I had not heard good things about our LA when we deregistered. I thought we would play it by ear and deal with things as they came and be cautious but optimistic. My optimism quickly dissipated when the EHE team wrote to us welcoming us to home ed, and then a week later told truancy that they had no idea who we were, prompting lots of confused phone calls from all sides trying to work out what was going on. That was last September, and required a stern letter from us to clear up the confusion, while simultaneously saying that we would be taking some time to deschool and that we would send in our Educational Philosophy in early 2013.
So, I was not surprised to receive a letter from them on Friday asking for a meeting. I hadn't actually sent them our Ed Phil yet as Podd only fixed our printer last week (ironically, by dropping it on the floor while replacing it with a new one!). I was, however, quite disappointed with the tone of the letter, which I'll copy for you here:
"Hello, my name is **** and I am an Attendance Improvement Officer working with **** where your children were on roll at **** Primary School.
We understand that you have recently taken the decision to educate your children at home. Children's Services fully supports your right to educate your child at home. However, one of the responsibilities of the Local Authority is to safeguard all children within our area. Children's Services looks to work with home educating families to support them in the best way possible to ensure that all young people achieve and progress. To help us both understand any support you might need or be entitled to from the authority, and to help us fulfil our responsibilities, I would like to arrange a meeting with you at home.
I would like to arrange the meeting for **** at ****. Could I also ask that the children being educated at home are also present at the meeting.
If the time and date I have suggested is not convenient, or if you have any other questions about this letter, then please contact me on ****.
I look forward to seeing you on the day."
There are so many things wrong with this letter. I shall do my best to address them below, although some of the points are linked and a tad difficult to separate into distinct points.
Number 1. The author of the letter.
"Hello, my name is **** and I am an Attendance Improvement Officer working with **** where your children were on roll at **** Primary School."
The LA have decided to completely disband the EHE dept as part of their budget cuts. You'd think this would be a good thing, after all the LA have no duty to monitor the provision of EHE, so technically having an EHE dept is paying for jobs that don't need to exist. However, what they've actually done is given the job of corresponding with home edders to the Attendance Improvement Officers (ie, truancy), who know even less about home ed than the EHE team did. Daft thing is, the AIOs don't particularly want the job, and are basically just trying to get the boxes ticked that they've been lumped with on top of their normal workload. Perhaps not the best decision ever made. A more sensible use of the LA's limited funds might be to change their approach to home ed to one that is more in keeping with the law, thus reducing the workload significantly and reducing the number of staff needed. Hmm. Maybe that's a leap too far...
Number 2. The blatant conflation of welfare and education.
"We understand that you have recently taken the decision to educate your children at home. Children's Services fully supports your right to educate your child at home. However, one of the responsibilities of the Local Authority is to safeguard all children within our area."
There is a worrying blurring of the lines between "children who are home educated" and "children who are vulnerable and need safeguarding" going on here. They've not even attempted to disguise the implication that home educated children are at risk of abuse or neglect. The law is quite clear on this. The Elective Home Education Guidelines for Local Authorities (EHE Guidelines), paragraph 2.15, state:
"[…] These powers allow local authorities to insist on seeing children in order to enquire about their welfare where there are grounds for concern (sections 17 and 47 of the Children Act 1989)."Fair enough. The LA should indeed be able to ask to see children if they have concerns about their welfare. However, the Revised statutory guidance for local authorities in England to identify children not receiving a suitable education (2009), section 73 states that:
"[…] Education of children at home by their parents is not in itself a cause for concern about the child’s welfare."So home education is not a valid reason to be concerned about the welfare of a child. Which leads me to...
Number 3. When did AIOs become social workers?
This one concerns me. A lot.
EHE Guidelines, paragraph 4.7 states:
"If any child protection concerns come to light in the course of engagement with children and families, or otherwise, these concerns should immediately be referred to the appropriate authorities using established protocols."It is the job of Social Services to investigate welfare concerns. If someone has concerns about a child who happens to attend a school, they report those concerns to Social Services. Exactly the same thing happens if that child happens to not attend a school.
The attendance team are not social workers. Their asking to see children for safeguarding purposes is far beyond their legal powers. It is utterly unacceptable for someone who is not a social worker to be put into a role in which they are deemed responsible for assessing the welfare of a child. Aside from anything else, it puts them in the firing line for any repercussions that come along with that responsibility, such as what might happen when they decide that a child is not in danger when in fact they are. Even social services get this wrong, a lot more often than we as a society would like. Nevertheless, they are the agency with whom the responsibility lies. It's not alright to shunt that responsibility onto someone else, nor for anyone else to take that responsibility upon themselves.
Number 4. Their presumption of responsibility for my kids education.
This is clear here:
"Children's Services looks to work with home educating families to support them in the best way possible to ensure that all young people achieve and progress."
Their presumption here is that they have to ensure achievement and progression. Let's go back to the guidelines. Again.
2.1 "The responsibility for a child's education rests with their parents."More specifically, here's the 1996 Education Act, Section 7:
"The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient, full-time education suitable -So, the LA have no responsibility to ensure anything. Paragraphs 2.6 to 2.8 outline where they do have a responsibility:
a) to his age, ability and aptitude, and
b) to any special educational needs he may have,
either by attendance at school or otherwise."
2.6 "Local authorities have a statutory duty [...] to establish the identities, so far as it is possible to do so, of children in their area who are not receiving a suitable education. [...] the duty does not apply to children who are being educated at home."
