Social Work and Home Education

Growing calls for greater regulation of home education need a social work response. Social workers are being asked to exercise greater controls over families who reject state education. This move is authoritarian and inconsistent with social work values and should be strongly resisted.

One of the proposals of the Badman Report is that local authorities should be given powers to prevent parents from educating their children at home if a child's 'safety' is in question. These draconian powers are completely unnecessary and represent a step too far in the direction of greater state intervention in family life. Children deemed to be 'at risk' may be forced into school to allow them to be more easily monitored. These changes would effectively put the local authority and home educating parents in opposition to each other and create a great deal of unnecessary stress for home educators. All this would be done for the sake of improved child protection. In reality, the proposed new arrangements would not result in better child protection and may actually cause more harm than good.

A key question hinges on the meaning of the term 'at risk' and whether a social worker should become involved. Social workers carry dual responsibilities - for welfare and protection. In the welfare role the focus is on the child's development in the broadest sense and in providing appropriate services; social work support is only provided with the voluntary agreement of parents. However, in the child protection role the social worker has powers and duties defined by the 1989 Children Act which includes powers to investigate suspected abuse and neglect and, if necessary, powers to remove the child if it is 'at risk of significant harm'. In this role social workers can use their authority to adopt a firmer, more persuasive style of working to reduce the risks and prevent the need for the child to be taken into care.

If a social worker becomes involved with families where the child is home educated it is inevitable that consideration will be given to whether the child would do better in a state school. However, the social worker is not an expert in education and should therefore take great care to avoid making any 'educational' judgements. The social worker should bear in mind that many children are failed by the state system and consider the emotional impact on the parent-child relationship of enforced school attendance.

Recent legislation has scrapped the long-standing principle of non-intervention with home educators and social workers are now required to take a greater interest in the education and welfare of home-educated children. In addition, government guidelines are deliberately blurring the boundary between child welfare and child protection. This has made the role of social workers more complicated and caused some confusion about their legal powers. On occasions, social workers inappropriately use child protection powers in situations where identified 'safeguarding concerns' are trivial and questions are now being raised about whether such powers are legally enforceable. Social workers must ensure that their compulsory powers are only used in situations where the child may be 'at risk of significant harm' - and relevant case law shows that evidence of abuse or neglect must be substantiated.

Many problems have arisen in child protection work because the 'safeguarding' role has broadened the scope of the work but created enormous confusion throughout the education system about what the term actually means. There is a perception that families are sometimes treated unfairly and professionals use 'safeguarding' to mean whatever they want it to mean. It is not surprising that home educating parents are alarmed at the prospect that social workers, with an ever-widening remit to safeguard children, may want to visit them.

The current system for protecting children from abuse and neglect is well-established and there is no evidence that additional legal powers are required. Although recent scandals have shown high-risk cases not being picked up that is more due to the system being overloaded than anything else. It is often the reluctance of local authorities to make use of their existing legal powers in high risk cases that is the problem.

Apart from the threat to civil liberties there are serious questions to be asked about whether local authorities should be taking on additional responsibilities at a time of financial cutbacks. There is a workforce crisis in child protection social work and many frontline workers are already struggling to cope with large caseloads. Extending the social work role with home educators is definitely not a priority while high-risk cases go undetected.

Hilary Searing