The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill has not received anything like the degree of public scrutiny it warrants, perhaps because it has published shortly before Christmas While the Bill contains some welcome provisions, such as an increased focus on kinship care in the children’s social care system, taken as a whole the Bill represents a radical assertion of the rights of the State over those of parents, under the pretext of safeguarding vulnerable children. If the Bill passes, local authorities, and not parents, will decide whether home education is in the best interests of children.
The responsibility of parents for the education of their children, and the attendant rights of parents to make choices about their children’s education, have long been recognized in UK law. This principle is presently enshrined in Section 9 of the Education Act 1996. Sections 24-26 of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill undermine the legal embodiment of this principle, and so undermine the parent-child relationship.
Section 24 makes it illegal for the parents of children in special schools to withdraw their children from school without the consent of the local authority. This provision ensures that the decision about whether or not withdrawal from school is in the child’s best interests is made by the local authority, and not the parents. In this case the state, and not the parents, will decide what is best for the child, and parents will be forced to comply with its decisions.
Section 24 also prevents parents under investigation by social services from withdrawing their child from school without the permission of the local authority. Parents may attract the attention of social services for a range of reasons, including malicious referrals from ex-partners or estranged family members, or school staff who disagree with a family’s religious beliefs. There is no evidential threshold for an investigation by social services, with only a tiny proportion of investigations resulting in any further action. This means that any sufficiently motivated person who disagrees with a parent’s decision to withdraw a child from school could force the decision out of the parent’s hands by making a malicious referral to social services.
Section 25 introduces a compulsory register for children not in school, requiring parents to register as home educators, and provide the local authority with details of every individual their children receive education from during the week. Parents even have to declare how many hours each week they spend teaching their children. Under current law, local authorities already have a duty to ensure that children receive a ‘suitable and efficient’ education, and many maintain registers of home educated children — albeit parents are not mandated to register their information. In addition to being burdensome on both local authorities and parents, section 25 ensures that UK law reflects and perpetuates the Government’s view that parents cannot be trusted to keep their children safe.
Section 26 introduces a new system for administering ‘school attendance orders’ (SAOs). Local authorities will be able to issue a ‘Preliminary SAO’ for any of the following reasons: a) the local authority decides that a child is not receiving a suitable education, b) there is any social services involvement (including an initial investigation), c) the local authority decides that it is in the child’s best interests to be in school, and d) the parent has not provided timely or sufficient information to the local authority.
The local authority is then empowered by Section 26 to issue a ‘School Attendance Order’, where conditions a, c, or d are cited, if the local authority judges that the parents have failed to show that they are providing a suitable education. Where condition b is cited, the local authority can issue a SAO if they deem it to be in the child’s best interests. Additionally, the local authority will be able to issue a SAO if ‘in the opinion of the authority it is expedient that the child should attend school.’ The implications of these provisions are painfully clear – it is local authorities, and not parents, who have the legal right to decide whether a child can be home educated or not.
In addition, under Section 26, parents served with a Preliminary SAO must comply with a home visit to inspect their premises and interview their children. Refusal to comply with an inspection may result in an SAO being issued. The premises must be ‘suitable’, a term which is left undefined. Might a home be deemed unsuitable if it is too small, too messy, or even too religious? Section 26 gives the Local Authority the right to force parents to send their children to school under a virtually unlimited variety of pretexts.
While the spin from the Government is that only extremely vulnerable or abused children will be forced into school, the legal right of parents to home educate their children will effectively no longer exist if the Bill passes in its current form. The state, and not parents, will have the right to decide what is best for children. Regrettably, much of the discussion about the Bill focusses on what the Bill is for, and not what it actually does. The Government claims that the Bill is for safeguarding vulnerable children, but what it does is strip parents of the right to make basic decisions about their child’s education and claim those rights for the state.
ParentPower Team
ppadmin
