NCB's Research and Policy Analyst Ava Berry outlines the potential implications of abandoning the Schools Bill for home educated children and young people.
Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash
This blog first appeared in the February 2023 editions of Headteacher Update and SecEd
Home educated children are some of the most invisible and under researched populations of children and young people in the UK.[1] This is largely down to the fact legislation doesn’t require parents to notify the local authority if they choose to home educate, which means no one knows how many children are being home educated at any time.[2]
The government doesn’t routinely collect any data on the long terms outcomes of children who are home educated.[3] We don’t know how many home educated children and young people go to university or experience mental health difficulties.[4] We also don’t know how children and young people feel about their home education experience, because of a lack of research or consultation.[5]
As someone who was home educated myself, I followed the Schools Bill very closely and felt optimistic about the new duties it would place on local authorities and parents, through the Children Not in School Register. The register would have placed a legal duty on parents to inform their local authority they were home educating their child, and a duty on the local authority to maintain the register.
While it is important the law continues to allow parents to educate their children at home, for a significant range of good reasons, more needs to be done to bring the voices of home educated children and young people into the centre of the conversation.
From my own experience, I’m aware some home educated young people can have difficulties with accessing exams, due to the costs of private GCSE’s and tutors. And the college system, which is usually the only other option, is in many ways not designed with the educational needs of home educated young people in mind, or flexible enough to enrol young people under 16 years old.
The Schools Bill was going to be a huge leap forward in terms of supporting families who home educate, along with children and young people not in school for other reasons, and ensuring local authorities hold data on children and young people being educated at home or children missing education.
The Bill included a duty to provide support, including financial, to home educating families, and the data collected as part of the register would help enable local authorities to respond to local need. This would have had a lasting positive impact on access to educational resources and opportunities for home educated children and young people.
Hopefully there will be other avenues to improve the evidence base and support offered to home educating families. NCB would like to see the creation of a register which includes the voice of the child. It should record and reflect the diverse range of feelings that these children have about their education and whether they would like to have any additional support, including for any Special Education Needs or Disability they might have.
The Department for Education should also commission research which tracks the experiences and outcomes of children who are home educated, as this would provide much needed insight for developing policy measures for home education, grounded in children and young people’s lived experience. This was a key recommendation of the Education Select Committee report “Strengthening Home Education”, published in 2021:
We therefore recommend that the Department urgently commissions and publishes longitudinal research on the life chances and social outcomes of EHE children in England, working in partnership with the full range of EHE communities and measuring ‘hard’ outcomes such as literacy and numeracy as well as ‘soft’ outcomes. These ‘soft’ outcomes could include less quantifiable factors such as mental wellbeing.[6]
Home education must continue as a right for children and their parents to choose as they see fit, but this shouldn’t deter the Government from getting better at understanding their different experiences and outcomes, and for local services to step in to offer support where needed.
[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn05108/
[2] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn05108/
[3] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmeduc/84/8403.htm#_idTextAnchor004
[4] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmeduc/84/8403.htm#_idTextAnchor004
[5] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmeduc/84/8403.htm#_idTextAnchor004
[6] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5802/cmselect/cmeduc/84/8403.htm