The EHEapp has functionality built in for sharing your journal. This can be used for sharing it with family and friends or, if you wish, with your local authority for the purpose of evidencing your child’s educational provision.
The first thing to be aware of is just because you keep a journal doesn’t in anyway mean a local authority has a right to see it. It is entirely up to you how you evidence the education you’re providing so there is absolutely not a right way of doing this. You certainly don’t ever have to fill out a local authority form or answer local authority questions or for that matter share your journal.
As an example of this our parents have been home educating for a very long time and at various times their children have been registered with various different local authorities and up until recently they had never shared anything with any local authority. They simply had a meeting and told them what they were doing. They never had any issues despite the lack of any specific evidence.
But, and it’s sadly quite a big but, things are getting more difficult both for home educators and local authorities. This is leading to less and less flexibility because local authorities are increasingly overwhelmed by the number of home educators they are being required to manage.
Given this new reality the question is how, as individual families, we should interact with our own increasingly stretched local authorities. We think there are three main ways you can use the EHEapp to help with this; we call these the backup option, the limited sharing option, and the share everything option. They each have pros and cons so let’s have a look.
The backup option
As it’s name suggests this is the idea of simply using the EHEapp to help you create your own report safe in the knowledge that whatever the local authority throw at you you have the backup of your journal. This puts you in a much stronger position in your dealings with your local authority and has the advantage of limiting what you’re sharing with them which is important to many of us.
The limited sharing option
If you decide you’d prefer not to write a report and you’re not happy to fill in one of the local authorities forms then the EHEapp offers you the option of simply sharing your journal. We have developed that app to cover the legal requirements of evidencing a suitable education. The app defaults to sharing the least amount of data possible which is just the non-private journal entries – no photos, no educational elements and no philosophy of education . You then decide what else, if anything, you want to share. Often just the journal entries and the philosophy of education will be more than enough to satisfy most local authorities.
The share everything option
We’ve created the EHEapp to enable home educators to satisfactorily evidence their child’s education with the absolute minimum amount of intrusion from the local authority into their family lives. Each aspect of the app satisfies one of the required elements that the courts and government have decided constitute a suitable education.
The journal entries satisfy the requirement for evidencing a full time education. The educational elements help evidence the specific requirement for numeracy and literacy provision. The app takes this further and includes life skills, STEM and socialisation because so much of what we do as home educators has value beyond simply numeracy and literacy. The philosophy of education satisfies the what you’re trying to achieve aspect of a suitable education. Finally, marking journal entries as progress satisfies the achieving aspect of your educational provision.
What the EHEapp can’t do
While we’ve tried to make the EHEapp as useful as possible to help home educators journal their child’s educational journey, ultimately the EHEapp is just a tool. The EHEapp can only record what you actually do and it is what you actually do with your children that will determines whether the local authority is satisfied that you’re providing a suitable education or not. What the EHEapp does is help create and present the things you do in a way that makes it far easier for you and your family and intrudes far less into your family life.