Help me figure out how to navigate pulling DD out of school

[MayorMumbum]

I've posted a ridiculous amount about this topic recently but am in desperate need of guidance.
For various reasons we are looking at moving out of our area soon, right after DD sits her SATS.
DD has had a hellish year at primary and we are looking to homeschool her for the rest of the school year and for some of year 7, keeping her on the waiting lists for a school with strong pastoral support and generally building her mental health back up (unless we both fall in love with home ed, a definite possibility!)
She has already been allocated a secondary school place for September we won't be accepting. Do we send a deregister letter to her primary and the secondary she hasn't started at yet? Or am I going to have to write to the (incredibly unhelpful and unsupportive LA) and inform them she won't be starting there in September and that she's being home schooled?

Any help appreciated!

We had a form we had to drop back to our secondary with tick boxes to either accept the place or turn it down. Is that not how it works in your area?

You deregister from the school your daughter is currently at - they have a duty to inform the LA that you’ve deregistered. Re the secondary school if you’ve already accepted a place you’d need to write to the school and say you no longer require the place. If you haven’t accepted a place it depends on the LA as to whether you need to formally accept or reject. In our LA no formal rejection of a place is taken as acceptance of the place offered but other LAs run different systems.

There are templates online for deregistering your child, which you send to the school. The school will inform the LA and your child will be taken off school roll. As PP said, you should have a form that allows to accept or decline a secondary place?

Thanks for your fast responses everyone!
The council have told me that we are not allowed to decline places this year as there aren't enough places for all applicants for year 7. Multiple members of the staff have said this.

They are now also telling me there are no spaces in any primary schools in the area we're moving to with a space for DS . I just don't know what I'm going to do.

The council have told me that we are not allowed to decline places this year as there aren't enough places for all applicants for year 7.

Umm, they don't get to decide that. Surely, if they're oversubscribed, you declining a space will help?!

Just write a letter to the current school with last date child will be in school. Write a letter directly to the secondary to make sure they know you won't be taking yr 7 place.

Then move. And do your own thing.

I'm not sure what they mean by that but those were their exact words. Thanks I think I'll do that, just write a letter saying she won't be requiring the place. Won't the LA then be in touch though? The whole thing is making me uneasy and anxious. When I went to speak to someone and said I was going to home educate until I can find a school place with strong pastoral support she told me that that isn't what home education is for and said they would be in touch if I decided to do that.
Just all sounded vaguely threatening

When I went to speak to someone and said I was going to home educate until I can find a school place with strong pastoral support she told me that that isn't what home education is for and said they would be in touch if I decided to do that.

She sounds clueless. You have every right to home educate while waiting for a school place, just as you would have every right to send your daughter to her allocated school while waiting for a place at a school you like better; there's no difference. The LA doesn't get to decide "what home education is for". Your reasons for home educating are not their concern. This is specifically stated in the government guidelines to LAs regarding how they should interact with HE families.

If and when you do remove your dd from school to home educate her, it would be well worth reading this document, which is clear and useful. assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/288135/guidelines_for_las_on_elective_home_educationsecondrevisev2_0.pdf You can expect the LA's home ed department to get in touch soon after you deregister, and they may feed you misinformation regarding your legal responsibilities. For instance, I saw that someone on one of your other threads mentioned that when they home educated, their LA had visited twice in a term: LAs are not allowed to insist upon any home visits at all! Anyway, the person you spoke to regarding admissions is very unlikely to be part of the team who deal with home education, so her opinions about home ed are irrelevant.

It is kind and considerate of you to let your daughter's allocated secondary school and the LA know that she won't be going there. This helps with their planning. If they don't act upon that information, it isn't your problem. You have plenty of other things with which to occupy yourself at the moment! I'd ensure that at some point before school starts in the autumn, you inform them by a recorded delivery letter that you are declining the school place. Then she won't be enrolled there.

Oh dear I have posted a lot of threads about this .

It's just the tone of what she said quite frightened me and it was very clear she wasn't happy about the prospect of DD being home educated. Under what circumstances can they force a home ed child to go to school again?
My fear is ill be forced to send DD to the school she was allocated, and she just couldn't cope with it in her current emotional state .

And her primary school do inset weeks where they all go off to the secondary schools they'll be going to for a week, if she isn't going will they make her go in to primary school alone all week while all her friends are having inset days? She is going to feel so left out .
It's just all become too big a mess for me to cope with. Feel like I need copious amounts of and to sleep for a week.

I don't have any home Ed advice but regarding the secondary school visit days, in my experience they don't all happen on the same days-different schools have different days so unless all of y6 are going to the same secondary school she won't feel left out...and they happen after SATS anyway and you say you are taking her out of school straight after?

It's just the tone of what she said quite frightened me and it was very clear she wasn't happy about the prospect of DD being home educated. She doesn't need to be happy about it. It isn't her daughter. She just has to do her job. Assuming she isn't part of the LA home ed department, your decision to home educate is unrelated to her job.

