Rant - Bloody incompetent LA

[ReformedCharacter]

Education welfare have a dedicated EOTAS (Education other than at school) Inspector. He writes to me every September to request evidence of DS's education. I send the evidence to the address at the top of the letter, which is our local council offices.

To make absolutely sure that it doesn't get lost or damaged in the post, I take it to the council offices, queue at the reception desk and get a receipt for it.

3 weeks later I receive another letter from Mr EOTAS claiming not to have received the evidence. So, I write again and send via Royal Mail this time (just in case there is some reason that mail left at reception is being lost). I wait for 2 weeks and then phone MR EOTAS on the mobile no. he provides and leave a message. I receive a text message the next day from him saying that he is off work this week and will get back to me next week.

That was yesterday.

Today I received a telephone call from an Education Welfare Officer at the council asking us if DS is still HEd because she hasn't received anything from us in over a year. I tell her what we have sent over the past 6 weeks and she explains that Mr EOTAS works from home now so wouldn't have received anything sent to him via the council offices.

She suggested that it would be easier considering the recent mix-up for her to just pop round here and see us. I declined. She asked me how I intended to prove DS was actually receiving an education if I didn't send a new lot of evidence. I have told her to look for the 2 letters sent to the council, addressed to Mr EOTAS, but she told me, sarcastically, that the office is a very big place.

I will NOT be sending anything else to them until next September. They are surely taking the piss out of me.

Honestly, WTF is the matter with them. I am going to write a strongly worded letter of complaint once I've calmed down.

I agree that is frustrating but most government offices are rubbish like that.

Why is DS not at a school?

er... Torii27, given that the law states that from the term after their fifth birthday, children must be in full time education at school or otherwise, that's kind of an irrelevant question. Home Education is a completely valid choice. You can choose school A, B or C, or home ed, yk? IT needs no justifying.

Because DP and I have chosen to educate him at home.

Why do you ask Tori?

Tori27 - your question is the equivalent of me going onto the primary education topic and responding to every question with 'but why do you send him to school?'

Maybe Tori didn't realise she was posting on a HE thread and thought I was in dispute with the LA over a school place ... maybe?

"Dear Ms. Information:

Thank you for your telephone call today, in which you explained the following points to me:

1. The return address on council letters is not the address to which I should send correspondence. I should instead use my powers of divination to determine the correct private address.

1. Staff communication has broken down to the point that you feel it is easier for you to drive to my home and ask me to provide yet a third copy of recent correspondence, rather than trying to find the previous two copies within your own offices. Letters sent via Reception and Royal Mail cannot be reasonably expected to reach the addressee.

1. Your offices are too large to allow staff to direct clearly-addressed correspondence to the proper department. I sympathise with your difficulties and trust that financial cutbacks will simplify your structure in future, perhaps by the elimination of departments which have a poor track record for efficiency and whose activities are of dubious legal status anyway.

In view of the above points, I fear that any new information I might send would constitute an intolerable administrative burden for you. (Indeed, such paperwork may even create a fire hazard: who knows where it could end up?) I am sure your time would be better spent in discussions with your line manager regarding retraining for a new career. I wish you luck for the future and hope you will find your true calling.

Yours sincerely,
ReformedCharacter"

Hahaaaaahaaa

Fantastic

I would so love to send that!

PMSL!!!

That is so funny - I love the bit about financial cutbacks!

Send it, please send it!

If your council consults with the public on where cuts could be made, make a suggestion that Mr EOTAS officer could be made redundant. Is redundancy would make the department both more efficient and more effective.

[sigh]

She's phoned again today. She said she's spoken to the man who runs the post room and he hasn't seen the documents. The latest suggestion is we bring a 3rd set of documents to the council and ask the receptionist to bleep her so she can come down and receive the documents personally.

So, not particularly convenient to me!

I am so fucking angry with Mr EOTAS. What a prick, telling people to write to him at the council when he works from home and there is no procedure in place to collect his mail.

Do not deliver any more documents to them.

Send in a complaint about the missing documents.

Send a letter to your local newspaper warning people not to send important documents to the council. As they lose them.

I am going to try very hard to stick to my guns and not re-produce these documents for them.

What pisses me off the most is the attitude of Mrs EWO. There has been no apology or explanation for their incompetence and her attitude is that the responsibility to get documents to the correct department lies with me. Nothing less than personally delivering the documents into her hands is good enough.

