Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill

 Written evidence submitted by Written evidence submitted by Nathalie Heaselden to The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill Committee (CWSB221). 

Introduction

I am a practising solicitor by profession and a homeschooling parent and have been homeschooling my children since 2021.

Background

Following a family move in 2020, my happy and healthy daughter joined a state school in year 9, having previously attended a private Christian school. Within 6 weeks she had been subjected to severe bullying and immense peer pressure relating to underage sex, drugs, smoking and sexualisation of the 13 year old pupils. The lack of teacher control of the students meant that my daughter was constantly vulnerable.

She became severely depressed, suicidal, anxious and bedridden for 4 months; diagnosed by the hospital consultants to have Chronic Fatigue. I pulled her out of school to home educate her and she has, after an intense health battle, now obtained grade 7 and above in her GCSEs.

I now home educate my second daughter who would otherwise have attended a state secondary school in year 7 in September 2024. She is doing extremely well. We follow the Accelerated Christian Education Programme, which is recognised in the UK as equivalent to the GSCE standard, and she has yet to obtain a mark lower than 85% in all of her subjects.

Areas of Concern Surrounding the Bill

This Bill is an intrusion into the private lives of families by authorities, where there is no evidence of any harm or abuse:

· Unique identity number

State agencies will hold and share personal data about children and their families, without any parental knowledge, on the pretext that this is required to keep them ‘safe’. This data will include ‘protected characteristics’, which of course include sexuality, race and religion. I am alarmed that this data will include details of the religion being practiced in the homes of families. What purpose would this serve other than to monitor those families?

· Presumed guilt

There will be a presumption of guilt over parents who wish to remove their child from school on the basis of their faith. Councils will be able to deny some parents the right to remove their child from a school, presuming parents are guilty of harming the wellbeing of a child, and therefore enforcing that a child be kept in a school where they may be less safe.

Local authority inspectors will have the right to enter the family home so that the parents can justify that they are providing a safe environment and a ‘suitable education’ when choosing to home educate. This is a vast invasion of privacy that does not extend to any other family in the absence of evidence or suspicion of risk of harm

Parents know their child best and have their best interest at heart from the moment of their birth. However under the proposals, parents’ intimate knowledge of their child will be replaced by strangers who become the arbiters of what is suitable for their child.

· Discrimination

This Bill requires home educating parents, to provide high levels of details of any place where their children receive any education, including the locations, names and addresses of any person delivering such provision. There is no corresponding requirement placed upon a parent of a state school child to report any external tuition e.g. music or sports coaching/clubs to state authorities.

At any point should the family have someone else tutoring their child or choose to adjust these arrangements, they would have 15 days to formally report this to their local authority officer or face the threat of having broken the law. This could include any religious instruction that a child receives from a church, including on Sunday.

· "Any other information"

Section 436C(2) includes the all-encompassing statement, "any other information about the child’s… circumstances… that the Secretary of State considers should be included… for the purposes of promoting or safeguarding the education or welfare of children".

The state would be given the ability to demand any information it deems necessary from home educating Christian families, or any organisation that educates them, if it decides it is for the wellbeing of the child for the state to know this. This is too invasive and open to exploitation by the state.

· Suspicion

Paragraph 37 of the explanatory notes to the bill highlights the inherent suspicion that exists from the state to anyone who does not send their child to a state school, and especially those who home educate: "For many children who may be at risk of harm, education settings are a protective factor."

The truth is that children are far more likely to be unsafe in the local state school, where bullying, violence, sexualisation, peer-on-peer abuse are already expected to be occurring by any trained state school inspector. As set out above this has been our firsthand experience.

The reality is that education settings do not operate as a protective factor for children who attend state school. There are many children in the state school system who are not in a safe, protected and loving home environments . Consequently, there is very little evidence that they would be a protective factor for the minority of children at risk of harm in the home.

This statement and the whole tenor of the bill suggests that all home-educated children are at risk of harm, simply because they are at home. In truth, for the vast majority of children, being at home with parents is the safest place for a child to be.

Conclusion

It is a parent’s responsibility and right to ensure that their child is loved, nurtured, fed and educated and it is in exercise of that responsibility and right that parents choose to send their child to state school or to privately/home educate them and that right and responsibility should not be removed.

If this legislation proceeds without significant amendment, the state will now decide from a starting point of presumed guilt, if certain parents are fit to educate their children. Christians who seek to live a counter-cultural life, where they home educate their children in line with traditional Christian beliefs, will have to prove that their homes and their education is suitable, to a vague standard of suitability. If parents do not meet undefined council standards, they may be given a school attendance order and to be forced into what may be an unsafe environment for their child, on pain of fines or imprisonment.

Recommendations for Amendments and Further Action

The intention behind the Bill to try and ensure that those children (thankfully in the minority) who are in abusive situations can be identified and protected is a good intention. However as currently drafted this Bill is far too wide and vague to give clarity and assurance that this aim will in fact be realised.

For example, there is no guidance as to what is considered to be a "safe environment" or "suitable education."

The term "promoting or safeguarding the education or welfare of children" is too ambiguous and open to abuse e.g. by those who may have differing views from that of the parents including faith or religious beliefs.

I urge you to engage with the homeschooling communities e.g. Christian Home Education Resources,Curriculum,Support |TEACH before releasing the next draft of the Bill

Clear guidance is needed to ensure that Christian families retain the right to raise their children with strong Godly principles and morals without presumption of guilt and the underlying suspicion that all homeschooled children are somehow less safe in their own home rather than a state school setting.

February 2025.