New Government: New threat to home education with Children’s Wellbeing Bill.
The new Government’s proposed Children’s Wellbeing Bill follows similar failed Bills in previous Parliaments. The recent Conservative Government pushed their own Schools Bill (2022), which they dropped after it was torn apart in the Lords over its problematic school proposals, but then supported Flick Drummond MP’s “Children Not in School” Private Member’s Bill (2024) which ran out time when the General Election was called. Labour’s new Children’s Wellbeing Bill risks stigmatising resourceful parents who choose to educate their children at home. The King’s Speech briefing notes state, ‘The Bill will improve the education system and make it more consistent and safer for every child by: ‘creating a duty on local authorities to have and maintain Children Not in School registers, and provide support to home-educating parents. These measures will ensure fewer children slip under the radar when they are not in school and more children reach their full potential through suitable education.’
The Government’s justification is to protect vulnerable children and the Government proposes that children who are not in school are particularly at risk. The trouble is, this proposed register includes home educated children as well as children ‘missing education’. The language used implies that both groups of children are at risk of slipping ‘under the radar.’ This conflation of the two groups is, at best, sloppy. At worst, it is a pretext to attack home education in the name of ‘safeguarding’. In either case, it may be expected to have profound consequences for educational freedom and parental rights in the UK. To ensure that home educated children are not lumped together with ‘children missing education’ the Government must make sure that legislation is sufficiently nuanced.
The proposal that local authorities should provide home educating families with more support is likely to be a source of concern among interested parties. It feels like a thinly-veiled attack on the centrality of the family. Parents are the first educators of their children and the Education Act 1996 makes it clear that parents are responsible for providing education at school ‘or otherwise’. UK has long upheld the right of parents to educate their children as they see fit. The new proposals have the potential to make parents justify their educational goals to local authority officials who don’t know their children. The proposals heavily imply that the responsibility for educating children lies firmly in the hands of the state and not the parents.
Parents generally home educate so that they can provide a child-centred education that is tailor-made to fit the needs of their children. They can spend a lot of time outside, study topics of interest in depth and are free from the constraints of the rigid testing system. Children ‘meet their potential’ outside the mainstream education system and most go on to lead interesting and productive adult lives. More ‘support’ from the local authority threatens these cherished freedoms. It is hard to see how more ‘support’ doesn’t really mean more assessment and more judgement.
It strikes me that there may be some good stated intentions behind these proposals, but if the best interests of children are really at the heart of this upcoming legislation, then their parents should be trusted to get on with the job.
ParentPower Team
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