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?

I've been following these threads, and this tragic case.

Personally I also feel that the HE aspect is a bit of a red herring when you look at the whole timeline and missed opportunities for proper sustained intervention from SS.

I have had personal experience of SS involvement and knowledge of a few cases among my circles, all very different situations but what strikes me is the lack of consistency in approach. And how "best interests of the child" can be a very loveable feast.

A multi-agency system is supposed to give extra protection and oversight, yet I've seen cases passed around like a hot potato, and genuine concerns from more than one quarter, both family and professionals get over-ridden and subsequently lost in red tape.

I personally think a focus on the HE aspect in this case is in danger of taking away the overall failure of the system here.

It's appalling. Despite being utterly traumatised by my own experience, which was riddled with bad practise and errors that were routinely glossed over and minimised, I do of course believe children should be protected from harm. The mechanisms to do this exist, and this case should have been resolved long before HE was a factor.

Oh the irony.
Some children are not having their right to a suitable and appropriate education met by schools.
Some of us are home educating because the schools can not meet the child's need. The environment of school causes some children such trauma.
Families in crisis trying to get the LA and schools to actually meet the child's education and support needs.

We wasted years fighting the system, jumping through the LA hoops. Do you know what progress we made ? Not a millimetre

Parents are gaslit, blamed
Children are suffering, self esteem being distroyed, and a real.risk of self harm, suicidal

We beg for help and support but the options were non existent or damaging.

It frustrates me that people are so focused on their 'rights' over the rights of all children to be safe.

To be honest all I care about is trying to stabilize my daughter's mental health and well being. It not about rights, it's about my daughter right now. I'm totally alone in this. It has been made abundantly clear that professionals whether they work for the school, the LA or CAHMS don't care even one tiny little bit about children, they care about their jobs and careers. If to carry out their job means harming a child that's absolutely fine by them. I just want these professionals to LEAVE HER ALONE. They just cause awful harm, then leave me to pick up the pieces.

Surely this was a ‘child missing education’ not a ‘home educated’ child. There’s a big difference they are 2 very different categories.

She was removed from school because her parents said they were going to home educate her. No one from social services checked up on her even though they knew her father was violent from before she was born. She should have stayed in foster care rather than being returned to her parents, both were know to be violent to their children. I assume it was because of a lack of foster care places

Why is this an irony? It sounds like an awful situation for your family but surely it's evidence that the system isn't working well. Nothing to do with safeguarding in home education. I fully understand the reasons some parents choose to home educate and I can't see where I've implied otherwise. It's this same defensiveness though that you will see with parents who don't have their children's best interests at heart.

And that's totally appropriate for your situation. I'm sorry you're going through that. It doesn't alter the reality that there will be some children being 'home educated' for very worrying reasons.

Easy scapegoat to detract from the failings of SS, the courts and the education system.
Also makes a nice juicy headline for the media.

So many of you really don't get it. For every child who sees school as a place of sanctuary away from a difficult home is at least one other child who is suffering precisely because of school. Thousands of children are only being home educated because schools failed them so badly and they suffered years of anxiety and trauma.
And now you want those same parents, who have already had to fight their local authority for years to try and get their child's needs met, to accept the local authority into their homes and to trust them to assess their provision fairly?

Sara sadly died because Social services made lots and lots of mistakes, not because home educating families need to be more regulated.

Ironically, teachers make a big proportion of home ed families. They mostly escape their jobs because they see the system isn't fit for purpose.

But what exactly are you envisioning that would have made a difference in this situation. There were countless opportunities for the state to save Sara since she was born. The state gets thing very wrong and harms people in a myriad of ways all the time, so if you are going to demand further state interference in peoples lives, it better be done well. How in reality would this be done, there aren't enough social worker to help children living with known violent parents as it is, but you'd redirect them to home educators causing even less oversight for these know to be at risk children? Or what I think will happen, already totally broke councils will hire unqualified people who have no clue for low pay, that is how home education is overseen at the moment after all.

Yes, I've noticed that too.

@littlebox I get it. I am a home educator with a child who couldn't cope with school.... and I won't put the needs of my child (who isn't abused and is safe and cared for) above those of a very vulnerable child like Sara.

I think we do need more regulation if it prevents cases like these and would stop some families as using the 'cloak' of unregulated HE as a way to abuse.

In the longer run it might actually be better for the HE community too as a whole.

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.

