Saturday 23 January 2010

Children missing from education

There is no doubt at all that local authorities have a duty to identify children in their area who are not receiving efficient, full-time educations suitable to their age and aptitude. We know this to be so because Section 436A of the 1996 Education Act states it explicitly. We also know that Section 437 of the same act makes it clear that this duty does not apply to home educated children who are receiving a suitable education. So far, so good. Local authorities and home educating parents cannot help but agree on these two points. In other words, a child missing from education is a child who is neither a registered pupil at a school nor being educated elsewhere.

Now establishing whether a child is a registered pupil at a school is a fairly simple matter. Discovering if she is being educated elsewhere is not. It has been argued that if a local authority, while looking for children missing from education, comes across a home educated child, then they have a duty to check that this child is being receiving a suitable and efficient education. If they do not do this, how can they be sure that this is a child being educated "elsewhere" and not a child "missing from education"? This is a perfectly reasonable point. Many home educating parents however, counter with the undeniable fact that a lot of children at school are not receiving a suitable education; just look at the appalling academic results from some schools. Why should there be a presumption that a child at school is receiving an education, but that one at home is not? This too is s reasonable enough point.

This is likely to turn into quite a battlefield in the next couple of months. A campaign is about to be launched in various places, including parts of the capital, appealing for the public's help in tracking down children who are missing from education. Now all those children who are missing from education have one thing in common, one easily identifiable trait which, like the mark of Cain, immediately sets them apart from all other children. They don't go to school. One cannot expect the average citizen to be a great logician. The fact that all children missing from education are also missing school does not mean that all children missing school are missing from education. Never the less, the thrust of the advertising campaign which is about to hit the streets and television screens will be, "Do you know a child who is not at school?". Confidential telephone numbers will be provided so that such children may be reported to the relevant authorities.

Inevitably, many home educated children will be caught up in this process of finding children missing from education. The question is, "Does it matter?" Personally, I don't think it does. I have before told the story of how my own daughter was wholly unknown to the local authority until we ran into a truancy patrol. This was irritating, but hardly a disaster. I would feel precisely the same today if my daughter were under sixteen. There certainly are children missing from education and this is a bad thing. I am glad that the local authorities are making an effort to track them down; it is high time that something was done about this. At the same time, I can quite see that this will cause some little inconvenience to a certain number of home educating families, but this inconvenience must be set against the very real possibility that some of those children who are genuinely missing from education might come to harm. This is of course not the case with home educated children.

It is often the case in modern society that innocent citizens are put to some minor trouble for the greater good. The queue at the airport while luggage is searched, the checks at banks to deter identity theft. The inconvenience which home educating parents are likely to suffer as a result of this initiative will be very trifling; the worst case scenario will be that a family might perhaps become known to their local authority. This is perhaps a small price to pay for the security of knowing that a number of vulnerable children are likely to be brought to light and their welfare protected.

14 comments:

  1. “ The inconvenience which home educating parents are likely to suffer as a result of this initiative will be very trifling; the worst case scenario will be that a family might perhaps become known to their local authority. This is perhaps a small price to pay for the security of knowing that a number of vulnerable children are likely to be brought to light and their welfare”

    The worst case scenario, as you are well aware, is that families will be issued with school attendance orders even if their children are getting a better education at home than they would in school, or, if their houses happen to be upside down because they are having building work done, that they will be the subject of a social services safeguarding investigation. These scenarios are a very high price to pay, especially if the change in legislation results in no truly vulnerable children being brought to light. This is of course, why there are such stringent constraints around access to the home and access to the child.

    There are two key related, but separate issues here. One is who has legal responsibility for the child’s education and the other is whether or not children are receiving a suitable education.

    If the parent has responsibility, which currently is the case, then if the child is on a school roll, the local authority and the school are answerable to the parent for the quality of education provided. If the child does not go to school, the child’s education becomes the LA’s business only if ‘it appears’ the parent is failing in their duty.

    If the local authority becomes legally responsible for the child’s education, then there are some important questions to be asked about the children who are, by the LA’s own measures, not receiving a suitable education in school. And if LAs are to be responsible for home-educated children, some important questions need to be asked about their provision for such children.

    What the government is proposing is a legal responsibility shared between parents and local authorities, without defining where the responsibilities begin and end in each case. Government has attempted to address this issue in relation to children in school, with their home-school agreements. It has made no attempt to define boundaries of responsibility in the case of home-educated children. Education ministers do not appear to have wondered why previous governments have maintained very clear boundaries of responsibility in relation to children. If the CSF Bill goes through, they will find out.

    A far better strategy would be to identify the issues around failure to receive a suitable education in school, or out of it, and to look at causal factors and how they might be addressed, instead of adopting a Procrustean approach to human behaviour.

