Briefing on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
By a Home-Educating Parent | 5 March 2025
On 21 March 2025, from 19:30 to 21:00 GMT, the Family and Life Academy will hold an online conference for parents concerned about the impact on home education of Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which has passed its second reading in UK Parliament.
The purpose of the event will be twofold: to inform and encourage parents to lobby parliamentarians and to build long-term parental resistance to the legislation, which seems likely to pass by a large majority.
At the conference, there will be an opportunity for participants to put questions for discussion to Dr Tom Rogers, representing Parent Power, which has reported on the Bill, and to Randall Hardy, a long-time defender of the freedom to home-educate, whose personal website is No Nationalisation of Our Kids.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill: concerns of home educators
There are five main areas of concern with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill:
- An underlying disregard for the principle that parents are the primary educators of their children and should ordinarily be free to choose whether or not to delegate that responsibility to a school without suffering discrimination on the grounds of that decision.
- Linked to (1), the presumption that homes are unsafe places whilst schools are safe places.
- The unjustifiable amount of data required when registering a home educated child, which presents serious safeguarding concerns relating to data protection issues.
- A lack of clarity which leaves the way open to abuse of any new laws based on this Bill.
- A substantial increase in the power of Local Authorities to scrutinise home educating families which is not balanced by any substantial commitment to supporting those families.
1. Parental rights
Section 25 Clause 436C (f) requires parents to justify why a child is not attending school. The implication is that school is the proper place for a child and that by not sending the child to school, parents are neglecting a duty and are at fault. In the UK, we have a strong tradition of civil liberties, and our laws regarding education have long worked on the basis that the state provides schools to assist parents in the education of their children. The principle has always been that it is for parents to choose to delegate their responsibility to the state. Now, for the first time, the Government proposes to overturn this principle and insist that the state — not the parent — has a prior right to determine where, when and how a child should be educated. Currently, the right of parents to educate their own children is only called into question when there is evidence that they are failing to educate; under the provisions of this Bill, parents would be required to prove their suitability to educate their own children in the first place and possibly be denied the right to home educate. Nowhere has the Government adequately justified either proposition: i.e. that the state rather than the parent should ordinarily decide how a child is educated, or that non-registration at school is of itself a safeguarding concern.
One implication of this thinking was highlighted recently when a local government official, giving evidence to the Select Committee on Education in early February, explained that what officers wanted was the power to enter the homes of families and ”interview children in their educational setting”. Private homes cannot be equated with (and therefore subject to the same scrutiny as) public educational settings. Such intrusion would be a violation of our right to privacy and to this author’s knowledge is unheard of in any other situation where there is no prior evidence whatsoever of suspicious activity — unless, as already suggested, home education is, for the first time in British legal history, to be deemed de facto a safeguarding risk.
One particular area of the Bill causing concern in our community is Section 24 434A (4, a) regarding Section 47 of the Children’s Act. This states that any parent whose family is subject to an enquiry by Social Services would need to obtain local-authority consent to withdraw a child from school or, if already home educating, could be served a school attendance order (SAO), with all attendant punishments for non-compliance. Home educators know from experience that it is very easy for reports to be made against them by people who, ignorant of the right to home educate, believe their children to be truanting. Such reports often lead to distressing, humiliating investigations in which parents are treated like criminals. Do we want to create a society in which parents who take the time and trouble to educate their own children are automatically suspected of neglect or abuse, and investigated accordingly simply because their children are not registered at a school?
2. Safeguarding failures of the present system
Perhaps the Government does not appreciate that thousands of parents have removed their children from school directly on account of safeguarding issues within the schools. Such children have often been emotionally, psychologically and physically abused, whether by other pupils or by staff; in many cases, their special educational needs have either been unrecognised or unmet. This author has met parents with very young children who were failing to thrive or were even self-harming and suicidal due to their experiences in a school setting. It is important to appreciate the position of parents who are terrified at the prospect of being forced, via threats of fines and imprisonment, to return their child to a situation which has almost destroyed that child’s mental (and often physical) health. The mere fact that these proposals have been put forward is already having a severe detrimental effect on a number of families, and many have asserted that they will go to court rather than comply with an SOA. Is this something the Government wants to see?
