the fine art of ignoring people who are asking inconvenient questions

This is a follow up post to my post last year about my utterly awful LA, and has been in the pipeline for over a year!

I ended that post with the declaration that I would take it higher up. When I replied to the letter I did in fact request that the LA reply to me with some clarification on what was going on. I asked:

• why they were asking for a welfare visit with our children when they are not Social Services and are not entitled to do so,
• why they were conflating education with welfare,
• why the Attendance Improvement Team were contacting EHEers when there is supposed to be a dedicated EHE team who know the law,
• why they were asking to see our children to "ensure their achievement and progression" when they have no duty to monitor the home education provided by parents, and
• why they didn't mention that home visits are optional and at the discretion of the parents.

I never received a reply with answers to my questions. I didn't receive a reply at all.

I did send a follow up email on May 22 2013 to the AIO who I'd been dealing with, as follows:

"Hi,

I am emailing you as you have been my point of contact in the past in relation to my electively home educating my children. I would like to ask for some clarification about the situation within Leeds at the moment.

As far as I am aware, the responsibility of communicating with home educators in Leeds has been given to the Attendance Improvement Officers such as yourself.

Firstly, I assume that the AIOs are being supervised by someone with regards to these communications - could you confirm whether this is indeed the case. If it is, I would also appreciate it if you could give me the contact details of this person so that I can contact them directly.
Secondly, I am curious as to whether you have been given any additional training specific to the role of dealing with elective home educators as clearly this role is very different to that of dealing with truancy in schooled children.

I look forward to your swift reply.

Regards, etc."

She replied to say that she would forward my message on to her managers and get back to me when she had had a reply.

Surprise, surprise, no reply was forthcoming. Ho hum.

In fact, the LA haven't contacted me at all except to send me some random irrelevant leaflets (info about the 15 hrs/week of free childcare that is available for all 2 and 3 year olds, a leaflet on how to choose a high school, plus a couple of other things which were vaguely child-related) a few months back.

I did wonder if I might be contacted on the anniversary of the letter I sent (beginning of March), but that time came and went and I still heard nothing.

Fast forward to last week. I received this email out of the blue (I've copied it exactly, and just edited out the personal details):

"Dear ******,  We are currently  up dating our information on the data –base for elective home schooling. It would be helpful if you could confirm that you are still home educating your children and that the information we hold for your family is correct.

ADDRESS    <mostly correct address apart from an incorrect letter in the postcode>

We do not seem to have any contact phone number for your family. If you would like us to add one to your details could you please send one when you confirm your address.

Once we have confirmed our data-base is up to date we will be sending you some current information that we hope you and your family will find useful.

Thank-you in anticipation.

******

Family Support and Parenting Officer"

I didn't reply immediately, due to an infinitely more important work situation that came up. When I did compose a reply I was tempted to send a snarky comment about my address being close enough for them to still send me rubbish in the post and it arriving at the correct house, and the fact that they should be able to work out by themselves that we still home educate because we've not registered our children at any schools.... but I couldn't pass up the chance to try to get some info out of them, given that they ignored my last email. So this is the reply that I sent:

"Before I answer your questions I would find it helpful if you could answer some questions for me, so that I can be sure I hold the most up-to-date information.

Firstly, I would like some more details about the latest reshuffling within Leeds LEA, where the EHE department fits into it and how you are involved in that. It is unclear to me at this time how the role of a 'Family Support and Parenting Officer' is related to elective home education at all. If you could clarify this for me it would help me to understand why you are contacting me for this information rather than the equally inappropriate Attendance Improvement team who had, as I understood it, temporarily taken on the role of communicating with home educating families in Leeds while there was no EHE team in existence. Am I to understand that Leeds are finally developing a dedicated EHE team and you are yet another stopgap measure in that process? Or is your role a more permanent one?

Secondly, it would also be useful to know how you and your colleagues are currently engaging with the home educating families in Leeds, and how you plan to do so in the future. I would like to know if there are any plans in the works to set up a forum so that the home educating families in the area can be involved in the development of new, legally accurate, respectful and supportive guidelines for the EHE team within Leeds to use when communicating with the families they serve. I think we can both agree that the current guidelines and approach used by Leeds do not reflect good practice as outlined by the Elective Home Education Guidelines for Local Authorities (2007) and are, at best, inaccurate and unnecessarily demanding, at worst, ultra vires and deeply offensive to parents.

