Stop the UK Bill targeting home educators
By a Home-Educating Parent | 5 February 2025
This is an appeal for urgent help to oppose the “Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill” which is being rushed through UK Parliament and which, if passed, would gravely threaten the right of parents to educate their children outside of the school system.
What is the Government proposing?
The current Bill is based on the false assumption that the education of children outside the school system poses, de facto, a safeguarding risk. Working on this assumption, it proposes various measures intended to reduce this perceived risk, including:
- Compulsory registers of home educated children to be kept by Local Authorities (LAs). These will contain a wealth of data including details of the children and parents, the names and addresses of every adult involved in the child’s education, the number of hours children spend “receiving education” daily, the reasons given to justify home educating and “any other information that the Government considers should be included”. Refusal to register will result in fines and the potential issuing of a School Attendance Order (SAO)
- Local Authorities will have the power to issue a School Attendance Order if they judge that parents are not delivering a “suitable education”. Even if education provision is deemed suitable, an SAO can still be issued if the local authority judges it in the child’s “‘best interests”’ to attend school.
- Non-compliance with SAOs will lead to fines, and up to 51 weeks’imprisonment for parents.
Is registration of home educators reasonable?
As Catholics, we need to question the presumption underlying compulsory registration, which is, essentially, that schools are “safe” whilst homes are “suspicious”. The message here is that parents cannot be trusted with their own children. Indeed, several MPs have expressed the opinion that parents should have to obtain permission from the state to undertake home education (this is already the case if a child is attending a special needs school). Such thinking implies that children are the property of the state, a notion which contradicts both natural law and Church teaching, as succinctly set out by Pius XI, in his encyclical Divini illius magistri, where he describes the right of parents to educate their children as “inalienable, because inseparably joined to a strict obligation, a right anterior to any right whatever of civil society and of the State”. This register will be created precisely in order to identify and investigate families who exercise the right not to put their children in school: as Catholics, not least in light of the routine corruption of children in UK schools through relationship and sex education curricula, we need to oppose it in principle.
Will this Bill safeguard children?
The Government claims that this Bill, if made law, will improve safeguarding of children, and has highlighted a number of high-profile abuse cases in order to convince the public that homes should not be regarded as safe places. Yet in every one of these cases, the tragic child victim was known to social services and could easily have been protected under current legislation. Legislation is already in place to deal with cases in which parents who claim to home-educate are failing to provide an adequate education for their children. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence to prove that it is schools which are often not “safe places”. Many of the “signs of abuse” identified in Safeguarding Training are actually part and parcel of the sub-culture and even the curriculum of most schools today: these are the very things from which parents want to protect their children by removing them from school. In light of this, the threat against parents to force their children into a potentially threatening schoo lenvironment is nonsensical and, from the parents’ perspective wholly antithetical to a genuine commitment to child safeguarding. We are home educating in order to keep our children safe.
A “suitable education”?
It is important to note that nowhere in law are the terms “suitable education” and “best interests” actually defined (see point 2, above). In practice, therefore, such a judgement would be based on the subjective opinion of individuals in the local authorities, individuals who may have no experience of home education yet can arbitrarily decide whether the education provision is suitable or not. This could easily lead to unreasonable demands: for example, home educators are under no legal obligation to follow the National Curriculum, yet, if in the opinion of an LA official, a Catholic family’s teaching is not fully in line with the national curriculum’s content on diversity and inclusion, that family’s education provision may be deemed “unsuitable” and their right to home educate revoked. If their children socialise primarily with children of the same faith background, an official may decide that their children are not being “properly socialised” and so deem that family’s education provision “unsuitable”. Who will decide what constitutes a suitable education and what does not? Given the unprecedented rise in home education since 2020, increasing numbers of parents clearly feel that the education offered in schools is no longer suitable for their child. Should they have to go to court to prove that they can offer something better, and safer?
It is also a cause for concern that under the terms of this Bill, SAOs can be issued if a family is at any point subject to an investigation by Social Services, even though the family may be perfectly innocent. In real life cases in recent years, one Catholic family was investigated as a result of a neighbour with a grudge making a malicious allegation to the council, another because a doctor reported suspected abuse when the same child visited A&E twice in the same week. Under current law, each situation was quickly resolved, but under the proposed legislation such families would be in danger of facing discriminatory levels of suspicion and potentially being refused the right to home educate, all on the basis of false accusations.
