Westminster Diary - 18th January 2010

Monday, 18th January 2010

The House of Commons recently debated the Government’s Children, Schools and Families Bill. Among the Bill’s provisions is a proposal to introduce a registration scheme to enable local authorities to record home-educated children, of which there are approximately 123 in Warwickshire and an estimated 20,000 in England as a whole. The scheme will be a register of all children of compulsory school age in their area who are being educated entirely at home. Local Authorities will also be obliged to monitor the education provided to a child on their home education register. There are several grounds on which I object to this and why, partly, I voted against the Bill on Monday.

The first thing to bear in mind is that there are many reasons why parents choose to educate their children at home: they might be unhappy with local provision; their child might have a specific educational need that can be better supported at home; or they might have philosophical objections to the style of education on offer at their local state schools. Whatever their reasons, I believe it is a basic right of parents to be able to educate their children in accordance with their own wishes and that includes educating them at home. This Bill erodes that right by establishing a registration scheme that allows an inspector into the family home and to revoke the right of a parent to educate a child if the education offered is not deemed suitable according to regulations laid down by the Government. It appears to me that this measure is not so much about safeguarding children, but about Ministers dictating what parents should and should not be teaching their own children, a policy that runs counter to the principle of parental freedom of choice in education.

In any case, there is no evidence to suggest that children are intrinsically at greater risk from abuse if they are being home educated - for instance, not a single home-educated child has had to be taken into care as a result of a child protection plan. For the Government to use child protection as an excuse to expand its control over what home educators choose to teach their children is disingenuous and wrong-headed. Children taught in schools spend most of their time in the family home - are their parents to be inspected for safeguarding purposes?

There may well be a case for establishing an inspections scheme to ensure that home education is of a sufficient quality, but that case has not yet been made. The Government have justified these measures on the basis of child protection issues.

Parents who make the decision to educate their children do not choose an easy path and they make considerable sacrifices in order to follow it. Suggesting that their children may not be safe in their care is not the right way to assure ourselves that these children are being educated well.

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Updated on Monday, 18th January 2010