The Government repeatedly uses high-profile tragic abuse cases to justify greater monitoring of home educators (most recently the case of Sara Sharif), whilst failing to make clear that in each case, the child victim was already known to the authorities and that such tragedies resulted from a failure to apply safeguards already in place. The irony here is that if enormous amounts of money and manpower are diverted into investigating home educating families, even more children who are really at risk may slip through a safety net already strained to breaking point. We fail to see how this could be construed as an improvement in safeguarding. If the existing powers were exercised effectively, at-risk children could be protected without the need for further legislation.
3. Data collection
The stated intention of the Bill to enforce, by law, the collection and sharing of an unprecedented amount of personal data on families raises serious concerns. Apart from the fundamental question as to whether such intense scrutiny of home educating parents can even be justified, in the light of frequent data breaches across various sectors of the Local Authority and related services there is an understandable lack of trust in those bodies to protect sensitive information. Rather than increasing protections, the potential for leaking (or misuse of) this data poses a very serious risk to children and families, particularly with regard to extended family members and friends who may be involved in the child’s education. There have been cases in which a child’s details have been shared (by official bodies) with an abusive parent with whom the child no longer lives. Addresses have even been revealed, putting a child in danger to the extent that he or she has had to move house. Again, there is a lack of clarity here: does Clause 25 section 463C (1) (b), for example, refer only to the child’s birth-parents or does it extend to step-parents? And if the birth-parent no longer lives with the child (perhaps due to an abusive situation), will data be required and, crucially, shared? None of this is clear. There is no guarantee that any of this data will be strictly used for the purposes for which it is being collected. Section 25 436C 2(k) specifies the right to demand “any other information which the Secretary of State considers should be included”: the open-endedness of this clause is disturbing.
Section 25 clause 436C(1) (e) is excessively intrusive whilst also managing to be vague: what constitutes “substantial involvement” in home education? Will schoolchildren also be required to register all those involved in their education, such as after school sports coaches and music teachers? If not, why this discrimination against home-educated children who are attending exactly the same groups at the same time? Or must parents only record those who help their children strictly between the hours of 9am and 3:30pm? This seems arbitrary to families whose education goes on during all waking hours. Home-educating parents often help to teach each other’s children (an extremely beneficial arrangement for all involved): such parents may stop offering help, not only because they do not have time to keep such records, but because they do not want to face undue investigation into their (perfectly legal) activities. Parents understandably struggle to see how this is increasing the safety of their home educated children, or contributing in any way to the quality of their education. They feel that not only would this legislation be discriminatory, it would be completely unworkable in practice: outside of school, children learn with many different people in many different settings and these change frequently. Again, there is a lack of understanding of how home education differs from schooling.
David Wolfe KC, a barrister specialising in civil liberties issues, has assessed this Bill on behalf of the home education community. It is his conviction that in its current form the Bill clearly engages Articles 8, 9 and 14 of the Human Rights Act 1998: an “interference which the Department has not even mentioned, let alone sought to justify” in its ECHR Memorandum. Members of the UK’s Jewish community have already threatened the Government with legal action on human rights grounds should this Bill become law. Other groups are currently preparing to take similar action.
4. Lack of clarity
Data is being collected in order that local authorities can monitor and assess the “suitability” of a child’s education and judge whether or not it would be in a child’s “best interests” to attend school rather than be home educated. The conditions under which such suitability or best interests are to be assessed are dangerously vague and leave parents at the mercy of the subjective opinions of local authority officials: such vagueness seems unreasonable and undemocratic and would only exacerbate the sort of “postcode lottery” home educators already face when dealing with officials on a local level. Given that concepts such as “suitability” and “best interests” are too broad to be given any universally applicable definitions (they must be assessed on a case-by-case basis if they are to be reasonable), we struggle to see how this dangerous level of subjectivity could be avoided. Under the terms of this Bill as it currently stands, parents would have no means to challenge their particular local authority’s working definition of “a suitable education” other than by appealing to the Secretary of State or taking legal action: again, many parents are prepared to go to court rather than accept the local authority’s judgement on this issue, not least because local authority officials notoriously have little understanding of how home education works in practice and how it differs radically from schooling.
