Somerset County Council vows to work with parents and schools to prevent rise in home-schooling

Somerset County Council has promised to work more closely with parents and schools to prevent a further rise in home-schooling.

Nearly 1,400 children in Somerset are currently voluntarily home-schooled by parents, in what is formally called elective home education (EHE).

Parents have called on the council to make schools more flexible to children's needs and to work to ensure pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) are properly integrated.

The council has promised it will address these issues in line with concerns raised in a recent inspection of its children's services.

The issue of home-schooling was discussed in detail at a virtual meeting of the council's children and families scrutiny committee on Wednesday afternoon (March 3).

Caroline Ellis, co-chair of Taunton Home Education, said demand for home-schooling was caused by existing schools not providing the flexibility that children needed.

She said: "Home education is growing in popularity because of increased awareness and the lack of personalised, flexible learning provided by institutions.

"The expectation is that parents should be allowed to get on with the job in peace, with the council in possession of a 'backstop' duty to intervene if concerns are raised."

Ms Ellis – who also represents the North Town ward on Somerset West and Taunton Council – said the county council "provides no services to home educating families" and accused officers of having "an anti-home ed agenda".

The number of home-schooled pupils in Somerset rose from 990 in October 2019 to 1,251 in October 2020 – a rise of 26 per cent, but below the national rise of 38 per cent.

There are currently 1,382 children being home-schooled in Somerset, with a fairly even split between boys and girls (707 vs 675).

The number of new home-schooled pupils in Somerset (i.e. those starting their education at home) has fallen slightly over the last three years.

However, the council said it expected numbers to increase "as a result of a variety of factors" in the current academic year, which was placing "significant pressure" on its safeguarding services.

Cassandra Davies from the Somerset Parent Alliance said mainstream schools were not doing enough to support children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND).

She said: "The push to drive students with SEND out of schools has been strongly driven by the complex and difficult process for mainstream schools to access high needs funding.

"It takes 12 months on average for each electively home educated child to recover from the often extreme degree of depression and self-harm, due to the emotional abuse by the poor quality of some schools and the failure of any services being willing to help."

A map produced by the council shows the largest distribution of home-schooling in the areas south of Frome, with substantial pockets in or around Burnham-on-Sea, Highbridge, Ilminster, Minehead and Wellington.

In an online survey, more than one in four (28 per cent) of parents who home-schooled said they "lacked confidence in local schools", with a further 16 per cent saying they had a "poor relationship" with their local school.

Phil Curd, the council's strategic manager for access and additional learning need, said the council relied on schools being forthcoming about either numbers of pupils moving to home-schooling or the problems they faced.

He said: "There will be children that remain unknown to us, but it is a relatively small number.

"It comes down to co-operation between our schools and how we are able to share information between services.

"We are not able to capture and report on parental reasons. We will be able to pick up very quickly whether there are concerns about specific schools, and can target those with support very quickly."

Councillor Frances Nicholson, cabinet member for children and families, said the council was keen to improve its relationships to families who elected to home-school their children.

She said: "We need to have good relationships for the good of all our children.

"We are very keen to improve our engagement with all who educate children at home. We absolutely clearly acknowledge, as identified in the joint Ofsted-CQC inspection, that there is much to do to improve the school officer for children with SEND.

"We have been surveying parents and families to get their views, and we are always trying to make sure we have a better flow of information, and we will explore more ways of doing that."