The proposed changes to home education in easy to understand language, with a template letter to your MP to help you stop the changes. 

Edited 5/1/25

WOW! Well that was a crappy way to end the year and start this new one, some very scary proposed changes to home education. Changes many of you are struggling to understand (and rightly so). Whilst we have written (and will write more) detailed breakdowns and discussions, we fully understand it is a lot to take in.  Instead of giving you more links and articles to read, this is the simplified version (hit previous posts down below to see the lengthier posts).

The Children’s wellbeing and schools bill is a proposal, it’s a first draft (that clearly didn’t have anyone with knowledge of home education be part of the process). It has had its first reading, and will be read again on the 8th January. On the 8th MPs can debate it. This is why you need to write to your MP now (see below). After the debate there will be changes made and a chance for your MP to become involved. Do not delay in writing to your MP. 

So let us break it down into exactly how the current wording will affect you (we will keep you updated on any changes, signing up to our newsletter will ensure you don’t miss anything).

We have also created a video from the LIVE discussion we had, this is a Facebook video, but you do not need an account to watch it.

Deregistration – the LA must refuse to dereg from special school if they decide it is not in the best interests of the child. This on the surface seems reasonable, however it puts a lot of trust on the LA, it also does not allow for the voice of the parent let alone the child. It does not allow consideration of what the parent has put in place to meet the child’s needs.  The current system is already misused by schools and LAs, the proposed wording allows this misuse to go much further, resulting in children being forced to stay on school roll even when school can not meet needs, or is not a safe space, or even because the parent no longer wants the child to attend school because they would like to home educate. (remember home ed doesn’t have to be a last resort, it is often a willing choice, but this change would disproportionately affect those home educating to protect their child). Expecting the LA to take on responsibility for deciding if something is in the best interests of a child is akin to giving them parental rights. 

Fines and prison – if you fail to provide the information the register requires you could ultimately face going to prison. The information is invasive, not respectful of most home education styles and does not respect the child’s right to privacy. 

The register is going to include info the LAs currently have, such as child and parents name and address, but it goes much further than this, instead of a simple ‘home education is suitable’ comment from the EHE team based on the information the parent has provided them during normal enquiries. It requires details such as the number of hours education takes place – how can most home educators give that kind of detail? Learning through home education is usually described as taking place during all waking hours. Learning is not confined to formal timetabled lessons, it’s discussions in the bath, it’s late night musings from the teenager, it’s walks in the woods, days out at the beach, it’s cooking with nan… talking of nan… the register will require names and addresses of everyone involved in the education.

The impact of requiring details of everyone involved is immense. You would need to send a weekly update to the EHE team as there’s no way you’re going to remember everyone on annual check ins. The list could be incredibly long. Imagine an annual register update and you send a 100 page document with 400 websites listed (that’s just 4 a week and we all know kids who use that many in an hour).   And I don’t think the postman who was stopped by your 6 year old to ask how the post is sorted is going to appreciate giving you his name, or the old lady your 12 year old struck up a conversation with in the cafe and she talked about the ‘olden days’.  

Going one step further they want details of groups (and info from groups), home ed kids are considered to be learning whilst at scouts, but for the schooled kids this is not part of their education, the scouts group would be expected to provide details of the home ed kids who attend. Same for swimming lessons, group language lessons organised by a home ed mum to bring cost down for her own children…. Many groups will cease to be open to home educators, thus depriving home ed kids of the experience and learning opportunity. The opposite of what the bill plans. Notice how so far no kids have been protected, which is allegedly what the bill is meant to do?????

Let me reiterate, they want website and tutor info… they’ve got to be kidding right? Can you imagine having to list every single learning website your child accesses, you’d spend more time making a diary than you would educating! Or what the tutor is going to think when they start being questioned by the LA? Tutors will start to refuse to tutor home ed kids, or put their prices up to cover the extra time needed, and what about the privacy of the child? They should be able to chat to a tutor if they’re struggling with content, without fear of the LA finding out and forcing them back to school. 

