty, and alters the relationship of the citizen to the state. It is not a duty of the local authority to proactively look for children to monitor in case there is cause for concern. Their duty is only to act where there are existing concerns. There is no evidence of cause for concern about home educated children per se and no evidence that home educated children are not seen in the community and likely to come to the attention of the authority where necessary.

 

It is not just for a consultation to be based upon so many false premises because it is leading the consultees to believe children are at risk when they are not and thus affecting how they answer the questions. When coupled with a sustained media campaign to damage the image of home educators by declaring home education a likely cover for child abuse, (see Baroness Denyth Morgan's comments and Vijay Patel's (of NSPCC) comments and AHEd's response-) this subject cannot get a "fair trial".

 

 

HMCI, in her response to the call for evidence, noted that ‘schools have an important responsibility to monitor children's safety and welfare but this safety net is missing for children educated at home.'

 

This makes the assumption that monitoring by school keeps children safe - ie provides a safety net. This is blatantly untrue.

First: school is often the place where bullying and abuse happens to children who may then be de-registered to be educated at home for their safety, well-being and piece of mind;

Second: when faced with such abuse, schools frequently cannot deal with it or even call on the right authorities to assist.  

 

The suggestion that schools act as a safety net is based on another false assumption -   i.e. that children educated at home are by virtue of absence from a single arena (school), totally hidden from view. Home educated children go to libraries, travel on public transport, go to guides, scouts, woodcraft folk, tutorials, private lessons, shops, parks, pools, playgrounds, clubs, etc.. They are certainly not invisible.

 

Schools do indeed have a duty to monitor the safety and welfare of children in their care and as they are in loco parentis, this is justified and necessary. However, schools do not have a duty to monitor those children out of school hours or at weekends or during school holidays because they are not responsible for them then and the safety net is not necessary. In the same way, schools are not responsible for the safety and welfare of all other children not in their care, either pre and post school age or educated otherwise by their parents. It would be quite irresponsible to claim that school is an effective safety net for preventing or detecting abuse or that enforcing inspections in the home where concerns are not present will be any more effective, to say nothing of the damage they would cause.

 

AHEd assert that this consultation is creating a false impression that there is a risk attached to not registering and attending a school (ie being home educated), which will adversely affect consultees responses. It is not just, for HMCI to offer her personal opinion, with no evidence base, and for a consultation to include that opinion in its Background and Context information.

 

 

1.4

 

For these reasons the government has decided to take immediate steps to reduce the risk that home education can be used as a cover for child abuse or neglect

 

It is breathtaking to say the least and frustrating beyond tolerable levels for DCSF to write the above sentence immediately after they wrote at 1.3 above:

"The review found no evidence that home education was used to cover forced marriage, servitude, or trafficking other than in isolated cases."

 

How is the everyday home educator or school-using parent to have any faith in the DCSF or in public consultation when such crude contradictions are thrust before them?

How do the BRE imagine that such contradictions help the stakeholders to "buy-in" in any confident manner, to this particular consultation?

Why do you allow such perverse manipulation of the truth to dictate policy and procedure?

AHEd members call on the BRE to challenge this blatant ignoring of the truth and ask that if you are a powerless committee in this respect, to tell us urgently who can prevent this miscarriage of justice so that we might appeal to them as soon as possible.

 

 

 

The response to the review records our commitment to tighten up safeguarding procedures by:

 

Establishing a register of home educated children in each local authority;

 

This is to establish a discriminatory practice against a minority group. Replace "home-educated" with "Muslim" or "Gypsy" to highlight the prejudice at play.

 

Giving local authorities discretion to prohibit children from being home educated in circumstances where there are safeguarding concerns;

 

This is in contravention with the Education Act 1996, Section 7, which provides that parents have the discretionary power to decide where education takes place. There are already other powers to deal with safeguarding concerns and it is frankly ridiculous to assume that sending the child to school will prevent those concerns from becoming material.

 

Introducing tougher monitoring arrangements which will require local authorities to interview home educated children and visit the premises where home education is taking place to ensure that a suitable and efficient education is being provided and the children are safe and well.

