New Foundations Home Education is now Home Education Wales

 Safeguarding

 

• Safeguarding is used disingenuously to excuse intrusions which are rumour and fear rather than evidence based

• Case studies show that where serious harm or death occurs in home educated children, those children are without exception already known to be or suspected to be at risk and therefore already in the system

• Evidence suggests that on average home educated children are more likely to be scrutinised by social services and less likely to be at risk (0.31%) than the general population (1.3%)

 Safeguarding is a reason often used by governments to justify further legislation. Such legislation would cause Electively Home Educating (EHE) families to experience intrusion into family life, beyond that already allowed for in current legislation.

 When studying any statistical evidence relating to safeguarding the following points that need to be taken into account:

Not every case is reported.

Some issues that social services may consider as of concern are resolved through arrangements such as the abuser leaving the home.

 

Safeguarding and Child protection are often confused, for clarification:

Child Protection’ is the protection of children from harm

‘Safeguarding’ is a broader term and means ensuring that all children fulfil their potential and covers all aspects of their welfare, including their education.

The Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) define ‘safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children’ as

·         Protecting children from abuse and neglect;

·         Preventing impairment of their health or development; and

·         Ensuring that they receive safe and effective care;

… so as to enable them to have optimum life chances.

 The Education Act 1996 section 7 makes very clear that the duty to ensure that a child of compulsory school age is educated is firmly upon parents and on no other person or body including the LA:

Duty of parents to secure education of children of compulsory school age.

The parent of every child of compulsory school age shall cause him to receive efficient full-time education suitable—

to any special educational needs he may have,

either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.

This duty is addressed under Section 437(1) of the Education Act 1996, empowering LAs to intervene if it appears that parents are not providing a suitable education:

‘Child protection’ relates to the problem of children suffering, or at risk of suffering, from abuse or neglect. That harm is usually perpetrated by their parent or other carer. Although there have been some high profile cases involving EHE children it is clear that in every one of these cases the child was known to Social services before becoming EHE and that in many cases a large number of professionals were already involved with the child. 

 The case of Siôn D (Flintshire SCR) is a prime example of this. Siôn was 7 years old when he died and is described as ‘a disabled child with global developmental delay’.

He was a child well known to his LA as noted in the SCR:

2.2 Initially, Mr and Mrs D appeared to be open to accepting guidance and support for Siôn, especially when they were still hoping to have a definitive diagnosis of his condition. However, there was a marked diminution of the level of their engagement with professionals working with Siôn from the time that he was about 30 months old and this continued up to the time that he died. The last professional contact with Siôn in his own home was twenty months before his death. Siôn never attended school as his parents elected to educate him at home: they would not give consent for his educational needs to be assessed by an educational psychologist.

EHE was not cause of the abuse and neglect Siôn suffered. He and his family were known to social services well before he reached school age. The review of his case notes that professionals, particularly education professionals, were worried about overstepping their legal boundaries. These concerns were unfounded as the correct procedure, which was for safeguarding/welfare concerns to be put before the Social Services who already have extensive powers to deal with abuse and neglect as the law stands, was not followed.

 Case conferences were held and concerns were voiced as the review of the case notes:

                3.6 The review of the case also identified a number of specific missed opportunities that professionals had                                           either to better understand Siôn’s circumstances or to undertake a full assessment of his needs.

 These were:

The local authority did not gather information from health and education colleagues following a police referral in January 2006.

The police dealt with a neighbour’s complaint about Mr and Mrs D’s behaviour towards her, without following up the neighbour’s statement that Mr and Mrs D were angry with her for having reported them for leaving a three‐year old child alone in the family home;

There was an inadequate response on three separate occasions to the observation of the concealed bruise that meant that further opportunities to undertake an assessment of Siôn’s needs were missed;

The community paediatrician did not adequately share professional concerns with Mr and Mrs D, despite being advised to do so, and she did not request parents’ consent to make a referral to children’s social services for an assessment of need; and,

The senior learning advisor in education services should have taken independent child protection advice rather than relying on the joint decisions of the professionals’ meetings.

