Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill in a Nutshell – by Education Otherwise
The UK’s home education support charity Education Otherwise writes exclusively for the Travellers’ Times about the alarming changes threatened to elective home education by a new law, and how that may affect families who home educate – including Traveller families. Important reading for all Gypsy, Roma and Traveller families who home educate and the charities and other groups who provide support for them.
Every reasonable person in this country wants children to be safe and to receive a suitable education, but despite the Government forcefully pushing it as a way to achieve such worthy goals, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill will in reality, harm many thousands of children. We know that Gypsy and Traveller children already face disadvantage due to lack of cultural understanding by public officials and there is a risk that they will be affected more severely than most. That is not acceptable in a modern society.
David Wolfe KC, a top lawyer specialising in education, has provided legal advice to Education Otherwise on those parts of the Bill which he believes we have a strong case to challenge in Judicial Review if it becomes law. There are other aspects which, whilst not necessarily readily challengeable in court by the wider community, are wholly unacceptable and possibly able to be challenged by individuals. There are numerous areas of concern in the Bill, not least how it rides roughshod over parents’ primacy in their child’s life, that is the parent’s right to make decisions in their child’s best interests.
Download David Wolfe KC’s opinion on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill below:
Home education is a popular choice amongst Gypsy and Traveller families for many reasons, including children learning their parents’ trades, children being more likely to be suspended due to lack of cultural understanding, schools not offering relevant education to Gypsy and Traveller children and bullying. If enacted, parents who home educate will have to provide their local authority with copious amounts of private information about their child, including details of every individual or organisation which provides education to the child even at weekends and, how many hours each week each parent spends educating the child. Then, if any of that information changes, the parent has 15 days to notify each change to the local authority. It is easy to see how this could encroach on family rights and privacy or even be used to monitor movements.
Not all members of the Gypsy and Traveller community live a traditional lifestyle, moving regularly, but those parents who do will have to repeatedly provide that information on every occasion when a move takes place. Regardless of their lifestyle, parents will usually have frequent changes in arrangements, and few have set hours for each parent’s contribution. The reporting burden will simply be far too great to be manageable for many families.
The threatened impact of the Bill on support groups and charities
The Bill goes even further, by placing a duty on education providers to report the data of all home educated children using their services, under threat of fines. There is no such reporting duty for school children. That includes the amount of time during which they provide the education without a parent present which, as any good home educator knows, often changes day to day and week to week, creating a huge administrative burden for every provider.
Many charities – including Gypsy and Traveller charities - regularly run events, workshops, meetings and activities for children which will catch them in this widespread net of extra administrative burden, making them legally required to provide data to the local authority for every home educated child. If a child lives in a different local authority area to the one in which the session takes place, the charity will also have to send relevant data to different authorities. It is easy to see how huge this administrative burden will be for those charities in finding the data, collating it, reporting it and then reporting every change. Many would have to hire additional staff in order to cope, taking funds away from services. Many cannot afford to do so.
It is not hard to put yourself in the position of a charity which has run well for years but is suddenly met with these extra resource costs solely for home educated children. What will it do? Several providers are already saying that they will have to close or to not offer services to home educated children as a result. That will remove access to vital support for home educated children and no reasonable person wants children to be deprived of opportunities.
This Government has steam-rolled this Bill through the House of Commons without listening to home educating families
The Bill places even greater barriers in the way of many parents, as it introduces a legal requirement to ask the local authority for permission to remove a child from the school roll if you want to home educate and the child is either at a special school, or subject to no more than an investigation by Children’s Social Services (CSS). Some might think that such requirements are welcome on the basis of ‘safeguarding’ children and, in cases when a child is subject to a child protection plan, that could well be said to be reasonable. However, when Government’s own data finds that 78% of investigations by CSS do not lead to a child protection plan it is not hard to see how readily a family could be unreasonably caught up by that provision. Surely, it goes too far?
Since 1870, the law has made clear that it is parents who decide what is in their child’s best interests educationally and this Bill aims to trample all over that right, but again, only for home educating parents. It states that the local authority must refuse consent if it ‘…would be in the child's best interests to receive education by regular attendance at school.’ What this means is that even if the parent is able to provide a wonderful education which exceeds the suitability of school education for their child, the local authority can refuse that parent the right to do so, solely on its view that school is in the child’s best interest.
In a climate in which local authorities and Government have a deeply ingrained view that school is always best, quite apart from inherent prejudice against anything outside the mainstream, it is easy to see how this will play out; referrals to CSS for spurious or minimal reasons which trigger investigations because social workers already consider home education to be a ‘safeguarding risk’.
In addition, the Bill makes similar requirements for parents who already home educate if they become subject to a CSS investigation. They would be served with a notice requiring them to satisfy the local authority that their provision is suitable and that it is, in the view of an individual who does not know the child, in the child’s best interests. This would be swiftly followed by a school attendance order.
This Government has steam-rollered this Bill through the House of Commons without listening to home educating families and, despite dozens of people being invited to give oral evidence to the committee, not a single home educating parent or representative has been allowed to do so. The level of inflexibility is bad enough, but the bias is simply astounding. None of us can afford to stand by and see home educating families, particularly Gypsy and Traveller families who will be hit so hard, singled out for draconian laws just because they are doing the best for their children.
By Wendy Charles-Warner/Education Otherwise
(Stock photo: Children (and Lucifer the horse) at Appleby 2024 © Eszter Halasi)
Romany Gypsy, Roma and Traveller families who home educate are encouraged to check out Education Otherwise's website (It’s packed full of resources and support for families) and to write to their MP – and to the Lords when the Bill is examined there – to complain about the new restrictions threatened for Elective Home Education.