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Brutal lessons
After a number of horrific abuse cases involving children educated at home, a private members’ bill is proposing a compulsory register – much to the alarm of the homeschooling community. Lucinda Borrell reports
In the wake of shocking cases of abuse, one peer is proposing a compulsory register of homeschooled children – but faces fierce opposition. Lucinda Borrell reports
My mother had a real thing about the soles of the feet. Walking with damaged feet is agony,’ says Christopher Spry. ‘I should know. It was one of the places she liked to beat us.’
Now 29, he calmly lists instances of torture at the hands of his foster mother, Eunice Spry. He went to live with her when he was three years old and was raised as her child for the next 13 years, with four siblings. From the age of five, they were all home-educated, isolated from the outside world. Spry was removed from his foster mother’s care at 16 when his oldest sister managed to contact the police. Eunice was convicted in 2007 and sentenced to 14 years in prison. The presiding judge said it was the worst case of child abuse he had seen in 40 years practising law.
The vicious abuse of Spry and his siblings went undetected by the police and local authorities for so many years in part because Eunice chose to home-educate. ‘I went to school for two weeks when I was five,’ Spry recalls. ‘But Eunice removed me pretty much straight away. I think she was worried, because I was going into school hungry and bruised, that the teachers might start asking questions.’
Spry’s brief experience of formal education took place nearly 25 years ago, yet the minimal legislation covering the safeguarding of home-educated children has not been updated. A decade ago the government’s Badman Review (following the death of a home-educated nine-year-old girl in Birmingham) unsuccessfully proposed compulsory registration for homeschooled children. Since then, organisations with interests in child welfare, including the NSPCC, Ofsted and the Children’s Commissioner, have also advocated for compulsory registration.
There have been a number of high-profile cases this decade in which homeschooling has been brought into question. In 2011, Dylan Seabridge was found to have died of scurvy aged eight while being home-educated in a remote Welsh community. Five years later, 18-year-old Jordan Burling, who was autistic, died after four years of homeschooling; his mother and grandmother were later convicted of his manslaughter (his condition was likened to that of an extermination-camp victim). He was described as being ‘invisible’ to authorities by the prosecutor in the case.
In August last year, a couple from South Wales were found guilty of multiple sexual offences against their homeschooled daughter after keeping her locked in the family home (when rescued by authorities she had never seen a playground, cat, dog or been on a bus). She was only removed from their care after police intervention; the judge in the case described the child as ‘so damaged that it is hard to see how she will ever recover from this’.
After the sentencing, the Children’s Commissioner for Wales and the NSPCC both emphasised the importance of regulation to monitor the welfare of home-educated pupils.
How many other children no longer educated in school are potentially facing the same fate? It is hard to say – local authorities have few powers to find out, and while there is a legislative
‘I think she was worried, because I was going into school hungry and bruised, that the teachers might start asking questions’
attempt under way to improve monitoring of home-educated children, the homeschooling community is vehemently opposed to plans to interfere, as they see it, with how parents and guardians raise and educate their children.
Homeschooling has boomed recently. In the past few years the number of children voluntarily registered with local authorities in the UK as homeschooled has jumped from 34,000 (2014/2015) to 48,000 (2016/2017). The true figure may be significantly higher as many parents do not choose to register their children as homeschooled.
Free, as they see it, from the rigid ethos of mainstream education, many thousands of parents, including actor Nadia Sawalha and singer Stacey Solomon, successfully oversee their children’s education at home. Yet children find themselves educated at home for other reasons: exclusion from mainstream schools (including the contentious practice of ‘off-rolling’, whereby schools, because of behavioural issues or academic underperformance, coerce parents to home-educate), failure to secure school of choice, chronic health conditions, parental religious preference – and occasionally, as a cover for abuse.
The extent of child abuse within the UK is not easy to gauge. The NSPCC estimates one in five children suffer domestic abuse and, according to the National Association of People Abused in Childhood (NAPAC), 90 per cent of sexually abused children know their abuser. A NAPAC spokesperson confirmed that in a significant number of these cases, the abuse is committed by family members. Of those sexually abused, the Children’s Commissioner estimates that only one in eight are known to the police and children’s services.
‘We don’t have any issue with homeschooling,’ one anonymous social worker said. ‘There are parents doing amazing jobs. Our concern is that if something goes wrong, children have nowhere to turn to, so any issues go unreported. The lack of registration means if a child is being kept deliberately isolated then we won’t know if things are going wrong.’ The Government recorded 646,120 referrals to children’s social services in 2016/17, just over half of which were related to domestic abuse. Police and then schools and education staff were responsible for the most referrals.
Schools must inform the local authority if a child is removed by a parent. But there are no obligations on families to register their child’s education status if the child never attends or relocates. As the Home Education in England report, published by the Government in May 2018, stated: ‘Local authorities have no statutory duties in relation to monitoring the quality of homeeducation on a routine basis.’
That may be about to change, in the form of a private members’ bill. The Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill is crawling through Parliament. Its sponsor, Labour peer Lord Soley, has stated that he’s in favour of home-education but is concerned that home-educators need more support, with a ‘small minority’ of them potentially covering up abuse. He proposes a national register of home-educated children alongside an annual visit to check ‘educational and physical welfare’.
