Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Written evidence submitted by an individual who wishes to remain anonymous to The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill Committee (CWSB107)

We are writing to submit evidence to the bill committee for the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. We are deeply worried by the wording of this bill especially the Children Not In School section and would like to speak mainly to this part of the bill as this is where our interest and concern lies.

About us.

We are a family of 4 with 2 children aged 12 and 14. My wife is an ex primary school teacher with 12 years teaching experience in the state sector; she and I are now home educators of nearly 6 years. Our children did attend state primary school for a couple of years, but the experience was a detrimental and harmful one for them. The ‘light went out in their eyes’. They lost their love of learning through the rigid, highly pressured, one-size-fits-all curriculum with its frequent assessments and tests. For us it was heartbreaking to see our bright, enthusiastic children be turned off to learning. Our youngest child (then aged 5-6) was going to school in the morning in tears as he hated the constant pressure to ‘perform’, to sit still at a table and write all day. He was even being made to miss playtimes on a regular basis as his teacher deemed he wasn’t writing fast enough. The final straw came when one day he was kept indoors ALL day to miss every one of his outdoor playtimes because "he hadn’t written enough in lessons". This is a child who aged 3 had had a kidney transplant after developing kidney failure aged 1. As you can imagine, this was deeply upsetting and unfair for him, and as parents, this was very worrying and we were not going to stand by and allow his physical health and WELLBEING to be affected in this way. My wife was also burned-out by the school system in her teaching job, as many teachers are who are also leaving the system in droves, and we made the decision to home educate as we knew we could provide our children with a superior education outside of a classroom, and crucially, one in which they were not being HARMED by school.

Our home educational philosophy.

Since then, the children have had many wonderful, varied and exciting educational opportunities and have regained their natural love of learning. The children are sociable, happy, thriving, bright and well-rounded. Most of their opportunities could never be taught or learned in a classroom. Although they do some school-type workbooks in maths, English, science and languages, most of their learning looks little like a school education. They have travelled extensively, have attended language school in Spain, visited countless art galleries, museums, planetariums, observatories, workshops, learned to code at a very high level (our 12 year old is coding at approximately ‘A’ Level and is covering the GCSE Astronomy course– he would never have had the opportunity to do this in school), they have attended weekly sports classes, forest school sessions where they have learned orienteering, map reading, tool skills, foraging and cooking skills, they have earned their bronze and silver John Muir awards, have learned to ride horses, bake and cook, they have attended cubs and scouts, they have built bird boxes, hedgehog houses etc and done watercolour art with their grandfather, they have an outstanding knowledge of the natural world as well as Space and Astronomy, our eldest has a volunteer job at the stables twice a week and they have had violin lessons, piano lessons and our youngest currently has drum lessons and also plays drums in a band at a local music project, We could go on. This is just a snapshot of their education. Sometimes it looks a little like school and more often it looks nothing like school.

436H Preliminary notice for school attendance order/436I School attendance orders/ 436 Offence of failure to comply with school attendance order.

A major concern we have with the bill is that it gives Local Authority (LA) staff the power to decide if the education we provide is ‘suitable’ and provides no reference as to how ‘violations’ would be determined. It fails to define the meaning of ‘a suitable education’. As stated above, the education we provide looks very little like school and is very difficult to quantify. It is flexible and child led. Their education happens ALL the time and in ALL places. It happens every waking hour, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Unlike in school in which learning happens 6.5 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 39 weeks a year. In school it is quantifiable and measurable whereas ours is unique to us as a family. Leaving the definition of a suitable education totally unspecified leaves it wide open to interpretation, personal opinion and abuse by the LA staff member. This section of the bill also gives LA staff the right to visit our children in our home. Our home is a private space which you only enter upon invitation, as I’m sure yours is too. Can you imagine an unqualified person being allowed to enter your private space and make subjective judgements? Would this adult be entering our children’s bedrooms too as they do some of their learning in there? This would be inappropriate and a safeguarding issue and assumes that all LA staff have integrity and experience.

There is no mention of training standards for LA staff members in the bill. They would need to be qualified in all the different styles of learning and ways to home educate. Home educators vary their approach to learning with some being very structured (a school-at-home style), some like us are semi-structured and child-led and some are fully unstructured and child-led. It is frightening to think that a random person (without training in alternatives to conventional schooling, child development, neurodiversity, health conditions like the one our child has or SEND) could come along and deem our children’s learning as ‘unsuitable’ on a whim or because they know nothing about all the above (or they want to abuse their power to further their career) and threaten our children with a School Attendance Order (SAO) or threaten us with a fine or worse, 52 weeks imprisonment! It is well-known that some LA staff already abuse their ‘power’ over us even without these all-encompassing extra powers the bill would give them.

