To think that having to have a DBS check to home educate is unfair.

Statistics show that abused children often go on to be abusers

No they don't.
Statistics of convicted abusers show a high percentage were abused as children. But those stats do not include people who were abused and who do not go on to abuse.

Statistics show that abused children often go on to be abusers, so I wonder how people would feel if every person who was abused as a child, then had to accept random and regular checks (at school or not) to make sure their children are not being abused. This would allow full body check and speaking alone with children.
There would be outrage, and in my opinion, quite rightly so, but, it could save that one child ......
Why should a whole group of people, who have already had plenty to deal with in their life be subjected to constant intrusion in their lives because of what 'may' happen?

Name one private school in England that does not enter their students for GCSEs

Acorn in Stroud? Brockwood Park? Sands School?

Yes they only enter students who want to do exams. But I didn't think that woukd meet Jemima's criteria as they enter some students.

www.summerhillschool.co.uk/

Name one private school in England that does not enter their students for GCSEs (and A Levels if the school goes up to 18)

Summerhill

Only pupils that choose to be entered sit any exams at all

This is a fundamental importance of home ed. DS1 was doing maths above his “age”, national curriculum wise, long before he could read. Schools following the NC would have forced him to read which would have potentially destroyed his love of books that he now has. DS1 reads very well now and reads encyclopaedias for fun, so clearly learning to read slightly later than in a school hasn’t hindered him.

No I can't "Name one private school in England that does not enter their students for GCSEs (and A Levels if the school goes up to 18)." Jemima! I said that private schools don't have to follow the NC.I didn't say they don't enter their students for exams.

Following the NC isn't just about content . If you follow it you have to learn things in a certain order. It's very detailed. Home educated children can learn in the order that suits them and then can go beyond the NC (like lots of private schools) .They can take their History GCSE (or IGCSE) at 12 id they like, but they might not be ready for Physics until 17. It doesn't matter.

State academies don't have to follow the national curriculum either, as far as I'm aware - and almost all of the state schools are academies now. However, I think most do pretty much stick to the national curriculum anyway.

Don't private schools sit the same exams as state schools? So surely have to be studying the same subjects and the same material, in order for their students to pass those exams?

Name one private school in England that does not enter their students for GCSEs (and A Levels if the school goes up to 18).

Private schools tend to statistically have much higher success rates in GCSE results than state schools, so clearly those students are being very successfully taught to the NC.

It’s interesting how there aren’t people as outraged by that about private schools than they are about Home Educators isn’t it.

Well, you might expect those things and most home educators do have those things and do those things. But home educators ( just like private schools) don't have to follow the National Curriculum.

Home educators don’t have to follow the curriculum. There’s no legal requirement to. The education must be “suitable” but that doesn’t mean following the curriculum. There are multiple ways to do that. Again, you say you expect to see some sort of structure - that again is your own bias and preference, we have no obligation to do that. And we don’t necessarily teach at the same time as schools do - for example, statistically home educated children learn to read a couple of years later than schooled children. However there aren’t higher rates of illiteracy among the home educated at 18 vs schooled at 18.

A lot of people who don’t Home Ed imagine it in a way that it isn’t, and I don’t think it’s fair to make Home Edders conform to those standards when one of the reasons we want to educate our kids ourselves is so we have the freedom for our kids to learn at their pace and the flexibility to do so

Not to mention this is a false analogy.

More like:

’A parent decides they want to feed their children a vegan diet. The council wants her to send in regular food diaries, submit to random fridge inspections and have her child interviewed by a professional butcher turned council officer. They should also be registered and notify the council of all places they eat out and when; they are also required to share any of their Children’s food allergies, likes and dislikes, E&D data and medical history; all of which the council may choose to share on a whim. The general public supports these measures because the parent isn’t a qualified dietician and constantly tuts about how the children will certainly not grow properly unless they eat meat. The national association of butchers helps this perception along by constantly lobbying against vegan parents and it’s ex-members are consistently hired as ‘nutrition support officers’ by the council.’

@ForestFae there must be evidence of the learning that takes place though? I would expect a homeschooling household with early primary aged kids to have plenty of books at appropriate levels for learning to read and perhaps some resources specific to that task. I’d expect to see things that can be used for learning maths, although some of that might be integrated into daily tasks like doing the shopping (addition and subtraction) or baking a cake (measuring). Things like lego are also great for learning maths. I’d expect to see evidence of organized physical activity but that might be things like being part of a football team or a dance class or taking swimming lessons or just regularly going to the pool yourselves. I’d expect evidence that the kids had been visiting or learning about different places, going to museums or art galleries, historical places, visiting local parks, forests or beaches. And yeah I would expect some structure to the timetable and some space in the house dedicated to this stuff because it takes considerable effort to make sure kids are keeping up with the school curriculum, even if you choose to teach those skills and that knowledge in very different ways.