 

This also is to establish a discriminatory practice against a minority group. School children are not all interviewed by inspectors; other private provisions by families are not subject to checks in the home and private interviews with a child. There is no evidence that visiting the home has any advantage over other methods for families presenting reasonable evidence of a suitable education. There is no case to show that home educators cannot be afforded the presumption of innocence.

 

AHEd are not calling for no contact with home educators; we are insisting on a presumption of innocence and proper use of current legislation where there is due cause for concern about a child's education or welfare.

 

AHEd members and many other home educators declare that this is an horrendous and breathtaking response to the review that is completely out of proportion to anything Mr Badman's research uncovered. It demonstrates the manner in which this government completely sidelines the evidence and forges ahead with the preconceived plan; yes the response to the review "records their commitment", but it does NOT put a valid case for that commitment. That is a very important difference that is not lost on us.

 

• There is NO evidence that home educated children are inadequately safeguarded.
• There is NO evidence to suggest that social services' powers in respect to home education are in any way inadequate or require tightening up.
• There IS evidence to suggest that Mr Badman has not been clear enough when discussing statistical evidence with contributors to his review, such as the Church of England, who at one point after speaking with him were under the impression that 40% of home educated children were on "at -risk" registers.

 

 

2. The Proposals

2.1 Register of home educated children

The review recommends that DCSF establishes a national registration scheme, locally administered, for all children of statutory school age who are, or become, electively home educated. The scheme described in the review is one where education and safeguarding issues are both considered as part of the registration process, with an initial statement of educational intent forming the basis for subsequent educational monitoring arrangements. The review response acknowledges that ultimately the scheme would need to be underpinned by guidance and training for local authority staff in order to work effectively.

 

Again BRE Code of Practice on Consultation Criterion 3 has been completely ignored. No assessment has been made concerning the financial cost of providing and training enough staff to implement this massive unnecessary project. There are 20,000 home educated children presently known to their LA in England and estimates by Badman and others that the actual numbers may be four times that. Many, possibly a majority, of those 20,000 children are currently not visited in their homes or annually monitored. Where enquiries are made of the parents, written communications should usually suffice. Most of the staff currently involved are not trained or educated in home education, especially autonomous education. The proposal is for an initial registration and visit, a six-month follow-up visit and subsequent annual visits. The financial impact for local authority Children's Services will be enormous and no extra money is to be provided. This may be a useful job creation scheme but it is a massively out of proportion response to an unproven concern.

 

 

It is also of grave concern to AHEd members that another impact of this scheme has not been addressed. The potential for harm to children subject to being interviewed without a parent or other chosen adult present is frightening. Badman suggests that any "vulnerable" children such as those with Special Educational Needs or communication difficulties, will be given extra consideration during interviews, but AHEd assert that ALL children are defined as "vulnerable persons" and should not be expected to be interviewed without their parent or chosen adult present - if they are to be interviewed at all.

 

If there are serious, or immediate concerns, for the safety of a child there is already scope in law for social services to see a child without the parent present. We understand that this decision, for very sound legal and safety reasons, is made by senior social workers. Badman’s recommendations appear to remove the restriction that it is a qualified social worker, let alone a senior social worker, who determines whether this power should be enacted.

 

Questioning a child is a highly skilled job; if done unprofessionally or incorrectly it can lead to harm to the child or other serious mistakes such as in the Orkney case of forcibly removed children.

 

That Badman infers that any LA personnel could determine whether they need to question a child and then determine whether to question that child alone, is a gross underestimation of the level of skill and knowledge required; let alone the skill required in actually questioning the child.

 

We accept that it will take time to put the full scheme in place particularly where more work is needed to provide more comprehensive guidance on the practical interpretation of ‘efficient' and ‘suitable'.

 

The courts have already interpreted these terms and it is not within the scope of the review to assess these terms. This is "mission creep" and AHEd members are alert to this further abuse of the Code of Practice.

 

2.2

Registration would be granted automatically unless there were safeguarding concerns (see next section): if at any time a LA became dissatisfied with the quality of home education provided to a child, it would - as now - serve a school attendance order.

 

The School Attendance Order procedure is already provided in current legislation and if used correctly eliminates the need for any of these other proposals.

 

2.3

We propose to legislate now for registration and monitoring arrangements that will focus on safeguarding but should also improve the quality of education.

