Witness statements from HE parent and LGA Vice Chair provide informative insights into what is at stake for home educated children and their families.
What’s been said?
Tuesday 4 February saw the Education Committee hearing oral evidence from three sets of witnesses. [Transcript | Video] It is worth pointing out that this was a different Parliamentary committee from the Public Bill Committee which met for fourteen sessions between 21 January and 11 February to ‘scrutinise’ the Children’s Wellbeing & Schools Bill.
Besides conducting inquiries leading to the production of reports, the Education Committee also undertake shorter pieces of work, sometimes taking evidence on a topical matter such as the CWS Bill.
Helen Hayes currently chairs the Education Committee, and its membership is listed here. The political affiliation of its eleven members reflects the composition of the House; seven Labour, two Conservative, two LibDem.
The nine witnesses called on this occasion were from a variety of settings. This Byte comments on evidence presented in the final segment (questions 25-44).
Clare Canning introduced herself thus:
“I am a home-ed mum to two teenage girls and a volunteer director of Broadleaf Home Ed Co-Operative in the New Forest.”
and the two other panellists interviewed alongside her were Thomas Brooke, Joint interim Chief School Adjudicator at the Office of the Schools Adjudicator and Councillor Bev Craig, (Manchester City Council and a Vice Chair of the Local Government Association (LGA).
Why does it matter?
Committee members’ questions were thoughtful and, taken as a whole, the session illustrated the contrast between the views of most home educating parents and the expectations of local authorities and other children’s professionals.
Extracts from participants’ responses are interspersed below (with emphasis added in all cases), but the complete segment makes a very worthwhile listen.
Opening questions from Manuela Perteghella (LibDem) gave Canning a perfect platform to expound the benefits of a home education, not just for the individual child but for the wider family and community of which they are part.
She spoke winsomely and clearly, including insights from both her own family situation and her years of experience in the Broadleaf community, and seized the opportunity to ‘educate’ the members of the Committee about aspects of out of school education probably unfamiliar to most of them.
It was encouraging to hear Caroline Voaden (Lib Dem) later acknowledging how Canning was speaking for “many, many parents” whom she herself had encountered in her own constituency of Totnes.
From Canning’s perspective,
“…home education is the most bespoke, child-centred education that you could give a child.”
“…home education may be curated in the home, but it is actually provided in the community with other people and families, with community at the core. Bringing people together in that way is immensely powerful.”
She was able to show how Broadleaf benefits the one hundred and twenty children coming to them each week, the vast majority of whom have SEN or “have experienced bullying and harm in their time at school.”
“All the adults there are highly invested. None of us is paid for what we deliver: we are the parents of our own children, providing exceptional opportunities for our own children and for others.”
“…There is no one more invested in our children’s education than the parents of those children, who put everything into it.”
The Committee, of course, were keen to hear a local authority perspective too, and had invited Cllr. Bev Craig to speak on their behalf. Craig is the Leader of Manchester City Council and a Deputy Chair of the Local Government Association and was therefore able to articulate the prevailing political narrative very clearly:
“From… a local government perspective… we really welcome something that we have been calling for for a long time..: the provisions for a national register that will mandate the ability to work together to inspect the provision that is being delivered.”
“We probably need to consider what modern safeguards would look like in the context of the growth we have seen in home education.”
“…we need to make education broadly more accessible, and do more to reduce permanent exclusions and to help keep children and young people in school, recognising that home schooling will not work for everyone.”
“… From a city of Manchester perspective, we already do a lot of proactive work. We already go out and check, where we can, the children’s home environment when they are home schooled and off-register. We do not have the ability to mandate that, but our professionals believe that it is very important to be able to see the child in the home…”
“It is an area that needs more regulation.“
When asked about LA provision of support for HE children, Canning hit the nail on the head as she spoke of ‘support’ being the key word, rather than ‘punitive measures.’ She also took the opportunity to push back strongly against the local government view that homes are educational environments:
“They are not educational provision; they are private family homes, which is why we have this issue.”
She went on to detail various problems around exams access, then a question about the least burdensome but most effective way an LA might collect the information required gave her the chance to explain the continually varying nature of the educational provision, and the unworkability of already busy mothers submitting details within fifteen days.
