Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Written evidence submitted by Julie Holland to The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill Committee (CWSB74)

I am an experienced Home Educating (HE) parent, who is coming to the end of my HE journey. I have already successfully HE’d my oldest child who is now an apprentice, with his dream apprenticeship. My second child is due to sit his final IGCSE exams this June and has a place already offered to him at our local college to take A levels). I have been involved in HE for over 20 years and have a lot of experience of the law, the Local Authorities (LA) and other HE families issues. I was an original founder of our counties HE Facebook group, we now have approx. 3,000 members who support each other.

Historically I was involved in the Graham Badman report in 2009. That report resulted in a breakdown in relationships between families and the LA. Over the following years a lot of work has been undertaken in our county to try and repair some of this damage.

If this bill continues without changes, the relationship between LA and HE families will deteriorate again, I suspect that families will attempt to go ‘under the radar’ [1] as they wish to educate their children and often repair the damage that the current state education system is doing to their children without interference from the state.

The demands that this bill would put on families would result in onerous amounts of time being spent on paperwork for the LA, when they wish to be educating their children.

To help the committee I have used the page and line number in the original published Bill for my specific comments

1. Page 7 line 18. ‘16LB Consistent identifiers for children – Over the past few years there have been numerous data breaches in LA’s and other government bodies and this is a great concern for many parents, particularly for families where Domestic Violence has taken place. As I am sure you are aware previous attempts at tracking children (such as Contact Point) have failed due to the risks to both family rights and privacy.

2. Page 46 line 34 ‘(b) must refuse consent if the local authority considers (i)that it would be in the child's best interests to receive education by regular attendance at school. Currently it is recognised that a parent is the person that knows their child’s best interest. If there is disagreement about this then the issue is taken to the Family Courts to decide. It should not be in the powers of the LA to decide. In particular when they do not have the skill base to make these decisions.

3. Page 39 line 14 ‘436C Content and maintenance of registers (1) (d) the amount of time that the child spends receiving education from each parent of the child,

(e) if the child receives education from a person other than their parent-

(i) the names and addresses of any individuals and organisations involved in providing that education, (ii) a description of the type of each provider named under sub-paragraph (i), (iii) the postal address of each place where that education is provided (where different from the address in sub-paragraph (iv) the total amount of time that the child spends receiving that education and the amount of time the child spends receiving that education without any parent of the child being actively involved in the tuition or supervision of the child.’

This would place a huge burden on all HE families. An HE child’s day fluctuates from day to day, particularly if the child has Special Needs (SN). Even without SN (my children do not have SN) I would find this an incredibly time-consuming job. This half term my child would have a minimum of 9 different providers, and this is different to last half term and will be different again next half term.

4. Page 50 line 42 ‘(3) A register under section 436B may also contain any other information the local authority considers appropriate.’ This is NOT acceptable at all, this would provide LA’s with permission to hold any information about children and their families that they wish, and as I previously mentioned they are not famous for being able to hold data secure.

5. Page 55 line 1 ‘436G Support For as long as I have been HE Parents have been asking the Department of Education (DfE) to provide the space and funding for HE children to sit their exams. In all this document this has not been mentioned once, and is probably the one thing that the majority of HE families desire from the Government.

I believe that this bill has been drawn up with a complete lack of knowledge about HE, and with a hatred for parents that chose to do the best for their children. The current State Education system does not support or provide for so many children, it is only right that parents can continue to have the right to choose how their child is educated and if it is via Elective Home Education (EHE) they should be supported, not discriminated against as this bill would do.

If this bill is signed into law, it will be treating HE families as guilty until proven innocent and interferes with our rights to family life.

In addition it will come at a huge cost to the state. Each LA would have to ensure that they were employing highly qualified staff who are aware of different educational philosophies and understand all the various SN needs of children. Historically a lot of LA’s do not employ staff with these skills, they often recruit at the lower levels and do not currently have the funding for the amount of bureaucracy that this bill would incur.

Which in light of the ‘black hole’ which the chancellor keeps telling us about would appear to be a backward step for this government’s finances.

January 2025