This brilliant post provides the laughs that are the only alternative
to tears of despair over the attitude of many LAs to home ed.
I have today introduced a monitoring policy for the staff at Barking
and Dagenham Elective Home Education Department:
Many people make a success of holding down a job whilst also
complying with the law, and make at least satisfactory provision.
However, because local authority staff are not monitored and
supervised by the general public whom they serve, there is the
potential for abuse of their power, and neglect to properly follow
existing law and procedures, to go unnoticed. This possibility has
been thrown into sharp relief by some recent high-profile cases in
which children have died due to failures by local authorities to
follow proper and legal procedures.
The law gives no power or duty for members of the public to
investigate any instances of people working for the Elective Home
Education department which come to their attention, unless there
are grounds for suspicion that a law is being broken in which case,
as with all breaches of law, this can be reported to the appropriate
authorities. This is clearly an untenable position in that, without
gathering information in a reasonably systematic way, the public
will have little basis on which to judge.
There is no statutory right to see the local authority staff or to enter the place at which they work, or their home.
There is no statutory right to see the local authority staff or to enter the place at which they work, or their home.
· Monitoring of them by the public is not required in law and it is therefore difficult to engage with elective home education staff who are resistant or resentful of the people they serve wanting to ensure they are not acting outside the law.
read the whole post here.
Sadly this is not the only LA making up what the law does not allow but what they wish was true, Doncaster have similarly lost the plot in an orgy of control freakery.
Leicester seem unable to comprehend the guidelines or maybe they think they are above the law like the LAs above, their add for a trained teacher to assess and monitor home educators would suggest so.
The Education Select Committee is asking for submissions on support for Home Education from LAs, perhaps if the persecution could stop for a moment we could take the idea seriously.
