Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Written evidence submitted by Helen Gwither to The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill Committee (CWSB70)

Written Evidence Submission: Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

1. Introduction

I am a home educator, and a JNC qualified youth worker with 25 years of experience. My experience in both roles leads me to have concerns about the proposed Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

In this submission I will cover the following areas of concern:

Mandatory Registration

Section 436C(e)

Section 436C2(a)

2. Background

As a military family who moved house approximately every two years as we were posted, we made the decision to educate our two sons at home. This meant that we could provide them with the continuity of education that the state system could not provide in our circumstances. They have never been to school, and now, in their early teens, they are bright, sociable and engaged young people, still excited to learn.

3. Areas of Concern Surrounding the Bill

I. Mandatory registration of children not in school is unnecessary, disproportionate and potentially damaging. It is vital to understand that home education is not a safeguarding issue. There is no statistical evidence that home educated children are any more likely to be vulnerable than any other child. In almost all cases of serious neglect and abuse, the child was well known to local authorities who simply failed to take appropriate actions. Although not always being seen regularly by education professionals, home educated children are very much part of the community and use health care and many other services in the same way as other children. There is no increased risk of undetected neglect and there are no known cases where parents have chosen to home educate to mask abuse. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous and completely wrong.

The use of mandatory registers in the UK (and almost all other democratic states) are solely linked to criminal behaviour and monitoring of those that have committed a criminal offence. It is therefore wrong that home-educators should be categorised in this way and subject to a severe form of state control, simply for exercising a legitimate right under domestic and international law. Mandatory powers are inevitably coercive in nature and incompatible with the freedom of parents to choose the education that is right for their child. The funds which would cover the cost of implementing a mandatory register would be better used in improving the social service or CAMHS provision, and ensuring those children who need help are able to obtain it. Given the overwhelming number of data breaches by local authorities across England, a centralised register which includes the amount of information proposed may very easily endanger the children listed on it.

II. Section 436C(e) of the proposed Bill speaks of the register holding personal information of "any individuals and organisations, other than their parent, involved in providing" education for a child not in school. The volume and breadth of education providers that are used by home educators means that this will prove, in practice, to be unworkable, and impossible to resource by any Local Authority.

To illustrate this, I will use an example of a single day of our home education journey. This day started with a poetry workshop at the Museum of London, with a group of other home educated children. The workshop was jointly run by a poet who the museum employed on a sessional basis, and the museum education staff. That afternoon we went to the Petrie Museum to meet family friends, including their son who was a history undergraduate. We attended a drop-in workshop on ancient musical instruments run again, by a visiting professional (in this case an academic who worked on 3D printing ancient musical instruments to understand their sounds) jointly with museum staff. Our friend helped my children to understand some of the artefacts on display. That evening we visited the Islamic Centre of England for Friday Prayers with another home educating family, who helped us to understand their faith. According to this clause we would need to inform the LA, within 15 days, of the names, addresses, organisations, type of education provided, location of the education (physical or online) of each of these individuals: the poet, the education teams from the Museum of London and the Petrie Museum, the visiting academic, our friend the history undergraduate, our friends who took us to Friday Prayers, and presumably the Iman and the older lady who talked to us about her faith. Repeat this, 5 days a week (or 7 since children are learning all the time), every week, for every child who is home educated. Then there are the informal moments of learning - the man in a wheelchair who helps a child to understand his disability - the Colombian lady who teaches a child some basic Spanish on the bus - the check-out assistant who helps the child to understand money as they pay.

Education outside of a classroom is impossible to quantify or define in this way. There is not an ‘on/off’ switch, nor a specific ‘time for learning’. Some of the best quality learning my children have done over the years has been spontaneous, and trying to ‘register’ the educators in this way is simply unworkable.

More worryingly, there is a great potential that it will discourage institutions from providing opportunities for Home Educators. The clause in the Bill is vague - it is difficult to understand what information is required about those providing education, and it certainly seems to be the personal names and addresses of each individual involved. Many people providing opportunities for home educators - volunteer-run clubs like Scouts and youth clubs, museums, universities, theatres etc - would be unable to provide the personal details of their workers. If this became legally necessary, there is a real risk that they would stop providing opportunities for home educated children. This clause has the potential to destroy the rich education of home educated children.

III. Section 436C2(a) states that the register "must also contain such information about, or in connection with… the child’s protected characteristics (within the meaning of the Equality Act 2010)". Storing this information about home educated children is unnecessary, disproportionate and potentially highly damaging. Neither schools nor Local Authorities are expected to register this information about children educated in school. This means that home educated children are being treated with less respect for their privacy than their counterparts in school without any kind of justification for this discriminatory treatment. Given that this data is not collected for children in school, there is little utility in gathering this data as, in isolation, it cannot be meaningfully used. The Bill is silent on the purpose for collecting this data and its uses and, given the extraordinarily intrusive interference with children’s right to privacy, it would require careful justification that is simply absent. Like other proposals in the Bill, it would be unworkable in practice. The development of identity for young people can be difficult and the pressure to report any change in identity, at the risk of criminal punishment, would add significant additional stress to both the young person and their family. In many cases, there is no fixed date when a person settles on their identity and yet this Bill seems to support the fallacy that these complex issues can be simplified to definable binary decisions, compounding the harm to children.

4. Recommendations for Amendments and Further Action

I recommend that the committee dismisses the idea of mandatory registration for children not in school. A register will achieve none of its stated goals, which in any event are unnecessary and disproportionate to address non-existent issues. It will simply redirect time, resources and funding which could be better used by Local Authorities if they are to improve the wellbeing of children. If the committee is unable to dismiss the idea altogether then the information that the register should contain needs considerable rethinking. That suggested in the proposed Bill is unnecessarily intrusive, damaging and burdensome to home educating families, and simply impossible to administrate for Local Authorities.

January 2025