Please help

[NickDyl]

Please please help. My son has been seriously bullied with police involvement, the headmaster has done nothing to protect him and I have spoken to so many different people at the council. He only has 36 more days left then is off to high school. If I keep him home and homeschooling him for those days, will it jeopardise his place at high school?

So sorry to hear this it must be awful for you all. I don't think it would do but would check. I would definitely want to do the same. Good luck.

He only has 36 more days left then is off to high school. If I keep him home and homeschooling him for those days, will it jeopardise his place at high school?

Have you already been allocated a place at high-school? If yes, then removing your child from school roll for Elective Home Education will not change the allocated high-school place.

That said, EHE isn't the best outcome here. It really, really isn't. You need to deal with the issue. Otherwise then next time your son faces a difficult time, instead of facing and overcoming it, he will stop attending, hide away and avoid facing the issue.

The issue - what has happened? When was it reported to school? What outcomes did you see?

Home educator here. Removing your son from school and home educating him for the rest of the year will have no effect on the secondary place he has been allocated. You will have to actually educate him, but there are many approaches you can use, and in such a short time you can just do something simple such as some projects, reading library books, or working on some area where he could do with extra help. You don't have to use a formal approach such as workbooks and you don't have to cover every subject.

However, if the bullying has been well documented and your son isn't safe at school, you shouldn't have to withdraw him. Depends whether you think you would actually be fined for his nonattendance - would the school mark it unauthorised? - whether you want to fight that, and whether you think you'd win in court.

Home ed is the simpler answer though.

If you withdraw your son for home education, in your case dealing with the authorities would be totally straightforward and stress-free. You write a letter to the school, which must deregister him immediately and must inform the Local Authority.

The LA is likely to get in touch with you at an early stage. They will want to know whether there was some problem at school which led to your decision to home educate and whether this could be resolved. No doubt it would be helpful and would give you some satisfaction to tell them about the unsatisfactory response to the bullying. They may also request some information about the education you are providing, but they may not bother about that if you tell them that home ed is temporary and he's going to school in the autumn.

In your particular case, it really doesn't matter whether the LA believe you are providing a suitable home education. If they thought it wasn't up to scratch, there is a whole process for them to follow, which could end with you being ordered to register your child at a specific school. By then he'd be too old for primary school, so he can't be sent back to where he was bullied. And you WANT him to go to secondary, so you wouldn't exactly live in fear of him being ordered to go there!

Feel free to come over to the Mumsnet Home Ed board if you need any help with the details.

My ds was bullied in his final year of primary school. Towards the end of the year he just didn't go in much of the time. We didn't formally withdraw him, he still went in maybe a day or 2 a week when there were things he wanted to join in with. He now says that knowing he didn't have to go in if he didn't feel like it meant he was more able to go in on the days they were doing end of term or end primary school activities.

I just phoned the absence line every morning to say he wouldn't be in. I didn't even pretend he was sick. The school knew exactly why he wasn't there. I made sure he spent the days he wasn't in school with kind people who made him feel good about himself. Protecting their mental wellbeing is the most important thing.

I'm sorry this is happening to you. It's so awful. Ds was placed in a different class from his bullies in high school and he thrived. He's doing great now. I hope things work out the same for your boy x