CASE is an organisation that campaigns on education policies but we are not in the business of advising individuals about education law as it affects them.
Example
- CASE would be interested in exchanging information with a group that was campaigning against the threat of prison for the parents of truants.
- CASE would not be willing or able to give advice to a parent facing prosecution for non-attendance.
If you need legal advice:-
- The charity Coram Children’s Legal Centre offers free legal advice on English law and policy affecting children and families.
- ACE education aims to offer a comprehensive range of advice and information on education issues. Please note that its normal opening hours are Monday to Wednesday from 10am to 1pm, term time only.
(Although the ACE phone helpline is much reduced to cuts in funding, ACE now receives an increasing number of enquiries from parents who will not agree to release family name and school name to government-funded advisers.) - Parent-friendly and easily accessible advice is also available from the for-profit sector. The public lawyer, David Wolfe QC, provides a blog entitled “canofworms” which answers questions about how the legal structures for schools became so complicated.
- GOV.UK (“The best place to find government services and information”) tends to refer enquirers to the local authority on such matters as school admission and exclusion, school transport, school attendance and school uniform grant.
- Although the statutory duty for the local authority to provide advice on school choice remains in place, the quality of advice varies, even within the same authority. For example, local authority staff working in Customer Services will not be in as good a position to advise a parent about school choice as the specialist school admissions team, which can often provide the best admissions advice available.
Finally, the post of ‘school choice adviser’ is no longer statutory and appears to have been cut or reassigned by most local authorities.
