Following the publication of the revised EHE Guidance in May, and the Ministerial Statement to Senedd on 6 June, the Welsh Government held two sessions with families, “to clarify any queries families may have in relation to the new statutory guidance and parental handbook on EHE.” Those attending had to apply to do so, and the numbers were limited for both sessions. The Children’s Commissioner for Wales chaired the sessions, which were held on 26 and 28 June.
Needless to say there were plenty of questions asked, seeking clarification from the Government officials who attended the sessions. Questions were raised both verbally and also through the ‘chat’ option, and there were too many to answer during each of the on-line events. Following the meetings, queries were also e-mailed independently to the Welsh Government both by attendees and by those who had been unable to secure a place at either meeting.
Replies to the many questions did not come swiftly. Enquirers had to wait until 13 September for a response, but when it came it contained an extremely large amount of information. The Government has to be commended for the amount of documentation shared, whether or not one agrees with the way they have chosen to try and implement the reforms which they say are justifiable.
The purpose of this page is not to comment on any of the documents, but to provide an easy access public domain catalogue of what was circulated. We will almost certainly be commenting on the contents on some of them in the future.
The files supplied cover two periods, with two documented events in each. Prior to the publication of the revised guidance, two training events for LA officers took place in February and March (2023), and documents and presentations related to both of these were included. The other period followed the publication of the guidance, and covers the two sessions described above. Because the latter includes the Government’s responses to the questions it was asked by home educators, we are listing these documents first, followed by those from the training sessions.
Update: 30 November 2023: A further batch of documents has now been made available as a single file by the Welsh Government. They are described in this post “Documents released by Welsh Government reveal highly intrusive objectives“.
The original files were released either as PDF documents or MS Powerpoint slide presentations (.pptx). The latter were large and not accessible to all. These have therefore been converted to PDFs with no loss of information. We have also added a prefix to each file name to provide a logical order to help with future identification on your devices. The prefix ends with a capital letter before a separator character [•]. This is followed by the supplied file name, with minor changes to make them search engine friendly.
The files can be downloaded by clicking on the images below. The short-links on the right are included to make sharing on social media easier, but they are not clickable; please copy and paste.
This page is part of our Welsh Government section
