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?

Agencies WERE checking.

Sara SHOULD have been checked on by SS properly - instead they gave her dad a phone call.

Despite her being on a child protection list since birth

Despite her being taken in to care twice

Despite the teachers discussing her abuse with SS

Despite the police knowing he was violent towards women and children.

Absolutely nothing to do with HE. Its a red herring and a good distraction by Keir

Home ed is definitely allowed in Czech Republic, Portugal and I believe in Italy as well.

I needed to buy PE equipment because we were in lockdown and leisure centres were closed, and we were only allowed out of the house for up to one hour a day!

We used that time to go to the local park, most days but the kids needed football, netball and tennis equipment to keep practicing their school team sports ready for their return!

How can you teach cell biology without a microscope?

I agree that some children struggle with some aspects of school, but support from staff and focused work at home ensures that they are capable of gaining a good understanding of a topic such as fractions, and sometimes additional teaching from a private tutor is also required. Learning is assessed in many ways at school, and using games like rockstars ensures that even at home children are engaged in completing their knowledge of times tables. It also shows progression over time.

It’s not solely the job of a school to educate a child, but they are able to ensure that any issues are identified. A good parent completes reading books with supervised reading in the evenings, noting how their children have done in their homework diary. My primary school daughter has projects to complete each half term, and regular homework. We ran out of books at the local library years ago, so I order four books a month from Amazon for pleasure reading.

I struggle therefore to understand how a child can leave school without being able to read unless parents are not engaging with their children’s education? If they are not engaged with their children’s education, then home education would only make things even worse!

Since lockdown there has been a huge increase in children being withdrawn from schools, and this is a massive concern! There may be a few exceptions but children should secure 10 GCSEs at 16 years of age, and four A levels at 18 years of age. I am not sure how many parents could actually teach so many subjects at the required depth with all of the supporting equipment? Chemistry for example is required for many A levels and you need a comprehensive lab set up for that! It would be less expensive to send your child to a private school that actually kit out your home with the appropriate equipment!

According to EP that LA hired my child needs specialist school with 4 children per class, with maknstream curriculum and similar peers.
Where would we magic such school out?

Many Primary and Secondary Schools have an inclusion base to ensure that where needed 1:1 care is provided in line with their EHCP and professional linguistic support etc.. if required. A nearby school actually offers a specialist service for visually impaired children within the academy and prioritises places to children with EHCPs alongside a 7 form year intake.

@envbeckyc 10 GCSEs and 4 A levels. Let's investigate why schools are failing so many children because the majority are not leaving with top results you cite.

All children in school are seen weekly apart from school holidays.

Any child of free nursery age up should be seen regularly by some registered professionals regularly as a layer of safeguarding.

Sarah and others were still failed yes. But that evidence was that the school where reporting but social where not acting. The answer isn’t less people seeing children it’s more with more investigation when issues are raised.

In fact home schoolers or any parent refusing should be an instant red flag because if you’ve nothing to hide. Then why hide.

I frankly don’t care about the adults right I care about innocent little children. A child doesn’t get to decide the family it’s born into. But they deserve to be safe and looked after and frankly many are failed by our give a chance system.

Title of the thread: to think home ed families are going to have to accept more oversight?

I was a specialist social worker working in home education. Many parents said no thanks to a visit from me, which is their legal right. Chances are a small % of these children were being abused. Of the ones who said yes I'd say 80% were the usual home education families. It was a privilege to meet these amazing, articulate, self motivated kids who had an obvious passion for learning. These families would never see me again but could contact me if they ever had need to. Only a handful did.
The other 20% were the children with special needs with parents just about coping, the ones caught up in criminal activity, the ones with no school, the ones being isolated, manipulated and abused by their 'loving' families. Without being in formal education and the, admittedly limited, protection that provides many of these children become lost and even more vulnerable. Don't home educated children deserve the same oversight as a formally educated child?
Yes social work is underfunded but how are we to identify and support vulnerable home educated children?