Craig was at pains to note that the provision outlined in Canning’s particular set-up did seem holistic, but she also wanted the Committee to know that her staff saw an enormous variation in provision. She therefore favours stronger powers, and a standardised response from LAs:
“[We] have everything in place but the ability to mandate… the more we can do to standardise local authorities – I think that will be key, and that is why sometimes there is great power in the Bill saying that local authorities ‘must’ do something rather than ‘should’ do something.”
Questions around LAs satisfying themselves about adequacy of education presented Craig with the opportunity to speak more broadly about “wider public services reform” and “the wellbeing of children.”
“The unique identifier is a great start, but we need to move very quickly into mandating health colleagues to share data for children who are out of school, for that to work across multi-agency settings and to be able to move really quickly.”
“…it is about additional regulation, additional capacity and resource, and clear parameters as to how public services work together to make sure that we have all the information about the child and the family. The more of that we have, the better.“
Having reassured the Committee that all home educators do want to see vulnerable children protected, Canning highlighted the issue of personal bias in local authority staff members, and emphasised that:
“HE children are not invisible… They are seen in the community, in the same way as children are seen at school in the school day.”
All of which led to the importance of understanding the key difference between “home schooling” and “elective home education”:
“All of the measures that are being proposed – the standards, the regulation – are based on a bias towards the school model of education, which is one model of education… One of the concerns of home educators is that… we are being measured against school measures. Both in my role as a mother home educating my children and in my role with Broadleaf, I see that we are being asked to step up to standards and a standardisation of home education that runs totally in the face of what home education is…“
She also reassured members that the necessary safeguarding processes and measures were “all in place already.”
“What home educators would like to see is extra funding and support to ensure that those things are as robust as they can be.”
Closing questions from the Committee concerned the Bill’s implications for Independent educational institutions, including communities such as Broadleaf. Here Canning voiced deep concerns, both about capacity and about the problem of regulation being devised by a body with a school-based model mentality, pushing back hard on the crisis in schools and the fact that LAs need provision like theirs.
“As volunteers, we are already absolutely at capacity… If we were given another duty on top to provide information on every child who attends, we would have to close. We do not have paid staff.
We do not work on a school-based model. We are something so polar opposite that if we had to adapt our provision, we would lose everything that makes Broadleaf so magic, and the changes and transformations we see would be lost. It would have a huge impact.
We are not the only one – there are other settings across the country popping up in response to the crisis in schools, and they are needed. The local authority needs our provision and is referring to us on a regular basis, so we need to exist.”
What can I do?
Watch this part of the session, taking careful note of the clear, informative content in Clare Canning’s responses. These are the sort of FAQs that are commonly raised in political circles.
The session also provided useful insights into the thinking of local government staff, which we may also encounter. The LGA website descriptions of their work are a good reminder of the connection between national government and local councils. These quotes are taken from the About and Who we are and what we do pages respectively:
“We always strive to agree a common cross-party position on issues and to speak with one voice on behalf of local government. We aim to set the political agenda and speak in the national media on the issues that matter to council members.”
“We are a politically-led, cross-party organisation that works on behalf of councils to ensure local government has a strong, credible voice with national government. We aim to influence and set the political agenda on the issues that matter to councils so they are able to deliver local solutions to national problems.”
It was good to see the two LibDem members asking thoughtful questions. If any of the Committee members happen to be your MP, we encourage you to use the content of this oral evidence session to seek to engage them further with the issues. When writing to Parliamentarians, it is worth pointing out the very relevant comment about the impact of data collection in community settings in this telling critique from Defend Digital Me on 17 December:
“The Bill details show there will be a vast data collection exercise about providers, that seems to badly misunderstand how much home education is delivered including in multi-family skill sharing working groups… The Bill will mean a vast data collection of providers that can change at any minute of any given week. The government should learn lessons from why they stopped the collection of AP provider data in around 2012, due its inaccuracy and unmanageability for little benefit.”
When it comes to data protection, it is worth remembering that the CWS Bill also opens the way for a Single Unique Identifier for every child and has been put forward in parallel with the Data (Use and Access) Bill which has already been debated in the House of Lords. A new collaborative initiative, Reclaim Rights for Children, has highlighted the combined dangers of these two dangerous bills.
“These two Bills are a threat to all children and their families and are a massive power grab by the Government and intrusion into the lives of ordinary families.
Both Bills are bad. Combined they will gut children’s privacy and that of their families in the name of ‘safeguarding’ and ‘wellbeing’.”
And finally, on the subject of listening, do make use of Doing Education Differently’s #Are You Listening Now? topical resources in any way you can.