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 (CWSB16). 

Summary

· We home-educate because of a lack of suitable provision for our SEN child

· Choosing to home-educate has required significant personal sacrifice

· Home-educating is difficult, costly, and time-consuming, and government provides no support

· The information Las will be permitted to gather is unreasonable and is given no bounds in the bill

· The bill would allow compulsory home visits – these would be extremely difficult for our child, whose home is his safe space

· The bill is too non-specific and relies too much on easily-modified secondary legislation

· My son is exceeding his educational milestones and there have never been any safe-guarding concerns around him – there have been no serious case reviews of a home-educated child coming to harm who was not already known to the authorities

· Home-educators are being singled-out and made to feel ostracised; we are under suspicion, chronically un-supported, and un-appreciated

Dear Select Committee

1.) I am writing as a home-educator to my young son (ten years old). I have significant concerns over parts of the Children’s Wellbeing and School’s Bill, particularly those relating to home-education.

2.) The decision to home-educate my son was not made lightly. He attended nursery for a year but was unable to cope with the proximity of other children and the level of noise and unpredictability. He was frightened, over-whelmed, and extremely unhappy. We withdrew him and, naturally, sought professional help in the form of our GP, then a paediatrician, occupational therapist, and psychologist. Our son is most probably autistic, with a PDA profile (he is awaiting assessment, as he has been for several years now) and has sensory processing disorder. These conditions can make him very anxious in environments in which he is not comfortable. As he approached school-age I visited numerous settings, each one of which said that they would be unable to meet his needs (mainstream) or were not a suitable environment (special). There are unfortunately very few settings in the UK which cater to children like my son – he is highly intelligent, very demand-avoidant, and has extreme sensory sensitivities. As a result of this we took the decision to home-educate.

3.) This decision has necessitated enormous personal sacrifice on my part, not least having no further children and giving up my highly-paid career; I would not be doing it if I did not believe that it was the best option for my child. Home-educating is not easy. The weight of responsibility to provide the best education possible (with, incidentally, zero council or governmental support) for my child is constant. The requirement to plan and prepare educational materials, to ensure we are following the curriculum should my son want to start attending school, to wake up every day (every day) knowing that today I must be both parent and teacher is time-consuming and draining. Home-educating is also not a free pursuit - educational materials, trips, and resources all come with costs attached, as do tutors, online-learning programmes, educational apps etc. There is no financial support for home-educators and every single home-educator I know makes significant sacrifices to their own standard of living in order to provide their children with the resources needed to educate them well (examples include minimal/no holidays, no restaurant/pub/takeaway meals, very little adult-adult socialising because that costs money and that money is being spent on their children’s social activities and education).

4.) Life as a home-educator is hard enough; I do not necessarily expect government to understand this, but I did not expect them to actively make it more difficult. There are aspects of the proposed legislation which will mean that I have to take time away from educating my child to spend filling in paperwork and providing information to our Local Authority (LA). There is no extra time in my life, I don’t have time to relax that I could use instead, or someone who could look after my son while I sit down and provide the level of detail which might be expected. The proposals for a home education register would require that I provide: unrealistic information about the hours the learning takes place, the number of hours each person provides the education, websites used, groups attended, and unsettlingly ‘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 (our learning, for example, takes place all the time, e.g. studying rock formation at Brimham Rocks, pretending to be monks at Fountains Abbey, arguing over whether Richard III was evil or whether it was Tudor propaganda at Middleham Castle).

5.) 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, and which would not work for my child. 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, books, magazines, apps used each week. 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? It will not; what it will do is impose a significant additional burden on an already stretched group, whilst doing nothing to help or support children like my son.

6.) My principal concern with the bill is that it appears to be opening the door to compulsory home visits. Our home is mine and my child’s safe space, and no one should ever have the right of entry unless there are genuine concerns over my son's safety. There are many reasons a visit can go wrong, such as a bad-mannered EHE, a refusal to leave, ignorance towards SEN, expecting a child to perform, demanding reams of information, disregard for certain styles of home-education 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 dislikes non-traditional styles of learning. The proposed changes include considering the home and learning environment. I am well aware that there are already LAs in England which try to gain entry to home-educated childrens’ houses, and this bill will give them further licence to do so. I have thought very carefully about the use of this word, but my child would be traumatised by someone from the LA coming and attempting to enter our home. His autism means that we plan any sort of visit, including from close family members, extremely carefully, and he knows that his home is a safe space for him. The idea that someone would want to look in his bedroom, where some learning takes place, would be invasive, horrifying to him, and anxiety inducing, and is an entirely unreasonable expectation. Do we really live in a country where home-educators are going to be forced to allow LA representatives into their homes or face punitive consequences? If there were safeguarding concerns then social services already have the power to check on the home environment; this proposed section is absolutely not necessary and massively open to misuse. Organisations exist to support innocent home educators who fall victim to badly behaved LAs but there is no consequence for the LA, no consequence for lying or misrepresenting the law (as does happen). These organisations support us if we live in the type of LA which regularly and needlessly serves 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; and who would keep our children safe and well then? 

7.) My other key concern about the bill is that there are very few specifics - these are found in secondary legislations which can be changed with very little input, discussion or oversight. 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’s demands and their SAOs. The result will be more broken children in a broken school system because parents won’t know how to fight an LA which is overstepping. 

8.) 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 and provide the best education they can for their children. There is no meaningful support included (whilst the bill discusses support it leaves it entirely in the hands of the LA to determine whether to offer it and provides them with no additional funding to do so), so no benefit to home educators. It truly is a backdoor attempt at banning anything other than a formal school-at-home type of home-education. 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 was home-educated and wasn’t known to services. Services failed those children. Innocent families should not be persecuted for those failings, particularly 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 have a lower chance of a case being opened, because the referral is found to be false), we take our responsibility of providing a suitable education very seriously. Yes, there will be 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.

9.) My son is exceeding his educational milestones, ahead of his year-group in core literacy and maths skills, and is being exposed to a varied education. There is not, and has never been, any safe-guarding concern over him and he is regularly exposed to adults who know him and would immediately raise issues. In addition to this he has medical appointments where, again, healthcare professionals could assess and raise any concerns. There is no-one in this world who cares more about his well-being than I do and this bill will not make him any safer than he already is. Instead it is already causing me concern over correctly meeting the LA’s reporting requirements (whatever they might end up being), significant anxiety over how my son would cope with elements such as compulsory home visits, and worry about the lack of specifics in the bill itself.

10.) I strongly feel that my parental rights are being eroded despite there being no concerns over my son’s safety or education, that I am automatically being deemed suspicious simply because I have chosen to do the best for my child. My child is also seeing his right to a suitable education eroded – governments have consistently failed to provide my son with what he needs, either in terms of autism assessment or a suitable education, yet are now questioning how I do so in the absence of any alternative and any evidence that I am failing to do so. I am sure that this is not government’s intention, but they must understand how this bill is making the home-education community feel - ostracised, under suspicion, chronically un-supported, and un-appreciated.

I would prefer this evidence to not be published, or if published then to be so in anonymised form.

January 2025.