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?

School did. They raised there concerns with ss.

Most families home educate because their children are not happy in school or they genuinely believe they can do a better job than schools.

A minority do it for all the wrong reasons.

Only two people can remove a child from parents who have PR, a police officer and a judge. Social services can not remove a child on their own.

I agree OP. I know several HE families. One is excellent, the worst is a single mother with many health issues which leads to her regularly spending all day in bed. Her child is neglected and not being HE. Her child appears to have been taken out of school to be her companion as she gets lonely and bored in bed by herself.

I agree

I home educate my dc. We always accepted the home visits although after 3 dc the LA said they didn’t need to do them anymore, we still accepted the 6 monthly review call though which isn’t mandatory. We also always sent photos and work samples (most home educators refuse and I’ve been chucked out of a few groups due to this as they say my compliance makes their lives harder)

School contacted ss on 3 separate occasions! Ss failed her, unfortunately.

HE should not be permitted in all but extreme cases e.g SEN and mental health of the child, and there should be regular high quality oversight.

This particular family shouldn’t even have been allowed to entertain the idea of HE.

Their abject failure in this case must not be allowed to be overshadowed by a debate about HE.

It shouldn’t have been possible for a child with Sara’s history to not be seeing a SW on a very regular basis. School, no school, holidays and high days - they should have had eyes on her and the threshold for removal needs to be discussed as she seems to have met it multiple times

There are so many nuanced issues though. Sara had been known to Social Services multiple times (and even removed from the family), so they had presumably visited the home many times over the years.

Presumably when abusive parents get visited, even unannounced, they don't openly beat the children in front of social workers. Who knows whether even if they had visited Sara in the last weeks Social Care would have discovered something was wrong.

Even children who go to school get murdered and there are some high profile examples of this.

It is also fairly common for schools to log safeguarding information against families whose children are struggling with school and are then removed for home education. "Safeguarding concerns" is a broad and often opinion based set of data. Most safeguarding concerns never meet thresholds of "significant harm" even when put together on school safeguarding systems and there is a legitimate reason for this - you can't refer every child to Social Care for every concern.

I'm not sure why there wasn't more concern over Sara's particular case from Social Care though, given the history. It's also just unfathomably tragic that Sara never felt able to tell an adult at the school what she was being subjected to.

I agree that home education needs to be monitored more closely. An ex friend of mine with very serious mental health problems has been HE her DS10 since taking him out of school in Y1. She has two older children who were put into care when they were 5 and 7.

She is clearly unstable (a simple check on her social media accounts would prove this) and has been reported for safeguarding issues multiple times to social services and she is still aloud to HE.

I feel for her DS so much, he has no chance at a normal life and no one is stepping in. She has moved to another part of the country and is not contactable and has isolated herself from all friends and family.

It's a massively complex area and we all know people working in safeguarding and child protection are overworked and underpaid. But checking up on children who are not coming into contact with schools is a quick win, imho

Not if the parents won't engage with the process it isn't, @DrZaraCarmichael - and just how likely do you suppose these were to have done so, never mind to have accepted repeated visits?

Admittedly such a refusal should trigger more stringent action, but then you're into "cultural sensitivity" territory, at which point authorities often retreat in terror

Well, I do think it's a valid choice that some parents make for the right reasons and I don't think that HE should be restricted for SEN snd mental health issues only.

But if parents don't want to take a child to school, how do you force them? Absence rates have rocketed since the pandemic.

Presumably when abusive parents get visited, even unannounced, they don't openly beat the children in front of social workers

Well no, @BackForABit, and even if services manage to get access the child may not feel able to disclose what was happening for fear of even worse following when they'd gone

Sadly I know, having been one of them - and that was back in the days when parents were automatically believed above their children, so there'd have been no protection even if I had spoken up

This! I electively home school, I keep up with all medical stuff- I even have to hunt stuff out that would normally be done at school- flu jab, hearing test etc. I asked for a 5 year review with hv. I chose to register with the Lea and update them on my child’s progress, it’s currently voluntary but is supposed to be coming compulsory, many home Ed friends are utterly horrified at this and see it as an invasion etc etc but I say if you’re doing it properly you’ve nothing to hide and they should be checking up and keeping all children safe and on the radar.

Obviously any child where the school raises concerns and the parents subsequently remove the child from school should be followed up on (even if they move to a different school, probably, as that could be to prevent people joining up the dots).

However, statistically, the strongest predictor of abuse around is living with a step-parent, particularly a step-father. Should there be extra checks on all those families? You'd be more likely to find abuse victims. So why home educators, who aren't actually statistically more likely to abuse?

Sadly this is my experience- many home edders are very anti having any involvement from the lea- all involvement I’ve had they’ve been super nice and very helpful! I send work egs and am always happy to have a visit/ review but so many famines are horrified at this!

for many SEN parents it's not a choice. Many children with SEN simply cannot get a place in a suitable school. all families who home educate I know have been forced due to failures by the local authority to provide an education. it happens far too often. I wish people would stop peddling out this myth of home education largely being a choice. it's not!

Yes it’s really not been any issue at all for us ? I can’t imagine schools getting away with refusing Ofsted and checks and then not allowing anyone to see work samples ?? Our contact with the LA has been fine they were helpful and not intrusive at all

As long as violent men are allowed to roam freely in society , the abuse will continue. No amount of social service intervention will mitigate the risk violent thugs

Which is fantastic but not all families want that level of oversight.

We are not a nanny state despite what people believe or hope for

Totally this.

Time and time again it is a proven risk factor. Especially men moving in with women.

Horrific case locally recently:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9vnx0k3047o

Violent men!! Fucking hell, there are some pretty vicious, violent women as well.

I don’t HE - I have one child in private and one in state secondary.

Why do you think people need the government to check on their kids? The ‘nothing to hide’ argument implies that if you dont want the visits - then there is something to hide. Which then causes suspicion on perfectly normal happy families.

Plenty of kids in school get abused and killed too. It's not exclusively a HE issue.