HED0371

Written evidence submitted by ACERT (The Advisory Council for the Education of Romany and Other Travellers)

ACERT EHE Evidence Submission

ACERT (The Advisory Council for the Education of Romany and Other Travellers) is a charity which advocates for improved education experiences and access for “Travellers” within the United Kingdom. The groups we cover are not necessarily defined by nomadism (the majority of us being either permanently settled or, if nomadic, only for short periods of the year) although it is still a feature of the lives of many of us. Formalised, state-ran education has been unequal and inadequate in catering for us for decades, as has been recognised since the 1967 Plowden report and in successive governmental or NGO reports and inquiries since, up to the Women & Equalities Committee’s 2019 report “Tackling inequalities faced by Gypsy, Roma & Traveller communities”. Although improvements have been made, these problems with mainstream formal education, particularly the inflexibility of the system and the discriminations within it, mean that many from the Gypsy, Roma Traveller (GRT) communities chose home education in preference to an unyielding, or outright hostile, system.

Broadly, ACERT is in support of placing a duty upon local authorities to assure the quality of home education and that adequate safeguarding occurs, as well as the duty for local authorities to maintain a register of home-educated children. We wish to raise the following considerations:

• What information will be placed on the register? Our contention is that ethnic monitoring as well as last school attended should be included. This way, it could be used to monitor whether particular areas or schools have un-representatively large numbers of home educated children; “Off-Rolling” is a problem for many groups and is a particular blight on GRT students- having a way to monitor this would be useful. A system of checking this should be put in place and an investigation to see if a school is engaged in illegal off-rolling should be triggered if the proportion of former students now home educated from a particular ethnic group is significantly higher than would be expected.
• Will there be a duty on parents/guardians to provide information or on local authorities to find it? What happens if a parent refuses to give the information? Some GRT have a distrust of council officials, would they receive sanctions for not providing this information?
• If a student leaves school without enrolling in another this should trigger an investigation by the LA; parents should be expected to provide details of how they will safeguarding the child’s right to an education. The LA should monitor this periodically and provide support (in the first instance) if the education is inadequate (national guidelines needed to allow for non-standard education).
• There should be a duty on parents for inspectors to see the child, rather than just an example of the child’s work.
• A portion of the funding that would have been allocated to the school for the education of a child should instead be allocated to a local authority when a child is withdrawn from education. This budget should be used to support parents to access support, such as regular tutors if it is deemed parents have a low enough level of literacy or numeracy to make them able to meet minimum requirements. Parents who do not engage with the LA would not get access to this funding, thereby incentivising regular contact which would help with assessing safeguarding risk etc.
• The suggestion is that the register would be held by local authorities. What if you are nomadic for at least some of the year? Do you need to register with each local authority you stay in, or pick one just as a base? It would be needlessly expensive and time consuming to have to re-register someone of no fixed abode whenever they took a caravan across a borough line. Our suggestion is to either have one local authority which is sufficient for the entire year or, at least, have a minimum stay length before your details are meant to be sought for the system. The details themselves could be easily transferred similarly to the CME system, using a childs UPN (this should be issued to parents when they withdraw their children from school). If a child is in a new LA for a significant amount of time, the LA they’re staying in can claim a portion of the funding as mentioned in the point above.
• Who is to check whether the LA has fulfilled their duty? Traveller sites are often overlooked; how can we ensure the data held is accurate. Ofsted should be tasked with inspecting the registers and to have a specific focus on ensuring underperforming groups, or groups over-represented in home education, are being adequately monitored.
• Clear criteria need to be drawn up to distinguish “Hands-on education”, as in a child learning trades and crafts from an adult, from using children as labour. Qualified inspectors who understand the UN Human Right definitions of an education.

In terms of the benefits of home education versus the disadvantages

• ACERT entirely supports the right of parents/guardians to home educate their children.
• We also recognise a child’s right to an adequate education which equips them to understand and participate in the wider community
• It is, however, important that this education is of a sufficient standard. Education can take many forms and need not be anything like standard school education, but there should be minimum standards in literacy, numeracy and IT literacy; if parents/guardians are unable to meet these standards (e.g. if they themselves are illiterate) then this would be insufficient; the local authority should mandate hiring tutors or provide them.
• Missing out on school also means missing out on opportunities to engage in “Early Help” such as school counselling, dyslexia assessments etc. a system of regular (quarterly seeming sufficient) visits to monitor non-academic factors such as wellbeing should be put in place.

Other points around home education in relation to GRT students:

• Could it be made possible to be dual registered between school and home education? For traveller families who are seasonally nomadic for work they are currently (under section 444 of the Education Act) allowed to miss school and be marked as a “T” in the register. The problem with this is that it counts as an absence (albeit authorised) and so negatively impacts the child’s and the school’s attendance figured. Schools are therefore almost disincentivised from having children who are seasonally nomadic. If it was possible to “dual register” between a base school and home education that would help remove this disincentivisation
• Of course, checks would need to be implemented to prevent this being abused by people using it simply to go on holiday but avoid fines etc.
• With the launch of the Oak National Academy, could this be a simple way to evidence ongoing work? Analogous to the Australian “School of the Air”.
• There are push and pull factors when it comes to a decision for Travellers to home educate. Inequality, failure to respect identity and difference (including a failure to tackle racist bullying), reluctance to work with parents as equal partners etc. can lead to a decision to home educate that isn’t about a child thriving but simply about removal from harm’s way. Once a family decides to home educate they should be met with by the LA to talk through the decision; collaboratively it should be decided whether they will make attempts to improve the school, change to a more inclusive school or to continue with home education. This will help parents understand their responsibilities and the associated costs (time and financial).

We are in favour of the increased flexibility and the chance to specify in a more meaning way that home education can bring but we are equally aware that the current system leaves parents both unsupported and children unguarded; the scope for children to receive no/insufficient education is enormous, as it the scope for serious safeguarding issues to be missed. We are excited by how potential changes in the way dual registration could help make nomadic living more compatible with a good education than it has been for decades.

https://acert.org.uk/

November 2020