by Georgia L Gilholy, spiked
The UK government’s schools bill threatens to strip parents of their rights.
An attack on Britain’s liberal homeschooling laws has been brewing for years. Plans for an unprecedented assault were laid out by the Conservatives in their shelved Schools Bill back in 2022. These proposals to increase surveillance on homeschooling families were ultimately withdrawn after major backlash, but Labour now seems determined to push ahead with similar proposals at pace.
The House of Lords is currently debating the inappropriately named Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. Although its main focus is on schools themselves, it would also mandate a nationwide register of all children not in school full-time. Parents would also have to ‘notify’ their local authority if they intend to remove their kids from school in the first place. How local authorities use this power remains to be seen. There is every chance they could err on the side of denying, rather than approving parents’ requests. In any case, it would remove the automatic right that families currently have to have control over their children’s education. Those who continue to homeschool could become targets of state surveillance, regardless of how well their children are cared for.
Such homes would be automatically treated as suspect by the state and thus worthy of local authority ‘inspections’ to ensure children are ‘receiving a suitable education’. If parents refuse to comply with whatever government whims their curricula are judged by, they could be prosecuted and subject to fines or even jail time. This could easily pave the way for a system like that of Germany, where home education is almost entirely banned and can result in the removal of children from the home.