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  2. You say that I know very well that home educating families who carry out home improvements are liable to be investigated by the social services. Actually, I didn't know this at all. On the face of it, it sounds absurd. Perhaps you could give me details of a few cases where social services have launched safeguarding enquiries based solely upon a family's decorating and building work?

    You talk about, "what the government is proposing", but I was talking about the current situation. Section 436 of the Education Act 1996 is already on the Statutue Books and it was to this which I referred. The new legislation is quite another matter.

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  3. I have 2 examples. The far outer reaches of Ceredigion and Pembrokeshire.
    1. Family moved to the area to flee spousal abuse, previously the mother had been home educating for 3 years her children aged 8, 4 and 2 had glowing reports from their previous LEA as they follow the basic national curriculum. Now due to the fact she has to rely on Housing to help home her she’s been living in a hostel, due to this the mother children have now been placed under a care order due to the fact Ceredigion County Council Corporation regard her as homeless. The LEA now brings a teacher out once a month to monitor and test the educational level of the 8 year old. My Husband and solicitor are now involved to try and help her.
    2. This family choose Home education as a life style, now I’ll try and be polite, there home could give “How clean is your home” a run for it money. They got caught in a truancy sweep and when the LEA visit she imminently informed the SS and as she couldn’t understand how anyone could live like this she placed the children under a care order. Now the children had lived like this for 15 years, children were happy, polite well educated but not at the national curriculum standards. The children have been forced into a school that they just cannot adjust to and life at home now has become very difficult.
    This to me would indicate if the LEA’s does not agree with you educational ways or your standard of living then things could become very difficult.
    My own personnel experience with LEA’s show this; they already question my ability to educate every year due to MS and being wheelchair bound. Luckily as a family we had a very good solicitor who has forced them to back off BUT if everything goes through I do wonder how this will affect us as a family.

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  4. I did not say that families who carry out home improvements are liable to be investigated by social services, but that this is a worst case scenario. Under current legislation home-educating families have been issued with SAOs even though they can demonstrate that they are educating their children, and we know that not a few school-educated children have been wrongly removed from the parental home under s47. These are the worst scenarios that parents worry about. I agree that the *most likely* outcome is that the family will become known to their local authority, but that's not quite the same thing.

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  5. Oh terrific.

    Those 'spy on your neighbour' campaigns don't have a great track record. My family was percecuted in the 1970's because we had an irish catholic name/background (and lots of kids) and had just moved into a 'nice, posh' part of England during the immediate period after the IRA mainland pub bombings.

    On the news every night people were encouraged to report any 'suspicious looking people' who'd just moved into their area, looking out especially for those with Irish names and backgrounds. I guess this would now be called racial profiling. Well, our neighbours did their duty and we had a lot of trouble convincing everyone we were not IRA bombers. The repercussions of those reports lasted years.

    Ugh, remembering that period of percecution of Catholics with an Irish heritage in England and its horrific results - the prison sentences of innocent people hauled into police stations on flimsy pretexts and makes me VERY concerned about the plans you are describing here.

    I would imagine that the reactions of HE'ers to such a campaign would be based on whether they saw it as a benign state Doing Its Best To Protect Children with minimal inconvenience to the majority or the deliberate persecution of a minority group by a blundering power-hungry state based on prejudice.

    Blimey, I don't normally write or think like that. Just brought back BAD memories.

    Mrs Anon

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  6. I can't believe that I spelled persecution wrong twice! Ah well.

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  7. Hmmmm, I remember 1974 very vividly, I spent part of that year in Belfast. I certainly do not remember appeals on the news after Guildford and Birmingham which specifically mentioned people with Irish names. there was a lot of guff about people moving about a lot and renting garages, that sort of thing, but I am sure that I would have remembered if there had been mention of Irish names.

    By the way, who are these innocent people hauled into police stations on flimsy pretexts? You surely are not referring to the Guildford Four? They were guilty as sin, no matter what the appeal court subsequently said!

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  8. 'but I am sure that I would have remembered if there had been mention of Irish names.'

    You clearly didn't, Simon! :-)


    Why would you have done if it didn't refer to your circumstances, as it did my family. Anti-Irish feeling in the mid 70's in England was at a fever pitch. And I was thinking more of teenage boys from my parents' RC church who were spied on, reported, pulled in for questioning etc. My own brother lost a job working for the MOD purely on the ground that he had a grandparent who had been born in Ireland.

    It's hard to remember now what conditions were like then for the Irish community in England.

