Labour’s war on homeschooling

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 These proposals to increase surveillance on homeschooling families were ultimately withdrawn after major backlash, but Labour now seems determined to push ahead with similar proposals at pace.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.

Apparently, the homeschooling proposals in the bill are intended to prevent a repeat of tragedies like the grooming-gangs scandal and the brutal murder of 10-year-old Sara Sharif at the hands of her relatives. Yet these scandals were totally unrelated to homeschooling. Five months prior to Sara’s murder, a teacher twice saw her at school with facial bruising, but this failed to lead to the discovery of her abuse. And if education secretary Bridget Phillipson was really that concerned about preventing child exploitation at the hands of gangs, she would not have smeared attempts to insert a commitment to a national grooming-gangs inquiry into her bill as a ‘sickening’ act of ‘political opportunism’.

Whatever Phillipson’s reasoning, these plans could not have arisen at a worse time. VAT hikes threaten private schools, special-needs education is at breaking point and many parents are scrabbling for an escape from our crumbling comprehensives. Almost half of pupils now enter secondary school functionally illiterate. So it is hardly any wonder that more than 50 per cent of English adults believe that our schools fail to prepare kids for either work or adult life. Labour would be better off addressing the disaster that is our comprehensive system than attacking homeschooling families for trying to escape it.

For over a thousand years, English Common law has acknowledged parents’ natural and legal authority over their children. Naturally, this includes oversight of their schooling. The Tories’ Education Act 1996 made explicit that children can be educated outside of schools, but this did not create a new ‘right’ for families to home educate – it simply reinforced the existing situation. This is because in our legal tradition, as opposed to the civil-law systems on the continent, rights are presumed to exist unless explicitly restricted by law.

Now Labour is attempting to overturn that ancient right. It’s not difficult to imagine that Keir Starmer’s government might use this opportunity to further politicise the national curriculum, while punishing parents who want to opt out. We have already seen countless stories of young children being taught critical race theory and gender ideology as though they were fact, as well as being subjected to deeply age-inappropriate sex-education classes. No wonder some parents would rather take their children’s education into their own hands.

This clearly isn’t about protecting children. Labour’s war on homeschooling is all about control.

Georgia L Gilholy is a freelance journalist living in London.