to think home ed families are going to have to accept more oversight?

[DrZaraCarmichael]

To try to prevent more cases like Sara Sharif. Taken out of school - where teachers were raising concerns - and then apparently fell off the radar.

Yes children's services have to look long and hard at themselves but taking a child out of school, especially when there has been previous SS involvement, has to raise a whole field of red flags surely??

I can see how families who are home educating for the right reasons and who have nothing to hide will see this as intrusive and unnecessary. But something has to change, right?

Not comparing... The point is it starts with if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.
It's scapegoating the issue wasn't home ed... It was systematic failure by social services for the child whole life.

But once freedoms and liabilities are eroded just because a group is a minority not a majority (with the only reason being some in a group may do something bad so we will target this minority group to be seen as doing something even through a greater percentage of this bad behaviour happens in the majority they will be left alone).

Once they have removed rights from HE families and the children still get killed at home by abuse because the underlying issue wasn't actually home ed.
What happens then they will target a different minority

One minority after minority until you are target for what makes you a minority. Ginger hair parents because everyone knows they have anger issues right because once I saw some one with ginger hair shouting at a child so all fingers need to be monitored

This reports highlights the fact home educators are being scapegoated. The government should be ashamed of themselves using a child’s murder for political agenda. This won’t end with HE families when your liberties are being taking away in the name of safe guarding without achieving the aim of saving the lives of children maybe you will understand.
https://www.educationotherwise.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Home-Education-and-Child-Abuse-How-Media-Rhetoric-Drives-the-Myth-2.pdf?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR2cMxemrmUPHHbZ6PyCva-AlN7JI1sOWC0IjMRHADFkLQQPKN1BXnyRgjA_aem_uJoObHpdcwlvROwqWnSi2g

I’ve just seen that this child WAS massively failed by her teachers & SS They didn’t lodge an official complaint - twice. Only spoke to SS who told them they have to lodge it officially - they didn’t.

The police KNEW he was a danger to women as he had already arrested for assaulting women.

Yet the blame is being put on HE.

Why did the teachers not lodge on official complaint?

The family court judge and CAFCASS will have a lot to answer for.

Maybe if Social Care was a lot less stigmatised and a lot better funded there might have been a different outcome. Sara should have been getting very regular and unannounced visits. She should have been so comfortable with her allocated social worker that she could say anything.

Sara could have been offered extra provisions such as much more frequent supported contact with her mum, paid for singing /dance classes she could attend, supported visits to a mosque when she started wearing a hijab. She really needed to have an adult she felt able to tell, clearly she didn't feel she could tell her teacher or previous social workers anything.

When this child was born a child protection order was put on her BECAUSE of her dad.

Its unbelievable this child was in front of so many government bodies AND was under a child protection order and this happened to her.

Shame on them all

DrZaraCarmichael, But the same official goes into a home where the parents don't seem to be doing any education with the kids, who are sitting in their pyjamas at 3pm playing on the Xbox, where there is no engagement with a network of other families, where the kids don't attend scouts, or dancing class, or any sporting clubs, not registered with a GP, and where the reasons for the kids not being in school are that they disagree with school as a concept, or are anti-vax, or see themselves as new age hippies who prefer to let their kids be free spirits - a much higher risk assessment.

My children's school taught them that there is a man in the sky called 'God' who they should pray to, should the school be subject to 'a much higher risk assement'? Ok fine, I'm being facetious. But the state shouldn't be involving themselves in people's personal beliefs, it's not some all knowing benefactor that always gets things right.

Like I have already said, in my town at least most home educated children are autistic, very often they are very emotionally bruised after coming out of school, they can/won't do all these wholesome activities you mention. At the home ed meet up we attend, parents often bring their children to a meet up after much coaxing, only for the children to insist on leaving after 5 minutes and never return. Judging by your criteria you'll have a lot parents of autistic children subject to 'a much higher risk assement'.

I'm a designated safeguarding lead in a school and I don't really understand what you mean by "lodge an official complaint". I don't have 'off the record' conversations with Children's Services, if I contact them to report concerns for the welfare of a child then I am, in every instance, doing so 'officially' in my capacity as a professional who works with children.

Schools don't make "complaints" to Children's Services about parents, they make referrals and everything I've read about this case states that the school did make referrals. That doesn't mean they got everything right, and it's important that every agency who may have missed opportunities to safeguard her is looked into. But your post doesn't make sense in the context of safeguarding, and it's illogical to say that because lack of oversight of HE wasn't the only or primary factor in this child's death it shouldn't be considered a factor at all.

In Sara's specific case, I cannot work out how the judge awarded her back to her father when he knew the history and did not order her to be removed to care along with her sister?

SS told them they needed to log on the system and make a formal complaint - as in write it down. They didn’t

Why does someone disagreeing with school as a concept put their children at a higher risk of abuse (which is what you ostensibly started this thread to talk about)? Now you're already saying that parents who home educate due to certain philosophical beliefs should be checked on more.

