Education: No home help

Elizabeth Harley-Brewer's article on home tutoring (Governesses: are they the answer to parents' prayers? 11 December) touches on the failure of many schools to educate children with special needs satisfactorily. Even with the good intentions expressed in the Government's Green Paper on special needs, there are always going to be some children who simply don't fit into the system and for whom home education is the best option.

We have such a child, who has been totally blind from birth and who has some additional language problems which were not catered for within the school system. When it became obvious the authority could not deal satisfactorily with her needs, we withdrew her from school in order to educate her ourselves at home. So far this has been a positive and inspiring experience for all of us. Like the people mentioned in the article, we use various resources to help.

The authority, far from welcoming our intervention, penalised us by cutting us off completely from all local educational support, so that we are forbidden to make even a quick phone call to the local visual impairment service about technical matters. We were surprised that the authority took such drastic action, when we were actually going to save them a lot of money and take a burden off their shoulders. In effect they were penalising our daughter for their spectacular failure. Blinkered LEAs who refuse to listen to parents, preferring instead to adopt a negative, vindictive approach, will swiftly drive people away into networks of home education. Is this really what is intended?

Dorothy de Val

Blandford Avenue, Oxford