Most regular readers will know that our local authority home ed advisor is a very lovely lady who we have a great relationship with. You may also know that her post is being “deleted” soon meaning that her role will be taken over by the Educational Welfare Department. But anyway….
I phoned her yesterday to see if I could put her name on a form and ended up on the phone for very nearly 3 hours. It seemed ironic that at the same time that some people are being told absolute tosh by their LA, I was being told really useful information by mine and being reminded to have copies of the relevent law handy when her replacements step in as they may not have had time to read and digest it all.
She did our “annual visit” over the phone whist we were at it, meaning that I won’t get visited again this accademic year and thus giving the new people the best part of a year to get a grip on the law before bugging me. She didn’t put it quite like that but she’s very good at meaning more than she says! She was careful to make sure that all of Aprilia’s little difficulties were recorded in her file in a way that relates them to the how and why of our home ed which will mean that, if she is no longer in the position by the time the DLA get round to contacting the dept then whoever does fill in the form will have no doubts as to things like bed ed being needed on days when her joints are just too sore etc. It will also mean that, when the new people do want to speak to me, they will know all about her learning problems etc which will save me having to explain it all.
She moved on then to other stuff I may be interested in and in between tidbits of info on the local colleges’ entry requirements and policies and suggesting that statementing may be useful before Aprilia goes to college (so taht all the funding will be sorted more easily – there is funding for HE special needs to go to college at 14 same as there is for mainstream ed special needs to go rather than either waiting for 16 or being in a school that doens’t provide them with the ed they need!) so mentioned Asdan courses. She was suggesting that, in a few years, the Certificate of Personal Effectiveness may well be a useful bit of paper to have as it counts as a GCSE and would mean that she wouldn’t have to mess about with “core skills” modules at college, just the stuff she actually needs/wants to do.
Obviously, finding a centre that would accept work from Aprilia would be an issue however, it’s been suggested that there could be a “virtual centre” for home ed peeps set up if there was enough interest. The very lowest award, the Stepping Stones programme which is for 7-12 year olds is very cheap to buy into and doesn’t need any payment to register as a centre. Aprilia quite fancies doing this with some of her friends and I’d be happy to add in others if you fancied doing it rather than having everyone registering as their own centres. The website says that clubs and youth groups can register so I see no reason why a home ed group can’t, even if most of the members only see each other sporadically!
The next tier of awards above that would mean registering the centre at the princely sum of around £100 per year at which point I’d be looking at there being at least 10 families clubbing together to pay £10 each and then each family could buy which ever of the short courses they like the look of or the Key Steps package (the next step on from Stepping stones) and we could “verify” them between us I think.
It’s only if there’s some of us looking at doing the highest level courses that it would start getting serious. It costs lots more money to register per year (just under £350) and whoever co-ordinates and “runs” the courses needs to have gone on a training day costing a further £200. So that would mean lots of families needing to be interested to cover the costs or less families and more outlay and either way that’s too scary for this year and not something Aprilia or I are ready for anyway!
I did idly wonder about making a business out of something like this once I’ve finished my degree but then again, do I really want to co-ordinate home educators? I watched the debacle that an Early Years yahoo list woman had to deal with over Education sodding City and that was only sorting out people with a cheap log on to a website! Hmmm…..