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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

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Original poster

To be slightly put off home schooling by scare stories about ss...

18 replies

bubbleymummy · 02/04/2010 13:02

I just keep hearing/reading reports about children being taken away from their homeschooling parents. I know most of this is probably just media hype or exaggeration but it does worry me slightly that if I decide to homeschool it will be a constant battle with library boards and ss etc to prove that I am a good parent and I'm not neglecting my children just because I choose to educate them at home. Aibu and very silly? Are there lots of people homeeducating out there with no problems at all?

OP posts:

ppeatfruit · 02/04/2010 13:20

Yes YABU.

There are good parents and bad ones. Some of both types home ed. just as they send their DCs to school.

I H.E'd my 3 DC's at different times and for diff reasons. In the case of my 2DDs I told the LEAs and heard Nothing.

My DS was chucked out of private school and there was no space in our local schools so he had to be H.Educated we had one inspector who was brill. (our DS was an autodidact) He did and learned more in the 3 years or so at home than he had at all the schools he had attended.

lolapoppins · 02/04/2010 13:25

I home ed and have had no probs in two years.

We had someone in our village call ss to say ds wasn't going to school. I assume they were from the school as it was educational ss. We are registered as home ed with the LA though, and we only found out as the guy who comes to visit us once a year called us to tell us ss had called to see if they knew of ds.

It was the only reason we registered with the LA actually. We have been heavily gossiped about in the small village we live in (one of the reasons we home ed, our lives were made hell by gossips during ds brief time at the village school) and I knew someone would report us when it was aparent ds was not a the school.

Firawla · 02/04/2010 13:28

im sure if you register properly and are actually educating your child @ home, as opposed to dont send them to school but dont bother to teach them anything @ home either, then you would be fine. they dont take children away just because of being homeschooled there would have been more to it in those cases. so if you want to do it then go for it, why not get in contact with others doing the same though like a kind of support network and group of homeschoolers? i think that would probs help if ss wanted to claim your child is isolated or anything and would be good for the child and support for the parents too i would have thought?

TottWriter · 02/04/2010 13:29

There really isn't any need to worry.

My mum HE'd my brother because of his SEN, and that was from year 1/2 to college age. She had worked as an LSA in several schools, and privately complained to me that the annual OFSTEAD inspections she had weren't very good - she could have gotten away with teaching him far less than she actually did. A friend of hers also HE'd without problem, and this was a child who never seemed to do anything at all, other than muck about on his playstation . In the end my mum set up a small 'school' in her garden, and this child was tutored by my mother three days a week, along with two other children. Yes, she had a lot of experience with teaching anyway, but she was quite dismissive of the OFSTEAD people that came round, when they did. I don't think anyone actually bothered checking in on my brother for the last three or four years.

lolapoppins · 02/04/2010 13:36

Fwiw, out of the, gosh, hundreds of home schooling families I have met in just the area i live in, I am in the tiny minority of people who are registered with the LA.

I awlays laugh when I hear the goverment statistics on the numbers of home ed children. Out of all the home ed children I know, I only know of three who are registered and therefore counted in that number.

lolapoppins · 02/04/2010 13:42

Also, what reports have you heard/read about ss removing home ed children? Home ed is perfectly legal and is in no way on it's own any possible reason for a child to be removed.

And it's not a legal requirement to do formal school work, follow the national curriculum or to register with a local authority.

sorky · 02/04/2010 13:43

Social services will only be involved with your family if there are welfare concerns, same as for children who go to school.
If you are registered with the LA and it is felt that you are not providing an education which is suitable to your childs needs, abilities etc, then you will still not be referred to SS, but you may receive an order telling you to return your child to school.

You have no more need to 'prove you are a good parent' anymore than any other parent in the country does.

HOME EDUCATION IS IN ITSELF NOT CAUSE FOR CONCERN

ps what on earth is a library board? and what do they have to do with HE?

Original poster

bubbleymummy · 02/04/2010 13:51

Thanks everyone. I have actually been lurking a bit on my local he group's forum but that is where I'm getting my worries from! It's not so much that there are member's children being taken away or anything! it's more that there just seems to be a constant worry that they will be reported to ss or whatever. I don't think I could cope with that constant worry which was why I was seeking reassurance here from your positive experiences. It does seem a bit unlikely that someone will just come to your door and take your children without there being some sort of warning 'we don't think you are fulfilling your responsibilities and we think you should reconsider school' type thing. I do tend to think of worst case scenarios a bit too much when I try to make decisions. Irrational I know! so do you think it's a better idea to let the lea know you're home schooling? Some people seem to think it's better to stay off the radar but to me that might seem a bit like you ARE trying to hide something in their eyes.