I don't think anyone is saying that homeschooling parents are more likely to be abusive. It's just that children who attend school have regular contact with adults with some training in safeguarding, which gives a better chance of detecting when there is a problem at home, and home-schooled children don't.
I'm not convinced that DBS checks on the parents will help, except in a very few cases. What is going to be the procedure where the DBS is not clear? Who decides? Obviously very occasionally it might pick up someone with a disturbing history, but more often there will be something like an isolated incident from someone's teens, and who decides if that's an issue? And it might pick up potential violent parents, but probably not those who might neglect their children or abuse them emotionally.

It might be more to the point to require that home-schooled children have regular contact with somebody independent who has some suitable training - it needn't be a social worker - it might be someone from an activity they attend regularly, for instance.

Except that for home education, we don’t do “schooling”. So many people think it’s just school at home. It’s not.

Schools get inspected all the time. The explanation given to the kids is usually something like :Mrs X is here today to observe our maths lesson. Mr Y is from the school board. They come and visit schools to see how we run things here. Let’s show him how great we are at basketball here at Riverdale High.
Same thing could work for Home Ed. LA visit and check that the kids have time space and materials dedicated to school work and ask a couple of questions about their favorite school activities. Parents could tell the kids ‘Mrs X is here from the home schooling department at the LA and we’re going to show her how we do school in our house. It wouldn’t pick up cases of abuse where things are going fine from an educational perspective but it would pick up cases where Home Education is being used as a way of getting kids out of sight with no attempt made to actually educate them. And actually it would strongly discourage people from using Home Ed to do that as it would be inviting inspection rather than avoiding it.

Will they force her to go and work in a state run kitchen if she fails the inspection?

If she fails it will be publicised by the council, and there's nothing like a 0/1/2 rating to drive the customers away, and if it happened the inspection regime itself could put her out of business. If she seriously failed to the point of being shut down on the spot (alarmingly, that's being below the standard required for a 0 score, but it does happen) then she would have to find an alternative way to generate an income to pay for, amongst other things, her council tax.

Failing standards of home education should absolutely result in having to find alternatives - be that a state school, private school, or (depending on the circumstances) paying for a tutor in areas where the education is falling short.

Schools can be shut down, merged or taken over by a multi academy trust if they are failing their students, typically after a poor Ofsted inspection, and heads routinely lose their jobs in such scenarios. I don't know why home ed people seem to think that parents should be allowed to fail their child with impunity.

One that also has a “needs improvement” rating and is underfunded, for that matter?

Right but home education isn’t even classed as a safeguarding concern - and how would you even measure a suitable education? How would you ensure people’s personal biases don’t come into play? And you get into the realms of standardisation with this, which is one of the things many Home Edders want to avoid - the rigid, box ticking, inflexible nature of schools.

the default educational responsibility lies with the parent - I think this is what causes a lot of these disagreements. People think he default is school when legally, the responsibility belongs to the parents it’s just many choose to use schools to fulfil this. There’s nothing suspicious or wrong with choosing to do it yourself.

Will they force her to go and work in a state run kitchen if she fails the inspection?

Sorry, I was accused of "whaboutery" earlier in the thread when I discussed abuse in schools ( which I thought was relevant to the discussion) so I definitely don't think you can bring catering into this discussion!!

@ForestFae Of course it's an analogy, but it's similar enough.

Life choices having implications for safety of others, and compulsory council inspection.

Trust me when I say that there are a lot of things in an environmental health inspection that can be subjective. There are underlying principles, but any chef can tell you a time that one EHO told them one thing and another told them something contradictory (I also have some professional experience as a chef).

@NotMyCircusNotMyCircus Personally, I think a lot of those laws are invasive and over the top, however - measuring the temperature of a fridge is an objective measurement. Determining the suitability of someone’s education is, in many cases, an opinion. It can easily be influenced by peoples prejudices. It’s not the same thing.

A friend runs a catering business from home, and uses her domestic kitchen to cook the food she sells.

As a result, the council (environmental health in this case) have a right of entry into her home, which she cannot refuse. She must keep records - everything from risk assessments to what temperature her fridge is running at twice per day. If she gets it wrong, she could have her livelihood taken away and then be prosecuted.

Is this harassment from the council? Not in her eyes, or mine. It's a direct result of the slightly unusual life choices she has made, and is designed to keep everyone (in this case, anyone who eats her food) safe. There's no bleating about being "harassed" for the "crime of cooking in her own kitchen", nor "being treated like a criminal". She knows that while her kitchen might be safe, she knows that other people's kitchens wouldn't be safe, and doesn't want her own reputation tarnished by the irresponsible actions of others, so she welcomes the inspection regime.