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Parents will still be able to deregister their child from the school roll at any time, automatically adding them to the Home Education roll.
The topic of home education was brought up during the continued lengthy debate on the now heavily amended Education Law Review.
The Committee for Education, Sport & Culture has presented the Assembly with a modernised version of Guernsey’s decades old Education Law for approval.
There are several propositions in it relating to home education, including an intention to means test parents of home-schooled children prior to the provision of exams. Deputies Yvonne Burford and Victoria Oliver not only sought to remove this, they also wanted to enshrine in law a parent/carer’s ability to take their child off the school roll if minded to do so.
Despite this currently already being the case, Deputy Burford argued that not enough people know it.
She said a parent had told her they’d been informed that to home educate their child they would need permission from the school and Education.
“When I was home educating my son over a decade ago I was also told by the-then education office that I needed to do this, none of which were true.
“Fortunately, I knew the law. It is disappointing that a decade on, home educating families are still being routinely misled as to their rights.
“One only needs to look at the home education page on gov.gg to see this. It says 'your child must - not should - must stay on the school roll and attend full time education until the education officer and school attendance officer have met with you’.
“This might reflect the law ESC would like it to be, but it does not reflect the law as it is and I would ask the Committee to correct this.”
Pictured: Deputy Burford.
On the point about prescribing the availability of qualifications/exams to home learners on an equitable financial basis, Deputy Burford closed her argument with a “sobering point”.
“In a survey of local home educating families undertaken ahead of this debate, two thirds of the respondents said they'd ended up home educating... because the schools and the system had failed them.
“These are children for whom ESC would have been funding their exams had they not failed them.
“The Committee seeks to add insult to injury in my view, by putting them through some unspecified and possibly expensive and intrusive means testing process, potentially resulting in charging them for something they would not have had to pay for.”
All three of Deputies Burford and Oliver’s amendments passed. Debate continues today on further amendments to the Education Law Review.
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