When Safeguarding Becomes Spin: Are We Being Consulted, or Conditioned?
The State Is Listening—But Only to Itself
For years now, “safeguarding” has enjoyed near-sacrosanct status in policy circles. Rightly so—protecting children from harm is one of the most vital responsibilities of any civilised society. But as with all noble causes, it is susceptible to distortion.
The government’s latest guidance, titled “Unregistered Independent Schools and Out-of-School Settings: Guidance for Local Authorities” (29 May 2025), reveals a troubling shift. It reads not as a neutral technical manual, but as a blueprint for steering public perception—and by extension, public consultation—towards a foregone conclusion.
This isn’t about protecting children from actual harm. It’s about redefining what constitutes harm, and then using that redefinition to cast suspicion on educational and cultural practices that lie beyond the state's preferred framework.
Let’s be clear: this is not consultation. This is conditioning.
Guidance That Frames Before It Informs
The tone of the document is unmistakable: it strongly implies that any educational setting operating outside the formal registration system is inherently unsafe—and, by extension, illegal.
From the outset, “unregistered” is not presented as a neutral legal status, but rather as a warning sign—conflated with risk, non-compliance, and safeguarding failure.
References to “illegal settings” and institutions “operating outside the law” are repeated throughout the text, yet no legal clarification is offered to distinguish between truly unlawful operations and legitimate, lawful alternatives such as supplementary education or home education.
In fact, under Section 96 of the Education and Skills Act 2008, it is only unlawful to operate a full-time unregistered school that provides full-time education to five or more pupils of compulsory school age. This does not apply to part-time settings, supplementary education, or home education. Yet the guidance fails to make this distinction, creating the misleading impression that any non-registered setting is automatically illegal or dangerous.
By linking unregistered provision with safeguarding failures, radicalisation, and extremism—without distinguishing between isolated failings and the vast majority of lawful, peaceful community-led initiatives—the document constructs a narrative of inherent risk. The implication is clear: if it’s outside the system, it’s a problem.
This isn’t just misleading. It’s deeply unfair to the thousands of parents, faith groups, tutors and volunteers who run responsible, culturally rich, and educationally effective out-of-school settings across the UK.
From Risk-Based Oversight to Suspicion-Led Surveillance
Perhaps the most significant departure from established safeguarding norms is the guidance’s instruction to proactively identify and investigate settings, even where there have been no complaints and no signs of harm.
In a rule-of-law society, we expect intrusion into family or community life to be based on reasonable cause, as laid out in Section 47 of the Children Act 1989. That bar exists for good reason. It ensures that interventions are not driven by ideology, preference, or vague concern—but by actual risk.
Yet this guidance quietly lowers that bar, encouraging authorities to use web searches, community referrals, planning breaches, and even fire safety codes to map, monitor and pressure settings that may be operating perfectly lawfully.
This isn't safeguarding. It’s a strategy of administrative pressure, cloaked in the language of child protection.
Policy by Presumption
Nowhere is the government’s predisposition more evident than in its treatment of children who attend out-of-school provision during school hours. The guidance flatly asserts that such children are “unlikely” to be receiving a suitable education.
This is not a legal finding. It’s a presumption—and one that subtly delegitimises home education and faith-based alternatives, despite their clear protection under UK law.
It’s worth recalling the UK Supreme Court’s remarks in Re B (a Child) [2013] UKSC 33, which reaffirmed that the State must tolerate a broad range of parental decisions—even those it does not prefer. There is no “officially approved” method of child-rearing or education in a free society.
By treating deviation from the mainstream as a red flag, this guidance undermines not only pluralism, but parental authority itself.
The Risk of Manufactured Evidence
Perhaps the most concerning feature of the guidance is its potential role in shaping the very consultation it is meant to inform.
Local authorities are advised to create referral pathways, establish information-sharing mechanisms, and monitor online content to detect “settings of concern.” But what happens if these unverified, anecdotal, or ideologically loaded findings are fed back into the government’s own consultation analysis?
It would amount to a closed feedback loop: data generated by suspicion becomes the justification for further suspicion. In such a model, the consultation is not an open question—it is a curated script, designed to validate decisions already made.
This risks not only undermining the credibility of the process, but also eroding public trust in the entire framework of safeguarding policy.
A Call for Intellectual Honesty
Let’s not mistake this for a fringe issue. The consequences of this guidance extend far beyond any one group. It touches on fundamental questions:
Who defines educational legitimacy in a free society?
Is parental diversity a right to be protected—or a problem to be managed?
Do we want safeguarding to be rooted in evidence—or in ideology?
If the State insists on intervening in family or community life, it must do so with humility, legal clarity, and a genuine openness to dissenting voices.
That means:
Resisting the urge to frame alternatives as threats.
Recognising the difference between non-conformity and non-compliance.
Ensuring that consultation is shaped by genuine engagement, not engineered consensus.
