Various Outcomes

Anon usefully put the following case in comments to a previous post:

"Whatever the result of this (the consultation process), it will produce a set of guidelines, not new law. You are free to ignore these guidelines if you feel that they should not apply to you, and you can challenge any Local Authority trying to implement these new guidelines as if they are a set of new laws.

"If the guidelines are what everyone wants (how likely is that in this control freak infested government) then fine, 'democracy at work' and all of that. Everyone should be braced however for a set of guidelines that are bad news. "

It is my understanding however, that the guidelines cannot exceed the law. My contention is that if the guidelines give explicit instruction to local authorities to intrude, monitor and prescribe, then they will have gone beyond the law, and we should be asking for the law to be re-written in order to reflect the effective change within it. (Not that we want this, but then, neither do they.)

I believe that the greater worry is that the guidelines will be written so as to be so ambiguous that LAs will be able to abuse the law, but then that differs little from the situation we have currently, save for the fact that we will all be known to the authorities and the guidance on the Children Missing from Education which stipulates that HEKs are not the target of the initiative is unlikely to be respected.

However, far better this, than a mass of state intrusion and prescription as was proposed when the matter of guidelines was first raised. Then we really would have been stuffed good and proper.