Based on this we would like to see these heavy-handed, sections of the bill removed. The threats of fines (and even prison) is terrifying for us and all other home educating parents (many of whom have had no choice but to home educate their children due to failures within the school system). It is tantamount to bullying language. You can’t threaten people with these punishments when it isn’t clear what the ‘crime’ would be. This would mean the LA staff are making a judgement based purely on subjectivity. A further point on this matter is that there is no mention of us having any recourse such as a tribunal or independent ombudsman if a LA steps out of line. That is totally unfair. Despite all of this, if a local authority tried to force our children back into school, we would not comply. Nor would many other HE parents. We would even be prepared to go to prison, as our children’s health and wellbeing comes above everything else in our lives.

436B Duty to register children not in school.

Local authorities in England already hold informal registers of home educated children. They also check up on us once every 12 months to see if our education is suitable. So, we want to know how this new register will differ from the existing one? It is very vague and unclear in the current wording. Also how does being on a register, protect vulnerable children in practical terms? Being on a child protection register does not directly protect children, it merely acts as an administrative tool. There are already several key pieces of legislation in place in the UK to safeguard children. Protection comes from action not another piece of paper. In the case of Sara Sharrif, she was already known and, on Surrey’s register, every detail about her life was logged with the authorities yet she was still failed by them. Another register wouldn’t have saved her sadly. Home education was nothing at all to do with her death. She had been known to be a child at risk for years but was classed as ‘home educated’ for a tiny fraction of that time. Please don’t use her death to scapegoat all the thousands of dedicated, hard-working, home educating families like us, by enforcing another register on them. Base this bill on evidence not ideology. Evidence shows that we are not a threat at all to our own children.

436E Provision of information to local authorities: education providers.

This section of the bill is not only a privacy violation for our children and potentially a GDPR breach, it also places a huge, unrealistic administrative burden on providers which would most likely result in the providers withdrawing their provision for home educated children. This would make those children less ‘visible’ to people outside of the home and would have the opposite effect this bill is supposed to be having. One of keeping children ‘visible’. This can already be seen by the numbers of further education colleges who until recently provided courses for home educated children aged 14-16 and in recent months have withdrawn these courses due to local authorities making it harder and harder for them to apply for funding for these children. We have personal experience of this happening to our eldest child and their friends. In addition, this idea of gaining information from any person, online provider or website our children learn from or come into contact with is intrusive and a huge overstepping of state power. Are we assured data leaks won’t occur? We suggest this section be revoked completely as it is untenable, unfair and a breach of privacy.

Additional information

The proposals in the Children Not In School section are an overreach of state power. It suggests that the state is better at parenting than parents. Parents are the ones who know their children best and should be the ones to make decisions about what is best for them, not the state. Additionally, children themselves have rights under the Children’s Rights Act. No-where in the bill are the voices of children represented. Have the government asked children what they think is in their best interests? We can assure you that our children both say they would never want to go back into school and love being educated at home. This goes for all their friends too. The bill reduces choice for parents and is built on some myth that school is always the safest place for children and that home is the most unsafe. We refute these notions completely and ask where is the evidence for this?

It also assumes that home educating parents are a threat to their children. Yet the state fails children far more frequently than families do. And even adjusting for the difference in numbers, statistically home educators are far less likely to be prosecuted for child abuse than parents of schooled children. 25,000 children a year are admitted to hospital a year from self-harming. In 2022/3 alone 8,782 children aged 10-14 were admitted to hospital in England from self-harm. There is a mental health crisis amongst children. We know far too much of this pressure is coming from school. Teachers and pupils are leaving schools in large numbers. Shockingly, 200+ children even take their own lives every year, even some as young as 6 or 7. Whilst school cannot be blamed for all these sad incidents, most of these children attend school. Children with SEND are more likely to fall into these categories. They in particular need home education as a safety net yet the bill proposes that parents of SEND children should obtain permission from the LA to home educate which is an incredible overreach of state interference.

There are also frequently stories in the media of bullying and abuse in schools (In fact many families come to home education due to bullying in schools – Home Education is a SAFETY net for so many families). Schools are not doing a good job of keeping children safe yet this bill assumes they are. Many would say that the current school system harms more families than it helps as bullying, harsh discipline rules and highly pressured assessments, are all common problems in schools which can have serious physical and psychological impacts on children as seen in my statistics above and regularly reported in the media. Please reconsider the proposals which ask for Local Authority permission to remove a child with SEND from school, please allow the parents to make that decision. And please take out the sections of the proposals which allow the LA to decide on the suitability of my children’s education.

Recommendations for further action.

No-one would argue that the wellbeing and safeguarding of all children isn’t of the highest priority. The idea of protecting children is a noble one but the whole section Children Not In School needs to be urgently re-written in consultation with the home education community. It is unjust and discriminatory to our community. There are many experts in this field such as Dr Naomi Fisher, Michael Charles and Jenn Hodge who could help with the next draft. The whole section unfairly demonises loving, dedicated, hard-working families who are doing something extraordinary for their children, many of whom have been failed by the state school system. And finally, we would like to suggest that if the government is truly committed to the wellbeing of children that it looks at what is going wrong in schools, why so many pupils and teachers are leaving and why there is a crisis amongst families with SEND.

January 2025