The government wants to regulate Home Education :-(

The below message I received recently, for me this is reason to worry. We moved to the UK to be able to Home Educate in freedom and then this goes on here. Hopefully a lot of people will make a lot of noise, which will result in keeping things the way they are. The enquiries of the LEA can be difficult enough to deal with.

Knowledge is power

What you need to know about the government’s plans to regulate home education.

Who are we dealing with?

The Department for Education and Skills (DfES) is the government department that is responsible for developing strategies in education. They see part of their remit as aiming to achieve excellence for all and their functions will accord with the Every Child Matters agenda.

You can read more about the DfES at http://www.dfes.gov.uk/aboutus/

What are they going to do?

Last year, the DfES carried out a consultation on draft local authority Home Education guidelines. They consulted lots of Local Authorities and a handful of home education organisations, but would not accept contributions from individual home educators. Many home educators felt this meant that the consultation did not adequately or fairly represent the views of a large portion of the HE community.

Following this consultation, the DfES have not produced new guidelines. Instead, they now intend to conduct another consultation on Elective Home Education. They describe the proposed consultation as being “a full one, conducted via the Department’s consultation website.”..where they hope to ensure that the documents are accessible to as many people as possible.

The consultation website is at http://www.dfes.gov.uk/consultations/

What will they be consulting about?

From emails that have been sent to some home educators by officials at the DfES, it appears that the DfES is considering using the Every Child Matters Agenda to insist that home educators conform to standards as decided by the state. We don’t know exactly how they are planning to do this, but it is likely to involve them trying to tell us what our children’s education should ‘cover’ and checking we are delivering the education they want through a system of monitoring visits.

DfES officials have said that:
“The state cannot currently prescribe what form of education parents should provide, whilst all maintained and independent school provision is prescribed in legislation and subject to inspection. This anomaly is at odds with Every Child Matters reforms, supported by the Childrens Act 2004, which set out the Government’s aim to improve educational outcomes for all children, regardless of where they are educated, and to narrow the gap between those who are doing well and those who are not.”
and that:
“whilst s437 of the Education Act 1996 provides a remedy for LAs which have concerns that there may be no suitable provision, this is unwieldy, time consuming and expensive and in some cases will be nugatory where home educators are making good provision but are resistant to LA enquiries.”

What you can do to keep Home Education as we know and love it
1. Keep an eye on them.
Write to Elaine Haste of the Elective Home Education Department (DfES) at info@dfes.gsi.gov.uk and ask to be included on a list of those who receive information about the consultation.
NB: This does NOT mean that you have taken part in the consultation and the DfES cannot honestly claim that you have. Until we see the consultation document and have more information about how the responses will be used, we can’t be sure that taking part in the consultation process will help our case.
So why bother signing up now if we don’t plan to actually take part in the consultation? Signing up is important because the DfES needs to know just how many of us they are going to have to deal with. It means they know we are watching them, and we are getting organised.
2. Spread awareness.
Tell at least 4 other home educators what is going on and get them to sign up, as above. Get them to tell at least 4 others. Blog the story if you have an HE or any other kind of blog.
Refer people to the explanation at http://daretoknowblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/what-to-do.html if you want a quick way to let them know what is happening. This leaflet is based on that text.
3. Spread the positive word about home education.
Follow up on any stories in the local paper or on TV with letters and comments. Talk about
personalised learning, healthy happy children etc - possibly using the recent media stuff about “toxic childhood”.
4. Join forces.
If you are a member of Education Otherwise you might want to communicate your feelings to the EO Government Policy Group about what you would ideally like EO to be doing about all this. You could also speak to your Local Contact. If you are a member of any other home education support organisation (or you know anyone who is) please pass on general information about the forthcoming DFES consultation.
5. Get political.
If you have any energy left, write to your MP and ask them to pass on your concerns to Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for Education and Skills.
• Tell them about why it’s important to you to be allowed to determine what is a suitable education for your child(ren).
• Remind them that Section 7 of the 1996 Education Act gives parents the responsibility to provide an education that is suitable to the age, aptitude and ability and any special educational needs of their child(ren).
• Explain how HE enables you to do that for your children and how external standards and
monitoring would make it harder to provide such an education.
6. Keep yourself informed.
Find out more about Every Child Matters at http://www.everychildmatters.gov.uk/. Keep up with the discussion about how to campaign to preserve our current freedoms by joining the UK-HOME-ED email list – see http://www.homeeducation.org.uk/list.htm for details of how to join.

November 2006