Comment attached to the Badman letter 06.05.09:

 

Dear Mr Badman, 

 

AHEd members have grave concerns about the inaccuracies in the questionnaire sent to local authorities as part of your review of home education. Many of the questions misrepresent the law and the responsibilities and powers of local authorities. Inaccuracies such as these create unnecessarily stressful relationships with home-educating families and foster misconceptions about the safety of home-educated children.  The questions are also so leading as to cause biased results. The whole questionnaire is based around acceptance and furtherance of ultra-vires activity. It simply should not have been allowed to go ahead or to form any part of a review of the legal practice of home education. Such a poor starting point for a review gives us no confidence in a just outcome. We have therefore prepared the following commentary for your information and to support our call for this review to be ceased. 

 

Q4 asks, “Would you be willing to take part in the next phase of the research in February/March (including in-depth interviews with key personnel in your organisation)?”

 

Why have home educators, in the public consultation part of this review, not been offered the same courtesy to discuss what is essentially the conduct of our private family lives? It is unacceptable that you should give LAs the opportunity to answer almost 60 questions about us and an opening for unspecified amounts of further input, whilst affording us 6 questions and no further input. Some home educators have been made aware that you have offered to read submissions from home educators who can send "one side of A4" to your secretary. This is only a token consideration of the opinions of the only real "stakeholders" in this review and is totally inadequate. You are severely limiting the access of a minority group to discussions about our chosen and perfectly legitimate lifestyle, whilst another group whose personal lives are not at stake have the undeserved privilege of being recognised as "key stakeholders" in our lives and asked to discuss us as if we are totally insignificant. No one is a greater stakeholder in a person's life than themselves and, in the case of a minor, their parents. This deliberate disenfranchisement leaves home educators feeling robbed and violated. How do you justify presiding over such activity?

 

It is also of grave concern that in your letter of 19th January to the Directors of Children's Services, you assure any LA staff who are willing to take part in your more in-depth interviews in February and March that their participation, along with their questionnaire responses, will be completely confidential. This puts home educators in the position of having potentially hostile and prejudiced public servants uttering or reiterating unfounded allegations about risks in home education, without any chance for us to know what is being said about us or to challenge it. This contrasts sharply with the disclaimer posted on the DCSF consultation web site about the lack of guarantee of privacy for participants in the public consultation - the only place where individual home educators (those who are lucky enough to have found out about the review) can have a say.

 

Some LAs and the DCSF have refused to give copies of the LA submissions to home educators. We are being accused of abuses and cannot even have access to the evidence. For example, Norfolk LA wrote

 

"Reason for Refusal

The exemption applies for the following reasons:-

(a) The disclosure of information contained in questions 3, 13, 15, 18, 21, 23 (part 1) and 24, would inhibit the free and frank exchange of views for the purposes of deliberation (Section 36 b(ii)). If this

information were disclosed, replies to consultations such as this in the future would not be made so fully as we would have to be more circumspect in the way we would reply.

(b) The disclosure would otherwise prejudice the effective conduct of public affairs. The disclosure of this information would mean that relations with Home educators would be damaged, and the ability of the relevant officers to perform their roles would be prejudiced (Section 36(c))."

 

Home educators are left wondering what Norfolk have said that they would not say publicly and how this can be justified in a public service department. This is not justice in action, this is breathtakingly underhand, cloak and dagger stuff not worthy of our public servants or our Commanders of order of the British Empire.

 

In Q5 (and throughout the questionnaire) you ask about "support" and "monitoring". These terms are used inaccurately and illegitimately in this questionnaire, mirroring the mistakes made by local authority personnel in their dealings with home educators. 

 

Very few home educators receive genuine, helpful support from their local authorities. Despite the fact that many home educators across the country would welcome genuine, unconditional support with certain things, such as access to GCSE exam centres and public sports and leisure facilities, this is almost always denied. Local authorities commonly state that home-educating families must bear ALL the costs of such an education, i.e. that rejection of state schooling disqualifies us from the right to receive any education services whatsoever from the local authority. Local authorities appear to believe that education services actually mean school services, and DCSF reinforces that view.

 

What local authorities refer to as "support" usually means more-or-less overt coercion of parents to meet arbitrary outcomes decided upon by the local authority and central government, and far too often based on the ill-informed prejudices of an individual officer. The word "support" in this context is a euphemism for judgement and control. This situation results in poorer outcomes for children and families, who are all too often put under unreasonable pressure, for example to accept home visits, creating anxiety and damaging the relationship between the child and parent by giving the message that the parent is not to be trusted. It is a tragedy that government does not appear to recognise that increased intrusion into family life ultimately increases risks to children rather than decreasing them. In the panicked search for the next Victoria Climbie, LAs unwittingly damage many children when they insist on "supporting" families that do not want or need intervention.

