HOME EDUCATION CONSULTATION CLOSES NEXT MONDAY 2ND JULY The Government has been holding a ‘call for evidence on home education’ – the consultation closes at 11.59pm on Monday 2nd July. The Government appears to favour introducing a mandatory register for parents who home educate. This may sound reasonable but it undermines an incredibly important principle…
Home Educating Parents Sidelined! On 10th April 2018, the Department for Education (DfE) published significant new draft Guidance for Home Education in England. This all seemed very reasonable, with the guidance subject to a public consultation ending on 2nd July: https://consult.education.gov.uk/school-frameworks/home-education-call-for-evidence-and-revised-dfe-a/ However, there was one major omission in the Government’s approach to this matter…
Gillick competence + GDPR = Parental rights overturned Background: From April 2015 patients registered with a GP in England have had the right to have online access to their medical records. Up until May this year, an individual having parental responsibility for a child under 16, wishing to see the child’s medical record, could apply to…
Why has the government stopped listening to parents? It is a fundamental principle of British society that parents are the primary educators of their children. Unlike some other nations like Germany which has a ‘Schulpflicht’ – compulsory schooling – in the UK, parents are not required to send their children to a school. Most parents…
Faith schools comprise one third of the UK school community. Many of these schools are over-subscribed, often reaching the top of local league tables and, more recently, reaching the top percentage of schools as high achievers in Progress 8. It therefore appears not only contradictory but also plainly ridiculous that a good number of Britain’s…
The good news of home education As part of the media attack on home education, The Telegraph published an article recently about twelve year old Lilian Hardy. Not many people will have heard of her before the article was published. She hit the headlines because her local council, Westminster, decided to issue a School Attendance…
New polling shows the public want parents at the heart of new relationships education proposals, with most wanting parents informed of the curriculum content ahead of time and to know who is delivering classes. This comes as the government is consulting on what form compulsory relationships education should take for primary school pupils in England,…
Will or won’t parents retain the right to withdraw their children from sex education? Education secretary, Damian Hinds MP, reignited the sex education debate recently when he confirmed in several interviews that parents would retain the right to withdraw their children from sex education classes once the new compulsory subjects of Relationships Education (RE) in…
The press hysteria surrounding home education shows no sign of abating – if anything, it seems to be getting worse. Following the introduction of a Private Members’ Bill by Lord Soley last autumn, which attempts to introduce registration and enforce home inspections, pressure has been building from a range of sources. The Times appears to…
The dubious practice of off-rolling Ofsted has announced that it is to conduct an investigation into exclusion figures, in particular trying to establish why two regions in the north-east (Yorkshire and the Humber) have higher rates of excluded pupils than anywhere else in England. Six of the 10 worst offending areas are situated in the…
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