"In some extreme cases, home education could be used as a cover for abuse"
It was stated all over the national press and kicked off the notorious Badman review into home education.
Well, using the Freedom of Information Act home educators went and asked all the Local Authorities(LA's) about their abuse stats on home educated children.
Guess what, the evidence shows that they had no reason to target home educators in this way. They could have asked the LA's this before they went to the national press to sling mud at us, and before they set up this farce of a review and wasted £75,000 of public money.
We knew it all along but now the press will know it and hopefully the general public will know it and stop spreading this vicious lie.
Here are the real stats:
LAs with calculated abuse rate 106 (from a total of 152)
LAs with zero abuse 80 (75.5%)
LAs with abuse less than national average 14 (13.2%)
LAs with abuse more than national average 12 (10.3%)
abuse rate in HE community 0.83%
national abuse rate (all children) 1.8%
Full figures with links here:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rbrk5-GEdrUdcmfi670Mihg&gid=2
or
http://tiny.cc/gdk8u
N.B. Even though there is clearly no evidence that home educated children are more at risk of abuse, Badman still recommended the most draconian measures to be taken against home educators and Baroness Morgan welcomed his recommendations in full.
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