education is compulsory

Notes About SAOs from Education Otherwise

• SAOs are served on the parents of children who are outside the school system.
• The School Attendance Order will name the school your child must attend and will direct the parent to register the child as a pupil at the named school.
• SAOs are often threatened but rarely issued.
• In our experience, a number of local authorities threaten home educators with School Attendance Orders. The main reason for doing this is because families will be intimidated by receiving a legally worded letter mentioning "school" or "court" and will be more likely to comply with the authority's requests. Statistics collected by Education Otherwise tend to suggest that very few School Attendance Orders are actually issued.
• It is therefore important to understand the steps in the SAO procedure and to ascertain whether the authority has moved to the point of issuing the School Attendance Order.
• SAOs come from the Education Welfare department.
• Home education Advisors/Inspectors cannot issue SAOs themselves, the order has to come from the Education Welfare Department in conjunction with the legal department. For this reason, the home education officer may say that the family will be "referred to Education Welfare".

First Steps

In the first instance, we would expect the home education officer at the local authority to give some indication to parents that there were problems with the home education, either in terms of the education itself or in terms of lack of information about the home education being provided.