Sir Keir Starmer links home education to violent extremism

COMMENT

Sir Keir Starmer has made some shocking comments linking home education with extremism.

In a speech about promoting British values and cultural integration, the Prime Minister condemned terrorist attacks against the Jewish community, and said: “How can it be right to turn a blind eye to racist hatred of any kind. Whether the victims are Jews, Muslims or any minority? It can’t.

“And so frankly, we do need to be much clearer as a society about what we expect of people, and the responsibilities that come with rights.

“That means much stronger powers for the Charity Commission to shut down charities that promote extremism. It means tougher regulation of home schooling, because schools are so important for integration, and so we need a higher bar for people who want to opt-out of that responsibility.”

State overreach

There is so much wrong with this.

Firstly – he’s paired extremism and racial hatred with home schooling, which is both appalling and ludicrous. The vast, vast majority of home-educated children are not being trained as extremists; they’re not being taught to hate democracy and Britain — they are learning English and Maths and Art and Music. And a lot of home-educating parents would argue their children are receiving a much more rounded education than they would be getting in school. So this haphazard pairing of home education and extremism has rightly got parents annoyed.

Secondly, schools are important for integration. Yes, it is good for children to mix with others their own age, but home education does not prevent that. There are lots of reasons parents choose to withdraw their children from school – sometimes because of bullying, sometimes it’s because they feel their child is not receiving a proper education, but increasingly we know more parents are concerned about their children being indoctrinated with LGBT ideology.

Ten years ago, The Christian Institute took on the Scottish Government in a legal case, arguing that its Named Persons scheme was state overreach into family life. The Supreme Court agreed with us and in its judgment said: “The first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is to get at the children, to distance them from the subversive, varied influences of their families, and indoctrinate them in their rulers’ view of the world.”

Doesn’t this sound like what Sir Keir is trying to do? In the name of integration, is he forcing parents to send their children to school so that they can be indoctrinated in the things he wants them to learn?

Parental responsibilities

Then he says there needs to be a higher bar “for people who want to opt out of that responsibility”.

It is not a responsibility to send your children to school. The Bible teaches that parents are the primary educators of their children. The Education Act says the same. Parents can delegate that responsibility to schools; schools are an option if they want to send their children to them. I went to a state school. My child goes to a state school. But while they’ve become the default for most parents, people should not be prevented from educating their children as they think best.

There has been a lot of discussion in the House of Lords about the Government’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. There were plans for highly bureaucratic registers, where parents have to provide all sorts of information about how they educate their children, when it is done, who is teaching them, for how many hours, and much more than that.

Thankfully, Peers ditched the most bureaucratic elements, although the registers will remain. Many home educators will still object to the registers in principle – understandably so as it’s stepping over into territory where you have to gain approval from the State to decide how to teach your children. But removing most of that bureaucracy from the proposals means the registers will be a lot less intrusive than they could have been.

The Bill as it was originally drafted would have required parents to name anybody else involved in the education of their child. That looked like including Sunday Schools, also putting them under an obligation to provide personal information to the local authority. The revisions put in place a threshold and, as long as the provision is below a certain amount per week, that duty will not apply.

These inflammatory statements from Sir Keir were at best misguided, and at worst betray a total lack of trust in parents’ ability to raise their children. Parents have a right to raise their children as they think best, and they may opt in to the state’s education provisions, not the other way around.