OP posts:

Original poster

bubbleymummy · 02/04/2010 13:53

Oops - sorry I'm in NI. our library boards seem to be your lea equivalent. I have no idea why they're called that!

OP posts:

Original poster

bubbleymummy · 02/04/2010 13:54

They're actually education and lb...

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sorky · 02/04/2010 14:00

My honest advice is to stay away from the local loops (yahoo) they can be quite toxic and I have nothing to do with them.
Meet with HE'ers but don't partake in the scaremongering or it will do your nut!

The law remains unchanged at present. Register or don't, it's entirely up to you and in some respects depends on the relationship you will likely have with you LA/LB.

If they are anti-HE and known to cause problems, then you may want to stay unregistered....it's up to you really.

lolapoppins · 02/04/2010 14:07

If you want to home ed, just do it.

Sending children to school has become the norm in our society and most people think it's the only way to do things, or even think school is compulsory and you need some kind of permisson not too.. (thank god we don't live in Germany where it is illegal!).

Like I said in a previous post, I registered as I knew we would get some nosey parker in our small commity (whom we nothing to do with so they couldn't ask us ourselves why ds wasn't at school) calling ss on us, we only registered to cover our backs. Not that there would have been a problem, HE being my right, but because I couldn't deal with any more stress.

MillyMollyMoo · 02/04/2010 14:13

2 examples spring to mind locally. The lady next door didn't get her first choice of school so kept her child at home for reception and home educated until a place came up in year 1, nobody ever contacted her despite her child registering for a school place, not turning up for that school and being in the system waiting for another place to come up.
We took ours out of state school to put them into private, made one phone call, spoke to the school secretary for 5 mins and then never contacted them again.
Nobody has followed up asking where those children went or if indeed they did transfer to private school.

CirrhosisByTheSea · 02/04/2010 14:44

Please don't worry. I'm a SW - the families who ostensibly 'home ed' but are of concern are the families who just don't bother sending their kids to school and who then say to the LA that their kids are home educated because then the EWO has to get off their backs.

I would say that 100% of these families would already be known to SS.

Please don't let it worry you at all.

AMumInScotland · 02/04/2010 15:41

I don't know if the law in NI is different from England, but you do need to make sure you know the legal position there and don't just assume English HE sites advice will cover you - up here in Scotland the law is different from England, and we have to do things differently to keep ourselves right legally.

But, so long as you have done what you are legally required to do, there is no more reason for SS to get involved with you than there would be with a family where the children are at school. The "extra" thing for you compared with a schooling family is just that you have to be prepared to show how you are providing a suitable education. That's all.

I suspect that the families you have heard of where children were taken into care will have been families where there were a lot of problems with the family not looking after the children, and just trying to hide by not taking them to school, but not giving them any education at home either. It probably isn't a big number of families, but likely your local press have decided to make a big deal about a small number of cases.

We home educated for 2 years, and the council never once got in touch with us to ask what we were doing, even though we had phoned them several times before we started to make sure we were doing what we needed to for the legal side, and gave them all our details.

Up here, if they did have a problem with the education we were providing, they'd have to get in touch to tell us what the problem was, and give us a chance to sort it out. Only if we wouldn't/couldn't sort out the issues, they'd then ave had to take us to court and convince the court that we weren't doing enough education - only then would they be able to order the child back to school. And absolutely none of this would involve SS, just the council education department.

HTH

Original poster

bubbleymummy · 02/04/2010 16:31

Thanks everyone! This has helped a lot. We still haven't decided what to do yet but this does reassure me a bit about home educating so I feel I can make a more balanced choice muminscotland, from my reading it looks like we're the same as England and Wales.

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thesehorriblemen · 02/04/2010 18:29

I had brief contact with SS to do with issues with my ex partner. When I mentioned to her I was thinking of HE'ing one of my dc who has SN she snorted through her nose and looked like she couldn't believe anyone would think something so stupid. Certainly put me off.

sheas · 02/04/2010 20:51

I home ed my DS who is 5, we have registered with the LEA and although they wanted to do visits to us, they are happy so far with written reports. So glad we didn't bow to convention and send him to somewhere where he would have been so unhappy. IMO children of 4 or 5 are FAR too young to go to school for 6 hours a day

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