 

"Monitoring" is mentioned in Q5 as if it is a legal duty and right of local authorities. It is NOT.  From the 2007 Elective Home Education Guidelines for Local Authorities [1], paragraph 2.7:  "Local Authorities have no statutory duties in relation to the monitoring the quality of home education on a routine basis." The newest version of Guidance for LAs for identifying Children Missing a Suitable Education [2], paragraph 88, recommends that LA personnel should follow the procedures as laid out in the EHE guidelines. This guidance also states in the same paragraph that LAs should make enquiries of home educating parents, which is NOT the same as monitoring them - and in any case is inaccurate as it should read "may" rather than "should" (see Donaldson [3]). 

 

It is vitally important that LAs do NOT assume a duty to monitor for suitability of education, as this would effectively remove responsibility for education from parents and place it with the LAs.  If the state makes such a fundamental shift in the rights and responsibilities of the various parties, it appropriates parental duties and should expect to be held liable when it fails to meet these duties; legal challenge and claims for redress would inevitably ensue as children continue to be failed by both state-maintained schooling and other forms of education.  Any such change would also remove the right of parents under Article 2, Protocol 1 of the ECHR to educate their children according to their own philosophical or religious convictions, again leading inexorably to legal challenge.

 

These comments serve to highlight how damaging it is to include such misleading terminology in your questions and how skewed the results of the survey will be as a result. 

 

In Q8 you ask for information about communication and collaboration between different teams involved in "supporting" and "monitoring" home education.  We refer you to the paragraphs above regarding the inaccurate and dangerous assumptions upon which these questions are based.

 

Officers within LAs obviously do liaise and discuss home educators. Problems arise when one ill-informed officer says something to another based on an, arguably culpable, lack of understanding about the legal situation. AHEd has direct evidence of this happening in the form of minutes of meetings in a local authority where a travellers' liaison officer made a forthright and confident statement about the legal situation regarding home education that was in every way inaccurate. 

 

Given the depressing and stressful frequency with which home educators come up against such boldly stated ignorance, it is clear that this sort of "collaboration and communication" is all too common. Such misinformation, if repeated with sufficient confidence, very quickly comes to be understood as reality.

 

The pervasiveness of such misunderstandings and Chinese whispers leaves many home educators feeling sorely aggrieved at the way they are perceived, treated, and discussed in their absence by local authority personnel.

 

Data and Tracking

 

The questions relating to the numbers of home educators are curious. In some instances (e.g. Q12, Q14), you are asking local authorities to quantify how much of something they don't know. Presumably if the local authorities knew what they didn't know, then they would know? Q21 to Q25 do not clarify whether they are asking about children the LA knows are home educated or including those you have asked them to guess about. Q22 is not clear whether it is asking about all HE children without a statement or all SEN children without a statement.

 

The term "statemented" is misleading and offensive when applied to a person rather than a provision.

 

This section of the questionnaire is also confused by the use of the word "registered". There is no legal register of home-educated children, and the inference that there is serves to support the ultra vires practices of many LAs that attempt to persuade home educators that they must "register". Many others, more subtly, state that it would be helpful if one registers; helpful to whom is never stated, but AHEd believes it is never helpful to the home educator.

 

Q27 “Do you think that you will be better able to track children in your area in the near future? e.g. planned changes to your own systems, ContactPoint, other system improvements?” clearly reveals the assumption that "better tracking" would be an "improvement".  Home educated children are not fugitives who need to be hunted down, and there is no need to "track" the movement of children in law-abiding home-educating families.

 

The further inference in this question is that the author does not understand the legislation. The Guidance on Children Missing a Suitable Education requires that if a child's education status is unknown it should be ascertained. Once a child is reported to be home educated, no further "tracking" or intervention is required unless section 437 of the Education 1996 applies: that is, unless the LA has reasonable cause to believe that despite declaring the child is home educated, the parents are failing to cause them to receive an education in accordance with Section 7 of the Education Act 1996. "Tracking", like "monitoring", is an example of pernicious mission creep.

 

Q29 asks, "How does the local authority ensure families know about their rights and responsibilities in relation to home education?" This is highly problematic. It is based on the flawed assumption that LAs both understand the rights and responsibilities of parents and are prepared to disseminate accurate information.

 

In our experience, LAs frequently have a totally inaccurate understanding of their own rights and responsibilities (fostered by prejudicial input from central government, such as this questionnaire), and virtually never understand those of home-educating parents. This leads to legally inaccurate statements in official LA documentation, such as “"It is the responsibility of parents to be able to show the local authority that they have a programme of work in place that is helping their child to develop according to his or her age, ability and aptitude and any special educational needs he or she may have" [4] and “[A suitable education] should offer: a broad and balanced curriculum; english, mathematics and information and communications technology (ICT); opportunities for physical, social, spiritual and cultural development.” [5] These are not isolated examples – they are repeated across the country in one LA after another, year after year.

