Whilst most of this website is filled with the joy of home education, this section represents an issue which causes us a lot of concern. Please find below our thoughts on the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill
This bill risks causing more harm to children than it prevents.
The government frames any opposition to this bill as opposition to children's safety.
On this page, we explain why we disagree and our concerns about how it could damage children's wellbeing.
A key section of the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, that is currently being rushed through parliament, relates to the compulsory registration and monitoring of all home educating families. This is framed as a means of keeping children safe but actually poses significant risks. As home educating parents we care very much about children's wellbeing, but oppose the risks that this register presents to children, including those who are home educated. Home educators oppose sections of the bill for many reasons, explained well in this article: link.
We do not represent all home educators but on this page we concentrate on two important objections summarised below.
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1. This bill means children who need help will be left unprotected, whilst resources are spent on the unhelpful monitoring of normal home educating families, and on pointless bureaucracy and administration.
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1. Children need to be given basic protections against local authority error or malpractice. These protections are missing from current home education law and the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill will put children at even greater risk.
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Current law offers almost no protection for home educating children and families against devastating wrongful decisions by local authorities.
School Attendance Orders are issued:
- By Home Education Officers with no statutory requirements for training
- With no requirement to take the child's wishes into account
- With no viable means of appeal
- With no judicial oversight
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The proposed bill and accompanying legislation:
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-Remove's protections afforded by the data protection act from home educated children
-Prioritises in law the voice of a local authority home education officer over the voice of the parent
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Local authority staff don't always get it right! Home educated children must be offered basic protection before this bill gives local authorities even more power over greater numbers of families
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Imagine the trauma for a child from our "Who are home educators?" section, forced into school through an unreasonable local authority decision.
If you would like to support a campaign opposing harmful elements of the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill Spread the Word and follow the link below:
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2. Children who need help are left unprotected whilst resources are spent on the unhelpful monitoring of families unlikely to abuse their children, or on pointless bureaucracy and administration.
This bill represents the misdirection of resources towards monitoring healthy, happy families, and away from supporting groups of children where there is clear evidence of need.
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No empirical data suggests that UK home educated children are more vulnerable than schooled children to abuse, and research from the US indicates there is no link (Ray and Shakeel, 2022). Peer reviewed evidence is essential in this debate since government reports have previously made false claims regarding links between home education and abuse (Stafford 2012)
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Click here to find out about severe bias in the government's current evidence. ​
Other groups of children are desperately in need of input from caring professionals, but while the focus is on scapegoating home education for governmental failings, resources will be misdirected.​
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Resources need to be go to Social Care Teams, to enable them to respond effectively when signs of abuse are reported to them.
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As with schooled children, in the terrible situations where home educated children have been seriously harmed it is very hard to find a case where significant amounts of contact with services (schools, education department, health care, social care, police etc) had not taken place, and a significant number of concerns about the children’s welfare raised (NSPCC). These children needed professionals resourced to robustly follow up on concerns. A register requiring 153,300+ home educating families to submit regular forms would sadly be unlikely to help these children and would likely pull resources away from protective services.
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Increased monitoring of normal families will take resources which could be spent on effectively following up on reports of abuse and neglect.​​​​​​​​
Pointless Bureaucracy and Administration
The bill will require local authorities to collect a huge amount of data from home educating parents, much of it of doubtful value. For example, it is hard to understand how knowing exactly how many hours a child has spent learning with their mother, father, grandmother, Brownie leader, dance teacher, swimming instructor etc…, will contribute to a local authority’s understanding of a child’s wellbeing. Similarly, a submission of absolutely every website a child learns from (reported within 15 days of them using it) would seem a dubious as a measure of how well a child is being cared for.
What does seem obvious, when you consider the 153,000+ home-educated children in the UK, is the resources that it will take to collect and process this amount of data, and to potentially investigate and penalise families if for whatever reason (illness, admin error etc) they do not appear to comply. ​​​
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To protect children from abuse, resources should be directed towards schools, mental health services, social care, and health visiting services, not administration.
If you would like to support a campaign opposing harmful elements of the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill please follow the link below: