Compulsory Registration for Home-Educated Children Risks Undermining Faith-Based Education
Proposed Measures in Clause 25 Create Intrusive and Unworkable Burdens, Threatening the Flexibility and Integrity of Haredi Educational Practices
APPENDIX A
Registration of Home educated Children (Clause 25)
Summary
1. Clause 25 introduces a new duty on local authorities to ‘register’ children not in school and creates various powers and duties in relation to it.
2. The Bill introduces several new obligations for families engaged in home education. Parents are required to inform the local authority if their child is deemed “eligible for registration” under the proposed new section 436D of the 1996 Act. Additionally, they must provide the local authority with specific information, including the child’s name, date of birth, and home address; the name and home address of each parent; the name of each parent providing education to the child; and the amount of time the child spends receiving education from each parent.
3. If the child is educated by someone other than their parent, parents must also supply details about the individuals or organisations involved in the education, including their names, addresses, and a description of the type of education provided.
4. Furthermore, they must disclose the postal address where the education occurs or, if applicable, the provider’s website or email address for virtual education. The total amount of time the child spends receiving such education, as well as the time spent without direct parental involvement in tuition or supervision, must also be reported (as set out in the proposed new sections 436D and 436C of the 1996 Act).
5. After the initial registration, parents are required to report any changes to the previously submitted information of which they are aware, as well as to notify the authority if the child ceases to be eligible for registration. These updates must be submitted within 15 days of the change, in accordance with the proposed new sections 436D and 436C of the 1996 Act.
6. Similar obligations will apply to ‘education providers,’ a term likely to include Yeshivas, other part-time educational institutions, and clubs serving the Haredi community, should they support home-educating parents (proposed new s. 436E of the 1996 Act).
7. The education provider will have to report ‘the total amount of time that they provide such education to the child and the amount of time that they provide such education to the child without any parent of the child being actively involved in the tuition or supervision of the child’. The local authority will have the power to demand that such information be provided.
8. Education providers that in the opinion of the local authority ‘failed’ to provide the information, will be subject to the imposition of ‘a monetary penalty’ (proposed new s. 436E of the Education Act 1996 and proposed Schedule 31A).
Effects
9. The registration process will be particularly significant and especially challenging for the Haredi community. Haredi families customarily home-educate their children, with part of their education taking place in a Yeshiva or another educational setting, and the remainder provided at home. The unique structure of this education system makes compliance with standard registration requirements considerably more difficult.
10. The proposed register will affect these families significantly, by giving local authorities extensive powers to continuously monitor and at least implicitly regulate and inspect the education of these children. This intrusion into the sanctity of the home - a private space where parents nurture their children according to their values - feels profoundly invasive. Requiring compliance with bureaucratic procedures in this setting feels as intrusive as mandating a GPS tracker on every family member to monitor how and where they spend their time at home.
11. Such measures force families to dissect and defend their natural routines, turning a place of learning and love into an environment of constant oversight and fear. These measures impose an impractical and burdensome framework, undermining faith-based education and creating a system destined to fail - an outcome that appears intended to push families into the mainstream system. The overall effect is to create a hostile environment for home-educating families, especially those selecting faith-based education.
12. First, it is implied by this Bill that faith communities are to be treated as a group, on the basis of that characteristic. The Bill invites the local authorities to collect information about the ‘child’s protected characteristics’ such as faith and ethnicity (proposed new s. 436C (2)(a)). Why would such information be collected if not in order to be deployed as a criterion for the assessment of the ‘success’ of the education provided to the child on the basis of generalisations about faith and ethnicity?
13. Second, Haredi families will be under constant supervision and, implicitly, regulation by the local authority. They will be required not only to report that a child is being home-educated but also to continuously update on any changes to the allocation of time between home education and education provided in a Yeshiva, other religious settings, or other institutions. This creates an ongoing obligation for parents to report every ‘change’ in the educational provision of their child.
14. This is particularly problematic because the Haredi education system is not based on rigid, pre-scheduled teaching models but on an outcomes-driven approach, where many subjects and skills are derived organically from religious studies and integrated learning. Attempting to fit such a fluid and holistic system into the rigid frameworks required for reporting and supervision would be nearly impossible.
15. The flexibility inherent in the Haredi educational approach conflicts with the standardised supervision models that local authorities are tasked with enforcing, leading to inevitable discrepancies and misunderstandings. Only families operating within a strictly structured timetable (an approach not universally practical, even in schools) might meet these obligations with greater ease. However, this prescriptive requirement fails to account for the flexibility central to many educational systems, imposing an undue burden on families whose practices do not conform to such rigid frameworks.
16. Moreover, the Bill’s requirement to report “the total amount of time the child spends receiving that education” in the present tense further compounds the issue. Such a demand presumes a predictable, uniform schedule that is neither reflective of nor compatible with Haredi educational practices. While conventional schools might manage this structure, Haredi education - driven by its emphasis on cumulative outcomes and the integrated development of moral, intellectual, literacy, numeracy, and character skills - does not lend itself to this kind of standardised and inflexible timetabling. This invites undue interference from local authorities and creates perpetual uncertainty for parents, as even necessary adaptations or refinements to the educational plan could be deemed breaches of the reporting obligations.
17. For those families who chose home education precisely because of a desire for flexibility, this risk will be ever-present. Flexibility allows parents to tailor education to their children’s unique needs, interests, and learning pace, which is a cornerstone of effective and individualised learning. This model of constant and intrusive surveillance, however, appears to be designed to make flexible home education as onerous as possible for parents and families.
18. The system of compulsory registration for home-educated children is fundamentally flawed, unworkable, and excessively oppressive, especially when it targets religious minorities who have historically faced severe persecutions.
19. The government’s legitimate safeguarding aims can be effectively achieved through other less onerous means, such as collaboration with health and children’s services, specifically targeting situations where evidence of risk exists. Local authorities already have sufficient powers under current laws to address such cases effectively.
20. Government has not explained how a register of information will enable hard cases to be detected. The proposed scheme will create great uncertainty and provoke great stress in the Haredi communities.
21. For all the reasons outlined above, we respectfully propose that the system of compulsory registration for home-educated children should not be implemented.