Compulsory home visits – oh heck no! We will fight until our last breath on this one. The home is the parent and child’s safe space, and no one should ever have the right of entry. There’s many reasons a visit can go wrong (bad mannered EHE, refusing to leave, ignorant to SEN, expecting the child to perform, demanding reams of info, disregard for certain styles of home ed etc), now the proposed changes include considering the home and learning environment. We know full well the bad LAs will use this to turn up, probably unannounced, and demanding entry. They’re going to use it as a threat of sending the child back to school if they can not assess your home, which could involve the child’s bedroom if they do any of their learning there. If your kids are SEN or not, they should never feel uncomfortable in their own home, parents with anxiety will panic, and maybe then struggle to explain how the education is suitable, or how the home is suitable.  If there are safeguarding concerns then SS already have the power to check on the home environment, this section is absolutely not necessary and massively open to misuse. 

Will your data even be safe? How many times have we heard of data breaches across different sectors? We won’t expand on this one, except to say we do not trust LAs to keep your data secure. 

This next point may not appear to impact you as a home educator, but it will affect those in school who now feel no option but to home educate. The section demanding academies follow the national curriculum will mean regardless of what is suitable for the child, they will have to follow the NC in school, schools lose the freedom to adjust what the child learns, in the extreme this means schools who follow a unique style of learning, like the one near me that my teen went to for a while, can no longer follow the all subjects covered in one overarching theme method. Schools will be forced to follow all of the NC which will lead to more children being home educated as the NC does not align with parental (and children’s) beliefs and philosophies. They’re forcing this change through without even knowing the outcome of the curriculum and assessment review. This really doesn’t look good on the government, they’re putting the cart before the horse as they say, or for those of us who don’t faff around with idioms, it’s a right mess.  Just as a side note, the NC has nothing to do with the content required to pass GCSEs, exam boards set their own syllabus. 

The bill itself has very little explanations, these are found in secondary legislations which can be changed with very little input, discussion or oversight, this is dangerous and could result in serious harm. It also means a heck of a lot of the explanations are hidden deep inside other documents that on the surface are not linked at all. For goodness sake the EHE teams struggle to understand the Education Act and EHE guidance, how on earth are they going to follow correct process and procedures with the new bill? How will they fund it? How many more untrained staff will be required? What happens when LAs do harm? Or when they misrepresent their actual duty?  Your average parent isn’t going to fully understand the now overly complicated, legally worded, and outright absurd bill wording, which we imagine will soon be followed by new EHE guidance; they’re going to rely even more heavily on services like ours, which is run by volunteers. They’re going to bow to the SAOs, that will come from every angle, they’re going to have broken children in a broken system. Nope, not on our watch. This is why we need your help. You need to share this article with every home educator you know, send it by text, email, PM, share it in groups, stand on your roof and yell about it (ok maybe don’t go climbing onto your roof, it was bad enough trying to get the christmas lights down). But the more people voicing their alarm, the more chance we have of sections being revoked or at least reworded. 

The bill does not protect the children it claims to, it does not identify children missing education, and it doesn’t safeguard any children. There’s no objective evidence to back up the reasons for the proposals, and there is no protection for home educators who just want to get on with their lives. There is no meaningful support being included, so no benefit to home educators. It truly is a backdoor attempt at banning anything other than formal school at home type of home education, which the vast majority do not do. 

What can you do?

You can write to your MP. Remember never use the term home schooling, only ever refer to it as home education. You will need to edit this template, you can change things around, add in your own thoughts, take out parts etc. But this should make the task of writing to your MP much easier. Remember to sign up to our newsletter to ensure you get regular updates, and to keep an eye on our news/blog posts for more detailed responses for MPs who want it. 

Dear MP

I am writing to you today with a matter of utmost urgency as the Children’s wellbeing and schools bill is due a second reading on the 8th January. I am asking for your support to ask questions of the government, and for your help getting the government to see that the wording of the bill is dangerous, not fit for purpose and will do irreparable damage to home educators like myself and 80k+ home educated children in England. 

