Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill: My submission to the House of Commons Public Bill Committee

Home educating parents in the UK will probably be aware that the government’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill has now passed its second reading and is in committee stage. This means you can submit your views, if you’re quick: they start meeting on 21st January.

The Bill is 128 pages long, and I don’t pretend to have read every word. The most relevant part for home educating families is Children Not In School (sections 26-29), which deals with local authorities giving consent for removal of certain children from school, the creation of a register of home ed children, and school attendance orders.

Home educators in the UK are widely misunderstood and derided. Only this week an opinion piece in The Times described home education as children being ‘brainwashed by crazies’. The committee scrutinising this Bill needs to hear from all the dedicated, reasonable, intelligent parents out there who are home educating for all the right reasons. This Bill will directly affect us and our children, so if you have views on it, now is the time to share them.

If you’d like to make your own submission, you need to email it to scrutiny@parliament.uk, and the sooner the better.

I also recommend taking a look at the blog post from Education Otherwise addressing the shortcomings of the Bill.

Here’s what I’m planning to send (minus the preamble):

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My principal concern is that the register is being put forth as a solution to a problem which has not been properly considered and defined.

The desire for a register stems from concerns about children unknown to the state, who may be unsafe and/or receiving an unsatisfactory education. Recently the case of Sara Sharif has been used as evidence that home educated children are unsafe. There are also concerns about high rates of persistent absence, and about illegal faith schools.

But it is not clear how a register of home educated children will address any of these serious concerns:

• Sara Sharif was known to Social Services throughout her life. Social Services had fifteen separate opportunities to intervene and save her life. When Sara was removed from school, supposedly to be home educated, she would have been placed on the local authority’s register of home educated children, as happens to all children withdrawn from the school roll in favour of home ed. The scandal of Sara’s death is that she was well known to the authorities, who utterly and repeatedly failed her.

• Home educated children are already twice as likely to be reported to Social Services by concerned members of the public, compared to schoolchildren and children under 5. But after the referral they are then significantly less likely to have the child made subject to a child protection plan. Even without the proposed register, home educated children are already more likely to be referred, and then less likely to have any action taken.

• On the quality of education received, the problem with the Bill as it stands is that there are no details given as to how the authorities will decide if a child is receiving a suitable education, nor who the inspectors will be or how they will be qualified to make those decisions. Home educated children are not obliged to follow the National Curriculum. There are no agreed standards that families and inspectors can use to say whether the education provided is or is not acceptable. Home educated children are not ‘state-educated at home’ children. They and their parents are free to choose their subjects and how they study them. This freedom is a huge privilege and should be a great source of strength. As Baroness Hale said:

  “In a totalitarian society, uniformity and conformity are valued. Hence the totalitarian state tries to separate the child from her family and mould her to its own design. Families in all their subversive variety are the breeding ground of diversity and individuality. In a free and democratic society we value diversity and individuality. Hence the family is given special protection in all the modern human rights instruments including the European Convention on Human Rights […]. As Justice McReynolds famously said in Pierce v Society of Sisters 268 US 510 (1925), at 535, “The child is not the mere creature of the State”.

  Unfortunately variety, diversity, and individuality are very difficult to record and quantify on a local authority spreadsheet.

• Children who are persistently absent are not home educated, and do not belong on a home ed register. They are clearly already known to their schools.

• Illegal faith schools are already illegal, and a task force already exists to find them and close them. Parents sending their children to these schools are already willingly breaking the law and deceiving the authorities, and it is not clear to me how the Bill in its proposed form will suddenly turn them into law-abiding citizens.

The Bill purports to be concerned with children’s safety, and the idea of a register is that children who are known to the state will be safer than those who are unknown. Again, any home educated child who has ever been on a school roll is already known to their local authority. But more importantly, we already have many thousands of children known to the state who are being unforgivably failed by the very authorities who are supposed to protect them. The victims of the grooming gangs are overwhelmingly children in care, who should have the highest levels of protection of all children. Time and again we learn of children who have been appallingly mistreated, despite being well-known to Social Services. From an education perspective, roughly 20% of secondary schools are rated by Oftsed as requiring improvement or failing. In 2023, 41% of Year 6 pupils failed to meet the expected standards in literacy and numeracy. That’s 275,000 school children, failing to meet the government’s own standards, in a single year. Since 2016 more than 180 council-run libraries have been either closed or handed over to volunteer groups. One in three consultant child psychiatrist posts are vacant in England. Around the country, children are having to wait months for an initial appointment with mental health services.

As we are constantly being reminded, the national finances are impossibly tight. I can’t help feeling that the enormous resources required to create and monitor a national register of home-educated children would be better spent on the many children that we already know are being unforgivably failed by the existing system.

I have yet to meet a home educating parent who isn’t deeply dedicated. I know there must be some, but they are a tiny minority. Parents who choose to home educate often choose to forgo an entire income, along with all the sacrifices that entails. They care deeply about their children and think long and hard about how best to educate them. The Bill as it stands seems overly concerned with clamping down on these parents and catching them out, and not remotely interested in supporting them or their children. The laughably short section ‘436G: Support’ says only that a local authority must provide support when requested by a parent, but that ‘the advice and information to be provided is whatever the local authority considers fit’.

Strangely, there is no equivalent expectation that a parent may provide to the local authority whatever information the parent considers fit.

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The image for this post is by Adi Ulici via Unsplash.