Members of the House of Lords have raised concerns that government plans could lead to a culture of “surveillance” on homeschooling families.
The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is currently at the Committee Stage. As it stands, parents home educating their children will be required to provide their names and addresses and the amount of time each parent educates their child.
Similar records must be submitted for any individual involved in the education of the child, with any changes recorded within 15 days.
Home education is popular among Christian families, who often wish to raise and educate their children in alignment with the values of their faith and may have concerns about un-Christian beliefs being promoted in state schools especially around marriage, gender and sexuality.
Opposition to the current bill is by no means confined to Christians however.
Green Party Peer Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb said the additional requirements would make “home education harder for parents".
"We are discouraging them from doing what is best for their child and for many others," she said.
The baroness also took issue with the idea that children being home educated were at additional risk from abuse. She said that “intrusive monitoring” of “decent people” was a misuse of resources that could be better spent on those in genuine need or at risk.
“Setting up a register for children whose parents are not doing anything illegal or dangerous, requiring the collection of a significant volume of personal, sensitive and often impractical information from home-education families, is discriminatory. We should be supporting people to home-educate their children," she said.
The government’s plans were also criticised by Conservative Lord Lucas, who described the requirements of the bill as an attempt “to force home education into a classroom straitjacket”.
The government has claimed that the intention of the bill is not to burden parents but to gain a greater understanding of the education each child is receiving.
Aidan O’Neill KC was asked to review the bill by The Christian Institute. O’Neill said that the bill may contravene the European Convention on Human Rights and data protection regulations.
O’Neill argued that “the measure at issue may not constitute a proportionate interference in the fundamental rights of the families and children involved, and hence be Convention incompatible”.
Christian Concern has urged home educators and Sunday School teachers, who may also be impacted by the bill, to submit evidence to the government in a bid to show how unnecessary the proposals are.
The group said, “We must defend the rights of parents to educate their children without draconian state monitoring.”