In Defence of Procedural Integrity
This is not an argument against safeguarding. It is a call for safeguarding safeguarding—protecting it from becoming a tool of institutional groupthink.
To conflate independence with illegality, or cultural difference with danger, is to betray the very principles that underpin both liberty and law.
We must not allow guidance documents—no matter how administrative they appear—to quietly reshape the boundaries of lawful behaviour and legitimate parenting.
Because when the rules of the conversation are written in advance, consultation becomes theatre. And when suspicion replaces trust, pluralism itself is put on trial.
Let us safeguard what truly matters: children, yes—but also truth, fairness, and the freedom to live and learn differently.
Thank you for raising this with such clarity and courage. Your piece cuts through the noise with principled insight, and I hope more voices join in questioning the direction these policies are heading.
For decades, “child protection” has been treated as an unquestionable moral imperative — a sacrosanct principle that demands deference and shields itself from scrutiny. Of course, protecting children from immediate harm is a basic human instinct: if a child is about to be hit by a car, you pull them out of the way; if they’re being bullied, you intervene; if they face real danger, you step in to help. But the official, legal, and media-driven version of “child protection” has become something very different — an oppressive bureaucratic regime fueled by media outrage and a powerful network of charities and organizations often dubbed the “abuse industry.” These groups, such as the NSPCC, generate funding and influence by amplifying emotional stories of child abuse, often spending more on advertising and campaigning than on directly preventing harm. Instead of stopping real abuse, they advocate for ever-expanding definitions of harm and policies that create hysteria, resulting in innocent families being caught in the system and even criminalized.
This sanctimonious status of child protection has become a shield for expanding state control over families — wielded with little accountability, transparency, or evidence. This unassailable moral high ground makes it nearly impossible to challenge invasive legislation like the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which masquerades as safeguarding but in reality tightens government power under the guise of moral necessity.
This sacred cow risks harming precisely those it claims to protect. Families and communities face increasing surveillance, criminalization, and bureaucratic overreach — all justified by an ideology that refuses to tolerate dissent, diversity, or alternative approaches to child-rearing and education.
Unlike the government’s claim that this is a benign register, there’s an uncomfortable truth many hesitate to say aloud. The elephant in the room was aptly highlighted by Lord Wei during the debate on the Schools Bill (the precursor to this Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill):
“One of the ways that we can provide protection is simply to exempt home educating parents who are delivering a high standard of education, in line with current law, from this register. It is, in my mind, ludicrous that those who are doing a good job are put on a register in an open-ended way. At any time, their home education can be interrupted. Those who complain can be forced to send their children to school, so they do not complain or appeal. There is no recourse and no time limit and there is no easy way to overturn this.
We have registers: we have registers for sex offenders and we have registers for criminals. Those who commit crimes are put on the criminal register. Those who commit a sex offence are put on the sex offender register.”
The comparison to those other registers speaks volumes, inviting us to seriously question what kind of register this is — and what it means for parental rights and freedoms.
Incidentally, I noticed that Hackney's Children's Safeguarding Commissioner who's a staunch supporter of this bill is Jim Gamble — are you familiar with his past involvement in leading the disastrous Operation Ore? That operation, was a miscarriage of justice on a scale comparable to the more widely known Post Office scandal, sweeping up thousands — many of whom ended up on that other infamous register, with no proper redress. I recently revisited the tragedy in more detail here: https://unmaskingchildprotection.substack.com/p/the-dark-side-of-operation-ore-a
Thank you for your incisive perceptions and your consistency in addressing this pernicious issue. As a former home educator I can only agree, and the rumblings of this stretch back, at the very least, to Blair’s Children’s Act 2004, the ‘Every Child Matters’ initiative and his choice of the deeply compromised Hodge as his first ‘minister for [state ownership of] children’. Intrusive legislation in the form of the Children, Schools and Families Act (driven largely, I am convinced, by the lobbying of local authorities perpetually outraged at the fact that they could not legally demand close oversight of home educating families without specific evidence of need to do so) was only narrowly averted in 2010 by the election that resulted in the coalition government, and would have affected our family directly had it gone through. (And not forgetting that the process that led to this narrowly-averted legislation was kick-started in January 2009 by the claims of Baroness Morgan in the House of Lords that ‘home schooling’ could be used as a cover for abuse, exploitation and forced marriage, thus cloaking itself in the mantle of purported child protection.) I remain profoundly thankful that we were able to confine any contact with the local authority to within the law and official guidelines, which were comparatively reasonable and benign at the time, as long as one was sufficiently aware of one’s own responsibilities and the actual limitations of the LA’s remit. Unfortunately, I recall many instances in which LAs relied on ignorance in order to push the boundaries, often resulting in the derailment of a family’s home education journey and an unhappy and reluctant return to the school system, or even in some cases a family’s relocation to a different county where the LA was more legally compliant and less adversarial in their approach to home educating families.