A better idea…
We feel strongly that if the Government were serious about safeguarding, they would reform a system which has failed to prevent the tragic deaths of known at-risk children in recent years. They would introduce measures to remove corrupting sexual content from the curriculum and take measures to stop the sexualisation of children from even the youngest ages by reforming the clothing industry, the film and TV industry, the mobile phone industry and the advertising industry. They would introduce legislation to give parents the right to know in full what their children are exposed to in the school curriculum and the concomitant absolute right for them to withdraw their children on safeguarding grounds if they feel this is in their child’s best interest. Instead, we are facing a Bill which would remove those rights and force our children into precisely those scenarios should we refuse to conform to the Government’s idea of what constitutes a “suitable” education.
Advantages of home education
On a positive note, we are fighting for the right to teach our children at home, in the heart of our families, because of the truly remarkable results which, by the grace of God, we have experienced. By not attending school, our children are protected from the serious dangers outlined above. They are allowed to retain the innocence of childhood for longer and, despite stereotypical notions to the contrary (and barring inevitable exceptions), home educated children are sociable, non-phone/tablet addicted, unaffected in their naturally joyful attitude to life and learning, happy, fulfilled and secure because they know they are loved and protected. They are not pushed to the point of suffering stress from being overloaded with excessive “schoolwork”, nor are they exposed to curriculum-content and experiences which they are not sufficiently mature to cope with and which can therefore be damaging to their natural development.
Home education works because it is more than simply an alternative method of intellectual formation. In Catholic home-educating families, the education and the family are in a sense one and the same thing. This can be difficult for those not familiar with home education to grasp, but it is the essential point. We are one, we are journeying to heaven together, we are working as a family unit; academic education is an important part of what we are doing, but it is not “standalone”: it is inseparable from every other aspect of our family life. We pray, play and learn together, doing our faltering and imperfect best to make saints of ourselves in all that we do. It is this atmosphere of charity, unity and commitment which protects our children and allows them the freedom to develop into the happy, balanced people they were created to be. It is this precious family unity which is under attack in this Bill, a Bill which may well pave the way for an eventual ban on home education. In many European countries, home education is already illegal; where home education is permitted, the restrictions are such that in reality, parents have no choice but to comply with exactly the same programme as the state schools (i.e. fully monitored “school at home”).
Please join us in this battle to protect our children. We cannot help but be reminded of Sr Lucia’s words to Cardinal Caffarra that the greatest battle we would face would be for our families and indeed, this Bill, in attacking the most basic rights of parents, affects all of us, not only home educating families.
Please consider writing to your MP and/or the Lords asking them to oppose this Bill. Most of all, please keep this matter in your prayers, particularly to St Joseph, patron of families.
May God reward you!
Guidance on writing to your MP
Here are some suggestions for points to make when writing to your MP:
- The legal right of parents to educate their children should be recognised as primary and inalienable. Parents may delegate to the state if they wish, but the right lies with the parents in the first place and it is not for the state to grant this right to parents. The right to educate one’s child is a natural extension of the right to conceive and give birth to the child in the first place.
- A compulsory home education register will not “save lives”. Children in situations of genuine concern are usually known about and already “on a list”. Typically, serious case reviews reveal that there were multiple opportunities to step in and save children who were subject to abuse and ultimately in some cases were murdered. Registering ordinary law-abiding people who educate their children will do nothing to improve this and will in fact overload an already strained, undermanned, underfinanced system leading to more at-risk children being missed.
- The ability for councils to issue School Attendance Orders based on personal opinions concerning the supposed unsuitability of education provision leaves families wide open to assault by ideologically motivated council officers. The Bill offers only one course of defence for parents against such actions by councils: appeal to the Secretary of State. This means of appeal already exists yet in very few cases had the SoS intervened in favour of parents. The vague grounds upon which School Attendance Orders can be issued and the wholly unsatisfactory appeal process offer no protections whatsoever for parents.
- The requirement to submit to the council details of all instances of education outside the home (piano teachers, swimming coaches, dance instructors and every other kind of “other” individual involved in a child’s education) is completely unnecessary and will be impossible to maintain as these circumstances will change frequently. Since children who attend school are also educated outside of school, often by the same teachers, it is discriminatory to demand that only home educated children must record these forms of education.
- It is impossible for parents to report to the council, as required under this Bill, ‘the number of hours per day a child spends “‘being educated”’. This betrays a total lack of understanding as to how home education works: it is always a natural part of family life and simply does not look like school. Much of what goes on in school (timetables, uniforms, constant testing etc) is needed to keep a busy school functioning yet has little to do with actual learning and is entirely unhelpful in a family setting, where education is much more focussed and efficient as it involves a very small number of children. Forcing parents to replicate “school at home” would undermine the very elements which render home education so effective.