Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson announced that the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill was a “landmark” children’s bill” which will seek to keep children safe”, conflating home education with safeguarding risk despite here being no evidence that home education represents a risk to children. That this was pushed out with unseemly haste in order to exploit the death of a little girl, is nothing short of disreputable.
To address that case as it will no doubt be further exploited, Mr Justice Cavanagh said that the child’s death “brings into sharp relief, the dangers of unsupervised home-schooling for vulnerable children.” What he did not say is that the child was known to Children’s Social Services (CSS) from before her birth, subject to prior foster care and that numerous referrals were made to CSS which were not properly acted on. More tellingly, Mr Justice Cavanagh failed to point out that it was a family court judge who gave the child to the care of her murdering father in the full knowledge of his long history of domestic and child abuse. Home education for a scant few months did not prevent CSS from acting and it certainly did not contribute to a court giving care to a dangerous man, in short, it did not lead to the child’s death.
Having addressed the political exploitation to further the Bill, it is of course, absolutely right that any parent whose child is on a Child Protection Plan (CPP) for good reason should require consent to remove the child from school; no reasonable person would argue that. However, this Bill goes considerably too far in applying the same regulation to children subject to a Children Act 1989 s47 investigation. Not a CPP, not a finding of significant harm, simply an investigation. In other words, if you home educate, a mere investigation of a referral is taken as the home educating parent being guilty. Given that home educated children are twice as likely to be referred to CSS and yet less likely than other children to be subject to a CPP, that cannot be acceptable in a democratic society.
Tellingly, government data releases(1) show that in 2024 there were 224,520 s 47 investigations and at 31st March only 49900 children were on Child Protection Plans (CPP); 78% of investigations did not lead to CPPs. Only 62110 CPPs started during the year, even taking that higher figure 72% of investigations did not lead to CPPs.
CPP reviews usually take place after three months and, of those CPPs in the year, only 35,090 lasted for longer. Consequently, only 16% of s47 investigations led to a CPP that lasted more than three months. This makes clear that the proposed restriction of parental rights on the basis of a s47 investigation is unacceptable as the majority of families whose rights are proposed to be curtailed, would not be subject
to a CPP. More importantly, the child’s education would be disrupted without good reason causing emotional harm to the child. This goes very much too far.
Domestic abuse victims
Even more concerning is the plight of the domestic abuse victim who happens to be home educating. The Home Office and professionals working in the family court are fully aware that domestic abuse can and often does, involve the use of repeat proceedings to perpetuate abuse through the court system retraumatising victims.
‘The evidence received by the Harm Panel showed that victims and survivors of domestic abuse find going through the Family Court retraumatising… and the panel noted how perpetrators may use the Family Court as a tool to perpetrate ongoing forms of abuse, for example by repeated applications.’(2)
Perpetrators of domestic abuse, use legal abuse and weaponising of children against the other parent leading to significant harm:
‘The impacts of DA span physical and mental health, and the abuse can be ongoing. Women subjected to perpetrator behaviors are more likely to have central sensitivity syndromes (CSS), chronic lower back pain and headaches, irritable bowel syndrome, restless legs syndrome, somatization of stress (including traumatic brain injury and gastrointestinal symptoms), reproductive health implications, and neuroendocrine and epigenetic changes. Victims globally report depression, anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder, suicidal ideation, and substance abuse’ (3)
Significant numbers of home educating, domestic abuse victims face repeated malicious applications through the court, by the perpetrator, to seek to force the child into school. These are often accompanied by allegations to Children’s Social Services (CSS) of significant harm. The court is required to investigate and through its processes will often require a report under the Children Act 1989 s37 (consideration of care proceedings), reports undertaken by CSS. CSS will have its own record of referrals of serious nature which trigger a s47 investigation. That investigation period can last months, with proceedings running into years.
The situation becomes cyclical as CSS will continue its investigations or move to CPP, until the court makes its final order whilst the very presence of a s47 investigation, or CPP, will be taken as indicative that education is not suitable. Then, the court seeing that a formal notice has been served under the Education Act 1996 s437 (the current formal notice provision) will take that as meaning that education is not suitable and be minded to order school attendance.
Of course, the outcome of this for a home educating abuse victim is that he or she will be facing the trauma of court together with the trauma of the s47 investigation and the requirement to ‘prove’ to the local authority that his or her education provision is suitable under the shadow of formal proceedings to force the child into school.
The outcome for the child is that the malicious referral forces him or her into school giving the perpetrator the outcome he or she desires, whilst disrupting the child’s education provision without good cause. Domestic abusers are handed a further tool to exploit to abuse.
Rising numbers of home educated children
This raises the question of why numbers of home educated children are rising, a situation which seems to cause knee jerk politics of spite to move to control home education. We know that the rise in numbers is being driven primarily by parents not choosing to home educate but having no choice due to schools failing their children.
