Daisy was getting her things together to rush to the hospital in what was suspected to be early labour. It was not an ideal time for the doorbell to ring and definitely not to find five police officers on her doorstep.
The officers were there because somebody had reported Daisy’s children as missing from education. Without so much as a phone call, the response was for these five officers to turn up unannounced at Daisy’s door.
Given the circumstances, it was eventually agreed that a second visit would take place. The next day one officer arrived, looked through Daisy’s food cupboards and checked out her children’s bedrooms, before concluding there was no cause for concern.
Daisy has been home educating her children in the same borough of South Yorkshire for fifteen years. She is known to the local authorities, who have her contact details, and she has been sending them annual updates on her children’s education for as long as she can remember. One phone call from the police to the home ed team would have confirmed this. Daisy also has no idea why the police were involved in an education matter.
Leila (not her real name) was surprised to get a phone call from the GP last week, asking why her daughter had not been to the doctor in over two years. In fact Leila, as she explained, has been trying to get her daughter to be seen by a doctor since the beginning of the year, but is never able to get an appointment in the 8am scramble. She was immediately told they could get her daughter an appointment out-of-hours, to which she reluctantly agreed. Leila believes that, “this was a sneaky way for some local authority to actually visually see my child to check all is ok,” but her daughter did desperately need the appointment. Leila has been home educating her daughter for four years; they are known to the local authority and send regular annual updates.
Is the deregistration itself the cause for concern?
In home education groups on Facebook, I see frequent reports of parents being reported after taking children to A&E. Twice in the past week, nurses told parents that “new rules” and “protocol” mean they have to report any child who is home educated, despite there being no safeguarding concerns. One parent reported that this was followed up with a phone call from the local council, who said they had visited the family home after a report of a child missing education and that nobody was in. Next came an e-mail, specifying the date and time they would visit again. It is not hard to see why this attitude makes some parents worry about taking their child to see a doctor.
Another example comes from a mother who was recently in town with her children. They were stopped by two Police Community Support Officers, who asked why the children were not in school. On being told they were home educated, the officers incorrectly informed the parent that home educated children must be kept indoors during school hours and asked for their names so they could report them to the council. One officer then told the children that school is the best place for a child, and, if she were his child, he wouldn’t allow all this nonsense.
As a home educator I have easy access to stories like the ones above, but this issue is not limited to home educated children. A friend told me about a mother she knows whose schoolchild missed three days of school last term with norovirus. On day three, she opened the front door to a member of staff from the school, who demanded to enter the home and see the child for a “safe and well” check. Flabbergasted and caught off-guard, the mother let the person in to view her child lying ill in bed. There were no previous safeguarding concerns.
It is also not uncommon for a school to have no safeguarding concerns until the moment a child is deregistered in order to be home educated, at which point staff members start turning up unannounced on the doorstep or report the child to social services. Of course, if a school has safeguarding concerns they must act on them immediately — which begs the question, did they have concerns before the child was deregistered and do nothing? Or is the deregistration itself the cause for concern? Teachers, medical staff and police officers need to be told that home education in itself is not grounds for referral. These are people we must be able to trust, not expect to report us without very good reason. There are over 100,000 children being home educated in England. Treating all of them as a safeguarding risk will divert already stretched resources from child protection matters that genuinely require attention.
Until recently, it would have seemed obvious that five police officers turning up to investigate a report of a child missing from education was a serious overreaction. But in the wake of Sara Sharif’s death, this kind of attitude is becoming normalised, and the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill looks set to reinforce it in the quest for total attendance and because of the panic over rising rates of home education. Of course we want to keep children safe, and sometimes doctors, police officers or teachers will need to refer the case of a child who is a cause for concern. Sometimes this will happen to families who have done nothing wrong. But the pendulum is swinging so far that children end up being accosted by PCSOs or being seen in their bed by a member of their school’s safeguarding team.
Authorities appear to be overstepping the mark in the name of safeguarding. Children must be protected but so must the rights of ordinary, law-abiding citizens, young and old. Otherwise who knows who will be lurking outside the next time the doorbell rings?
