I sit on the Wolverhampton Council’s Children and Young People’s Scrutiny Panel. At a meeting earlier this year, we were presented with a paper on Elective Home Education. If a family decide to home school their children there is very limited legislation which currently allows local authorities to properly monitor the quality of this
To give you an idea, in the current Elective Home Education Guidelines for Local Authorities, it sets out that there is no obligation for families providing home education to do anything of the following:
Teach the National Curriculum, have a timetable, have set hours during which education will take place, have any specific qualifications, observe school hours, days or terms etc.
As you can imagine, we were all quite alarmed by this and it seems odd that parents who keep their children off school for family holidays would be fined or other but there is absolutely no legislation to monitor or discipline parents who are home schooling.
In Wolverhampton, there are currently 270 number of families home schooling, there are 17 of these families who have no engagement whatsoever with the local authority. There are no ‘safeguarding’ concerns so there is no legislation which forces these parents to engage. The Council employs an Elective Home Education officer who works hard to visit families, monitor and evidence work that the families are doing etc. But, you can imagine that their job is quite difficult as their is no legal obligation for the families to engage with the EHE officer. There is no requirement to provide outcomes for any of the children home schooling so there would be no data to even give you about how many children in the city who are home schooled ‘achieve’ results.
I contacted my local MP Pat McFadden who has written to the Secretary of State for Education raising these concerns. The Education Minister’s response isn’t hugely helpful but our panel will await the results of the consultation.