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?

But you weren't arguing for oversight you said I personally don’t agree with home education. School was hugely damaging for my daughter, no one at school cared a tiny little bit about her safety or well being. The safety valve of home ed allowed me to rescue her from a terrible situation. It was the only option available to me, I'd love her to be in some suitable school or provision, but there is none. What would you do?

Absolutely.
There was a documentary about a large number of Welsh primary schools that were using a completely out of date method to teach the children to read.

The majority could not read by the end of primary school. It was really sad.

Failings unfortunately, occur in school as well.

Because you don't need all of that to learn. Why on earth would he need pe equipment? Many home ed groups have resource libraries where you can borrow equipment for free, we share between friends.

I don't do testing because all that shows is that they can sit a test. I sit and work alongside my child all day, with the curriculum that we choose to follow in front of us.

My child will be doing a minimum of six IGCSEs (which are recognised internationally). He has no intention of going to university so we aren't concerned with that. What we are concerned with is

1. he is not being bullied to the point to he wanted to commit suicide a year ago

2. That he has a broad range of life skills. He can cook, garden , decorate, he has built planters and a bin shed (planning,measuring, 7 making), do basic car maintenance amongst plenty others. He can sit with an adult and have an articulate conversation about current affairs, he understands budgeting. He is a qualified first aider. That is all much more important than whether he can work out the answer to a simulatenous equation (which, ironically, he can do!)

3. That he has the qualifications he needs to get him into the college or industry of his choice.

He has achieved a hell of a lot more being home educated (not home schooled, we aren't schooling, we are educating)than he ever would have at school.

My other child goes to high school. It works for him, so I'm not at all anti schools. However many children need more than 30 mins of learning about fractions, half of which is disturbed by kids fucking about, followed by half an hour of something else in a different lesson completely unrelated. We work on concepts at a pace that my child can understand, so he doesn't just have a surface level understanding which many children end up with just to pass an exam.

Instuction obligatoire for kids aged 3 to 5

This is a very dangerous slippery slope!
As a home educator for nearly 5 years now I can honestly say I have not met one family who does not have their children's best interests at heart (and I have met a lot!)
What you are essentially suggesting is that anyone who is at home with their children is an abuser.
Once you all push for this legislation, how long do you think it will be before parents of pre-school aged children suddenly go on a register too and then every single parent has to be assessed by people with no qualification to do so?

Home education is a legal right in this country and the majority of families do it because it is what's best for their family, not because they want to abuse their children! For a hundred different reasons, school is not a good place for many children and that right should be protected, not treated as something sinister because of the odd extremely rare case of abuse in home-ed families!
Do you not think kids in school are abused after school hours?

What I meant is, there's no chance of that happening here at all because everything is too poorly funded.
Hence my statement, they even force some parents of children with additional needs to home ed, so how will they ever ban it?

Also, it shows how boxed in you are with your thinking.

Comprehension- read a newspaper article and talk about it together. Read a book and talk about it, review it. Also, plenty of online resources that are free.

Circuits - take a plug apart. Take a piece of electrical equipment apart and put it back together.

Microscopes - borrow from a resource library, although we had some which we bought when they were younger before we home educated

Pe - bikes. Footballs. Trampolines. Parks. Beaches. Normal stuff you would have if you had children.

We apply learning to real life situations. My son mows the garden - we work out the area and perimeter. We want to do electronics, we take apart electrical items and look at them. We want to learn about a religion, we go and talk to people of that religion, we visit their holy buildings and take part in celebrations with them. It is not all about sitting exams.

This is like saying you want all families visited on the weekend because they are alone in their homes with their children and nobody watching them!
It's a ridiculous statement to make!

As a home educator for nearly 5 years now I can honestly say I have not met one family who does not have their children's best interests at heart (and I have met a lot!)

Might that be because parents who home ed as en excuse to bring their kids up as radical Christian / Jewish / Muslim zealots or beat them up on a daily basis don't attend the same nice HE groups as the rest of you?

