What does Elective Home Education involve?
It is parents who are responsible for ensuring that their children receive a suitable education. While most parents aim to do this by sending their children to school, some parents choose to educate their children at home.
The decision to Electively Home Educate should be taken solely by parents and schools should not seek to influence or pressure parents to opt to educate their children at home.
Elective Home Education differs to education which may be provided ‘otherwise than at school’ for example tuition for children who are too ill to attend.
Parents may choose to engage private tutors to assist in providing a suitable education, but there is no requirement to do so.
The local authority recognises that there are a range of styles that a parent may choose, to educate their child at home, including but not exclusively, school at home, autonomous learning, child centred approaches and learning through experience.
Does EHE differ with children with SEND?
The right of parents to educate their child at home applies equally when a child has Special Educational Needs (SEN). Where a child has an Education, Health & Care (EHC) plan and is Electively Home Educated, it remains the local authority’s duty to ensure that the child’s needs are met and therefore, the EHC plan will continue to be reviewed annually via the statutory Annual Review process. The only difference being that the review will be undertaken with the Family Services Team Coordinator.
If a child has a special school named in the EHC plan, the local authority will need to give its consent to the school to be able to remove the child from its roll. This can only happen when they have information about how the child will be accessing the provision that is laid out in their EHC plan. To do this they will make contact with the parent and ask them to provide this information. The pupil will remain on the roll of the special school until such time as consent is given for the child’s name to be removed from the roll. Should consent not be given, then the local authority will expect the pupil to attend the special school named in EHC plan.
A parent who is Electively Home Educating their child may ask the local authority to carry out a Statutory Assessment or reassessment of their child’s SEND by contacting the Family Services Team and making that request. The Elective Home Education team can help and advise with this process and there is an information sheet available from the team to help parents with this.
Further information
For more information, please visit the Suffolk County Council website.
You can also find more information on EHE, the laws surrounding EHE, and the EHE process on the gov.uk site.