    Mrs Anon

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  9. Again, I think I would have noticed if anti-Irish feeling was at fever pitch at the end of 1974 after the bombings at Birmingham, Woolwich and Guildford. There was certainly very strong anti-IRA feeling and many people were in favour of bringing back the death penalty for acts of terrorism.
    There were very few grounds for an established officer of any grade being dismissed from the civil service that year. It was notoriously hard to sack a civil servant in those days. Having an Irish grandparent was definitely not one of the grounds. What was your brother's grade, Clerical officer, Clerical Assistant? If he had had the job more than a year, then he would have been what we called "established" and all but immune from sacking for all but the most serious offences. Before that period was up though, he would have been effectively on probation and liable to be dispensed with after six months or a years service. Was this the case with your brother? Under those circumstances, no reason needed to be given. The other possibility of course is that being the Ministry of Defence, he might not have revealed something during Positive Vetting, some material information which later came to light. In such a case, this would constitute gross misconduct and he would be liable to be dismissed.

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  10. My brother was a teenager woking in the arms sales bit of the MOD. After he'd been there for a few weeks he came home with a form to fill in about where every member of his family was born, back to his grandparents. The fact of his grandfather having been born in Ireland was given as a reason for discontinuing his employment. It's possoble he was offered another job in the MOD in a less sensitive dept, I can't remember and I doubt if even he could after all this time.

    I do remember the fact that his sisters were born in Germany being a security problem for him too, until my father stepped in with proof that he'd been serving the the RAF at the time which explained that to their satisfaction. But he had to dig up all the documents ot prove that.

    Interestingly, our grandmother's birth in the US wasn't a problem. Only our grandfather's in Ireland.

    It's interesting that you don't remember how being an Irish Catholic in the 1970's was proof of guilt of IRA membership in the eye of public opinion back then. Catholic = terrorist even in my kid sisters' schools.

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  11. "You say that I know very well that home educating families who carry out home improvements are liable to be investigated by the social services. Actually, I didn't know this at all. On the face of it, it sounds absurd. Perhaps you could give me details of a few cases where social services have launched safeguarding enquiries based solely upon a family's decorating and building work?"

    There was a case very recently in the national press (sorry, can't find a reference) of a family who had their children taken into care after they were mistakenly raided by police with dogs, or something similar. They were decorating and stripping wallpaper at the time, the dogs came in and made a hell of a mess, emptying bins all over the floor etc, and hey presto, the children were assumed to be at risk.

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  12. You might be thinking of this case Erica;

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/5782557/Couple-fail-to-prevent-daughter-being-adopted-after-kidnap-by-social-services.html

    There's a good deal more to it than was reported though.

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  13. "There is no doubt at all that local authorities have a duty to identify children in their area who are not receiving efficient, full-time educations suitable to their age and aptitude. We know this to be so because Section 436A of the 1996 Education Act states it explicitly."

    The Education Act 2006 adds this duty and it states:

    "436A Duty to make arrangements to identify children not receiving education

    (1) A local education authority must make arrangements to enable them to establish (so far as it is possible to do so) the identities of children in their area who are of compulsory school age but—

    (a) are not registered pupils at a school, and

    (b) are not receiving suitable education otherwise than at a school. "

    Notice that it does not say receiving a suitable education at school. Otherwise presumably they would also have to identify children not receiving a suitable education in their schools, talk about double standards. If a parent states that their child is providing an education at home, the LAs duty under this section should be fulfilled. They should only have to look for those not receiving an education - suitability of education should not be an issue if it is not the same for children at school. The provision of a suitable education is dealt with by the duty of all parents to provide a suitable education in S437 and the duty of a LA to issue a SAO if they believe the parent is not providing a suitable education and this should apply equally to school using parents and home educating parents.

    "Now establishing whether a child is a registered pupil at a school is a fairly simple matter. Discovering if she is being educated elsewhere is not."

    It is as easy to establish that education is being provided at home as it is that that they are registered at school. A letter from the parent stating that their child is being educated at home in response to an enquiry replaces the name on a school register as proof of registration at a school and could fulfil this part of the Act if it did not discriminate against home educating parents.

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  14. Reading the Daily Mail online (I refuse to buy it!) I saw 2 interesting stories yesterday. In one breathe, the editorial line (and the average Daily Mail reader, it would appear) are up in arms about the failure of the "authorities" to intervene and stop the families whose children became the "torturers" of the Doncaster case; in the next breathe they are condemning social services for removing the newborn of a couple where the mother was said not to be bright enough to raise a child. They (ie social services) just can't win, can they?

    In the case of home educators there are the identical issues; personal responsibility versus
    the need to protect the vunerable. We can't agree where the line should be; society in general can't agree, and probably all this debate is a waste of time; the short term future of the shape of HE will depend on political jiggery and the date of the election.
    I do wonder though if this legislation is lost this time (ie lost to Parliament due to time issues and therefore "won" by home educators) whether we will be having the same issues raised in a couple more years, albeit by a party of a different political flavour - whatever "they" say now.

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