Firstly, I wish to tell you a little about my family, we are NAMES AND AGES OF KIDS, we live at ADDRESS (address needed for MP to be able to act on your behalf), we started home educating in YEAR OR MONTH, this was because explain why you home ed, did school fail your child, were they bullied, sen not met, not safe etc, did you choose it for the array of opportunities etc, since starting home education CHILD has been happy/ learning/ thriving/safe etc. Home education for us is SEMISTRUCTURED/CHILD LED/ AUTONOMOUS/STRUCTURED, this means EXPLAIN THE STYLE. It allows flexibility/freedom/opportunities etc. Whilst NAME education looks nothing like school, they are receiving a suitable education, in fact it goes far beyond just being suitable. Include examples of things they would not have had the opportunity to learn/experience if they had been in school. 

Current legislation and process – At the moment, the government allows EHE teams within the LA to make informal enquiries of us to satisfy their duty of identifying children missing from education. We provide information that gives far more detail than I just shared with you. And in most LA areas they are satisfied and leave home educators to get on with things (they can escalate to s437(1) and SAO if there are concerns about the education, and refer to children’s services if there are safeguarding concerns).  There is no support, whether moral, physical or monetary, and this is ok with most home educators.edit this section if your LA does offer any support, but be clear to explain it is rare around the country ‘Support’ would come with strings attached and we do not wish to have further intrusion from untrained LA staff.  

Current problems – Unfortunately not all LAs currently act within these bounds, some turn up unannounced on doorsteps claiming the family are breaking the law, that they have to allow entry and for them to speak to the child (these are not cases where any safeguarding concerns are known), there are all manner of issues that arise including a lack of understanding of different styles of home education, and a lack of training on different SEN. include your own experience here, especially if the LA lied to you etc. There is evidence of a number of LAs that misuse the SAO process to coerce families into complying with demands that go way beyond their current role and lots of evidence of harm being done daily by EHE staff who do not understand or respect home education and its many approaches. Yet there is no evidence to support needing to intervene any further than is currently allowed. LAs already do immeasurable harm (you can read the research on www.educationalfreedom.org.uk), I fear the bill will allow massive overstepping. If you are able to, you can download this file to attach to your email. and include ‘Educational Freedom have written a short document that details the current adequate and suitable legislations and the many safeguards in existence. I feel utilising these properly would iradicate the need for most of the bill.

Home education register – The new register proposes to include information LAs already have on their current registers (as schools must provide these details when a child is deregistered to be home educated). This includes the child and parents name and address and the fact the child is home educated. The proposals for a home education register would require that we, as parents, provide unrealistic information about the hours the learning takes place,the number of hours each person provides the education, websites used, groups attended, and scarily ‘any other information the local authority considers appropriate.’. These requirements do not acknowledge the more child led/autonomous styles of learning that the vast majority of home educators use in their learning. explain the style you follow, how learning happens at all hours and in all places, give some examples of the random places your child learns, or the people involved. This information would be required in addition to the information we already provide when the EHE team make annual enquiries about the provision. When the LA make enquiries about the education i explain how it is full time with ‘quote how you describe a full time education’. As you can see, this really should be all that is required to know the child is not missing education. 

Information from groups – The ‘Provision of information to local authorities: education providers’ section is concerning,and again shows a lack of understanding of home education from those who wrote it. My children attend x and x groups, they also go to x activity with schooled children, all of these activities are part of my child’s education. This section infers the LA will require these settings to provide the LA with information about home educated children who attend, I expect some groups will cease to be, or end access to home educated children, as it is not their responsibility to ensure suitability of the education. I as their parent choose for my child to go there and I ensure the learning is appropriate. I am the parent! This bill seems to be forgetting that!

Home education being banned by the backdoor – The way the bill is currently worded it will in effect ban any style that is not a formal timetabled approach, which most home educators do not follow. It would be impossible to quantify the number of hours my child learns, or who is involved in the learning, or the dozens of websites used each week, or the many groups and activities they attend. 