Finally, for future reference, the correct phrase as described by law is 'elective home education', not 'elective home schooling'. Also, database is one word, not two; as is updating. Thank you, however, is two words.

After you have given me the information I have requested, then I would be happy to answer the rest of your email.

Regards, etc"

I do appreciate that the comment about the spelling was probably unnecessary, but it irks me when people in roles where they are required to have written contact with the public don't know how to spell reasonably basic words correctly. It doesn't set a good professional image. It's also not ok to have the personnel who are dealing with home ed families not know that the legal term in this country is elective home education, not home schooling.

I resigned myself to not getting a reply, or, if I did, not a very helpful one. Low and behold if two days later a not entirely helpful, but better than I expected, reply appeared in my inbox:

"I apologise for referring to EHE as home schooling as you rightly point out by law I should referred to it as Elective Home Education.

I currently have been seconded to EHE to look at the  information that we hold for families participating in Elective Home Education and to ensure it is up to date.

Unfortunately in other e-mails I have sent out to families I have explained my position to them. I understand that this must have been confusing for you to receive an e-mail from me with a title for my primary role within the council. Again I can only apologise for not giving you the  curtsey of explaining my position .

I am going to forward your e-mail to my manager **** who I am sure will be happy to explain the development of the Elective Home Education Service.

If I could ask if you could confirm your address and also any contact number you would like us to add to your details on our system I would be very grateful.

Thank you."

I am unsure why it is unfortunate that she explained her position to other families. Perhaps she was unwilling? That wouldn't surprise me, considering their reluctance to actually answer questions about, like, everything... And yes, before you all think bad of me, I do know what she meant... it's a shame she didn't say what she meant.

As an aside, do people still curtsey? Perhaps they should bring that back...

Anyhoo, this is what I replied with, and I sat back to wait again.

"Firstly, thank you for explaining your current job role as it relates to the ongoing changes within Leeds. While a curtsey would be nice, I feel it would be unnecessary.

I have actually inquired, in depth, about the status of the EHE team in Leeds a couple of times before and each time I have been told that a manager would get back to me and answer my questions. I am pleased to hear that you have forwarded my questions to ****. However, as my most recent correspondence with a member of Leeds Council regarding EHE was approximately one year ago and I've still not received a reply, you'll have to forgive me if I take your assurances that she will be "happy to explain the development of the EHE service" with a rather large pinch of salt. I am eager to have my doubts proven wrong, though, so I will await her explanation with interest.

To answer your original email: the postcode is actually ***, not ***, but otherwise the address you have on file for our family is correct. The lack of a phone number is not an oversight but a deliberate omission on our part; we prefer contact via email or letter and find the best way to ensure this is to not have a phone number available at all, otherwise people tend to ignore our preferences for written correspondence and phone us anyway. However, I am in the process of changing email addresses so if you could update our details to reflect my new email address I would appreciate it. The new address is: ****. I will soon be closing this email account (****).

Finally, I would like to know what "current, useful information" you are proposing that you send to me. I feel that myself and my husband, rather than yourselves, are best placed to decide what information is useful or otherwise to our family. I would hate for you to waste time, energy and money sending irrelevant leaflets that will simply line our recycling bin, as the last lot of leaflets did. If you can give me an idea of what the information is, I can give you an idea of whether or not we will find it useful, and therefore whether or not it is worth sending."

I thought it highly likely that I'd not get any answers at all in the next reply. When it came, it didn't disappoint:

"Thank you for your further comments I will pass your e-mail onto ****."

Note that she didn't hyphenate 'thank you' this time.

I say it didn't disappoint me.... it did. But it didn't surprise me. I'm not sure whether it's the questions I'm asking that are above her pay scale, or simply the spelling, but alas, I'm getting no answers at this time. Perhaps the fact that she's only on secondment and this is not her primary role has something to do with it, or perhaps the LA simply don't want the home educators to know what's going on. Whichever it is, they have really nailed the art of ignoring inconvenient questions.