“Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of time. But if she could have looked a little further back… she would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor’s stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward.” - Aslan, C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

When Safeguarding Becomes Surveillance: A Home Educator’s Dispatch from the Frontlines of Procedural Retaliation


🎩 DISPATCH No. 2025-05-23–OFSTED–SAFEGUARDING-BY-THEATRE
Filed Under: Performative Protection · Procedural Vengeance · Education in Exile
From: Polly Chromatic
Director, SWANK London Ltd.
Flat 22, 2 Periwinkle Gardens, London W2
✉ director@swanklondon.com | 🌐 www.swanklondon.com
🗓 23 May 2025

🏛 Subject:

A Formal Complaint to Ofsted

On the Misuse of Safeguarding to Punish Lawful, Disabled Home Educators

Dear Ofsted,

Permit me to raise what I wish I could call an anomaly, but which appears instead to be an institutional reflex: the abuse of safeguarding frameworks to discipline disabled, law-abiding home educators for daring to conduct their affairs on their own terms.

I am the mother of four children. They are well. They are educated. They are thriving in a home education environment supported by documentation, structure, and what can only be called excellence. And yet — in 2024 and 2025 — I found myself repeatedly surveilled, summoned, and scandalised under the false banner of child protection, for no reason other than my refusal to attend verbal meetings that contravene my medical care plan.

🩺 The “Risk” They Couldn’t Find

Social workers from Westminster and RBKC escalated to CIN and CPP status, not because of risk to children — but because of risk to their authority. Specifically:

  • I invoked a written-only communication adjustment, clinically mandated and legally protected under the Equality Act 2010.

  • I declined to perform emotional compliance in person.

  • I refused the theatre. And for that, the curtain fell — on reason, law, and proportionality.

📚 Misuse in Costume:

  • Repeated safeguarding referrals despite zero evidence of neglect

  • Intrusive visits with no pedagogical basis

  • Harmful interference in learning schedules

  • Psychological distress induced in my children for the crime of being parented by a disabled adult who keeps immaculate notes

This is not protection. It is harassment in policy drag.

⚖️ What I Ask Of You

That Ofsted formally acknowledge the following:

  1. That safeguarding powers have been misapplied as punitive tools

  2. That disabled home educators face discriminatory escalation for lawful boundary-setting

  3. That local authorities be instructed and regulated accordingly, before the idea of home education is entirely colonised by suspicion

Let this dispatch serve as both a complaint and a chronicle — of what happens when policy is used not as a shield, but as a stick.

Yours in embroidered defiance,
Polly Chromatic
Director, SWANK London Ltd.
Flat 22, 2 Periwinkle Gardens, London W2
✉ director@swanklondon.com
🌐 www.swanklondon.com
⚠ Written Communication Only – View Policy


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