State must raise its game to protect home-educated children, judge insists
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Version 0 of 1. A family court judge has questioned the right of parents to remove their children from mainstream schooling after a severely disabled child who had been withdrawn from school to be educated at home was found to have suffered years of “serious neglect” and “significant harm”. Judge Lynn Roberts criticises the laws surrounding home education for failing the child, named in the ruling as James. In her report, the judge finds that although the parents were “loving”, they “refused entry to their home to all professionals, even those involved in James’s home education and therapies for many years”. As a result, James became isolated from the outside world and was disengaged from health and other specialist services. According to the report, it took three and a half years after his removal from mainstream education for the local authority to gather enough evidence to prove that James was rarely taken out of his home, barely educated, not given vital medical care and forced to live in cramped and unhygienic conditions that exacerbated his already serious mental and physical disabilities. Roberts says the case highlights issues that make her doubt whether the “right of the parents to opt for home education is compatible with the rights of their children in many cases”. If the right to educate children at home is to continue, Roberts adds, then “the state must do much more to establish that the child is being educated according to his or her needs, and that the child is not otherwise neglected or having his or her needs unmet”. She continues: “It is of great concern to me that it is possible for a child who is home educated not to be seen in his home environment. It cannot be right and I shall want those responsible for home education locally to consider this … It cannot be right that a school-educated child has his school premises inspected but that a home-educated child does not have his home inspected. As this case shows, such a child can be being educated in a harmful environment and the state neither knows nor acts for years. It must be, in my judgment, incumbent on the home education service to visit and assess a child in his home environment.” James’s education was monitored once a year by the council’s home education service. But their assessment, says Roberts, was not “worth the paper it is written on ... The parents are not challenged in any way. James is not assessed. James is failed by his parents and by the education service. This is a disgrace, in my view. It was seriously neglectful.” James is now living with foster carers and attending a special-needs school. His parents contested the custody arrangement but Roberts ruled that although they could have regular contact with their son, James should not return to live with them. Roberts’ judgment highlights the lack of accurate information about home-schooled children in the UK. The Guardian asked 43 local authorities in England and Wales for information about home-schooled children deemed to be at risk. Their responses were so incomplete and the methodologies used to collect their data so varied, however, that it proved impossible to get a clear picture. Even the authorities that did keep comprehensive data admitted their reliance on the voluntary registration of home-schooled children meant they could not estimate how many were in their area, much less feel secure that their welfare was being sufficiently monitored. About 21,000 children in England were registered as home-schooled in December 2014 but the Department for Education, which has responsibility for child protection in England, admits it cannot be certain of the true number of those being schooled at home because of the voluntary nature of registration for home-educated children. Barry Sheerman, former chair of the education select committee and a trustee of the National Children’s Centre, says the laws around home-schooled children are scandalous. “If we do not take action, there will be tragic consequences that we will regret,” he says. “People will say, just as they did with child neglect and Baby P, that we all knew what was going on and no one did anything to stop it.” Sheerman points out that any figures local authorities are able to give on the numbers of home-educated children found or considered to be at serious risk may be only a fraction of the whole picture because “the law severely, and potentially dangerously, curbs local authorities’ ability to monitor home-educated children”. The NSPCC has called on the government to radically increase powers to monitor the welfare of home-schooled children. “In a series of recent [serious case] reviews of home-educated children we examined, children had died or were seriously injured by neglect, physical, emotional and sexual abuse, malnourishment and severe wasting, suicide, and substance poisoning,” says Alan Wardle, head of policy and public affairs at the charity. “In most of these cases, their isolation and invisibility was flagged as a serious issue.” Ofsted, which does not have the power to monitor or inspect home education, also supports a registration scheme for home-educated children. It says: “While we are clear that home-educated children are not all in need of protection, the information that we receive forms an important part of our evaluation of how a local authority monitors the progress and safety of children who may be vulnerable or in need of support.” But Wendy Charles-Warner, of the organisation Education Otherwise, maintains that home-educated children are at lower risk than conventionally schooled children. She wrote a report in 2014 that used Freedom of Information (FoI) responses from 132 local authorities in England to analyse the comparative levels of safeguarding risk of home-educated children and children aged five to 16 in schools. Charles-Warner says she found that child-protection plans were in place for only 0.17% to 0.24% of home-educated children, compared with 0.49% of five- to 16-year-old children. Her figures, however, do not take into account the estimated 66,000 children in England in 2013 who were neither registered as home educated nor attending registered schools. These children are deemed to be “invisible” to the authorities. Roberts states in her court judgment that local authorities too frequently drop investigations into children because parents make it too difficult for them to access the children. This, says Roberts, is what happened to James. Graham Stuart, chair of the Commons education select committee, says mainstream schooling is not a “fail-safe” solution to preventing or stopping child abuse. “Most of the children who fail education attend school. Most of the children who are abused attend school. Numerically, not proportionally, obviously: we don’t have the data on home-educated children to make that claim proportionally,” he says. “Every time you have one of these tragic cases, it turns out the home-educated child had been reported multiple times to social services, who failed to act. We don’t need a hugely expensive registration scheme for home educators. We need appropriate social services teams who turn up and take appropriate action, regardless of education.” Tony Mooney was a secondary school headmaster of two schools over 14 years before becoming a home-education inspector for two London local authorities. “The law around home education is dangerously slack,” he says. “It’s terrible. It is a scandal waiting to happen and I think the next government needs to have a long, close look at the laws to allow us to scrutinise more thoroughly the provision that is being offered to these children.” The family of one 15-year-old boy evaded Mooney’s visits for three months, after which he learned that the child had committed suicide. “I still think about that boy,” he says. “I still wonder if the local authority had had the power to compel the family to let me see him, whether I might have spotted he was in such a bad way.” He adds: “I had concerns about almost all the children I saw and I absolutely doubted the ability of a great many parents to educate their children.” But Mike Fortune-Wood, who educated his four children at home between 1992 and 2009, says social services’ attitudes to home-schooling parents can be “abusive”. Fortune-Wood runs Home Education UK and was involved in editing the elective home education legal guidelines. “It’s the children’s right to be educated in the way that’s best for them, and it’s the parent who is responsible for that.” |