 

It appears quite wrong to AHEd that a Bill in progress is already being used to introduce these powers when the consultation is not closed and so has not been analysed or reported, the Regulatory Impact Assessment has not been produced, full details of the report such as the statistical analyses have not been released and the full Department response to the report is not due out for until September.

 

Also there is, implicit in this comment, an assumption that the government believe the quality of education being received is in need of improvement. There is no evidence to support this assumption and it is a further extension of the scope of the review and consultation. It appears that the DCSF simply tag all of their preferences onto this bandwagon in the hope of railroading due process.

 

 

They will have the following features:

Every home educated child of compulsory school age must be registered with the local authority in which the child is resident;

• Regulations will specify the information that parents must provide which is likely to be child's name, date of birth, address, the same information for adults with parental responsibility; a statement of approach to education, and the location where education is conducted if not the home;
• Scope to extend the scheme to 18 in future;

The above already includes compulsory school age - why would the Department wish to have a freedom outside that scope?

• Regulations will specify how registration should take place;
• Any changes to registration details should be notified immediately;
• Registration must be renewed annually;

• It will be a criminal offence to fail to register or to provide inadequate or false information;
• Pupils should stay on the school roll for 20 days after a notification to home educate;

 

This would be a prejudice against those home educating who had previously been to school and AHEd is aware that this tactic is used to pressurise parents to keep their child in school

 

• The school must provide the local authority with a record of achievement to date and predicted future attainment;

 

Predictions would be unnecessary and could be harmful. It is unlikely that they would be relevant to the changed educational process.

 

• DCSF will take powers to issue statutory guidance relating to registration and monitoring. 

 

AHEd members have good historical reason not to accept the process of introducing practice via statutory guidance documents that are not subject to the same rigourous scrutiny as primary legislation. This just allows for more mission creep and less due process.

 

2.4 Safeguarding

 

The review recommends that local authorities should have a discretion to refuse registration where there are safeguarding concerns. In addition, if safeguarding concerns are identified after home education has begun, the LA would have powers to revoke registration. Each case would need to be considered on its merits, balancing the rights of parents to home educate, and the rights of children to receive a suitable education in a safe environment.

 

This is an inappropriate conflation of education and welfare issues that makes it appear necessary to override a parent's legal duty to choose whether their child is educated at school or otherwise. It cannot be right to consult on this sort of misguided approach to welfare. As stated earlier, if there are safeguarding concerns in a child's home it is ridiculous to think that altering the place of education for several hours a week and several weeks of the year, could be a protection against that risk. There IS a right of a child to receive education, there IS a duty for the parent to ensure receipt of a suitable education, there is NO duty on the LA to routinely assess the safety of the private educational environment - only to act where it comes to their notice that a child IS at risk. Proposals to assess the safety of home education environments are unlawful.

 

2.5 Monitoring arrangements

Local authorities tell us that they need greater powers to ensure that home educated children are safe, well, and receiving a suitable education. The current arrangements allow parents to submit evidence that a ‘suitable education' is being provided, which could be mainly written evidence. Local authorities have no powers to interview home educated children to establish that sample material provided is representative of their work, nor to establish that they are safe and well.

 

This is simply untruths, peddled to persuade the public that home educated children are at risk.

Local authorities have indeed been bemoaning their lack of free access to home educated children. This is either because they don't understand the powers they already have, to act where there is due cause for concern about a child's education or welfare - or it is because they want powers above and beyond anything a parent or child should have to tolerate, ie powers to deny, at will, a presumption of innocence.

 

Previous consultations have already established this; most recently the Guidelines for Local Authorities on Elective Home Education, produced after consultation, established that LAs should not have automatic access and that adequate current legislation is available to them.

 

2.6

We believe that local authorities should interview children within 4 weeks of home education starting, after 6 months has elapsed, and thereafter at least annually to assess the quality of education provided and ensure that children are safe and well. The local authority should visit the premises where education is conducted, and question the child about the education provided, although at least 2 weeks notice should be given before the visit is conducted. The local authority should have the right to carry out the interview without a parent being present, if this is judged appropriate, or alternatively if the child is vulnerable or has particular communication needs, in the company of a trusted person who is not the home educator or parent/carer.

 

See AHEd comment under section 2.1 above, for points relative to this section.

 

END