Educational Freedom is a non-profit organisation providing Home Education information and support. Our primary purpose is ensuring all Home Educators have access to FREE information and support. We aim to provide everything you could ever need to know about Home Education.
A great way of ensuring your Home Education journey goes smoothly is to read all of this website. The menu at the top will help you navigate each section.
On each page of our website you will find a video with the audio of that page. (This is a new feature so give us some time to create them all and add them).
Making the decision to Home Educate can be daunting. But be assured that there is plenty of support out there! There are lots of families that have been in your situation, and we have supported tens of thousands of them.
Read through our website to learn all about Home Education. Use the menu to navigate through all of our pages especially the WHAT TO DO FIRST page for your country.
Here’s a sneak peak at our FB page feed where we share factual info as well as fun memes. Drop us a like, a follow and come chat to other Home Educators.
Erosion of Parental Responsibility by the Backdoor
So many of you are panicking right now. And yes the proposals are not good, but speculation and panic won’t help. Take a breath, then become part of the solution, follow the info we have laid out in our news/blog section of our website, we have even written a sample letter for you to use, make sure to keep an eye on updates too. The best way to do that is sign up to our newsletter.
We are saddened and disappointed although not surprised to see the initial announcement of what the Children's Wellbeing Bill will contain. The one thing guaranteed is this contains nothing to genuinely ensure a child's wellbeing it spits in the face of every SEND parent as those children are unsurprisingly ignored, other than if you choose to home educate then you will now have to demonstrate your home environment is safe even if your Education provision is topnotch (note that little or they slid in) it proposes to in effect circumvent other legislation to remove parental responsibility by the back door, for all who choose home education. It does nothing to support parents to protect their children when the school environment is enabling them to be harmed, in fact despite all the news stories over the last few months about the real harm happening to children at the hands of schools it plans to strengthen schools' positions. It appears to be planning to reverse Labour's legislative policies from the last time Labour was in power. It was labour that removed the requirement for qualified teacher status in certain schools, it was Labour that introduced Academies specifically on the premise they would have freedom in what they chose to teach so they would not need to follow the national curriculum. It does not surprise us to see that long-promised support for home educators by this bill appears to have magically vanished and it is now all subjective judgments on home educators, we know the children not in school register will not help a single home educator who wants to be home educating because the children's commissioner has explained its purpose as " If we get proper registers and we have our local authorities taking their responsibilities seriously to engage with these families, we may find that we can get lots of them back to school, which is where they need to be." If I have chosen to home educate my child does not need to be in school, if my child has asked me to home educate them and I act on their request to facilitate there education through home education they do not need to be in school. If I withdrew my child because the school environment was harming them my child does not need to be back in school. Worse than that we already know Local Authorities are not good data handlers. A document released recently shows Local Authorities recording parents' social media accounts on their "CME registers" It showed an active choice to include home-educated children knowingly in receipt of a suitable education on their "CME registers" It showed a substantial proportion of Local Authorities recording children who are not CSA (so do not need to be in education) on their "CME registers". They are not a safe space to hold registers so why give them another register to handle when they can not handle their current responsibilities. As for the unique Identifier comparing it with NI number is disingenuous because my NI number is not held on my medical records it is like saying cheese is the same as milk, and turning our children into data fodder and ensuring they grow up in a world where they never have ANY meaningful privacy rights. We will ensure when the full wording is known to analyse it closely and highlight any specific concerns and potential unintended consequences, let's just hope the DFE got ahead of itself in its blog and the intention is not as bad as it first appears. Until the bill's wording proves me wrong I am nicknaming it the Child's unhappiness bill.
We believe in transparency so every time we send a newsletter to the LAs we share a copy with you. Here's the December issue. Don't forget to sign up to our home education newsletter to see information relevant to home educators. December LA newsletterDownload
We have many decades of hands on Home Education experience between us and many years as a professional support service.
Our team is made up of people from all walks of life, and all styles of Home Education.
We never have, nor will we ever, charge Home Educators a fee to access our website, personal support or anything else.
However, we do have costs such as web hosting, so feel free to donate.
Our aim is that our website contains everything you should need to know.
Beyond that we have a Facebook Page where you can connect with other Home Educators and our amazing admin team. We also have the option to contact us, for those times where you don’t have Facebook.
Staffordshire website design and website SEO by Fellowship Studios.
Keep up to date with home ed news, important info and some fun stuff.
