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Education: Home Schooling

Answer

We cannot say with absolute certainty that releasing Birmingham City Council's responses to the questionnaires would lead to harassment and vilification of specific individuals in the authority. This does, however, appear to the department to be a likely outcome. The internet campaign of vilification and harassment against Graham Badman and individual home educators who have declared they support aspects of the review has worried local authority officers. Some have suffered personal harassment through the internet, some have found individual home educators have ceased to co-operate with the local authority and others have come under severe pressure from repeated Freedom of Information Act requests which seem intended more to disrupt their day-to-day work than genuinely to be seeking relevant information. We and individual local authorities keep the release of data under review, bearing in mind the nature and intensity of harassment and the risks this indicates. Some local authorities have decided that the risks to individual children and their employees are sufficiently low to release the questionnaire responses. These assessments can only be made at local level and bearing in mind the circumstances prevailing at a particular point in time.

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

761; 716 c23WA

Session

2009-10

Related items

Education: Home Schooling
Thursday, 10 December 2009
Written questions
House of Lords

Subjects

Disclosure of information Birmingham City Council Harassment Home education Questionnaires Home Education Independent Review

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk