2.45
The Committee have requested to receive an update on Elective Home Education and the Oxfordshire situation. Accordingly, the Deputy Director for Education, Hayley Good and the Head of Learner Engagement, Deborah Bell will attend the meeting to give a verbal update on the current situation.
Minutes:
The Committee have requested to receive an update on Elective Home Education and the Oxfordshire situation. Accordingly, the Head of Learner Engagement, Deborah Bell attended the meeting to give a verbal update on the current situation.
The Chairman reported that he had asked for this item to be put on the Agenda as the Performance Scrutiny Committee had requested that the Committee look at the recent Serious Case Review to see if there were any issues for the Committee to take forward.
Deborah Bell reported that the serious case Review was a matter of public record and could be found on the OSCB website. She stressed that the events surrounding the circumstances were aged from an Education perspective and that there was no one in the Local Authority now who was around at the time and they were operating from a very different place now regarding services to electively educating children and families. Although the legislation hadn’t changed, there approach very much had. A lot of work had gone into changing their approach, and she believed that the action plan which would come out of the serious case review, would reflect many of those significant changes, that had already been put in place. The learning and the consequential action plan would also be a matter for public record.
The Chairman stated that from the figures they had been given, they were aware that numbers of parents who were knowingly home educating their child had gone up, it would be a matter of record once they were through the worse of the pandemic how many of those trickle back into school and what the new number was. From conversations held at the Performance Scrutiny Committee it was felt that there was work to be done with colleagues in other sectors like Health, to underline their understanding of what rights the Local Authority had in terms of entry into properties.
The Secretary of State had been written to several times now, asking for a full review of Elective Home Education and the rights of local authorities, so that the rights of local authorities could match in some way to the responsibilities.
Deborah Bell reported that two letters had been sent to the Secretary of State, with a third pending regarding the existing legislation and in terms of learning from Child K, the arrangements for health colleagues to record a child’s educational status had been expanded to incorporate elective home education, which health colleagues were unsighted to at the time. There was now a system in place whereby all electively home educated families were written to annually, for the explicit purpose of highlighting health services that are available for them to access, including school nursing service, who were responsible for the rollout of inoculations to all pupils in Oxfordshire. They wanted to incorporate all electively home educated children in that cohort.
When a child became electively home educated in Oxfordshire, they now had an information pack that was sent out, highlighting health services that they were entitled to access. That was not in place at the time of the events surrounding Child K.
Councillor Pressel queried whether the authority ever paid for exam entrance for children who were being electively home educated. Deborah Bell reported that they did not and that there was no obligation or budget to do it, and it was something that was articulated very clearly to parents when they make the decision to Electively home educate.
Councillor Howson referred to the fact that the serious case review had made mention of the role of general practitioners in the review and queried whether the issue should be referred to the Joint Health Overview & Scrutiny Committee to have a look at. Deborah Bell commented that the action plan coming out of the review would inform a wider remit than just Education, so maybe to wait until the action plan came out to make that decision.
The Director for Children’s Services, Kevin Gordon stressed that it was being looked at by the Children’s Safeguarding Board.
The Chairman suggested that it be added to the new committee’s work programme for June.