urgent. consultation closes on Weds

[jo70mo]

Hello everyone
At a meeting with Home Educators last Wednesday Lancashire County Council representatives said they had only received a few responses about the draft Protocols and Procedures document currently out for consultation with Home Educators – or indeed anyone who wants to comment. The meeting went well and we need to keep up the momentum. Discussion at the meeting will count as a response but people should still put in individual submissions too.
The Consultation documents are on this page of Lancashire County Council's website:
www3.lancashire.gov.uk/corporate/atoz/a_to_z/service.asp?u_id=388&tab=1
(If anyone cannot read the documents online here, please let us know and we will e-mail them to you directly.)
Anyone can put in a submission – parents, grandparents, friends, children. The submission does not need to be in their form or format. You can make it as short or as long as you like.

For those who are not known to the LA and want to respond without using your own email address you could forward your response to form @ lancashire-he. org.uk (without any spaces) and we will forward it using the groups email address.

Ian Dowty has written a document specifically critiquing the draft policy and it can be viewed here if you would like to read it.
www.lancashire-he.org.uk/docs/consult/lancashire%20observations%20amended.pdf

There are pointers for responses at:
lancashire-he.dsa-lancashire.org.uk/docs/MediumResponse.pdf
lancashire-he.dsa-lancashire.org.uk/docs/SimpleResponse.pdf

The closing date is this Wednesday 30th November and they plan to have a document ready to go to Susie Charles (who does not like the idea of home educators not being regularly monitored) for signing off by the 15th December.
This seems an extremely short timescale and we asked at the meeting if they would consult further on the next version rather than just rushing through changes to get them signed off as soon as possible. They were not optimistic that they could do this so if we could ask for that specifically as part of our responses we may be able to sway them.

We really need to take advantage of the opportunity in front of us. It has taken nearly 3 years of hard work to get here and it would be a shame not to push hard on this chance now we have it.

If you would like anything clarifying or have questions just contact us and we'll try and help.

Thanks.
Jo

[fionan]

Hi

I'm currently thinking to send something on the following lines:

It is not clear who Lancashire policy document is directed towards. It doesn't read as though it is written for people working with children in Lancashire to explain what is meant by home education and to learn more about the law on home education and how it might apply to them in the course of their work with children. Nor does it sound as if it written simply and clearly for parents to tell them what will happen once they take their children out of school for home education.

I have made various attempts to respond to this consultation, which can be seen on my website. First I tried to go throught the draft document, highlighting text which I thought should be deleted. This led to my making suggestions for new text. I abandoned this because I didn't think the end result would be a good policy. It would be possible to go through the policy line by line and take out or water down the sections which have provoked the most criticism, but this would not result in a useful policy document.

Next I tried to summarise the key issues under 5 main headings: Suitable Education; Providing Some Information Is Not The Same As Providing Evidence To Satisfy The LA; Safeguarding; Special needs; and Children Missing Education. Some people told me they found this helpful but I still didn't feel that it offered a way forward.

Then I returned to the Council's consultation form which asked for comments to be grouped under the same headings as in the draft policy, namely Principles and Policy Statement; Law Relating to Home Education; the Lancashire Context and EHE; Special Needs; Safeguarding; Cross Border Issues; Procedures; and Additional Comments. The drawback to making this type of response is that it can't convey the scale of the problem and it would be too detailed and technical for non-specialists.

The current draft policy strikes the wrong note, especially for anyone who has any awareness of the back-story and problems between the local home education community and the Council. A new policy could be an opportunity to make a fresh start. But instead, the draft policy reads as a defensive justification on behalf of a service which has been put under the spotlight. The current draft policy also gets the law wrong in a number of significant respects which have been outlined by barrister Ian Dowty and which I will also explain briefly later in this response.

By way of contrast, neighbouring Cumbria's Elective Home Education Booklet says at the outset that it is "designed to simply explain the basics of elective home education and the specific role of Children's Services. It should help you to understand what happens in Cumbria to promote partnership between Children's Services and families who choose to provide their children with education otherwise than by regular attendance at school."

The gist of my response is this: the draft policy should be torn up and in its place the Council should produce a much shorter user-friendly document, primarily for families but also for members of the wider children's workforce in Lancashire. The document should be accurate and up to date with respect to the law. Technical information for schools (eg action required on receipt of notification from the parent) could be included as an appendix. Detailed instructions on data collection and fair processing would be better placed at the end of the document in a further appendix.

As the Government Guidelines have noted, it is important that first contact is constructive and positive. It would not be difficult to re-arrange the order of the policy document and to rewrite the opening on a more positive and inclusive note while relegating the technical issues to the appendix. This could be done straightaway even while the Council's interpretation of its statutory duties remained in dispute.

Since 2008 I have followed the developments in Lancashire with dismay. It appears that for a considerable period of time there has been no one in charge of updating procedural documents to bring them into line with the current law. During 2008-9 Lancashire Council undertook a review of Elective Home Education. I attended a meeting with Lancashire Council in 2009 in my position Chair of Education Otherwise Government Policy Group. The report was published in 2009.

The home education service was in difficulty before the 2008 review, mainly because of capacity issues where staff were wrongly being required to conduct a formal assessment of each child as part of routine monitoring. Deadlines were constantly missed, largely because the Council misread the law and imposed unnecessary and impossible targets, with parents being viewed as obstacles to be overcome or circumvented by whatever means possible. The 2009 Report shows that the Council also aspired to limit the number of children entering home education and to use safeguarding procedures to reintegrate children into mainstream schooling.

Mid-way through the Lancashire review, the Government asked Graham Badman to conduct a national review of home education. The Badman Report, published in June 2009, recommended a number of changes to the law. It was clear that Lancashire Council supported the Badman recommendations and councillors and staff were confident that the Badman proposals would be enshrined in new laws. With this expectation in mind, the Council called off discussions with the local home education community and began to prepare for the changes to the law. However, as everyone will be aware, the Education Select Committee was highly critical of the conduct and findings of the Badman Report and the Government subsequently withdrew the proposed legislative changes in early April 2010.