Talking to the enemy

In the light of recent posts and emails about the DfES consultation on Home Education, it was interesting that last night our local home ed group had arranged a meeting with the top bod in the our Local Authority for home education (he wears an awful lot of LA hats, but one of them is top bod for home education). Hence the provocative title and the apprehension (on both sides, apparently) before the meeting.

He seemed a nice bloke, and respected the right of parents to educate their children at home. He was at the same time an official for the LA, with a set of competing duties and rights to combine somehow. He has to ensure that no children on his radar are at risk of abuse or neglect; that all these children receive an adequate education; and that his staff (e.g. the people who inspect home educating families) aren’t at risk either.

There were families he knew of who used the pretence of home educating to get their son to leave school early, who gambled that the LA wheels would turn too slowly to do anything before he had reached school leaving age anyway (the LA wheels turned more quickly than the family expected and they received a schooling order). There are also home visits where the family have been belligerent bordering on aggressive, and some of his female colleagues might have felt very vulnerable doing that visit on their own. (We asked why an Education Welfare Officer accompanied the inspector on the first visit: his response was that staff safety was a factor, although by no means the whole picture.)

We told him how stressful it can be withdrawing your child from a school, how emotional, irrational and fearful you can be. So, the standard form our LA sends out that asks for Criminal Records Bureau information for all people (other than the parents) who will be involved in the child’s education is far from helpful. As is its suggestion that you need to replicate school at home, with a curriculum etc. We asked him his view of autonomous home education, but I can’t remember the details of his answer. It was rather vague, but was along the lines of “I realise now that my own standard grammar school education was fairly poor, so my attitude to home education as a whole has mellowed over time.” Positive, but not a definite endorsement.

A startling little nugget that he came out with was the matter of funding. Veteran home educators may already know this, but I hadn’t realised that central government pays the LA some money only for children in state schools. They get no money for children in private schools, or for home educated children. Therefore all the LA can afford is a dedicated part-time co-ordinator for home education, but no dedicated inspectors. Instead they carve up the county into areas and an inspector covers all the schools and home educators in that area. As there are many more children in schools than home educated, the inspectors just aren’t as used to home educators and have a strong temptation to fit them into a school-shaped box.

He is keen to bring all the inspectors up to a common high standard, wants us to give him feedback on inspections, and has gone away with a big list of things to think about and possibly do. He’s working on giving us a copy of the inspection reports (he sees no reason why we shouldn’t have them, and is aware that we could get them via a Freedom of Information Act request). He wants us to comment on the official forms and letters, and the LA web site will soon include a link to the local home education group’s web site. There seems to be a lot of un-intentioned cruft on the LA’s part that could be cleared away fairly easily, and that he’s open to fixing.

So, it was an encouraging meeting. He realises that, just as no two schools are the same, no two home educating families are the same. We realise that we represent only a sub-set of all home educating families; we are all nice middle class articulate professionals and not e.g. travellers, and so the LA can’t customise itself to our needs completely. We respect the fact that there are certain things where he just cannot compromise, but we didn’t reach any last night, and he’s keen for us to give him the evidence he needs to help him improve their policy and practice. We’re planning on having a meeting about once per school term, which seems about right and next time he’ll possibly bring along an inspector now that he knows we’re not too scary.