pisces I have a practical reason and a moral reason to object to obligatory inspections of HE families.
Moral reason: These proposed inspections are being brought in on the grounds of welfare anxiety. It is discriminatory to single out children who are not educated in school as being in need of routine welfare monitoring (completely leaving aside whether such monitoring would achieve its stated aims).
Practical reason: trauma to children who are not neurologically typical. There are a lot of them in HE, and it must be quite hard to imagine from the outside living with a child of, let's say, 6 years old, who is selectively mute - that is, they do not speak to ANYONE until they have known them for quite a while. Or let's say a 10 year old child who has never actually been diagnosed, but people tend to say once the family have left "you know, I'm sure he's aspergers". Or maybe a 7 year old with severe speech delay although not developmentally delayed in other ways, so that their family udnerstands their conversational code but they remain completely incomprehensible to those who don't know them.
The really really vulnerable children in this scenario are those who are just a bit, well, weird one way or another. As they are now, they gradually learn how to interact with society, they carve out their niche, they tackle the world from a place of security within their families, the people who love them best and understand them the most anyone is going to, and are doing the very best they can to help them interact with the world. ("Born on a Blue Day" is illuminating about the sort of spectrum I'm particularly thinking of here).
But with compulsory inspections, those children are going to come under a different sort of scrutiny. And it's no longer going to be ok to have them on their life's journey accepted as what they are - a little odd in one way or another, but getting there in their own time - within their family and friends circle. Their parents may well feel the need to have their children professionally diagnosed - and not because they will then be accessing extra assistance from their LAs, because most of the SEN assistance comes with a school place AFAIK, but because they need to have the piece of paper which says "this child is unlikely to be prepared to have a conversation with an inspector because they have condition A, B or C". So I'm seeing an unintended by-product of compulsory inspection as being that a certain number of HEing families are going to see the need tactically to go down the time consuming, anxious, maybe even traumatic route of clinical diagnosis when their child may simply have developmental delays or idiosyncracies of one kind or another which could be taken the wrong way by an unsympathetic council official. And remember that such autistic spectrum diagnoses are not an exact science in any way.
I'd be worried about whether having a label is necessarily a Good Thing for every child who then carries that label for the rest of their life. There are certainly HE children one comes across who've said "no, I don't want the testing thank you" even though they look pretty aspie to their parents and friends. Those parents may no longer feel they can respect their children's wishes in that regard, through fear of being judged as parents by LA officials.
This isn't a case of "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". This is a case of "child not sufficiently orthodox and normal OR family dynamic not sufficiently conventional = resistant to being scrutinised by council employees with God knows what ideology and values but a massive amount of power over the family"
Sorry this is such a rant. You know how HVs can suck their teeth at co-sleeping or breastfeeding beyond a year or whatever? Well, what about a family who continue to have a family bed as long as the children want it, and who maybe breastfeed as long as 3 or 4 who have older children being HEed. And where before the home was a private space, with sleeping and nursing arrangements rightly a private matter, under compulsory inspections, there is going to be some council employee with a tick list. That family has no idea whether the family bed is going to be seen as grounds for referral to SS. It could well be with a sufficiently closed minded inspector. These are the sorts of anxieties perfectly competent HE families are facing - that the details of their private lives may suddenly become a public matter to be judged by people and there is NO GUARANTEE that those people will be sympathetic to their way of life.