‘Home Truths’ on home education in Scotland

The Scottish Home Education Forum has conducted a major investigation into local authorities’ home education policies, practices and relationships with home educators in Scotland.

‘Home Truths’ is the most comprehensive study ever undertaken of home education in Scotland and the findings have now been published in full (110 pages) and in summary (12 pages).

Download ‘Home Truths’ (full report)
Download ‘Home Truths’ (summary report)

Read the press release

The forum makes 16 recommendations for action, which, it is hoped, the Scottish Government will see fit to progress in the course of its forthcoming review of statutory home education guidance.

Public inquiry into GIRFEC human rights impact: parliamentary petition update

[Reblogged from Home Education Forums]

The Scottish Parliament’s Education & Skills Committee is due to reconsider petition PEO1692 for an independent public inquiry into the human rights impact of GIRFEC policy in the coming weeks.

In order to inform the committee’s further deliberations, joint petitioners Alison Preuss (on behalf of the Scottish Home Education Forum) and Lesley Scott (on behalf of Tymes Trust) have sent the following submission in response to the latest correspondence received by the Convener from Deputy First Minister and Cabinet Secretary for Education and Skills, John Swinney (dated 22 August 2019) and Dr Ken Macdonald, Head of ICO Regions (8 July 2019):

UNCRC incorporation into Scots law: trick or treat?

Having co-founded the kick-ass children’s rights group ARCH in 2001, I’ve become used to banging on about how the UNCRC  resembles a box of Quality Street, where the hardest nuts and caramels are downgraded in favour of the palate-pleasing soft truffles and strawberry cremes.

Article 16 (right to privacy) is one such hard nut that is always left languishing at the bottom of the tin because none of the highly-paid cheerleaders, including the children’s commissioner who has a particular fondness for all things sweet and gooey, wants to risk breaking their molars on it.

Home-educators ‘face an overtly hostile environment’

Published in TES Scotland, 29 June 2019

Home-educators ‘face an overtly hostile environment’

Home-educating families are being unfairly treated through Scotland’s health-visiting service, writes Alison Preuss

New research by the Scottish Home Education Forum on families’ experiences of the health-visiting service in Scotland will make uncomfortable reading for service providers and the government alike.

It was prompted by an increase in members’ complaints about the quality and accuracy of information and advice offered by health visitors in relation to childcare, nursery and schooling options, and a lack of transparency regarding the voluntary nature of the service.

Schooling and the cult of presenteeism

Earlier this month, Leicestershire Live reported on the case of a parent who was prosecuted and fined for failing to ensure her school-refusing teenage daughter’s regular attendance at school, despite having made valiant efforts to get her there and fully co-operating with the authorities in the face of the child’s outright defiance.

Readers proceeded to express their collective outrage that the mother should have been punished for the actions of the truculent teen, bemoaned (in varying degrees of authoritarian-speak) the breakdown of discipline in ‘schools and society today’, and berated both the council for bringing the action and the magistrates for convicting her.