It frustrates me that people cannot understand why families of SEND children in particular would be resistant to HE visits. When your child becomes mentally very unwell because of school, your sole focus is on helping your child to recover. Home was the only safe place for my son; to allow HE visits could have retraumtised him and cause even more suffering. My son, and others like him, have a right to safety too.

Me. I am an ex teacher turned unschooler.
I wanted better for my own children and couldn’t be part of the system any longer.

Boom. In our group it's the same story. Ex teacher who gave up their job because they couldn't teach any longer. The curriculum, the ofsted box ticking, the paperwork.

I think home schooling can be the right choice and I wish everyone had a suitable school place available if they wanted it.
Separately though, surely we can all agree that sometimes people don't send their kids to school to hide abuse and we need to find ways of helping those kids?

1. When I home educated my son we were inspected to see if it was up to standard (although one visit could be faked I guess and it was some years ago so cost cutting may have stopped the visits).
2. Surely SS should have kept a closer eye on a child removed from school if they've previously been involved.

Don't get why people have children when they have such anger/hatred. If you don't like kids why have them. I know it's not that simple but the number of kids hurt or killed every year is sickening.
How many SS have enquiries which end with 'lessons will be learnt' when obviously lessons are not being learned.

But those that abuse will be just driven underground.
Similar with A&E. I only took mine once, for playground injury (hit head on concrete).
Child said it was playground injury, we even had a recording my husband took as he was recording said child while I was playing with him. All was going well. Then I was asked about school and said home ed.
We ended up with SS referral. I don't mind but a) I wasn't abusing him and b) that's a lot of referrals that are unnecessary and swamp SS.
Meanwhile a real abuser would never take child to A&E (see Sara).

Absolutely no understanding of special needs by many people and schools and LAs. Blame culture. Totally taken out of context led by Starmer because of the absolute failings from the top down. And a pair of disgusting abusers who deserve nothing more than capital punishment.
But let's blame home education. Sure.

As a community we all have responsibility to try to do our best for kids being abused. This means DBS certificates for school trips, scrutiny by doctors when children are injured etc. I want my child and others’ children to be as safe as possible, the annoyance is worth it for the protections this brings, although god knows it’s not enough. It should also mean some process to review kids out of school. It’s not about your safe and loved HE child. It’s about the child being abused.

Anyone talking about homeschooling or home education or whatever has really not read this case and/or just wants to foam at the mouth about homeschooling.

This child should have been permanently taken away from her father while she was in school getting abused and long before the idea of "homeschooling" got to him. This child was taken away a few times and was given back to her father by the same judge who presided over either the same case that led to her being taken away or other cases about her violent father. The social worker who recommended this also was aware of all the issues of violence Sara was experiencing and her father's history. Her mother, who consented to this arrangement, was also aware and was both a victim of her father and an abuser of Sara too at different times in the past! It doesn't even make any sense that atleast 3 adults and 2 of them in a role of authority were involved in putting this child back in danger.

The school or social services and courts still talking of "monitoring" while she was in school receiving the horrific treatments she was throughout her 10 year life, didn't think she needed to get away from her father by all means. Yet when her father took her out towards the end of her life, the claims are that all chances of monitoring the family will be low. Monitoring? What other monitoring did they need to do to get the child away from the family?

With all the evidence of abuse and neglect, "monitoring" shouldn't be where they still were before her father took her out. A decision should have been made with the result of the 'endless monitoring but no action' to get her away before he took her out of school and a decision should have been made once he decided to take her out of school.

He wasn't taking her out to homeschool her, clearly not with their history of abuse WHILE SHE WAS IN SCHOOL. He was clearly taking her out to finish her off daily, and he did.

This isn't a homeschooling issue at all and making it so is just goady both by the media and any poster.

the annoyance is worth it for the protections this brings, although god knows it’s not enough. It should also mean some process to review kids out of school. It’s not about your safe and loved HE child. It’s about the child being abused.

Annoyance! Why not read what people are writing. I am worried this 'further oversight' is going to result in some untrained officious idiot sending my daughter back to school and this time she might succeed in killing herself. I'm not worried about annoyance. I get it though, you really don't care.

Also could you please outline how the home ed overseer would have succeed in helping Sara when social services, school, foster care, relativse in the know, etc. all failed.

I can see how that would be frustrating, because you know you weren't abusing him. But how would SS know that without a check?

How do social services know you aren't abusing your children without at check?