 This is not the case of a child for whom EHE is used to hide his abuse from professionals. It is a case where professionals failed, duty time and time again, in their duty to help him. Notwithstanding that this is clearly identified in the case review recommendations include:

Recommendation 6

5.14 The LSCB should formally urge the Welsh Assembly Government to implement the proposed review of elective home education.

 It is hard to understand why such a recommendation should be made in circumstances where many professionals could have intervened on a child’s behalf before he was even of compulsory school age. Registration and monitoring would not have helped in this case; the child was already registered with the LA and already being monitored by several professionals. It is more likely the case that the extra workload from registration and monitoring could reduce the ability of LAs to protect children such as Siôn. Much of the data collected and time spent in collecting it would be irrelevant. Those efforts would take staff away from supporting children with genuine need.

Furthermore, it is difficult to see how registration and monitoring could assist children in respect of child protection issues, as EHE children are in fact less likely to be abused than children in the general school population. During attempts by the UK government in 2009 to introduce registration and other measures for EHE families, significant amounts of safeguarding information was collated both by government representatives and by EHE groups. Whilst those statistics were not specific to Wales, they are indicative of the UK situation as a whole, and so provide a reference point for Wales. The National abuse rate for all children as reported by LAs in response to freedom of information requests was 142,459 which is 1.3% of all children. The rate reported for EHE children was 0.31% (Daley, L), just 23% of the rate recorded for all children. This would seem to indicate that rather than EHE children requiring further safeguarding measures to protect their interests, they are considerably less at risk of harm than children in the general population.

 Indeed, studies in the UK and worldwide have nearly universally found that EHE children do not suffer from lack of socialisation, and that they tend to have higher self esteem than schooled children. There has been no evidence, anywhere, that home educated children as a category are prone to abuse (Sauer, A). During the U.K. debate Baroness Delyth Morgan claimed that parents who were educating their children at home could be using it as a cover for abuse, neglect and forced marriage.

The Baroness went on to say that home schooling could be masking a range of evils including sexual exploitation and domestic servitude. At no time was any evidence produced from any source by the government to substantiate those claims whilst evidence that was produced clearly demonstrated that abuse within EHE families was considerably lower than that in the general population. Had such evidence to support the claims made by Baroness Morgan been available, it would have been published as the issue was being stridently pursued at the time.

Nobody would disagree with the desire to safeguard children’s wellbeing; however, parents have legal responsibility for their children’s education and welfare whilst those children are of compulsory school age, just as they are prior to compulsory school age.  Currently LAs have the power to intervene when there is concern for a child who is EHE.  Guidelines pertaining to Elective Home Education in Wales were last updated in 2008[1] and comprise section 6 of the document Inclusion and Pupil Support Guidance National Assembly for Wales Circular No: 47/2006[2]. These make clear that LAs must refer any child for whom there is concern as explained below:

  2.6 Where parents have notified the LEA or the LEA is otherwise made aware of a child’s withdrawal from school with the intention of being home educated, the LEA should acknowledge the receipt of this notification and consider quickly whether there is any existing evidence, either in an authority’s own records or from other services or agencies, indicating whether there may be cause for concern over the withdrawal. Previous irregular attendance at school is not of itself a sufficient cause for concern. In many cases, parents and their children have reached a crisis point, for example, with bullying, so advice should be sought from education welfare services where there is any doubt. Specific instances where they may be concerns are included in Part 6 of this Section. In these cases the LEA should immediately refer these concerns to the appropriate statutory authorities using established protocols.

Hence, any suggestion that registration is required to safeguard children from parental neglect or abuse is manifestly wrong. EHE children are already open to investigation if there are concerns about their wellbeing.  They are also at lower risk of abuse than their schooled peers.