Mine weren't seen. We got discharged by health visitor by 10th day after birth and never heard from them again. He didn't go to nursery apart from short stint (bc of SEN).
Sara died during school holidays.

Again look to history and minority groups being told that type of phrase nothing to hide why hide.

Followed by oppression and persecution

'base' isn't what he needs. He needs tiny school, maybe 30 kids max. Git it on various paperwork. LA certainly couldn't find it.

Home Ed children take many different routes through their education. You just have very rigid thoughts on it as that is what school teaches you.

My DS certainly hasn't been prevented from doing anything he has wanted to do. But he's not done thinks for the sake of it either.

So you're talking about a lock down learning which is NOTHING like home education.

You still didn't need to buy pe equipment. I managed to keep four children active during lockdown without buying pe equipment. Most parents have things like footballs etc anyway, don't they? That's not specialist equipment, that's kids outdoor toys which i would hope they'd have anyway...

We don't have to do particular gcses. My son won't be doing chemistry because it's of no interest or use to him. Instead, he's doing an environmental science igcse which is much more useful to his future life plans. That's the beauty of home education...we don't have to follow the very narrow curriculum or gcse choices a school sets out.

My child, for example will be doing English, maths, history (and we could choose which spec he did so that its something he's interested in rather than the one schools choose), environmental science, ICT, business, geography, and Welsh.

He almost certainly won't do a.levels because he wants to do an apprenticeship. You're assuming people want to follow the path of GCSE - a level - degree. That's not what everyone wants to do. .y brothers certainly didn't do anywhere near 10 gcses and zero a levels and both own successful businesses. I'd love to know where you've pulled that 'they should'from because

Many groups offer the use of specialist equipment for things like science. you certainly don't need a whole lab of things. There are virtual experiments, there are commercially produced kits available for units of work if you did want to purchase and they're a few quid. You're assuming home edders won't know this... we do. We know any potential costs involved. We know how and where to source resources. We are in groups, meet us and, shock horror, have friends and family!!! We also wey strangely access the Internet and use tools such as TT rockstars, Ed place, bitesize and so on. Many of us use that regularly as part of learning with our kids. I sir down once a month wirh the exam syllabuses and go through what we've covered, what we need to cover and what we need to go back through
We use past exam papers which are readily available along with mark schemes.

.Very few people jump into it without doing a fuck tonne of research first, and those who do usually end up sending their kids back to school within weeks.

Schools are failing kids because they try and cram far too much into a curriculum that does not suit a huge number of children. The curriculum is far too heavy and instead of focusing on a smaller amount of things as in greater detail (as most home edders do, they rush through a ridiculous amount at surface level. They're focused on targets and exam results and making sure kids pass them rather than actually teaching them a concept and to be able to think critically around it, to be able to discuss it.

@EmmaEmEmz

Excellent post!

I would add to your comment lots of us are using the resources schools are using too that my dd while in school had her teacher reading the twinkl PowerPoints as a lesson. Well I say teacher but they were mostly substitutes as 3 teachers left in little over a year due I assume to the behaviours of some of the students.

How many kids come home with worksheets from Twinkl as homework? Read write inc books and workbooks. Who's kids are doing white rose maths in school? These are all resources home educators can access and our teacher pupil ratio is significantly better and we are able to tailor the education around a child's SEN in ways school just cannot. Have you had Roman day, Victorian day or viking day where the kids dress up? There are home educational groups that organise these things too. We can give more than a day to it, my kids have spent days and even a week on trips away for every history and geography requirement in the national curriculum. And this has not been hard to source at all.

I give my kids assessments to track progress. One of mine wanted to try school so she attended for 18 months. In that time she made no progress in maths and her handwriting got worse. I know because I tracked her progress when home educating before and when she returned to home Ed I did assessment to see where we were starting. Literally I had to go back to the level she was at when entering school.

