We have no hesitation in supporting our home educating friends south of the border who have asked us to sign and publicise their petition to the UK Parliament.
Require local exam centres to accept home-educated students for public exams
Home educators have always had problems getting access to exam centres, either because of distance, lack of provision for access arrangements, or because of excessive pricing by the centres. Since the outbreak of COVID this has become even more of a problem, with many centres pushing up their prices to levels we haven’t seen before, and other centres shutting their doors to home educators completely, leaving the poorest and most vulnerable in our community disproportionately affected.
Without access to exams, many home-educated children are unable to take up college places, apprenticeships, university places, and jobs. A system that withholds opportunities from certain individuals (whether knowingly or not) is called discrimination.
Please sign and share this petition to raise awareness of the problem home-educated children face, so that we too can get the same rights for our children that every other child in the UK has: to take public examinations.
Although education is devolved, many home educated young people in Scotland have opted for English GCSE and A-Level exams. Similar issues have arisen with SQA exams access here and we recently co-signed a letter from Home Education Scotland to the Cabinet Secretary seeking assurances that home educated candidates will not receive less favourable treatment as a result of Scottish exam cancellations in 2021.
The Westminster petition is more than half way to the 10,000 signatures needed to get a government response, so please consider signing and sharing it widely.
There is no doubt Home Educated children should have free and equal access to exams. Anything less is pure discrimination and unfair on families that have already saved the system by choosing to Home Educate their children.