Parents who want to educate their children at home will now get a much quicker decision from local authorities following new guidance from the Scottish Government.
In the past, families have complained that it can take many months - and in one case a year - for councils to agree to a request to home educate.
However, the new official guidance has ruled that decisions must be made within a six-week period, with the understanding that it could be much shorter than that.
"The aim should be to issue a decision within six weeks of the receipt of the original application. The majority of applications can and will be dealt with well within this timescale," the new home education guidance states.
Last night, the new timescale was welcomed by the Schoolhouse Home Education Association, which is a charity which represents home educators.
Alison Preuss, a spokeswoman for Schoolhouse, said: "It has been a significant concern that councils can drag their heels for months to reach a decision and that makes it a very harrowing process for families, particularly where a child is being bullied.
"Hopefully, the new guidance will resolve that issue."
Figures published in 2006 show there were 580 children receiving home education after being removed from a local authority school in Scotland. A further 126 were being taught at home having never been to a local authority school.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article