Latest News:Latest News - September 2010
Excluded from school or off-rolled – pupils who are lost in the system
A report published in August 2010 has laid bare the amount of children said to be ‘missing from education’ and flags up how some schools are illegally excluding children from education or off-rolling them against the rules.
The Ofsted report states that local authorities are responsible for safeguarding the children living within their boundaries and yet many fail to fulfil these duties. From September to December 2009, 15 local authorities in diverse locations – from urban to rural – were visited to assess how children’s services, council departments and other agencies worked together. The results were not at all promising, with not one of the children’s services departments feeling confident that it knew about all of the children living in its area.
When families move around within an area or even out of the area, the Local Authorities don’t seem to be able to keep track of children and in only five of the 15 LAs visited was this issue being addressed. These were the authorities working closely with health professionals to identify children not being placed in school and flagging up their existence to children’s services to enable the children to be placed in education.
More worrying for us was the finding that some schools are not following clear protocols for taking a pupil off the school’s roll – off-rolling – excluding them entirely or enforcing a part-time timetable. This places vulnerable pupils at great risk when schools do not follow the correct guidelines and procedures – pupils who are out of school unofficially and where no action is taken by the Local Authority are more at risk of exposure to drugs and alcohol, crime, pregnancy and mental health problems.
Shockingly, in 14 of the 15 authorities surveyed, there was very little communication between state schools and independent schools about pupils’ movements. Not only that but independent schools and Local Authorities are found to have particularly poor communication channels – there has been a call for new legislation to address this issue, but that legislation has not been introduced.
In every authority surveyed schools were found which did not follow the rules for excluding pupils and when schools disregard the policies and processes it means children can very quickly become lost to the system – and may well find themselves in harm’s way.
This report came as no surprise to us at Maxwell Gillott as it is entirely consistent with our experience of many local authorities. All too often parents come to us in situations where children have been lawfully or unlawfully excluded from school and have been left entirely without provision for education and special educational needs for weeks, months or even years.
We have a great deal of experience in this field and often find that a well-phrased solicitor's letter on its own is enough to wake local authorities up to their responsibilities; however, if necessary, the issue can be taken to court in the child's name, often with public funding, and again we have an excellent success rate with such cases.
As experts in Education Law with a strong track record of handling school exclusion cases, we are following developments closely and would be happy to offer advice and guidance if you would like to take legal action in this specialised area of law.
Please get in touch with our team on: 01524 596080 or email us at office@mglaw.co.uk.
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© Maxwell Gillott 2008
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