I can accept 1 set of documents going missing, but two in a row is taking the piss.

I don't understand why she has picked the week that Mr EOTAS is on holiday to start investigating this either. Sounds very odd to me. It's possible that he has collected the letters from the council and has them sat in a drawer in his house somewhere. I mean, they are obviously somewhere

Please make a complaint about the missing documents.

Local government will never improve unless parents make complaints.

lilyfire - so one person who may not know much about home ed (or realise they are on a home ed thread) asking why someone's child isn't at school is equivalent to you asking 'but why do you send him to school' on every school thread? Really?

No one should have to justify a particular choice of school either, but 'why did you choose that school?' is a fairly innocent question that any parent might find themselves being asked. Is it really necessary to assume that anyone asking why you home educate, or why a child isn't at school, is malicious or demanding justification, rather than just curious?

I would not produce the documents again either, I would go for politely but tenaciously insisting that they make an effort to find these documents with the personal details of a child on, which should not just be lying around lost in council offices for anyone to pick up. I would copy my politely insistent letter (plus copy of receipt etc.) to whoever seemed best further up the management chain, and consider copying it to the local paper as well, making the point that the council should be taking care not to lose personal information about children.

And I would get angry, but I'd do a round of politely insistent letters first on the basis that I'd want to keep the moral high ground of politeness, at least at first.

It'll be a sign that HE has really sunk into more general public consciousness when home edders find that they can react to questions like 'why do you HE' without assuming the person asking must want a polarised debate with themselves cast as the anti-HEer/pro-school-at-any-cost person. I can see why it's hard to do that when people are veterans of many harder fights and seem to have to keep answering the same daft questions about it though, but it will be nice when it's not like that.

Thanks wishingchair. I did send a copy of the receipt with my second letter, which has also been lost. I still have the receipt which say's "letter received for Mr EOTAS 13 Sep 10", so yes, I agree the responsibility to recover it surely lies with them. If somebody hand delivered documents to me and obtained my signature I don't think I could lose the documents and insist they were sent out again.

It irks me particularly because we get nothing out of this process. It's a chore to complete and I hate having to wait while they judge us. The last 6 weeks have been very stressful, wondering what the hell is going on.

As for lilyfire's response, we've had a few big debates on this board that have turned unpleasant. It does get tiring to keep on repeating your reasons to HE. It's rare to have a day when we don't end up explaining our choices to strangers. "What school do you go to?", "Ooh I didn't realise it was half-term already", "what did you learn at school today?" etc. Then there's neighbours and relatives that know you're HEing but feel the need to share their worries with you about how your child is missing out on the best days of their life.

I don't mind talking about our reasons to HE providing that any questions are borne of curiosity rather than a desire to express distate.

By the way, if anyone wants to know DS hated school and wasn't learning. I found his teacher very unsupportive so we gave HE a go. 18 months on we're all really happy

Agree about DS's personal information being lost as well. Didn't write that here before as wondered if I was being PFBish.

X-posted with your last 2 posts WC.

DP has turned into a mini-activist, but probably because I'm with DS most of the time and it upsets him a bit, I try to avoid it.

Oh Lucinda, yes I am going to complain loudly about the inefficiency of the department. I want to make it known that EW are effectively ignoring my right to supply evidence in writing (rather than a face-face meeting) by consistently losing everything I send.

I would like to write to them (risky, I know ) telling them that as the LA Guidelines state that there is no obligation for LAs to check up on HEd children regularly that it is in fact unnecessary to send them anything in future. They obviously don't give a shit about the evidence if they keep losing it anyway. Surely this could be considered a deliberate and unnecessary interference to our lives.

Also phone up your councillor or send her an E-mail saying how inefficient the Educational Welfare section is, and suggest that when cuts are being made, Educational Welfare should be the first to get cut.

Would it be appropriate to copy in my MP when writing to EW, or better to complain directly to MP and copy in EW?

Do not waste your time writing to EW. Complain straight to the council Complaints department.

The wishing chair - I didn't assume that Tori was being malicious. It just seemed such an irritatingly irrelevant question, given the very practical nature of RC's problem. The way she wrote it just sounded a bit as if RC was bringing this administrative nightmare on herself by her choice of home ed. I think if Tori had prefaced her question by saying 'On a totally different point, and to satisfy my own curiosity, why did you choose to home ed?' I wouldn't have been irritated. Or even better started a 'why do you home ed?' thread, which are fun to respond to if you are in the mood...