Home schooling and the thought police
by Tristram Llewellyn Jones, TCW:
IN February when I warned ‘Watch out, home educators, the Left is coming for you’, I had no idea that the Schools Bill Schools Bill [HL] (parliament.uk) would propose such wide-ranging powers to regulate and control parents who teach their children at home, a freedom Britain has always enjoyed.
Home-educating parents are alarmed at the proposals, and frankly perplexed at why a Conservative Government, once so in favour of the family, pursues a basically socialist policy of state control. The Committee stage of the Bill has just started in the House of Lords and there are many amendments on both sides of this debate.
The key question is just what is triggering the zeal with which the Government now pursues home educators for information about their families?
The Schools Bill proposes a register of home-educated children, although local authorities already know about most children in their area. It also proposes that local authorities can ask parents for any information they ‘consider appropriate’. That is basically a power for a civil servant to make unlimited inquiries before deciding whether or not to prosecute parents for not providing a ‘suitable education’.
So what is a suitable education? It has always been, on the balance of probabilities, some form of education that would satisfy a reasonable person that the child is being educated. This is a very old, common law approach that has stood the test of time and not been challenged by Parliament since it was formally acknowledged in the 1944 Education Act. This is the freedom that home educators have enjoyed and want to be left alone with.
So what is the Government really interested in? Curiously, for a Government so obsessed with regulated standards, it is not yet placing any demands on parents for results in literacy and numeracy (the 3 Rs in old money). So why the push for the power to make unlimited inquiries to replace what a bench of magistrates might judge in a few minutes?
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