2.7 "Under Section 437(1) of the Education Act 1996, local authorities shall intervene if it appears that parents are not providing a suitable education. This section states that:
"If it appears to a local education authority that a child of compulsory school age in their area is not receiving suitable education, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise, they shall serve a notice in writing on the parent requiring him to satisfy them within the period specified in the notice that the child is receiving such education."
2.8 "Prior to serving a notice under Section 437(1), local authorities are encouraged to address the situation informally. The most obvious course of action if the local authority has information that makes it appear that parents are not providing a suitable education would be to ask parents for further information about the education they are providing. [...] Parents are under no duty to respond to such enquiries, but it would be sensible for them to do so."So the LAs responsibilities only begin if and when they get a report that says that an education is not being provided, and in that case they should make enquiries of the parents first to establish whether the report is accurate or not. This is pretty much the same way that social services investigates after they get a report to say that a child may be at risk. By that, I mean that social services doesn't blanket assume that every child in the UK is at risk of being abused without even knowing anything about them, and demand regular welfare checks to assure themselves otherwise.
So, the responsibility to ensure achievement and progression (or more generally, an education) lies with the parents, and no one else, and unless the LA have evidence to suggest that there is no education occurring, they've no reason to be contacting me. (Have more on this point later.) All this is inextricably linked to...
Number 5. Their presumption to monitor home education.
Again, the same bit of the letter:
"Children's Services looks to work with home educating families to support them in the best way possible to ensure that all young people achieve and progress. To help us both understand any support you might need or be entitled to from the authority [...] I would like to arrange a meeting with you at home."
Now, they're only asking for one meeting at this stage, and they are sugar coating it nicely in way which sounds like they're trying to help. Sidestepping, for the time being, the previous point which kind of blows this one out of the water anyway, I find it difficult to imagine that they would be able to "ensure that all young people achieve and progress" with a single meeting. Therefore my not-unreasonable assumption is that they would either ask for a follow up meeting after 3-12 months (depending on what happens at the first meeting), or ask for regular reports to be submitted that update on current progress etc.
The law is very clear here too. The EHE Guidelines (para 2.7) clearly state that:
"Local authorities have no statutory duties in relation to monitoring the quality of home education on a routine basis."So, um, yeah. Don't think I need to say much more on that.
Number 6. Visit are optional, and the kids don't have to be there.
But not according to the LA. Or at least, not in this letter:
"I would like to arrange the meeting for **** at ****. Could I also ask that the children being educated at home are also present at the meeting.
If the time and date I have suggested is not convenient, or if you have any other questions about this letter, then please contact me on ****."
Note that she says that if the time and date is not suitable I should contact her, but makes no mention of the fact that:
3.6 "[…] parents are not legally required to give the local authority access to their home. They may choose to meet a local authority representative at a mutually convenient and neutral location instead, with or without the child being present, or choose not to meet at all. Where a parent elects not to allow access to their home or their child, this does not of itself constitute a ground for concern about the education provision being made."So no, she can't ask to see the kids. And not mentioning that both the meetings and the kids being there are at the parent's discretion is, at the very least, misleading.
So, overall, not a very good letter.
Now, you might say that this is because of the fact that they no longer have an EHE team, and how are the AIOs supposed to know any better? I've 3 things to say in reply to that:
- From all accounts, they've been like this for years. And the form that they sent me last year that asked for a timetable, and outlines of how I was going to cover topics covered, and names and dates of birth of any children who come in contact with mine doesn't really go far to suggest that this is new. (Before you ask, no of course I didn't fill it in. But I have kept it for evidence.)
- There's this:
3.3 "each local authority should have a named senior officer with responsibility for elective home education policy and procedures. This officer should be familiar with home education law, policies and practices. Local authorities should organise training on the law and home education methods for all their officers who have contact with home educating families."
- Ignorance of the law is no excuse for breaking it.
Finally, you might say that there have been various cases of home educated children who have died after being abused/neglected by their parents, and therefore surely the intrusion is worth it if it saves the life of just one child who is genuinely at risk? The quote "if you've nothing to hide then you've nothing to fear" comes to mind and is often bandied about as some kind of mantra. (I feel an exploration of this is necessary... but here is not the place for it - this post is getting a bit long and might go off topic, so will defer this to another post.) Let me address this primarily by saying that this is falling into the trap of equating education and welfare as the same thing. They are not the same, as I outlined above. The relevant procedures and agencies, both for reporting and dealing with welfare concerns and for reporting and dealing with children missing education already exist. There is no need for anything additional. However, because this is one of those things that gets referred to in the media etc I would like to ask, very specifically, which cases exactly might those be? Home educators have looked very hard and very carefully into all the serious case reviews where home education was named as a factor, and in every single one of them the children concerned were already known to the authorities to be at risk, before they were taking out of school. There are no cases, absolutely none, of non at risk children being home educated and then becoming 'at risk' afterwards. Every single time the children involved were already known to be at risk, and every single time the relevant authorities failed to act appropriately and unfortunately the children paid the ultimate price for their failure. So, in answer to the question, no, the intrusion into our family's privacy is not worth it because no lives will be saved that way. Improving Children's Services will save lives. Putting home educators under the microscope will not.
Anyway, back to the question posed in the blog title... what we do with an unlawful LA is first of all, write them back a letter outlining exactly why we will not be accepting their offer of a meeting, now, or at any other time. Done - it went in the post on Saturday afternoon, complete with our Ed Phil for their viewing pleasure. Second of all... we take the matter higher up the food chain. The reason for this is that, realistically, the LA are not going to change their behaviour unless we, home educators, work with them to change their current attitude and behaviour and show them how it can and should be done.
If no one challenges the status quo, the status quo will never change.
Brilliant,Caz.Eloquently put. Thank you.
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