Peers challenge ‘intrusive surveillance’ of home-educated families

Peers have warned the Government that its proposed home education register would create a culture of “surveillance”.

During the House of Lords’ Committee Stage on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, Peers finished debating the proposals’ overreach into family life, which place an “unworkable administrative burden on families”.

Parents must provide not only their names and addresses, but the amount of time each child spends “receiving education from each parent” – and provide the same information for anyone else who educates the child, updating it within 15 days of any change. The rest of the Bill will now be examined at Committee Stage.

‘Straitjacket’

Green Party Peer Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb emphasised that it is “simply not true” that school is the ideal place for all children, and by “making home education harder for parents, we are discouraging them from doing what is best for their child and for many others”.

She highlighted that there is an “inaccurate conflation of home education with a safeguarding risk”, and “intrusive monitoring” would only be “another diversion targeting huge swathes of decent people and ignoring those in real need”.

“Setting up a register for children whose parents are not doing anything illegal or dangerous, requiring the collection of a significant volume of personal, sensitive and often impractical information from home-education families, is discriminatory. We should be supporting people to home-educate their children”.

Conservative Peer Lord Lucas also questioned the “breathtakingly open-ended” data collection, calling the time-keeping requirements an attempt “to force home education into a classroom straitjacket”.

Burden

In response to concerns, the Government said the requirements were not intended to be “overly burdensome” and further detail would be outlined in regulations and statutory guidance.

Minister of State for Education Baroness Smith of Malvern indicated that “primarily social or recreational” activities such as rugby would not need to be recorded, but excluding information about weekends and holidays could “potentially leave large gaps in the overall picture of a child’s education”.

Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, a Government whip, confirmed that the Government would begin analysing the collected data one year after the register comes into force, and recommend any changes to Parliament.

ECHR

Earlier this year, top lawyer Aidan O’Neill KC raised “significant questions over the scheme’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 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”.