There is no oversight or accountability to the Welsh Government on the use or misuse of existing powers or remits of local councils towards home educating families.

Some may find this surprising,

Others – namely those with lived experience – will not.

But this is confirmed in writing through this Freedom of Information Request.

The Welsh Gov want to create a system of oversight of law-abiding, loving home educating families by LAs,
but there is no oversight of monitoring of those LAs.

How can this be acceptable?

We look to the next Welsh Government and Members of the Senedd to pause any consideration of increasing powers and remits of councils towards home educating families until there is an efficient, effective, reliable means of accountability and monitoring of the use of these, alongside an impartial means of redress for any misuse or inappropriate conduct.

LAs, with the encouragement of the previous Welsh Government, have already been trying to create questionable systems of oversight and monitoring of law-abiding, loving families,

Without oversight or monitoring of themselves, without accountability.

If Welsh LAs have poor policies on EHE that overstep remits or that are inappropriate in some way- there’s no accountability to the government that issues the guidance LAs are meant to be following,
to the guidance that the government has (repeatedly but mistakenly) called statutory.

There is no other accountability of LAs.

Internal complaints are handled by the same departments and people that the complaints relate to.
Research by the charity Education Otherwise demonstrates the inadequacy of both internal complaints processes or attempts to engage the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO) as theoretical means of trying to address incorrect or inappropriate conduct by LAs.

That research report clarifies that the LGO has confirmed in its reports that it will not examine whether policy is lawful, or investigate complaints about decisions/assessments made by council staff, and concludes:

“Home educating parents have no viable means of redress in the face of unreasonable conduct by their local authority. The current position encourages poor conduct by authorities which is supported by the DfE”.

It is worth noting that in the time frame covered by this FOI, in just the last couple of months, the Welsh Government have commissioned two evaluations that each involve input and feedback from council staff and departments of their opinions, but that excluded feedback from the community impacted.

One of these was a commissioned evaluation of the considered efficacy of Welsh Government’s EHE guidance, as considered here,
a commissioned report essentially eliciting opinions of council staff on what increased powers they wanted, whilst excluding input from the community affected.

The other was an evaluation, commissioned from the same commercial company, of Welsh Government’s CME database pilots, as reviewed here.
Again, only the council staff were permitted to take part, with those affected excluded from participating.

Both of these were commercially commissioned gatherings, at undisclosed expense to the taxpayer, of the opinions of council staff but not of those of the community affected.

So, feedback had been obtained when it had suited the Welsh Government, when it was part of an expression of desire for increased powers.

But not for how existing powers are used or whether they are held to.

This cannot be acceptable.

We repeat our call to the next Welsh Government, and to those who seek to be elected to represent the people of Wales:

• Make sure the government and councils of Wales are accountable to the people of Wales.
• Make sure any policies are based on the lived experience of the people of Wales.
• Listen to the people of Wales before considering acting.

Are these really too much to ask?

To repeat:

We look to the next Welsh Government and Members of the Senedd to pause any consideration of increasing powers and remits of councils towards home educating families until there is an efficient, effective, reliable means of accountability and monitoring of the use of these, alongside an impartial means of redress for any misuse or inappropriate conduct.