I wonder if OP is from the DofE media team spreading propaganda about home education again?

There are quite a few assumptions and attribution biases in this thread. The reality about education is complex but I will try and outline in one place here.

The education system for many children has collapsed. The people who home educate from the outset struggled at school themselves, so don't want the same for their children. The occasional parent does it because their child is not challenged enough at school so they can do more at home. Some do it for religious reasons and a significant portion do it because the education system does not meet their needs.

Barriers to accessing suitable full time state funded education include: - Local Authorities up and down the country make unlawful decisions systemically and repeatedly in order to cut costs, particularly for children with EHCPs. - regulations of these decisions are fragmented, expensive, not guaranteed to work and have long waiting times of over a year. . Parents either have to go to SENDiST for failure to assess, failure to issue EHCP, content of some parts of the EHCP. The burden of proof is on them, so they could spend tens of thousands on evidence and witnesses and not get that money back. LAs spend an awful lot of money on barristers defending their decisions and not on the children themselves! - maladministration is similar , with the LGO only looking at 20% of complaints submitted. Cases are taking over a year to investigate and awards of fault by the LAs are token amounts, not really full compensation of the true cost of the injustice.

• some elements of getting access to education like home to school transport and personal budgets actually take judicial review to get your child the help they need. This is tens of thousands of pounds and no guarantee this will work. JR is also used for schools and LAs who simply refuse to follow the EHCP or follow the SENDIST tribunal. This happens a lot. Bullying is rife in schools, and not being addressed too, which is a reason for parents to pull their child out of school. For many, it's not just a case of try a different school. Many families simply don't have a true choice like outsiders believe.

• things like dyslexia come out of a school's budget so they are inclined to maybe screen but won't do a full assessment. This disability is complex, but almost 100% of the time, a parent would have to pay privately. Then pay privately again for specialist tuition. This is again tens of thousands of pounds.

• if your child’s needs aren't being met through all this, and child starts not wanting to go to school, parents are threatened with fines as though it is their fault.

• for specialist medical input, the government is not funding things like therapies properly. Speech and Language therapy has been in extremely short supply for a very long time. They might get paid enough for assessments and not enough for actual therapy. The local authorities are responsible for commissioning these services and will only commission them for children attending mainstream school. Home educated children, especially those with no ehcps, can not access this help. Even for those with EHCPs this is a gamble as to whether it will he provided as you are at the mercy of the Local Authority. They do not have the child's wellbeing at heart. The therapy is actually an outdated, restricted model of child development. It is little wonder no progress is made .

• the whole of the education department is being informed by an ill-informed medical workforce. I was even telling a paediatrician yesterday about a condition that affects cognition, in which there are a few clinics in the UK, and they had never heard of it (trained in the 80s). But this is an example of how badly trained most mainstream medics are here. There is pretty much no NHS treatment for things like auditory processing disorder, or eye tracking issues. Both needed to be able to read, write and spell. ADHD medications is another one very difficult to get assessed, medications titration etc on the NHS.

• parents who home educate get no funding whatsoever, so I see many children who could do with help, but don't have the financial means to go private. There is no clear cut path way defined in the mainstream as to who to go to first. Parents have to pay for exams, they don't get access to free school meals etc. If a child is not ready to sit a GCSE, then it is unlikely the parent will pay for it. (Don't forget exams like this are standardised so a certain percentage fail).
• DofE are spending £90million on media coverage of their vision, have added vat onto independent schools (some have a large percentage of SEND Children), so they are closing down. They are working on removing children with SENDs legal rights but still not sufficiently funding the change necessary to meet the kids needs. They are not investing this money into the children directly.

So let's go back to oversight: do you agree that a system that is failing our kids and families so badly, should be given carte blanche to decide what is considered a full time suitable education for a child when meeting them once a year for 5 minutes? Who is to say that history or French is suitable for child with learning disabilities? Or how long they should be sitting at a desk for when they need to move? For the case of the child that is at the stables all day, how do you really know they don't have SEND? Many of these things are invisible, even to the "experts". Home educating parents know to look for learning in the every day, so running a stable is one of them. The child is socialising with other people, learning to look after another being, learning maths by working out ratios in the feed, geometry in dressage, measurement in between the show jumps, how high the horse is, volume of shavings for the stable. These days spelling might not be the aim as there is auto correct. This child actually sounds they are doing well under the circumstances.

If anyone does suspect neglect, then people can contact their LAs MASH team and they are obliged to investigate.

In my experience, parents who are home educating their children go above and beyond people who are paid to do their job to give their child educational and enriching experiences. For those complaining that their parent did not provide this, this might be a one-sided story. A lot has to do with the child's willingness and ability to do the work. If you had the capacity to do more, but chose to play Minecraft all day, then a lot of that is on you.

At the end of the day, parents who are home educating are having to be educator, TA, LSA, school dinner lady, admin team bus driver, solicitor, barrister, gp, specialist neurologist, nutritionist, therapist. With no break and no pay. It's time to STOP the parent bashing and get on board with changing the systems and culture of child care within the UK. Some parents call it protective home education and are shielding the kids from an abusive system. They can only do so much with the limited resources they have.