Under what circumstances can they force a home ed child to go to school again?

Here's the process. Once your daughter has been withdrawn from school, the LA may contact you with an informal request for information about how you are home educating her. They don't have to do that, but most LAs do. There's no legal requirement to comply with this request, but home ed parents who are clued up about the legal process strongly advise you to provide something at this point. If you ignore them altogether then they may put the wheels in motion to take you to court and try to send your daughter to school, so it's best to avoid that risk.

It's up to you to choose how to supply the information. Many LAs will offer a home visit; however, from a legal point of view it's much safer to decline the offer and keep all communication in writing instead. (I'd say its also easier for you to safeguard your daughter's mental health that way. You can keep her safe from unpredicatable officials who might make her anxiety worse by criticising or threatening to send her to school. If they do make such threats, better that it should be in writing to you, so she doesn't even have to know about it!)

You can send in a report describing her home education. There are plenty of helpful and experienced HE parents in forums who will be glad to help you explain what you are doing. If the LA has questions or concerns after receiving this report, they should write to you giving you an opportunity to address their concerns. You have plenty of latitude in deciding how to educate your child, and the education doesn't have to be perfect, only adequate, so it's likely they will be satisfied.

Having corresponded with you, if they think your daughter's education is unsatisfactory, they will send a formal legal notice (Notice to Satisfy) warning you that they intend to issue a School Attendance Order. They must give you at least 15 days to respond and satisfy them that you are actually educating her appropriately.

Once this time has expired, if they are still not satisfied with the education, they can issue a School Attendance Order naming a specific school and directing you to register your daughter there. You are allowed input into which school is named, but of course if all other schools are full then they will name the only one with vacancies.

You can refuse to comply with the SAO. Sometimes LAs will ignore you after this, if they know that you probably would win the court case so it would be a waste of their money. However, the LA can prosecute you for noncompliance. You then present evidence to a judge, who will probably find in your favour. If the judge finds against you, you will be fined, but your child STILL doesn't have to go to school! Instead of, or after, prosecuting you for noncompliance with the SAO, the LA may apply to the court for an Education Supervision Order. If the courts agree to the ESO, then the LA instead of the parent has responsibility for decisions regarding your child's education, and they can register her at school despite your objections.

At that stage, failing to ensure her regular attendance at school would leave you open to truancy prosecution.

So you see it is really quite an involved process, and not a quick one for the LA to push through. At every stage you have opportunities to provide the LA (or later the court) with information to convince them that the education is adequate after all, or to alter your educational methods in order to satisfy them. It isn't an easy thing for the LA to force a home educated child to school, UNLESS either

1. the parents ignore the LA altogether, provide no information, and don't turn up to court, or
2. the parents are intimidated by the process and give in and send their child to school. Unfortunately this happens rather often because people don't realise they can fight it.

I hope that doesn't sound scary. My aim was to reassure you that there are many chances to stave off a return to school. In fact, it rarely happens that a child is sent back to school over the parents' objections, unless one of the two conditions above is met.

A much more common scenario in which a child can be ordered to school is when the parents disagree about their education. If someone else with Parental Responsibility objects to you home educating, and takes you to the family court, apparently judges often do side with the parent who wants to keep the child in their current educational placement. So if the child has been home ed a long time, they aren't often sent to school by the family courts. But if the child has been at school and one parent removes the child against the other parent's wishes, the court may well order a return to school.)

Our feeder primary went to quite a few different secondaries so there were multiple children left behind on the different feeder days. They usually went to 'help' in reception.
Or just take her out before this happens?

Can I ask why you are keeping her in the current school until after SATS? You do know they mean nothing for the children? Why not home school her now rather than add to her mental health by letting her have stress put on her by the school to get grades that only inform their league table place?

I have to say that I'm Hampshire, when I deregistered DD2, I simply got a letter saying 'Thanks for letting us know. We have HE advisors available if you want them. Contact us if you do, otherwise enjoy HE.'

That was it. In fact, DD2 continued to go to the school I deregistered her from, to collect DD3, and the HT never once asked how HE was going, what DD2 was doing, etc. A teacher did, once, and DD2 said 'I mostly watch TV...' I had to explain that DD2 would like to mostly watch TV, but that wasn't all we did.

Thank you for your replies. Chocolate it's DDS choice to stay on to do her Sats, I would rather take her out before, but she has asked to stay so she can "see them through" as she has worked very hard and is expected to do very well in them. I'm incredibly proud of her for this tbh, otherwise I'd have removed her already.
I will definitely educate myself on how to respond to the LA when they get in touch as I am very sure they will and would really like to avoid a home visit. I think that would really stress DD (and me!) out, especially whilst we're still finding our feet in home ed.

You can just refuse them.