Some schools are brilliant but many are not and this assumption that no parent could do better than a school just infuriates me! I only home educate because our local schools are so shit, I want my kids to have opportunity in life by reaching their potential something neither were even close to doing at school

There is a lack of logic being applied to this case as it relates to home education just as there is surrounding hchild protection generally. It seems to be an excuse for those who already dislike it to pronounce it problematic. Research has shown that home educated children do as well as or better than children in mass education. Research has also shown that home educated children are happier and are less likely to be abused on average. Home education is not a safeguarding risk. This is right up there with those people who are trying to equate beating a child to death with smacking laws.

Sara's death has very little to do with her being home educated and more to do with an enormous failure on behalf of the courts and social services and looks like yet another attempt to shift professional blame onto innocent parents and the public (although one can argue that working out who will murder their children is something that would require a crystal ball and will therefore never be a perfect science.) The school referred Sara, who was already very well known to social services, but social services did NOT act, despite this long history of violence in the family, and that is shocking. She was still being beaten when she was in school, hence the hijab, this did not start when she left school, in fact she was out of school for only a few months before she was murdered, does anyone honestly believe she wouldn't have died, given the case had been CLOSED, had she still been at school? Statistically far far more children are harmed that attend school versus those home educated when relative numbers are taken into account, and the vast majority of the abuse she suffered happened when she was at school, and before she even went to school as a toddler, and indeed she was well known to services. Also, are all members of british society to be slighted because nobody wants to talk about the elephant in the room here which is the cultural issues in this case. That again and again relatives knew the truth and who could have reported it but dismissed it as reasonable chastisement and put the blame on Sara and her behaviour. Why are we not having a conversation about integration, professional confidance in challenging other cultures and british values instead?

Also, 1 in 5 families (1 in 4 in Scotland) have been referred for safeguarding reasons to social services by the time a child has turned 5. Let this sink in a minute, that is going to bar a lot of otherwise perfectly caring and competant families from home educating due to unfounded or sometimes even malicious referrals. The majority of parents who have been referred to social services are not safeguarding risks either, an investigation does not equal a child abuser and does not mean they should spend their entire lives being monitored as a risk because of one persons 'suspicions' or one innocent incident, what sort of dystopian nightmare is that? Also schools can and will abuse safefguaridng powers if they dislike home education and want to raise a parents enquiries about it as a safeguarding referral, also this is highly likely to give teachers who do not understand SEN and are fixated on their attendance statistics rather than child centered education more powers to prevent parents from home educating by making an ill founded safeguarding referral due to the very attendance issues and unmet needs issues that inspire parents with SEN children to home educate. Parents who feel they are protecting their children from harm by home educating them will effectively be barred by preemptive actions of teachers who believe that school is best. By restricting home education to those who have never had a safeguarding referral we are banning it by the back door for a large proportion of families, the vast vast majority of whom (over 90%) do not go onto any kind of plan.

130000 new families each year are subject to a child protection enquiry with no further action taken, that is a staggering number of families and telling families that it will permanently effect their decison over something like home education seems to fly in the face of human rights laws. The huge and ever increasing number of children being referred to social services by professionals who have taken a two day safeguarding course that tells them even the most minor things can be part of a bigger pattern of abuse is actually contributing to children like Sara being missed. In Sara's case the signs weren't minor at all. The knee jerk reaction to overmonitor is having the opposite effect, because the signal to noise ratio increases as social workers recieve increasing numbers of referral forms listing red flags such as regularly mismatched socks, a maltloaf in their lunchbox and a 81% attendance record from overzealous professionals. Social workers are enormously overburdened by these low threshold referrals about minor neglect and emotional harm and slightly imperfect parenting. Good enough parenting has become perfect parenting for those working outside of social services and it is neither helpful nor realistic. More help in fact should be provided at the level of the professionals referring up it could well be argued. As the safeguarding referrals have increased there has been no corresponding increase in the number of child abuse cases detected! In 10 years detection rates have fallen from 24% to 8%. Yet many families are left feeling traumatised, scared and in some cases with PTSD, it is not a simple case of better safe than sorry, the fall out for families, who never get an apology, is enormous. In particular, over monitoring of children with ASD and anxiety can worsen mental health problems whilst doing absolutly nothing to catch out real abusers like the father in this horrific case.

