Govt pares back home-ed register bureaucracy from Children and Schools Bill

Intrusive and administratively burdensome measures under Government plans for a register of children not in school have been significantly cut back.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill had proposed bureaucratic local authority registers that would have required parents to state the amount of time each child spends “receiving education from each parent” and obliged them to provide the same information for anyone else who educates their child.

But in a House of Lords Report Stage debate this week, Peers backed Government amendments to the Bill removing the requirements to record such details.

The Christian Institute has campaigned against the Bill’s overreach from the outset, arguing that the provisions for a register required too much information, and that they were invasive and impractical for both parents and local authorities.

A child’s ‘best interests’?

Despite these concessions, the Government suffered a significant defeat over the rules governing when parents must seek state permission to withdraw their children from school.

Peers passed a Conservative amendment that transfers the authority to decide a child’s “best interests” from the parents to local authority officials for any child classified as a “child in need”.

The Government Minister noted that many children with disabilities are classified as “in need” simply to access support services. Under this new amendment, those parents would lose their unilateral right to home-educate, regardless of whether there is any evidence of risk to the child.

The Christian Institute’s Head of Education John Denning said: “Many home-educators will still have reservations about the register, but the Government’s changes are certainly welcome. Of course it is important that there is intervention where a child is at risk, but the Conservative amendment goes far beyond that.

“The law must respect the principle that ordinarily, it is for parents to make decisions about children. We can pray that the Government will be able to remove this overbroad amendment from the Bill before it becomes law.”

Further concerns

Other changes include a new requirement for local authorities to consider a child’s home address when they add them to their registers. If they have concerns, they can request a home visit; if parents refuse, the local authority may take that into account when considering whether a child is being provided with a suitable education.

The Westminster and Welsh Governments will also have to introduce pilot schemes in some areas in England and Wales, which will see local authority officials meet with parents and their child when the child is withdrawn from school for home education.

Until that meeting has taken place, the child’s name will not be removed from the school roll. This means that parents will technically be in breach of the law if they do not cause their child to attend that school regularly. This could result in a fine or, theoretically, even imprisonment. When the pilot schemes end, they could then be rolled out.

‘Disproportionate interference’

Last year, top human rights lawyer Aidan O’Neill KC raised “significant questions” over the register’s compatibility with the European Convention on Human Rights and data protection regulations.

Mr O’Neill, who was commissioned by The Christian Institute to review the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, found “no evidence to suggest that all homeschooled children and their families require to be a particular focus of concern by the State”.

Rather, he argued, “the measure at issue may not constitute a proportionate interference in the fundamental rights of the families and children involved, and hence be Convention incompatible”.