 WAG publishes data with regard to child protection issues and children. Freedom of information requests were made of all authorities within Wales to ask:

·         How many children in your authority are on the at risk register?

·         Of those how many are school age?

·         Of those children how many are considered to be EHE?

·        Of those who are considered EHE, how many were known to your authority prior to becoming EHE?

The data responses are included on the following page. 

In 2011 there were 2,880 children in Wales on Child protection registers a rate of 46.1 per 10,000 children aged under 18⁽¹⁾. Of these 1520 were school age children from 5-15 years (52.8% of those on the CPR).

Local Authority	Number of children in LA aged 0-19 2 (2)	CPR numbers from(1)For 2011	a)Number of child protection registrations(3)	b) No of a) in which child EHE (3)	No. of b) where abuse was known to LA prior to becoming EHE (3)
Isle of Anglesey     2011/2012	15650	35	90	0	0
Blaenau Gwent	16530	100	68	0	0
Bridgend	32090	165	166	1	0
Caerphilly	42690	225	225	0	0
Cardiff	81150	270	309	0	0
Carmarthenshire	42220	155	116	0	0
Ceridigion	16830	45
Conwy	24320	40	40	0	0
Denbighshire	22310	75
Flintshire	35210	90	123	declined	declined
Gwynedd	27240	50	94	1	Not known
Merthyr Tydfil	13850	60	164	0	0
Monmouthshire	20360	60	75	0	0
Neath Port Talbot	31920	205	152	1	Not stated
Newport	36230	110		0	0
Pembrokeshire	27860	90	133	0	0
Powys	29330	85	73	0	0
Rhondda Cynon Taf	56270	340	567
Swansea	52790	255	255	0	0
Vale of Glamorgan	31070	90
Torfaen	21660	180	152	0	0
Wrexham	31570	155	68	0	0
All Wales	709150	2880

 

(1)   Source: www.wales.gov.uk.statistics. Local Authority Child Protection registers Wales 2011. Accessed 26^th August 2012

(2)   Statistics taken from population by age http://www.daffodilcymru.org.uk. Accessed 24^th August 2012  totals may vary due to rounding

(3)   Data provided direct from LAs in response to Freedom of Information requests.

Comment to be put in here analysing data once data received

Further data on abuse of children is enlightening in respect of both how comparatively safe children are in an EHE environment and how differently school staff are treated compared to how the proposals treat EHE families. In 2011 the department for education (UK) commissioned a report into allegations of abuse against teachers and other staff in schools (York Consulting). Findings from that report indicate cover the year to 31st March 2010 and 2827 reports of abuse were made against school teachers and 1709 against non teaching staff during that year.

 

	Physical	Emotional	Sexual	Neglect	Conduct	Other	Not recorded	Don’t know	Total
Teachers	1584	224	550	64	315	75	15	0	2827
Non teaching	842	76	427	82	208	56	0	0	1709

Taken from table 2.3 p.9

	Substantiated	Malicious	Unfounded	Unsubstantiated	Don’t know	Total
Teachers	857	56	497	681	540	2631
Non teaching	603	26	236	377	336	1578

Data taken from table 2.10 p. 15.

Definitions used in the report:

Substantiated: sufficient identifiable evidence to prove or disprove the allegation. Malicious: there is clear evidence to prove there has been a deliberate act to deceive and the allegation is entirely false.

Unfounded: there is no evidence or proper basis which supports the allegation being made, or there is evidence to prove that the allegation is untrue. It might also indicate that the person making the allegation misinterpreted the incident or was mistaken about what they saw. Alternatively they may not have been aware of all the circumstances.

Unsubstantiated: not the same as a false allegation. It simply means that there is insufficient identifiable evidence to prove the allegation. The term, therefore, does not imply guilt or innocence.

	teachers	Non teaching staff
No further action	952	510
Reinstated	243	148
Dismissed	152	177
Resigned	102	99
Cessation of use	77	48
Acquittal	16	15
Caution	37	25
Conviction	51	42
Referral to independent safeguarding body	173	136
Referral to regulatory body	127	30
Other	658	369
Don’t know	367	224

Taken from Table 2.11 p16.