GIVE AN EXAMPLE OF THE RIDICULOUS AMOUNT OF INFO THAT WOULD BE REQUIRED, just enough to give them an idea of how nuts this is. For example Yesterday, Bobby spoke with the postman about oversees mail, he chatted with Doris next door about being a baby in WWII, he then used BBC Bitesize and 4 youtube videos to research rationing, he then went to the shop (with his nan) and chatted to the book shopkeeper about rations and he bought a book about cooking in the war, he then went to the supermarket with my sister Donna, Donna tells me he talked to the cashier about baking a cake from the war cook book…. Can you see the ridiculous amount of detail that the register would require in it’s current format? At the moment, annually, i provide a breakdown of the learning, in which i would just state he learned about rationing using outings and websites. This is all the information an LA needs.  Would I really be expected to keep such detailed records to be submitted to the LA? Would the LA have enough staff to deal with the paperwork? How will this identify children whose wellbeing needs to be protected?  I already provide the LA with information that explains how the education is suitable to age, ability and aptitude. The details in the register differ from this information, and would require me to take time out from educating my children just to fill in boxes on an unnecessary register. It seems the people who worded the bill do not understand home education nor do they understand the harm it will cause. 

Changes will disproportionately affect SEN children – Deregistration from special school already requires consent from the LA, the proposals include that the LA ‘must’ refuse if they feel it is not in the child’s best interests. Say if this would have affected you, or may affect you in the future, explain any issues you had deregistering from special school. You can still include the following even if it doesn’t apply to you. However, the LA do not know my child, they will be relying on school for the information. This proposal does not allow for the voice of the parent let alone the child to be heard. It does not allow consideration of what the parent has put in place to meet the child’s needs. The current system is already misused by schools and LAs with some delaying the decision for up to 18 months! The proposed wording allows this misuse to go much further, resulting in children being forced to stay on school roll even when school can not meet their needs, or is not a safe space, or even because the parent no longer wants the child to attend school because they would like to home educate (home education doesn’t have to be a last resort, it is often a willing choice, but this change would disproportionately affect those home educating to protect their child). Expecting the LA to take on responsibility for deciding if something is in the best interests of a child is akin to giving them parental rights.  There is an addition that automatically denies requests to home educate again within 6 months of a previous request. What happens if the child’s needs or health changes? What happens if school can not keep the child safe? I imagine parents will have no option but to keep their child out of school and risk prosecution rather than to risk their child’s life. If this could have any impact on you, please explain how.  Schools, LAs and the government believe that school is the best place for a child, they might claim to respect the right to choose home education, but many don’t! An LA could refuse the request, without just cause, or from ignorance of home education (an issue we already know happens a lot). Please be aware that all of the concerns I am raising are in relation to children where no safeguarding concerns are known. 

Compulsory home visits seem to be being sneaked in – Government are being sly here, and it worries me a lot. Our home is mine and my child’s safe space, and no one should ever have the right of entry. Some badly behaved LAs already try to force home visits if this applies to your LA then reword this section to explain what they do. But there are many reasons a visit can go wrong, such as bad mannered EHE, or refusing to leave, ignorant to SEN, expecting child to perform, demanding reams of info, disregard for certain styles of home ed etc. Visits that go badly are usually not because of an unsuitable education, but more likely because the person from the LA has no respect for home education, or lies to force certain styles of learning. The proposed changes include considering the home and learning environment. I know full well the bad LAs will use this to turn up, probably unannounced, and demand entry into my home explain how this will impact you especially if you have a SEN child or you have anxiety/autism etc,explain how this would make you all feel etc.. They’re going to use it as a threat of sending my child back to school if they can not assess my home, which could involve my child’s bedroom as they do some of their learning there. I can not imagine how invasive this would feel. This proposal is not in response to any safeguarding concerns, it is for all home educators, who just want to get on with the important task of educating their children.  If there are safeguarding concerns then SS already have the power to check on the home environment, this proposed section is absolutely not necessary and massively open to misuse. 