And this is why people are against it. It doesn't take long for the mask to slip, does it?

Oh quite.

But even on these forums, any move to reduce or invade peoples privacy is always countered - usually with some rather nasty undertones - by this canard.

Just look at the repeated attempts of successive governments to try to insist we can't use tools they can't break.

So as far as I am concerned, sauce, goose, gander.

I find it astounding that there is no oversight already, a parent can say they want to Home School and do nothing or make a total hash of it.

There is though. HE parents have to make an annual report to the LA. It has to be approved. The LA keep records of all local HE kids. Don’t be fooled by the media and government rhetoric about how HE isn’t monitored. It’s a scapegoat agenda.

Came here to say this. This is why schools remained open for vulnerable children. Though obviously it was a parental choice to send them, and I don’t know that these children were offered places.

Only if your child has been in school, though.

At least in Scotland, and I think it's the same in England etc, if you home ed from the beginning you don't have to give any updates or have any contact with LAs. And I know this because I've been home educating for 7 years with no contact with my LA home education lead, and no need to tell anyone we're doing it.

My kids also didn't go to nursery.

We engage with the outside world, but if we didn't no one would know.

At the end of the day, society is not prepared to pay the financial cost of protecting children who are at risk.

Children keep being abused and killed by their supposed caregivers ... we will have another enquiry, but nothing changes.
I agree that where there are any concerns home education should not be allowed to proceed or should be stopped. I'd go so far as saying it should be regularly reviewed and checked on by the designated school.

I completely agree there should be more oversight, but I don't think there is either enough will politically even with this horrific case that home educators are likely to have to accept it yet & I don't think Education Welfare as it stands now is in a place to do it. We've seen during the Badman review that the loudest home educators will rally against oversight, spread fearmongering to keep people from supporting it (during that, there were instances of slippery slope reporting, claiming thing like that government officials wanted to require intimate physicals on home educated children to check for abuse, which was reported in some home ed groups as fact), and there isn't really much of a void of the middle ground.

The data I've seen strongly suggests that home education in itself isn't a safeguarding concern, but becomes one when it is combined with other safeguarding concerns. Pulling children to home educate when there are already safeguarding referrals should be a red claxons.

In my dreams, home educators would register the same as school educated parents, and each academic year at least would have a meeting outside the home for the parent and child to show progress, discuss concerns and ways to support the child and family's needs, with independent career/qualification guidance for teenagers.

I home educated my children for over 15 years, I had no oversight for over half of that time and barely any when I did. I cancelled one home visit due to a family funeral and just fell off the radar. I have seen far too many of my children's home educated peers get into bad situations that would likely have had more support in school. Once our home ed kids get to a certain age, they're basically invisible. No one checks when a parent signs off at 16 that a child is still being home education whether that child is actually getting that.

I've also sat on a school governing board and been in Chair and Vice Chair briefings with the local authority, hearing the head of Education Welfare complain about the rise in home education in our area & nationally, read out snippets of emails from parents who had withdrawn a child to home educate who were, to me, clearly in distress (and one very clearly confusing Elective Home Education with Education Otherwise Than At School), infer the parents were idiots and called all home educating parents arrogant.

So yeah, there are reasons why home educators are resistant to oversight - most home educated children in the UK are withdrawn after an issue in school, and even children who were home educated from there start, many of the parents have had some sort of issue with public services who have a dim view of parents. The children deserve better, but I don't see how to get there with how things are now and have been for such a long time.

What's 'the designated school'?

That's to JoyousPinkPeer

Yes this is true in some cases. I have friends though like you that have never sent their DC to school and are known to the LA. Some LAs join the dots some don’t. And with so many parents pulling their DC out of school now daily, HE teams are absolutely swamped. They can’t keep up with ‘demand’.

I dont think they will grasp the SEND issue either. When my autistic son dropped out of school I had a period of unschooling him because there was no other option. He had become suicidal and lost his ability to talk and it was clear that his time at school had led to this. A teacher visited us and I was open to that but the affect on that visit was so triggering for him that I had to say no more home visits from that particular teacher. The issue for us was the toxic school environment he had been in and the lack of understanding of his needs which led to him ending up wanting to die. What was even more horrific was the lack of understanding from professionals who I turned to for help, notably CAMHS who refused to believe that school were unsupportive and that it therefore must be my fault. If we going to increase oversight of HE families then we need to understand why so many SEND children are dropping out of the system and why families like mine end up home educating, even if for a short while. For us, it probably saved my son's life.

There speaks someone of little to no knowledge of other teaching systems

Pay social workers a good wage so they can recruit more of them. Basically bottom line.

Absolutely, I'm so sorry for all your son has been through, it has been very similar for my daughter. After leaving school she had a panic attack in asda after seeing the 'Back to school' display.

Was wondering this myself…

@JoyousPinkPeer