How to scare potential home educators

Following on from yesterday’s post, in which we looked at the pernicious influence of a document entitled Home Education and the Safeguarding Myth, which was consulted by those investigating the death of Dylan Seabridge, I want to consider now a fear which some well-known figures in the world of British home education seem determined to promote; the idea that parents opting to educate their children at home are routinely referred to social services. This is of course quite untrue, but for some reason people like Mike Fortune-Wood, Wendy Charles-Warner, Alison Sauer and Paula Rothermel all seem determined to promote this particular fiction and even, as in the Home Education and Safeguarding Myth paper, elevate it to the status of supposed fact. Here are two quotations on the subject; the first from Wendy Charles-Warner’s document and the second from Paula Rothermel’ book, International Perspectives on Home Education; Do We Still Need Schools?

'referral rates in some Local Authorities indicate a policy of automatic referral for home educated children,'

'there is an increasing tendency for welfare officers and social workers to become involved with home-educating families from the outset.'

Both these statements were published in 2015, so this is very much a current myth in the making. Rothermel gives no reference for her belief that social workers might be involved with home educating families ‘from the outset’, and it is possible that she has relied upon Wendy Charles-Warner for the figures to back up this strange assertion. Looking at how these figures were acquired will show us firstly that the idea is a nonsense and secondly that we may safely disregard the paper Home Education and the Safeguarding Myth as a reliable source of information on this, or indeed any other, subject.

We find that Wendy Charles-Warner is claiming that in one local authority 100% of home educated children have been referred to social services. It is of course quite untrue and the explanation casts further doubt upon the methods used by the author of the paper to compile and analyse data.

The local authority in question is Telford and Wrekin and on 31 December 2014, a Ms Martel, acting on behalf of the author of Home Education and the Safeguarding Myth, made a Freedom of Information request, asking how many children aged 5 to 16 in the LA had been referred to social services. She then asked, how many of these were home educated. The answer given was;

Aged 5-9 EHE number is 28
Aged 10-16 EHE number is 105

This was a simple error on the part of whoever answered the request, because these are the total numbers of home educated children in the LA. In fairness to the local authority, the question was not very well phrased and it is easy to see how the misunderstanding arose. Obviously, they have not referred every single child to social services. Just to be sure, I telephoned Malcolm Webster, the man at Telford and Wrekin who deals with EHE, and asked about this. He was absolutely bemused at the idea that he would have been referring every child to social services. Why on earth would he do such a thing?  Just to make perfectly sure, I followed this up with a Freedom of Information request of my own, which confirmed what I had suspected.

The fact that the document's author did not bother to make checks of this kind  indicates another flaw in the process. It also suggests that the number of social services referrals for home educated children has been greatly inflated. The numbers are very low anyway and the addition of 133 extra children in this way was sufficient to throw all the apparently careful calculations made about social services referrals hopelessly out of kilter. When this and one or two other points are taken into account, there  turn out to be no more referrals for home educated children than there are for those at school.

I do not know why these characters are so determined to spread the alarming notion that home educating parents are being referred, as a matter of course, to social services. In the case of one of those mentioned above, there is probably a strong business end to it, for she runs a company called 3rd Way Law, which is a commercial concern helping people deal with legal problems relating to home education. Obviously, the more anxiety there is about the possibility of social workers knocking on the door; the greater market there will be for an organisation which will, for a price, help deal with the supposed problem. From this perspective, it makes sound business sense to promote a feeling of unease and fear among potential home educators.

The Child Practice Review on Dylan Seabridge

 I have been reading through the Child Practice Review which was held in the wake of Dylan Seabridges's death. One point leaped out at me, and this was that Wendy Charles-Warner's paper about safeguarding and home education was cited. This was a great shock, because this document has caused harm to home educators in several ways and to see it being consulted officially in this way is a little disturbing.

Those of you familiar with the thing will know that the author is hoping to tell us something about the rate of abuse in home educating families; Wendy Charles-warner claims in this paper to have something useful and novel to say about the levels of abuse in home educating families. How do we know how many home educated children are being abused? For the author, this is simple. For everybody else though, it is shockingly offensive and wholly misleading. The only way that abuse is measured is by the number of children with Child Protection Plans. The author thinks, quite wrongly, that any child with a Child Protection Plan in place must have been ill-treated, neglected or abused by her parents. She says this explicitly on page 13;

A child educated at home subject to a CPP is most usually found to have suffered at the hands of a carer or parent

This is completely untrue. Children are given Child Protection Plans for all sorts of reasons which do not involve suffering at the hands of their parents. Sometimes, a teenage mother is unable to cope, perhaps another mother has an unsuitable boyfriend, there is drug use, it look as though the mother is struggling; there are all kinds of reasons for CPPs. The aim of issuing one is often to avert problems. To suggest that any child with a CPP has ’suffered at the hands of a carer or parent’ is not only wrong, it is also stupendously offensive to parents who are being helped by social services. I know home educating parents  whose children have had, or do have, CPPs and I doubt very much whether any  of the professionals involved with them think that they are  are abusers!

In short, the only way that the author of Home Education and the Safeguarding Myth has been able to say anything at all about the abuse of both schooled and home educated children is by assuming that all or most Child Protection Plans are a result of abuse or neglect. This is quite untrue and tells us that we may safely disregard anything she has to say on the subject of levels of childhood abuse.

That a group of social workers, people from health and so on have been reading this sort of thing and seeing that a home educator herself thinks that any home educating parent with a CPP has probably been, as Wendy Charles-Warner puts it, suffering at the hands of a parent,  is terrible. I shall have more to say about this document in future posts.