Thus 719 teachers and 557 non teaching school staff were either dismissed, resigned, cautioned, convicted or referred to another body for allegations of abuse of children in schools. It is important to note that a further 591 of these cases were recorded as ‘don’t know’. Another 1462 cases were recorded as no further action and these cases would include incidents where they were unsubstantiated. As the report states:

Unsubstantiated: not the same as a false allegation. It simply means that there is insufficient identifiable evidence to prove the allegation. The term, therefore, does not imply either guilt or innocence.

 Furthermore, not all allegations of abuse are referred to the organisation upon which the study was based as noted on p 20

“We believe that there must be allegations that are not notified to us. Some schools have a reputation for being proactive and some never make contact.”

It should not be suggested that all teaching staff and other staff in schools are likely to abuse children, and to be wrongly accused of doing so is clearly a stressful and humiliating experience. If WAG suggests that registration and/or monitoring of EHE is necessary for safeguarding/child protection reasons, this would in effect put suspicion of abuse on every EHE parent or carer. This is pertinent in that the above report was commissioned to study ways in which allegations of abuse against staff in educational institutions can be better dealt with in order to reduce levels of stress to the staff created by the investigation. EHE parents are therefore being treated inequitably with other sections of the community concerned with education.

It must also not be assumed that each incident of abuse by a member of school staff equates to one abused child. Nigel French, a caretaker at a Merthyr Tydfil school was jailed for spying on girls in the shower through a hole drilled in a ceiling above them. As Judge Twomlow stated:

            ….No girl who went into that changing room will know whether they were spied on or not…”

Consequently the under-recording of abuse is likely, and difficult to quantify. In the above case every female child in the school could be a victim of the convicted man and yet it is recorded as one incident in the statistical reports on school staff abuse. The data above (York Consulting table 2.10) indicates that 856 allegations against 

teachers were fully substantiated, a figure which represents approximately one third of all allegations of abuse against teachers recorded in that study.  Further, the study describes the record of abuse allegations as related to 0.6% of all employed teachers. Thus a full 0.2% of employed teachers have allegations of abuse made against them which are fully substantiated with a further 46% of the abuse allegations being recorded as ‘don’t know, or unsubstantiated’. The report describes examples of investigated allegations in which several children are involved but only one teacher, so, as with the Nigel French case, those findings represent abuser numbers and the number of their victims is likely to be considerably higher.

 Home Tutors

Registration is unlikely to be well received by EHE parents, as recent reports of reactions of home tutors indicate (Guardian, 2010). The report covers the estimated 750,000 home tutors in the UK, who had been asked to register with the ‘independent safeguarding agency’ but were not obliged to do so. Three quarters of the 525 tutors interviewed said that they would not register on the ‘vetting and barring’ which was described as intrusive. Comments made in reported interviews reflect feelings of unfairness and injustice:

             ‘Four-fifths believe it will fail to stop abusers harming children, while 68% argue it will lead to miscarriages of                                       

             justice’

Deryn Cullen, a cello tutor from Leeds, said the database implied tutors were "guilty until proven innocent".

“This scheme is in danger of undermining that bond of trust as it breeds the suspicion that every adult who works with children is a potential paedophile.” Henry Fagg (Tutor and founder of the Tutor Pages)

 

Last July children's author Philip Pullman led a chorus of protest from prominent writers over the scheme. He called the plans "outrageous, demeaning and insulting" and said he wouldn't be visiting schools again because of it.

 Yet, the scheme for home tutors is voluntary whereas WAG proposes to make registration of EHE families compulsory. How very much more might EHE parents find registration ‘outrageous, demeaning and insulting’ or to consider that it made them ‘guilty until proven innocent’ when they are considered less trustworthy than tutors who could come into their homes, as tutors are not required to register.