In 2024, Government data(4) finds that there were 575,963 EHCPs with 84,428 being new in 2023 (138,242 were requested). The legal timescale for assessment and issuing an EHCP is 20 weeks and yet only 50.3% of EHCPs were issued within that time limit.
In the year to October 2024, 54% of parents coming new to home education cited the child’s mental health needs and Special Educational Needs (SEN) being unmet in school as their primary reason for removing the child from school.(5)
The 2024 Children’s Commissioner for England reports 949,200 children and young people having had active referrals for Children and Young People’s Mental Health Services (CAMHS) in England in 2022-23.(6) That is equal to 8% of the 11.9 million children in England. A third (28%) of children referred to mental health services (270,300) were still waiting for support, while almost 40% (372,800) had their referral closed before accessing support. Children are still waiting long times to access support with nearly 40,000 children experiencing waits of at least two years.
Children are not coming to home education in these cases through choice, but because drives for 100% attendance, poor quality SEN support in schools and increasing lack of acceptance of mental health issues as reason for failure to attend. These failures need addressing and the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill does nothing to address them and putting funds into local authority family support
addresses the symptoms with taking steps to address the disease; the proverbial sticking plaster on a serious would.
Are children better off in school?
In the 2023/24 academic year, the Government reports that 153,300 children were home educated at some point.(7) During that same period approximately 7,000 notices were served under the education Act 1996 s437 (Notice to satisfy), that is a maximum of 4.6% of children for whom a s437 notice was issued (they are issued to each parent). An estimated 2,100 School Attendance Orders (SAO) were issued (of which 400 were revoked), that is a maximum of 1.4% of home educated children subject to a SAO.
Of the 24,453 state schools in England,(8) a full 267 (1.1%) were in special measures. To put this in context, in 2023, 10% of Ofsted inspected state schools in England were found to be inadequate or to require improvement.(9)
This bears repeating, parents’ home education provision was found to be unsuitable and a SAO issued in 2023 in at most, 1.4% of cases, whereas schools were found to be inadequate or require improvement in 10% of cases with 1.1% in special measures.
What seems clear here is that children are not better off in school in a great many cases, rather, they are being removed from schools because schools are not fit for purpose.
What about support?
For more than a decade, Education Otherwise has been telling the Government and the DfE that parents want to have access to examination centres in order that their children can take exams should they wish to do so. The cost of providing an examination centre in every region would be far less than the cost of implementing the provisions in this Bill and far more supportive of family rights, children’s rights and their futures. This Government has no interest in supporting home educated children in the way that is needed, instead it perpetuates othering narratives which can only serve to set those children up as ‘folk devils’.
However, it is not only home educating families being attacked, but every single child will be allocated a ‘track and trace’ number in order that the state can usurp parental rights and introduce close monitoring of every child. Not only is every child’s data at risk and, let’s be clear, data breaches are numerous and not uncommon, but the rights of every family in this country will be breached.
This Bill needs to be taken back to the drawing board.
- Gov.UK 2024 ‘Explore Education Statistics, Reporting year 2024 Children in need’ [Online] Available from: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/children-in-need
- Home Office (2024) ‘Independent report The Family Court and domestic abuse: achieving cultural change’. [Online] Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/the-family-court-and-domestic-abuse-achieving-cultural-change/the-family-court-and-domestic-abuse-achieving-cultural-change-accessible-version#chapter-2-continuing-issues-for-adult-and-child-victims-and-survivors-of-domestic-abuse-in-the-family-court
- Dalgarno, E., Ayeb-KarlssonS., BramwellD., Barnett A. and Verma A. (2024) ‘Health-related experiences of family court and domestic abuse in England: A looming public health crisis’. [Online] Available from: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/26904586.2024.2307609#abstract
- Gov.UK (2024) ‘Education, health and care plans’ [Online] Available from: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/education-health-and-care-plans
- Charles-Warner (2024) ‘Home Education, Picking up the Failings of Schools’ [Online] Available from: https://www.educationotherwise.org/home-education-picking-up-the-failings-of-schools/
- Children’s Commissioner for England (2024) ‘Over a quarter of a million children still waiting for mental health support, Children’s Commissioner warns’. [Online] Available from: https://www.childrenscommissioner.gov.uk/blog/over-a-quarter-of-a-million-children-still-waiting-for-mental-health-support/
- Gov.UK 2024 ‘Explore Education Statistics, Reporting year 2024 Children in need’ [Online] Available from: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/children-in-need
- Gov.UK (2024) ‘Schools, pupils and their characteristics’ [Online] available from: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/school-pupils-and-their-characteristics#dataBlock-53cdc8f7-fc56-4c64-a79d-ccf5047b7616-tables
- Ofsted (2024) ‘State-funded schools inspections and out comes as at 31 December 2023’ [Online] Available from: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/state-funded-schools-inspections-and-outcomes-as -at-31-december-2023