‘Homeschooling families tend to fit broadly into one of three categories,’ says Soley. ‘The first group is the parents who are doing a great job. The second group are the people who may have had to homeschool their children because the school system has for whatever reason failed them.
‘The third group are families where abuse is occurring, and homeschooling rules – particularly in their current format – are being used to hide this,’ he says. ‘As part of my research in this area… I’ve had contact with a lot of former [home-educated] pupils who support what I am doing because they feel their experience was abusive.’
He adds, ‘These laws aren’t designed to restrict families doing well. It will allow these families to continue, but will provide additional support.’
But within the homeschooling community there is widespread concern that the bill will hand local authorities unprecedented powers. ‘An annual inspection is misguided and potentially harmful because it will lead to the imposition of the very thing parents are trying to save their children from – a dumbed-down curriculum driven by a harmful agenda of political correctness,’ says Chris Mcgovern of the Campaign for Real Education, which lobbies for parents to have more autonomy over education. ‘There is some support in the home-
‘The UK is the leader in home-education… Registers don’t keep children safe – if they did, no schoolchild would suffer abuse’
schooling community for a register but little for the destructive dead hand of inspection. We subscribe to the UN conventions of human rights – so this will be contested in the name of fundamental rights of parents.’
Eileen Tracy, a home-educator, was until recently in dispute with Westminster Council about the education of her daughter Lilian, star of the West End show Matilda. She is highly critical of the proposed legislation. ‘UK children are not safe in the hands of local authorities,’ she says. ‘The UK is the leader in home-education because its laws have been based on presumed innocence. Bureaucrats currently have sufficient legal powers to take action where they see cause for concern. Registers don’t keep children safe – if they did, no schoolchild would suffer abuse.’
Every homeschooled abuse survivor who spoke to the Telegraph Magazine for this article claimed that an absence of proper monitoring contributed to their abuse. Jessica, 35, was home-educated from the age of nine. ‘Being homeeducated removed the safeguarding and enabled the [sexual and emotional] abuse I experienced as a child to continue until I was taken into care at 13,’ she says. ‘Once I was removed from mainstream school my education stopped. I was left in the custody of my abusive mother for several years.’
Another homeschooled pupil, who preferred to remain anonymous, was sexually abused by her stepfather – the absence of monitoring meant she felt she had nowhere to turn. ‘Homeschooling isn’t something I would rule out myself [for her child],’ she says. ‘But I think it’s essential to tighten the laws to avoid what happened to me, happening to someone else.’
Lord Soley worries too about children in illegal schools. Ofsted contends that some illegal schools, particularly those that have recently come to its attention within Muslim and orthodox Jewish communities, exploit the current legislation to avoid prosecution. According to Victor Shafiee, Ofsted’s deputy director for unregistered schools, ‘We often identify potential illegal schools, but then these schools will do things such as reducing class sizes or contact hours. This means that pupils are technically homeschooled so what they are doing isn’t illegal. But it is unsafe.’
In some areas of the UK, additional monitoring of children by authorities is already under way. Following on from success in Darlington, police and local authorities in County Durham two years ago launched an initiative to check on children who have not been seen by the authorities in 18 months. ‘We provide support to the local authorities when it comes to children they have concerns about because they haven’t been seen,’ says Detective Superintendent Victoria Fuller. ‘We work with them to visit families so they can identify if the family needs additional support and to alleviate any welfare concerns. In some of these cases, issues have been identified that are classified as neglect.’
For its part, the Department of Education continues to insist that all homeschooled children have the same access to safeguarding as pupils in mainstream education. A spokesperson says, ‘There are thousands of parents across the country who are doing an excellent job of educating their children at home. We know, however, that in a very small minority of cases children are not receiving the standard of education they should be or, very rarely, are being put at risk.
‘We have also consulted on revised guidance that will help local authorities and parents better understand safeguarding laws applicable to home-education. We are considering the responses and will respond to both the call for evidence and consultation in due course.’
‘I think it’s essential to tighten the laws to avoid what happened to me, happening to someone else’
Lord Soley’s bill is due for its second reading in the House of Commons next month, but, as a private members’ bill, it is unlikely to become law. Fiona Nicholson of home-education consultancy Ed Yourself believes ‘it won’t get through the legislative stages’. Lord Soley said last year he thought that it had a ‘60 per cent chance’ of becoming law, but worries that the Brexit log-jam will delay its progress. The bill, nevertheless, is still provoking debate.
Christopher Spry, who wrote a book called Child C about his experiences at his foster mother’s hands, has emerged from his years of abuse with a career and describes himself as happy. He explains, ‘There is the life that happened back there to Christopher and then there is who I am today. In my head the two people are separate.’
Others have not been so fortunate – should Lord Soley’s bill not make it on to the statute books, the home-educated children of the UK will have to do as they have done for decades: trust in the goodwill and care of their parents and guardians, and hope that these will keep them from harm.