I got it wrong, says mother of six jailed for letting her children go to school when they felt like it
A MOTHER jailed for allowing her children to ‘pick and choose’ when they went to school because she thought they would learn ‘more on a beach than in a hot stuffy classroom’ now admits she was wrong.
Claudia Ward, 42, said prison was the wake-up call she needed and that her children all now had 100 per cent attendance records.
Miss Ward said she initially wanted her six children to have ‘an amount of choice themselves’. She admitted that if her two older children were up late and ‘didn’t fancy’ going to school she would let them stay off. On other occasions she said she had ‘just wanted some company’.
But their schools and her local education authority disagreed with her flexible approach and she was prosecuted five times before being jailed for five months.
Miss Ward, who served ten weeks of a 20-week sentence, admitted: ‘When I spent my first night in the cell, the enormity of what I had done hit home. I felt so guilty; my stubbornness had meant I was on a prison wing in Gloucester, miles away from my young and vulnerable children.
‘I accepted that my views on education were not correct and everyone must adhere to the same rules, or there would be anarchy. It was the wake-up call I needed.’ Miss Ward, who is single, has six children: Jack, 24, Amos, 21, Rudy 17, Annie, 16, Nia, nine, and Riley, six. They have four different fathers.
She was prosecuted in 2008 and then again in 2011 and 2012. But the court heard her children’s ‘attendance issues’ dated back to 2002.
‘If it was a sunny day and I thought one of my children would have been bored and sat staring out the window of the classroom wishing they were at the beach – I could not see the merit of them not being on the beach looking at rock pools,’ said Miss Ward, a freelance creative writer from Falmouth, Cornwall.
‘I thought they would gain far more from that. I thought they would be far better actually there experiencing it rather than sat in a stuffy classroom. My ideas for education were always more outside the box and free-thinking,’ she added.
‘I was all about the children having an amount of choice themselves. This didn’t tally well with the national curriculum. It got to the point where there was no room for dialogue with the school and it was conflict all the way.’
During the 2012 court hearing – which Miss Ward failed to attend – magistrates were told that three of the children’s education was suffering through their absences and one had missed a GCSE exam.
Liz Mozeley, education welfare officer, told Truro Magistrates’ Court: ‘She felt they could pick and choose when they go.’
On that occasion, after a warrant was issued for her arrest, she was given a 12-week prison sentence suspended for 24 months. But the truanting con- tinued and she was jailed for 20 weeks in February 2013. Cornwall Council said it has been working with her for a decade at a cost of about £15,000 and prosecution was a ‘last resort’.
Education welfare officer John Heath told the court: ‘Claudia is a capable woman but has a very odd outlook as far as education is concerned.’
The court heard that three of the children; Annie, Nia and Riley, missed more than a third of sessions between September and December 2012 – equalling 73 whole days.
Miss Ward served ten weeks of her 20-week jail term. She was released in April 2013. Her children were looked after by other family members.
She said: ‘I was shocked and did not for one second did I think they would give me a fivemonth sentence.’ She said she used her time inside to re- evaluate her principles.
‘The wake-up call I needed’