What you are essentially suggesting is that anyone who is at home with their children is an abuser.

You are suggesting no-one is. Which is more likely to result in harm to children?

The thing is there already are procedures in place that should have stopped Sara Sharif from being home educated and they didn't work because social services didn't do their job properly.

SS are already underfunded and overstretched, how do you think making them do thousands of needless extra checks are going to help anything?

Obviously proper SS funding should be the first step

Possibly. But there are people from so many different backgrounds in these groups. I'm not personally religious but not everyone who is is a zealot! There are plenty of those on both ends of the scale!!
Take it from someone with experience rather than the right wing press, this is a massive case of hysteria once again.
What happened to Sara was truly awful and her father and step-mother deserve to be put down in my opinion, but this has nothing to do with home-ed, it has everything to do with lack of funding and staff in social care!

I think we can probably take it as read that HE groups are by definition attended by well-intentioned HE families. The ones who HE to isolate and harm their children don't attend them. There are, for instance, an estimated 6,000 children attending illegal extremist faith schools.

And I'm not suggesting no-one is an abuser, what a ridiculous statement to make!
Please read the statistics though before you label all home-educators as abusers.

You are only meeting the ones who are doing it with the best of intentions. As I said in my previous post why is it such an imposition to have checks if children can be protected? Without such checks I would not have discovered the sexually abused child in the very affluent middle class home or the children whose only book was the bible and who had never had contact with anyone outside the home, no tv, internet or even radio. It's not just about you and your choices.
What suggestions do you have for how we ensure the safety of all children who are home educated?

LAs haven't got enough staff to support the families they are supposed to be supporting never mind every family that home eds.

fucksake no-one at all is saying all HE families are abusers.

Sara Sharifs case has absolutely nothing to do with home educating.

Concerns had been raised about her older siblings before she was even born.
They had been removed from and returned to their parents on previous occasions.

Add that to the fact that she was finally murdered during what would have been the school holidays and you have no reason to blame home education for her death.

Still, those who want to jump on that particular bandwagon will use any excuse to do so.

This. Another heartbreaking story l hope that the judge who decided to let Sara live with her father can sleep at night, Another failure from SS and the system "lessons will be learned" when it that start ?

Those of you who have home educated will know that families who have been flagged as a concern will still continue to have involvement from social services, it should never just stop because they are not in school.

When you remove a child from school (which is every parents right in England if they attend a mainstream school) the school legally have to notify the education authority (LA)
It is the LA's job to then contact the families approximately once a year to confirm a suitable education is taking place. Not to monitor, but to receive a response from the parents explaining how they educate their child.
How this looks varies hugely - that's the beauty of home ed, it works around the child, not box-ticking - and if they have any concerns at all that education isn't taking place it is their job to issue a school attendance order.
They obviously have their own 'red flag' system if parents don't respond and they can then pursue this in court. They have no more right to enter someones home than a school teacher does, as it should be.

Safety worries about children can be reported by anyone, not just teachers, and social services are then responsible for making the appropriate checks.

In my experience, which is more than a lot of people commenting on this thread, almost every home ed family have their children's best interests at heart, just like the vast majority of people who send their children to school.

What about the children who are suffering in schools?

There are currently over 100,000 children being home educated in the Uk.
You hear of 2 or 3 who are abused and suddenly home ed is the problem, it's crazy!

Do people really think that an abused child is going to tell a stranger who visits to check up on them what is happening? Home visits won't make any difference for abused children who are home Ed!!

I can see how this is an argument for forcing all kids into school however the counter argument for this is that is would harm FAR MORE children than it would help

Totally agree SS closed her case after 6 days after speaking to the father over the phone, should it not have been a red flag that she was taken out of school soon after the school reported possibly abuse. Did it not warrant a home visit especially knowing the abusive father.
There seems to be no protection for little children it makes me so sad.

No - but we’ve had people on this thread think would help prevent hoarding…

Sara wasn’t a HE child. She was in the school system until her bruises got so bad they kept her off school. Despite her being on the SS register since the day she was born she was still failed