I reiterate Lesley Scott’s thanks for the opportunity to come before the committee.
It is hard to condense what has become our lives’ work into a few minutes. Home educators have been at the sharp end of the SHANARRI stick right from the outset, and we have evidence of multi-agency professionals getting it wrong and acting outwith the law.
Home education might be a minority activity but, when the rights of minorities are trampled on, the rights of everyone are trampled on—that is a basic founding principle of human rights law. Home educators recently conducted a survey in which it was found that the major drivers for home education were unmet additional support needs, including chronic illness and disability, safety issues in schools and the GIRFEC cult, which has also led to parents abandoning nurseries and other care settings because of excessive data gathering that amounts to profiling. For example, background checks on home-educating parents have no legal basis, but they have found their way into local policies. Entire families have had their health, police and social work records accessed without their knowledge. That is contrary to national guidance, the general data protection regulation and convention rights.
In mid-May, I wrote to the education directorate to raise serious concerns, but I have had no reply. We have found that being ignored by public bodies is quite commonplace and that even lawyers’ letters now go unanswered—we might say that that is due to non-engaging professionals. The problem is that they are all working to practices and policies that have remained uncorrected since the Supreme Court judgment, including the 2014 child protection guidance, which shifted the threshold for data processing without consent.
We found from the minutes that it was a series of backroom deals that caused the threshold to be dropped to the subjective notion of “wellbeing” from “significant harm” in 2013. That was a year before the Children and Young People (Scotland) Act 2014 was passed and three years before the data processing provisions were due to come into force—they never did, of course. The minutes also said that the public were deliberately kept in the dark because there might be an adverse effect. We sounded the alarm at the time, but we were completely ignored and excluded from the debate.
The Government needs to get its story straight. Either GIRFEC data collection and sharing is consent based below the risk of significant harm or it is not. If it is, that is absolutely fine and the higher GDPR threshold will apply. If it is not, we have been misled and there still needs to be a legal basis that satisfies article 8(2) of the European convention on human rights. “Wellbeing” does not cut it, as the Supreme Court said.
Human rights are self-defined whereas SHANARRI wellbeing outcomes are state dictated, as parents have found, and are open to dangerously subjective interpretation. Families have been denied remedy for wrongdoing, having been told that it was all legal when it was not. Even if they had a spare £15,000 for judicial review, legal time bars might well have kicked in.
Meanwhile, inaccurate information is still being peddled by public and third sector bodies, which adds insult to injury. I stress that our evidence is comprehensive and that it comes from public records, freedom of information responses, families’ subject access requests, correspondence and recordings.
We need an independent inquiry into this debacle. There is also a need for victims to relate their experiences to MSPs privately rather than those experiences being paraded in the national press before another assault on human rights is voted through.