Home education statistics challenge
CAN I take this opportunity to thank you for your coverage of our "Not hidden- Home Educated" picnic and address some inaccuracies and issues raised by your report?
Home educating parents are not ‘refusing to send their child to school’. The law makes parents responsible for providing an education suitable to the age, ability, aptitude and any special educational needs of the child by attendance at school...or otherwise. We are part of the ‘otherwise’. Home education has equal status in law.
Legal safeguards already exist to ensure that education meets the child's needs and local authorities already have powers to compel children to attend school if provision is inadequate. Home-educating families can expect exactly the same service as any other family if there are any safeguarding concerns.
A difficulty we have nationally is the variabilty of treatment which home educators receive from local authorities. My statement was attributed to Sheffield council, which has varied over time. However, home educators and Sheffield council representatives have been meeting in the past two years to try to improve the situation locally. Local authorities also have difficulties because of the lack of funding to assist with this work.
You state: ‘the review found that youngsters educated at home were twice as likely to be on social services' registers for being at risk of abuse as the rest of the population’.
This is not a finding in the report but the repetition of a misunderstanding eminating from a press conference at the launch of the report.
The review did find that home-educated children were more likely to be known to social services ‘in some areas’ but it did not add ‘for being at risk of abuse’.
There is a higher proportion of children with SEN in the home-education community and many of these children are known to social services because they require additional services such as speech therapy. In some areas home-educated children are known because the local authority has a policy of referring all Home Educators to social services when they remove a child from school.
The launch of the report was quickly followed by an announcement that the DCSF select committee will hold an Inquiry into the report, its conduct and findings. Home educators welcome the inquiry and will be challenging the statistical basis of the report and the unnecessary and disproportionate recomm-endation contained in it.
Annette Taberner
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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