Spousal maintenance when homeschooling?

[gaspard201]

I wonder if anyone has any experience of this. My granddaughter has a little girl who has autism. She hasn't worked since giving birth and has home schooled (child is now 6). She and her husband have split up and getting divorced. My friend told me that because my granddaughter home schools the little girl she could ask for spousal maintenance when they sort the money out? Is this true?

there is a bit of a blind spot on MN about the many cases where it is to meet the needs or wants of a parent and not in the child's best interests

The same can be said about school.

The same can be said about all sorts of decisions parents make.

Fair enough if a parent is home educating because they want to. They are able to make that choice.

Not all parents who want to home educate can afford to do so though. This also applies to many things that parents would prefer to do.

At level of income no way - she needs to register for uc but they will expect her to seek work around school hours. If the child has dla at the higher rate then she could be exempted as a carer but purely because she homeschools there is no exemption from seeking work.

Most children with mild to moderate autism attend mainstream schools, my dd is autistic and is at university now. There's specialist education for those who have severe needs.

Im guessing reading the op's posts that there's more going on here, the mother sounds anxious, trying school might be really beneficial for the dggd

Exactly and I think this is why divorces can turn nasty sometimes too. There can be an expectation from one party that their lifestyle will continue as before but the reality is that the lifestyle of both partners will have to change to live within reduced means. This is especially the case where one person has been staying at home to bring up the children; this is a stretch even for families with one high earner these days, let alone families who now need two homes rather than one.

There is still a degree of variability in how this would play out in court depending on the payer's ability to pay. A payer earning £30k would at most pay just under £300 a month in child maintenance (assuming that they had no nights with the child at all). This would leave the paying parent with an income of about £1.7k which is barely enough to live on nowadays. The receiving parent would get the £300 child maintenance and would also be eligible (assuming they did not work) to around £1,550 in benefits a month (around £1.4k of universal credit, £95 child benefit plus help with council tax). Disability might also mean a carer's allowance on top. So a total of £1,850 which you will notice is already higher than the payer's income. Depending on the severity of disability, the receiving parent might either receive a carer's allowance or be expected to work which could increase their income slightly (you lose 55p of universal credit for each £1 you can earn so

Of course it can. The sentence right before that was saying that home ed can be fantastic.

I used to live in a community with a lot of home educating, and many kids and their families got so much out of it. There were also some cases where it was extremely clear that it was parental anxieties or extreme beliefs driving it, or one case where it was a chaotic home life with fairly severe mental health issues and abuse, and those kids were actively harmed by being at home, and it also didn't get picked up the way it would be at school. There are also a ton of ex home ed kids from these sorts of backgrounds around the internet and on TikTok talking about the harm it did to them.

Doesn't mean there isn't harm at school. Does mean that there shouldn't be an automatic defence of something that requires a lot of parental effort to do well (whether it's structured or unschooling), and that potentially leaves a child with additional needs in a difficult situation with little money and no outside oversight.

Middle rate care is the level of DLA that exempts a full time carer from the requirement to seek work. Doesn’t need to be higher rate.