On 17 December 2021 Education Minister, Jeremy Miles MS responded to our letter of 30 November. His reply [PDF] did not address the points we have raised previously with him concerning use of the UNCRC as justification for the registration and monitoring of all electively home educated children.
On 19 January we replied to the Minister restating our main concerns, and our willingness to meet with his officials. Our letter is reproduced below or is available as a PDF.
Date: 19 January 2022
To: Jeremy Miles – Minister for Education
Dear Mr Miles,
Thank you for your letter of 17 December.
We appreciate that your work as a Minister carries many responsibilities, and that your time is therefore limited. This is why in response to your previous offer for members of our group to meet with your officials, we stated in our letter dated 30 November, “We would be happy to do this at some point, provided that doing so does not distract in any way from our central concern in relation to the interpretation and application of the UNCRC with regard to electively home educated children.” We confirm that we remain motivated for representatives of our group to meet with your aides, even though it seems they will be unable to address our main concerns.
It was only after we last wrote to you that we became aware that your colleague, Jane Hutt, MS, Minister for Social Justice had responded four days earlier on behalf of the Government to the Children’s Commissioner for Wales’ 2021 Annual Report. We were encouraged to read in section 11, on Home Education, that the Government rejected the Commissioner’s call for primary legislation, though we also note the commitment to, “implement the proposals previously consulted on in 2019 and 2020.”
We therefore trust that during “the final consideration of the consultation responses,” the Government will take careful and proper account of the two legal opinions provided to them by Protecting Home Education Wales in response to the previous consultations, along with the relevant points from our own more recent submission to yourself as Minister for Education.
We look forward to hearing from your officials so that a meeting with them can be arranged.
Yours faithfully,
Families First in Education Wales
If you have not already read and signed our initial open letter to the Minister for Education, you can do both on this page.
Correspondence received and sent since then is available here.
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