HEdline

Present: Cllr. Rachel Fryer, Cllr. Alex Phillips, Dani, Pearl, Imran, Linda, Cintha

The meeting was held to discuss the Badman Review of home education, and how the home education community could have an input to Brighton & Hove City Council?s response to the current government consultation.

Dani presented the councillors with a briefing note and a copy of the Badman Review recommendations and the government's consultation document.

The discussion was friendly and wide-ranging.

Some points that arose were:

Safeguarding

Rachel was concerned about children being home educated by parents who were overly controlling, to the point of being emotionally abusive.

Imran outlined the existing powers of local authorities to carry out an investigation under the Children Act, if there is reason to believe a child is in need of services or is at risk of harm. What we object to is the proposal that all home educating families should be treated with suspicion, even where there is no evidence of a problem.

Dani made the point that blanket surveillance is not an effective way to deal with the problem of child abuse, and mentioned the danger that a screening programme such as that being proposed by Mr. Badman would lead to many people being wrongly suspected of abusing their children (false positives). This is inevitable, and is the reason for mass screening not being employed as a measure to prevent child abuse.

All the parents at the meeting said they would not be happy for a visiting education officer to have the right to interview their child(ren) alone, and that this goes against current best practice. This is what is being proposed by the Badman Review.

Children's right to an education

Rachel was concerned about children not having access to an adequate education

Dani outlined the existing powers of local authorities to deal with situations where it appears that a child is not receiving a suitable education.

Linda explained that local authority officers, who would have the job of assessing suitability of education under the Badman proposals, are not experienced or trained in the wide variety of educational approaches used by home educators, and may well not understand the educational processes that are happening in an autonomously educating family.

Learning to read, for example, does not happen at a predetermined age, but a non-reading home educated child is not unable to learn, because parents can provide educational opportunities through other means than the written word.

The requirement to submit a 12 month plan

All the home educators at the meeting expressed concern about this aspect of the proposals. For autonomous home educators, the idea of predicting outcomes for a child 12 months in advance is entirely at odds with the educational philosophy they have chosen.

For parents who choose an approach based on a parent-defined or external curriculum, this proposal is also a problem. The Badman review recommends that children should be required to demonstrate 'progress and attainment' in accord with the plan drawn up the previous year. Are children who do not meet the targets set by their parents in the plan to be deemed failures?

The power for local authorities to refuse or revoke registration

All the home educators at the meeting pointed out that these recommendations (23 and 24) would leave home educating parents at the mercy of individual local authority officers' prejudices.

The proposal gives local authorities the power to refuse or revoke registration for any reason, and also encourages information sharing between different services, for no practical purpose. This massive increase in meaningless information being passed between service providers could easily cloud or obscure any genuine reasons for concern.

There is no mention in the Review report of any process for appealing against such a decision.

Failure of the Review report to take into account the views of respondents

Dani described the process of consultation that had taken place during the course of the Review, and the previous government consultations on EHE guidelines (2007) and on the duty to identify children not receiving a suitable education (2008).

Home educators all over the country have spent time and effort responding to these repeated consultations and our voices are not being heard, or even acknowledged. Out of 1600 responses by home educating parents and home educated children to the Badman Review, only 2 were quoted in the final report. The recommendations reflect the views of only 10% of respondents to the public questionnaire, and give disproportionate weight to the views of just 25 local authorities, who responded to an additional request for information, subsequent to the initial questionnaire for local authorities.

Brighton & Hove City Council's response

Dani mentioned that Brighton & Hove had responded to both the questionnaires sent to local authorities by Graham Badman. She offered to send Rachel and Alex a link to the first questionnaire response, which had been released following a Freedom of Information Act request.

Because the existence of the second questionnaire was not revealed until over a month after the publication of the report, the response to the second questionnaire has not yet been released under the FOI Act.

Rachel and Alex offered to meet with Gavin Thomas, Head of EOTAS, who will probably be given the job of responding to the current consultation. They will suggest that he meet with home educators as well, before completing the response.