Some help please about HE in Scotland

[MommyUpNorth]

Hello. We've been thinking about HE for years really and have always used the school breaks to 'play school' which the children actually ask to do. Anyway, just after the Oct break my car broke down and we're still without it which meant that the children have been at home. The school had been sending work home for them to get on with, and of course we have been supplementing with loads of other learning. The older kids (9 & 11) have said how nice it is to be able to go in depth into topics that really interest them as they only have short bursts of it at school.

But, we weren't really going to just pull out... DH & I talked about them going back at least until Christmas just so I could put a sort of plan together and give it my absolute full attention... however, then HT just sent a very firm email about having them back in school by Monday or she will pass it on to other agencies. (She's already gone to the council's education dept.)

In her msg it says we are: ?obliged by statute? to send the children to school and need to find alternative transport measures to get them here. Also: ?Home Education? is only acceptable with his consent and subsequent approval of the provision.

Could someone please tell me how I could search to find a copy of this policy so that I know where we stand on this? Any advice very welcome!

Many thanks!

Please contact Schoolhouse who will help you.
Good luck.

All of the legal stuff is linked from the Schoolhouse site, so you should be able to read the full wording in there.

But in summary, they are right. In Scotland you have to apply for permission to take your child out of state school to home educate them. It does sound odd though that they started off sending work home for them, and then suddenly moved the goalposts - have they not mentioned before that they were only happy to do it for a little while?

If you've decided that you definitely want to HE, then you could start the process rolling by writing to the council education department to say you are going to do it. You are meant to keep sending your child to school until you get permission, but in practice they will generally be lenient, and their guidelines say that they won't normally start any proceedings about non-attendance while your application is being considered.

Thank you both for the info. I've now looked at the documents & understand what we would need to do should we decide to go down the HE route.

As for the school coming to this decision, I suppose they're just following guidelines really. They didn't say that they could only send work for a short while, but then we probably both thought that I'd only be without a car for about a week or so max. I gave them updates every few days based on what the garage said and we just took it a day at a time. However, this is now the 4th week of school that the kids are missing, so to be fair, they probably can't let us go on like this forever! They suggested that we use either the public bus for the kids or the before/after school club... but all of that is at quite a bit of extra expense (on top of whatever the car will cost!), and the kids would then leave the house at 7:10 and be back home just after 5! We weren't terribly keen, but will now have to possibly consider it.

Now we just need to work everything out in our heads and make a super fast decision. We're in regular (good terms!) email contact with the contact for HE in our area, so we could let him know before this Monday deadline if necessary... but it all suddenly seems so real! Panic has now officially set in!