 

Most LAs refuse the offer of workshops provided by the home education community, who have spent years studying and monitoring relevant legislation. Even those who do avail themselves do not necessarily put into practice what they have learned.

 

We are also acutely aware of how this institutional arrogance has been played out in Scotland where education authorities were called to task by the Scottish Consumer Council but continue with ultra vires practice.

 

AHEd members hope that a belief in LAs' ability to acquire and disseminate accurate information is not implicit in your question.

 

In Q30 and Q31 you again ask about what support the LA provides to home-educating families. We refer you to our comments above about the inaccurate and misleading use of the word "support".  The responses you get from LAs are likely to focus on activities such as home visits and other contact that many home educators view as unwarranted and ultra vires harassment rather than support. 

 

Assessment and Monitoring

 

Qs 32 to 40 make the assumption that there will be an "initial assessment visit" and subsequent ones.  Again, the assumption of a right or a reason to make any initial assessment, let alone a visit, mirrors that of many local authorities, and underlies much mistrust and irritation that home educators feel towards them.  There is no obligation on local authorities to assess or monitor home education, and such a process is not a necessary part of a mature relationship between home educating families and their local authorities.   The standard to which parents are required to educate their children is set out clearly in the law; and parents are not accountable to anyone except their children for how they choose to fulfil their legal obligations, unless there is some evidence of failure.

 

The assumption that some sort of visit will happen, or that it is necessary, is generally driven by a concern for the welfare of the child, together with some other erroneous assumptions (some of which defy logic) such as:

 

*"seeing" a child allows an officer to assess whether or not they should be concerned about the welfare of that child… 

 

All it tells you in reality is that the child is "still alive".  After all, if routine visits provided any meaningful protection for children then all families would surely be visited during the school holidays. 

 

In the high profile case of a home educator abusing her children (Eunice Spry in Gloucestershire), not only were the children known to social services, but Ms Spry and her children were visited far more frequently than the great majority of home educated children - and these visits still failed to accurately assess what was happening in that family.

 

*if a child is not "seen" by a local authority official then they are not "seen" by anyone - and are therefore "at risk" in some vaguely defined way… 

 

In reality, people live their lives amongst other people and whatever else may have changed in this world, the fact that people will intervene on behalf of a child they think may be suffering thankfully has not - even if they are more likely to phone social services than step in themselves to offer to help.

 

*that the community surrounding a child would not intervene on its behalf when necessary…

 

Eunice Spry was not only referred to social services by people in her own church, but by her own children.  Home educators local to her also expressed their concerns and were looking out for the children themselves.  It was clearly not the community that failed to protect these children, nor even the home education officer - but Gloucestershire Social Services.

 

AHEd does not deny that there may be occasions when a home educated child needs the state to intervene on their behalf to protect them from harm; and indeed would expect the state to take appropriate action proportionate with the risks.  However, at this time there is no evidence being offered of a child being simultaneously discovered to be both home educating and abused and to suggest that this may hypothetically happen in no way justifies the routine imposition of visits from LA officers. Also, most importantly and significantly, there are safeguarding procedures already in place to deal with such a hypothetical case should it ever happen.

 

LAs who overstep their role by making and acting on this assumption create hostile and mistrustful relationships with home educators, many of whom feel coerced and harassed and also increasingly angry. Home educators are not stupid people and know full well that a "supportive" visit to "assess their educational provision" is not only not legally mandated, but is a thinly veiled cover for "checking you are not abusing your children".  Not surprisingly, they find this offensive on a number of counts: i.e being treated in one fell swoop as potential abusers and as too stupid to be able to see through the "support" that is "offered".

 

On the other hand, where LAs relate to home educators on the understanding that they have no routine duty of monitoring, assessment or inspection (or other similar term), they are able to develop relationships with the local home educating community based on trust and mutual respect.  Ironically, the LAs that understand this have the best relationships with their users and are therefore far better placed to discharge their safeguarding duties if the need arises.  Sadly, their number is depressingly few.

 

 

 

References

[1]http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/localauthorities/_documents/content/7373-DCSF-Elective%20Home%20Education.pdf

 

 

[2]http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/resources-and-practice/IG00202/

 

 

[3]Lord Donaldson's judgement. In Phillips v Brown, Divisional Court, 20 June 1980, unreported.

 

 

[4]Trafford LA policy information for parents:

http://www.trafford.gov.uk/cme/live/dynamic/Download.asp?c=docman2&f=pdf&id=F103479A-137A-493A-962E-FFCF7436E02A

 

 

[5] Wiltshire LA home education FAQs: http://www.wiltshire.gov.uk/educating-your-child-at-home-faqs.htm