No consequences for badly behaved LAs but prison for parents? – Organisations exist to support innocent home educators who fall victim to badly behaved LAs but there is no recourse on the LA, no consequences for lying or misrepresenting the law. These organisations support us if we live in a rogue LA who are trigger happy with serving SAOs, but the new changes would mean far more severe consequences should we fall foul of a court who does not understand home education. The consequences of failing to provide the unattainable level of info the register will require, could be prison!  Not every home educators knows about support services, they will be risking their freedom over data gathering! More children will be sent to school when home education was in their best interests. 

Data security – I am concerned at how the LA and government will ensure our data is safe? I hear often how LAs misuse or lose data, but this is information about my children, where they go and who they are with, this worries me. GIVE AN EXAMPLE IF YOU HAVE ONE OF A DATA BREACH

Support or is it? – There’s a whole section in the bill about support, but it doesn’t make it a requirement as the LA can deem the request as not ‘fit’ to be provided, and there is no government offer of funding to provide any support.  I do not want the LA to support me though, EHE advisors are usually ex school teachers, they have no specialist experience or training in home education, and therefore not someone I would ask for advice from. Instead, we have active local home education groups, and national organisations run by home educators. If your LA offers support then include it but explain it is not common place, and the extra hoops to accessing the support. Be careful not to confuse school like info/resources with anything actually supportive of home education.

National Curriculum in academies – The section demanding academies follow the national curriculum will mean regardless of what is suitable for the child, they will have to follow the NC in school, schools will lose the freedom to adjust what the child learns, in the extreme this means schools who follow a unique style of learning can no longer follow the all subjects covered in one overarching theme method. Schools will be forced to follow all of the NC which will lead to more children being home educated as the NC does not align with all parental (and children’s) beliefs and philosophies. 

They’re forcing this change through without even knowing the outcome of the curriculum and assessment review! This really doesn’t look good on the government. Just as a side note, the NC has nothing to do with the content required to pass GCSEs, exam boards set their own syllabus. If relevant include any parts of the NC you don’t agree with, or parts that don’t go far enough etc. 

Hiding the detail – The bill itself has very little explanations, these are found in secondary legislations which can be changed with very little input, discussion or oversight, this is dangerous and could result in serious harm. It also means many explanations are hidden deep inside other documents that on the surface are not linked at all.  At the moment EHE teams struggle to understand the Education Act and EHE guidance, how are they going to follow correct process and procedures with the new bill? How will it be funded? How many more staff will be required? Will they be given training? What happens when LAs do harm? Or when they misrepresent their actual duty?  Parents are going to be confused with all the jargon hidden in many documents, and will end up giving in to the LA demands, and the SAOs that will come from every angle, there’s going to be a lot of broken children in a broken school system because parents won’t know how to fight an LA who is overstepping. 

The bill won’t protect children – The bill does not protect the children it claims to, it does not identify children missing education, and it doesn’t safeguard any children. There’s no objective evidence to back up the reasons for the proposals, and there is no protection for home educators who just want to get on with their lives. There is no meaningful support being included, so no benefit to home educators. It truly is a backdoor attempt at banning anything other than formal school at home type of home education, which the vast majority of us do not do. The current laws and guidance are ample, children are known to the LA when they are deregistered from school, they are currently on an informal register and the LA can and do make enquiries about the education. If concerns are known about the child, then the EHE team can take action, as can children’s services. There is no serious case review of a harmed child where the child home educated and wasn’t known to services. Services failed those children. Innocent families should not be persecuted for those failings. Especially when there is no evidence showing the proposals will protect any child. Home educators are not hiding away, we are not harming our children, we are more susceptible to false/malicious allegations to social services (yet a lower chance of a case being opened, as the referral is seen as false), we take our responsibility of providing a suitable education very seriously. Yes, I accept there are children out there who are not receiving a suitable education, but the LAs have the powers already to do something about that. And based on the SAO statistics they do act on it. I see no benefit for any party in this bill wording related to home education, and I sincerely hope you will use this opportunity to support me and the many home educators in your constituency by not supporting this bill in its current format.  

I will be happy to provide further information should you have any questions, though you may find the news/blog section of www.educationalfreedom.org.uk useful as they have written many short articles on the proposals. 

Yours sincerely