Under 5 Year Olds

Comparisons above demonstrate that an EHE child of school age is less likely to be abused than a child of the same age who is not EHE. This leads to the obvious question of why compulsory registration, if it is based on those children lacking interaction with ‘authority figures’ such as school staff, is only proposed for children of compulsory school age (5-16) and not for children of under compulsory school age? Statistical evidence demonstrates a far higher level of abuse in the pre-school age child population than in children of compulsory school age. Further, the incidence of under reporting in this group must be greater by the very nature of their age and consequently less advanced communication skills.

Rates of abuse per 10,000 children in Wales

	< 4 years	5-15 years	16-18 years
Boys	173	83	7
Girls	158	83	9
Totals	331	166	16

Source: www.wales.gov.uk.statistics. Local Authority Child Protection registers Wales 2011. Accessed 26^th August 2012

 In addition to rates of abuse, evidence with regard to homicide rates in children clearly demonstrates that the rate in under 5 year olds is considerably greater than in older children. Indeed, in approximately two thirds of all child murders in England, Wales, Canada, the USA and Australia the victim is under five years old (Yarwood,D). In 2002/3 a total of 99 children under 16 were victims of child homicide in England and Wales, a figure that represents 9.8% of all homicides in England and Wales at that time.

Child murder statistics for England and Wales 2002/2003

Age	Number	Percent of all child victims
<5	65	65.6
5-15	34	34.3
Totals	99	99.9% (rounding)

 (Taken from Data Yarwood,D. Reported p4)

Further, as that study found:

 During the 12-year period 1992 to 2002/03, the number of parents suspected of killing their children under the age of 16 averaged 53 per year with a range of 41 to 80 parents.

Thus, every year during that study approximately 35 children on average in England and Wales were killed by their parents whilst under five years of age. Additionally, rates of abuse in Wales, published by WAG, indicate approximately double the rate of abuse in under five year olds than in all children of compulsory school age. Despite this evidence parents are trusted to care for these children without compulsory registration being imposed upon them other than the registration of their birth, until the child reaches the age of five years. It would be completely disingenuous to suggest that parents become less mindful of their children’s welfare and safety when they reach compulsory school age, than they were prior to that time. The evidence clearly indicates that this is not the case; children are considerably more at risk whilst under five.

Notwithstanding the clear evidence to demonstrate that EHE parents are less likely to abuse their children than families who are not EHE and that children under compulsory school age are more likely to be abused than those of compulsory school age (whether EHE or not), EHE parents are the ones for whom compulsory registration is proposed. Registration of a child at school is not compulsory registration as it is a choice that parents can elect to make or not, as they see fit. Hence if EHE families are made subject to compulsory registration, they would be treated considerably less equitably than other families which is completely contrary to not only the rules of natural justice but also British law.

References:

 Daley, L. Abuse in Elective Home Education.

  11th June 2009. Accessed 14th August 2012.

Sauer A. Children Schools and Families Bill 2009; Briefing Pack and Resource Document. The Sauer Consultancy Limited.

Siôn D, Serious case review Flintshire. Published 11th January 2012.

York Consulting LLP. 2011. Allegations of abuse against teachers and non-teaching staff. Research report DFE-RR192. Department for Education.

Wales Assembly Government, 2006. Safeguarding Children: Working Together Under the Children Act 2004 NAFWC12/07

Wales Online. 6th August 2012. Caretaker jailed for spying on schoolgirls shower cubicles.

Guardian. 16th April 2012. Home tutors reject government’s ‘intrusive’ child safety database.  Accessed 19th August 2012.

Yarwood, D. June 2004. Child Homicide, Review of Statistics and Studies. Dewar research Ascot.

[1]  http://wales.gov.uk/topics/educationandskills/policy_strategy_and_planning/schools/339214-wag/inclusionpupilsupportguidance/section6/?lang=en