Yes that list is very wrong. It is allowed in Italy and France too.

“children should secure 10 GCSEs at 16 years of age, and four A levels at 18 years of age.”

tell that to the 30-35% of children who leave mainstream school without the required number of very basic GCSEs. You are very naive in your view of education today.

And also very naive in your view of what home education is. Maybe do a bit of research before you continue spouting nonsense.

Right?

Imagine having the audacity to tell home educators what they need to educate but being SO wrong about it.

There may be a few exceptions but children should secure 10 GCSEs at 16 years of age, and four A levels at 18 years of age.

Pretty much every school is failing then. Perhaps we should shut them all?

Not every child is academic either, of course!
I home ed all three.
Child 1 - multiple SEN, but very bright in history/geography/practical stuff. Struggles with reading massively. Had SEN tutor provided by LA for 10hrs a week for over a year. They didn't teach him to read or count, despite being excellent.
Why? Because it was before he could grasp concepts. Now at 10, he is excellent at maths (learnt via monopoly and other card games) and can read but still struggling with it.
Child 2 was at prep school and also has reading issues. Did they teach them to read? Nope.
Child 3 is 5 and very fast reader of everything. Never been at school.
All three are 'registered' with LA.
How would state 'assess them'? Child 1 probably won't sit any exams, not because he isn't clever enough, but because he still can't sit still for more than a minute. Plus he mentions he wants to go to work asap.

If this comes in and home visits are mandatory, I might as well send child 1 (whose life it will ruin as he has serious school trauma) to school at cost of 100k plus to taxpayer. It will cause him serious harm, but that's what state wants, they can deal with aftermath.

I had a naive view of LA and laws. But they break them all the time! What's to say they won't over reach? And don't make up safeguarding issues, like they did previously with us numerous times? This happened bc I fought for specialist placement for over 3 years. I won it all but still no suitable school.

The issue in the recent case is social services not acting on referrals from a school - that should be the main focus in the aftermath of that case and it’s being totally misdirected towards HE families

Just reading the new information released about poor Sara and how there were concerns for her when she was less than a week old. It does feel like the intense HE discussion in the media is a smokescreen and we need to be focusing on social services. As I’ve said before I do believe that HE needs a few more compulsory checks in place but the discussion around HE being such a huge factor in a child murder is really quite inappropriate. I think it is a case of a ‘child missing education’ which is a totally different category .

It is.

This is a child who was on social services radar before she was born. She’d been in care more than once before she was even of school age.

The children in that home should have been having very regular contact with their social workers regardless of being registered at school, HE, whether it was holidays or any of that.

This is nothing to do with HE and everything to do with a known violent man being given repeated chances by social services and the family courts to harm his children.

I agree, but that doesn't take away from the fact that home educating can provide a smokescreen for abuse in families.

There was a huge safeguarding failure here in that not only should Sara not have been removed from school, she should have been removed from the family and placed in a safe home. I'm sure there are multiple reasons for that, not least of which is how stretched services are and a lack of foster placements available. I wonder if an added layer of complication would have been finding a culturally appropriate (i.e. presumably Muslim) placement for her. I don't know.

But regardless of that, this case does highlight the fact that without regular outside input or oversight, abusive situations can escalate much more severely. I'm sure there are many wonderful home educating families and the vast majority do a good job. I know schools are imperfect too. But the fact remains that we are an anomaly in allowing HE to be done here almost completely without any outside input, so it's completely the luck of the draw whether these children are in fact receiving an appropriate education.

Abusive families aren't going to be joining HE groups, they aren't going to be engaging with services. So the people posting on here who are involved in all that, simply won't see the other side of the equation. It frustrates me that people are so focused on their 'rights' over the rights of all children to be safe. We have these systems in place to try and prevent that minority from falling through the cracks. It's never going to work perfectly, but we should be ensuring regular contact from trained HE facilitators as a minimum.

I agree