Research by Dr Fé Mukwamba-Sendall and Wendy Charles-Warner 2025
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill aims to place a duty on local authority staff to provide advice to home educating families. This report asks what support is available for families and looks at the feasibility of supporting our most vulnerable families, those living in areas of multiple deprivation.
We found local authority home education staff and parents to be unanimous in the view that support for home educating children is essential and deserving of proper resourcing from central government. They were passionate about home education whilst recognising that it can bring challenges, and that those challenges are particularly acute in areas of multiple deprivation.
Families would welcome support, although for some, it must come without ‘strings’ attached.
We question the financial and political short termism of government failing to fund access to exams for home educated children and disclose the dismay felt by local authority staff and parents alike at this approach.
All home educated children are suffering from lack of resourcing, but it is our most deprived children who are suffering the most.
Read the full research here.
