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?

It seems most agree with you OP looking at the poll. I think I did read in the news recently that people won't be allowed to home school if there has been previous social service involvement. Long overdue

I'm sure I could find plenty of others before and after. One child every week of the year. We will never know if they would have been abused or killed anyway, lockdown or no lockdown. Certainly children were even more vulnerable but family were reporting concens for both children multiple times. Nothing done. I suspect both abusers would have abused the child in their care whatever the national circumstances. Vile bullies.

If a school full of adults seeing this child every day couldn't safeguard her, what is an 'assessor' (teacher? Social worker? Administrator?) going to do once a year?

There should be. A family member was not in school and was in an awful situation but all under the radar. No one checked. Mum has a posh voice so no one was interested. It wasn’t abusive but neglectful. He’s in his 20s now.

i think there are many amazing parents home schooling but there are some awful ones and children can slip through the cracks.

I just don't get the argument that because there have been safeguarding failures from social services, that there is no point checking up on home ed families.

Anyone who has done safeguarding training (and for me it's been a while, I admit) is taught that everyone has a duty of care and if you are worried about a child or a child makes a disclosure to you then you immediately take that to the safeguarding lead or nominated child protection person. Whether you're a class teacher, working in the school office, or a parent volunteering to hear children read. A child who is in school will come into contact with multiple adults every day. Multiple chances to pick up that something is wrong. A home schooled child whose parents are keeping them hidden will not - so makes sense to me to have someone checking on them.

For some families, one visit will be enough to reassure that the parents are home educating for the right reasons. But for others, the risk is much higher and they may require much more regular visits.

Hope you are teaching your kids better reasoning skills than that

Maybe the focus should be on families like Sara's where safeguarding issues had already been identified.
More social workers, more family support workers, lower thresholds for intervention, social workers having more rights to enter homes and speak to children etc.

Often people object to the idea of social workers having greater powers to intervene but seems like on this thread the feeling is more in that direction?

How did he get his baby and toddler immunisations without anyone seeing him?
What year was he born? Mine was born 2019, and we had about 6 months of not seeing anyone, but otherwise attended nursery, pre school, 2 year developmental check, jabs, many GP appointments etc, started school at 4.

Why don't we ask them if they're going to be sn abuser and give them a badge to highlight their self assessment? Honestly, you do realise that abusive adults claim they will home school to conceal their abuse.

I'm not disagreeing but, with a severe recruitment crisis in Education and Social Services, how on earth will they fill the 1000's of jobs this proposal will create and, how will Labour fund it without a big tax rise?

As someone who is home educating a child, I am fine with the theory of a register and welfare checks. Caveat that I am only here because my child's needs can't be met in school, I never set out to home educate.

In practice, there is no budget for proper social workers at the moment, so who would be doing these checks and what would their training and powers be?

For poor Sara the reality is that the school did report the issues and social services did not intervene when she was in school. What difference would a home check have made? Imagine some low paid badly trained council worker popping along to be intimidated by the father. Sara would hardly have been able to say anything with any of her "caregivers" there. I don't see how it would have made a difference when she was repeatedly returned or ignored by courts and social services.

This is horrific, but I don't think this idea really does anything apart from suddenly make home education cost the country loads. Abusers will hide abuse. You could visit them weekly. They'd still hide it.

Maybe being in school might not have saved her but not being there undoubtedly made the abuse easier to carry out and hide.

Schools aren’t perfect but they can’t remove children. If there is no support from SS and the family courts school can’t protect children. They can only raise concerns. This may in fact be successful more times than we realise but it doesn’t get reported.

A few years ago I ended up with my daughter’s friend staying here in lieu of temporary, emergency foster care. She had disclosed something to my daughter who knew enough to mention it to a teacher. The next thing I knew I was getting a phone call from SS - could we possibly take her because they had absolutely no foster carers available and she couldn’t go home. After a few nights with us they found a placement for her and she is now in long term foster care. I have no idea of the details but I do know that she has not seen her parents since so whatever was going on must have been fairly horrific.
If she hadn’t been in school she’d still be in the setting that was so bad that it warranted immediate removal despite a lack of places for her to go. It was school that were able to kick start the process.

No she didn’t talk to school herself but she did talk to DD who was then able to mention it. If she hadn’t been in school she wouldn’t have known DD.

I just wanted to balance things a bit. We hear about the failures but we don’t hear about when it works. I’d love to know how many kids have been protected in part because schools were keeping an eye and reporting.

This isn’t on schools.

Social services should be able to carry out their jobs satisfactorily, it’s not up to a separate service, which the child no longer attends, to chase them up to make sure they are doing what they should be.

In this case it shouldn’t have mattered.

Sara was on social services radar before she was born.

There had been multiple interventions, including being placed in care more than once.

This isn’t a case where checks on a HE’d child would have prevented a tragedy. This is a case where social services and the family courts doing their jobs properly would have prevented a tragedy.

Allowing it to be turned into a debate about HE is diluting the fact that this was a child who was on all the radars. She was a child who would have been murdered by her father regardless of her education status - that is clear by the obvious escalation of violence over the years - and that should have been prevented because this little girl was on the radar before she was even born and the flags were raised multiple times before she was even school age.

I'm not sure if anyone has shared the link earlier, but this explains the chaotic life these poor children had.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgedlr7qg1o

I think this is a reasonable level of oversight. This is the type of oversight I'd like to see be made statutory for home educating families.

I understand some families who are genuinely home educating, and who have had bad experiences with their local authority, will find even this intrusive, but that surely has to be balanced against the safeguarding risk from abusive families, however small that number is.

This. I'd also make the point that some groups are not afforded the same scrutiny by the authorities. Sad but true. A British working class family would be much higher on the list to be scrutinised

This is a joke right?

I had to take my suicidal 10 year old out of school because he was trying to kill himself.

I fought for years for anyone to give a shit about either his mental and physical health or his education.

I feel very sorry for Sara what happened to her was appalling. But this idea that children are protected by schools and public services is not my experience nor that of many other parents like me who have struggled to get help for our children.

Same happened with Rose and Fred West, took the children out of school and no one checked. It happened more than once and its been known about since that brutal murder cases - nothing done

She wasn't killed while she was attending school. She had been removed from school 4 months ago for "homeschooling"

When she was at school the odd bruise was spotted and reported to SS. We know that after she was removed from school for her final 4 months, she suffered far, far worse

I home educated my son after he had multiple suicide attempts and school couldn’t manage his needs. When he was in hospital we had done social services involvement.
When I removed him, nobody contacted us. This despite him clearly being in a very dark place. I would have welcomed any interest.

So why didn't the school hand responsibility that back to SS so a social worker could check in on her again? Everyone knew where she was, she didn't vanish.

Ok but how often would you want an assessor to visit home educated children? What kind of checks or examinations would you want?
While she was at school, and bruising was reported, social services spent 6 days investigating and did nothing despite a 13 year long history of violence in the family.