This lack of understanding is highlighted by the requirement in Section 25 clause 436C (d) to detail the “amount of time which a child spends receiving education”. Home-educated children often learn in ways which do not involve the kind of school-style direct teaching which the term “receiving education” implies; rather, this form of education can be happening at any time and is often interest-led and self-directed (this is indeed one of the keys to its success in forming children who are lifelong learners). If an official’s idea of “suitability” means “to what extent does what is happening in this home resemble what would be happening in school” then the government should prepare itself for an avalanche of SAO cases, because education at home simply does not resemble schooling in any substantial way. There are many ways to educate a child to a high level: schooling is only one of them, and arguably, in England at the moment, not the safest or most effective. Do we want to see parents going to court simply because they have a different understanding of what constitutes a “suitable education” for their child, or because an official who doesn’t even know their child claims to have a better idea of what is in that child’s “best interests”? This is heavy handed indeed.
5. Lack of support
Whilst extending ill-defined powers to Local Authorities, the Bill offers little if any effective protection or support for the tens of thousands of families who choose to home educate. For example, there is no offer of support for home-educated children taking GCSEs, which is a notoriously challenging process. First, there is the question of costs. An exam board charges around £50 per exam entry, yet home educators are required to pay an average of £150 to £200 per exam in a local school (now more, if it is an independent school, due to VAT), rising to £250 to £400 per exam in a commercial centre such as Tutors and Exams. Parents (unsurprisingly) prefer to use local schools but, since Covid, most schools have closed their doors to us. In many boroughs, there is not a single secondary school which accepts home educated students for public examinations: shockingly, there is no exam centre in the whole of Cornwall and parents must travel to neighbouring counties for exams. Bear in mind that each child needs to take between five and ten exams, that each exam consists of between two and four papers, and that exams can be spread over a six week period: this means that in addition to the cost of the exam itself, parents must also factor in the cost of transport to and from each paper. Increasing numbers of parents are now forced to travel so far that they have to pay for overnight accommodation. As you know, parents receive no financial assistance towards examinations. If the Government is serious about wanting to ensure that home educated children are not “left behind” they might help with these costs. At the very least they should ensure that local councils commit to providing at least one accessible, affordable exam centre in each borough.
We are often told that home education is a form of private education akin to private schooling, the implication being that parents who chose this route must be affluent. The truth is that parents home educate because they feel it is right for their children, regardless of socio-economic status; indeed, it is often parents in deprived areas whose children are most severely let down by the local schools. The decision to home educate normally involves the loss of one income, with all the sacrifices this entails: as the cost of exams increases, home education is sadly in danger of becoming the preserve of an affluent elite rather than a legal recourse for parents who legitimately feel that it is in their child’s best interests. If registration is made mandatory (and if so, it should be no more than a child’s name, age and address, since local authorities already have powers to investigate education provision once a child is known) what substantial assistance will be given to balance scrutiny with support?
Click here to sign up for the conference on the impact of Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill on home education, on 21 March 2025, from 19:30 to 21:00 GMT at the Family and Life Academy.
Resources
UK Parliament, The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
David Wolfe KC, “Proposals relating to children not in school: two big issues“
The HE Byte, The Children’s Wellbeing and School’s Bill (tag)
Parent Power, “The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill — a radical undermining of the parent–child relationship“, 30 January 2025.
A Home-Educating Parent, “Stop the UK Bill targeting home educators” (Voice of the Family Digest, 5 February 2025).