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?

Must be different people objecting than the ones who want increased state monitoring of home educated children.

The school must have had valid concerns, or the Police would have refused to do the Welfare Check.

We are extremely cautious with child welfare checks. I'm a radio dispatcher and there would have to be glaringly obvious evidence that it was a malicious call or an ex partner trying to use the police for their own ends for me, any of my colleagues or indeed anyone of the supervisors or senior officers to take a risk and say we won't attend.
given all the previous cases I prioritise child welfare checks over pretty much everything else that hits my dispatch queue and it would have to be meeting a very high threshold for me not to do it. There is just too much risk involved to go "nah ain't doing that"

But the school can't refer directly to police, so it would have gone through social services, who do set extremely high thresholds.

A quick Google confirms schools can go directly to the police for a welfare check.

They most definitely do

This is my point. The school thought they had valid concerns contacted SS/police did a welfare check because of home ed.
So that was doable for Sarah Sharif so why didn't it happen and why then point the finger at home ed for being the main reason her murder happened.

Except when it came to Sara Sharif.

I would have thought a police welfare check was one of the best ways to sniff out abuse in the home.

In my case the attendance officer from the council asked the police to do a welfare check on my child, simply because I would not let her in or see my DC to cause further trauma. The police sensibly didn't attend. She'd been seen by the school nurse a few days before and due to see another professional after the weekend. But maybe it is because of all the malicious referals (school also did a malicious referal to Children's services.) that the real ones get missed. Schools and attendance departments should get fined everytime they do a malicious referal.

Totally agree

Where are all these 'proper qualified person within child welfare and education' going to be found and how will they be paid for?

Yup. It’s big in our city, but of the people I know doing it - in our neighbourhood- I doubt those kids are benefiting at all. The parents are not qualified.

Putting children into school doesn’t save them from abuse, unfortunately. Schools often either miss the signs or they report cases to social services who don’t then have the resources to follow through.
Actually having the resources to properly follow up and monitor cases where there are already clear signs of abuse would be more effective and save lives.

If we are looking for non-reported cases then there are also weekends and school holidays to think of. Maybe all parents of children in school should also have welfare checks but is this level of monitoring going to help or simply cause other issues? There is even a risk from the people coming out to monitor children because people in positions of power are sadly not always totally safe.

Wouldn’t it be better to fund social services and just follow through more rather than spreading limited resources even more thinly?

I don't think there are any qualifications in parenting or home educating yet.

The reason why homeschooling is illegal in some countries....

Oh here we go again. Mumsnet and its ignorance/hate of home education 🥱

To the posters who think that home educators should allow unqualified local authority staff (which by the way are very thin on the ground and are very underfunded so really this is a moot point as they do not have the capacity to do such a ridiculous extra pointless task) to come into their homes WHY?

Statistically home educated children are at NO MORE risk of abuse than schoolchildren and at LESS risk of abuse then the under 5s. Fact. The research has been done.

So based on that fact every parent in the country should allow unqualified local authority staff into their homes on a regular basis to assess if your child is at risk. Especially the ones with under 5s, the group of children in England statistically most at risk and not in school.

And don’t give me the ‘oh if you’ve nothing to hide line’ as I’ll send it right back at you. It’s nothing to do with having nothing to hide and everything to do with the fact that at present we write a report to the LA (or talk to them on the phone) who make a judgement on our education. No other group of parents is under this scrutiny and no other group of parents has to prove their ‘innocence’.

No other group of people are on a national register other than paedophiles. My DC are already on a local register too. Why should my kids be registered like criminals. People who talk about children who ‘fall through the net’ fail to realise that all the legislation and all the procedures already exist to safeguard children at risk. The issue is that it is not being used properly! (Look at the cases of Victoria Climbie and Sara Sharrif - they were known for years and years as being at high risk! Another piece of paper/a register wouldn’t have prevented what happened to them! Wake up! They are scapegoating home educators to distract from their shameful failings).

This new bill treats home educators like criminals and if you read it you’d be shocked at the threats it makes towards us. Fines, court and prison for 52 weeks if we refuse to send our kids back to school (over my dead body) and the saddest part is that the vast majority of home educated children have been failed by the school system and many are traumatized by it. A very large proportion have SEND and the system can’t cater for them. Go figure.

Well, exactly. But it would be nice if the parents were able to teach the subjects they need to… so if I decided to home school I can cover a few languages, law, politics, history, English, GSCE Science but maths, DT, sport, art, computing science for example I would need a lot of help with. Coding? I know fuck all. Business Studies? Sure, some.
Philosophy, ethics, RE? Again, i’d struggle to teach a curriculum

‘Statistically home educated children are at NO MORE risk of abuse than schoolchildren’

ok. No-one is saying genuine home-schoolers are abusers but abusers can and do use ‘homeschooling’ as a reason to avoid contact with people who would pick up
kn the signs of abused and neglected kids.

Hopefully @DragonFly98 you won't need to home ed any children then.
And they don't need to teach the subjects you list. And there are lots of pathways to follow to educate children.
Don't hurt your head overthinking it you don't need to.

Send children are more at risk of abuse so your statistics don't make sense. Which is why there is more of a need for home educated children to be checked on.

The statists are correct, home educated children without SEND are less likely to be abused than schooled children with SEND. For home educated children who do have SEND the risk is the same as school children without SEND.
Furthermore this bill will put SEND home educated children at risk, they are more likely to die or be seriously unwell at their own hands than their parents if the bill goes ahead as it does.