CROSSPOST: The problem with Labour's home-school crackdown
My latest piece for The Spectator
This is a preview of my latest piece for The Spectator, which has been published today. Follow the link at the end to read the whole thing!
And you can except a regular post from me here at The New Albion from me later this week.
There are some counterintuitive differences between the US and the UK. One of them is this: home education has always been far easier in the UK, legally speaking, than across the Atlantic. But that is all about to change.
In states across the US, the right to home educate, and the attendant level of government oversight (e.g. registration, submitting planned curricula, proving progress etc.) has always varied wildly. But in the UK it has always been very simple: centuries of English common law mean that if a parent wishes to keep their child at home to be educated it is none of the government’s business.
This makes sense after even a moment’s consideration: British mass education is a Victorian social experiment. The Elementary Education Act of 1880 legislated that all children aged 5 and 10 must receive an education. But people have been having children for quite a bit longer than that, and no reform has removed the right to keep one’s children at home.
Indeed, the default status of any British child can be considered to be home education. Section 7 of the Education Act 1996 states that the duty to ensure that eligible children are educated, ‘by regular attendance at school or otherwise’, lies with parents, not with the state. The state’s sole duty at this juncture is to provide schooling for those who wish to avail themselves of it or have no other choice.
Properly speaking then, sending one’s child to the local comprehensive is delegating one’s duty of education to the state. Section 437 of the Education Act allows local education authorities to intervene, but not at their whim; rather, only ‘if it appears… that a child of compulsory school age in their area is not receiving suitable education’.
This is the legal reality. But in practice, most parents assume education is the duty of the state. Many local authorities, meanwhile, are staffed by zealous ideologues who see elective home education as enough reason in itself to judge that a child ‘appears’ to not be receiving a suitable education, and distress home-educating parents by insisting upon information and home visits to which the local authorities have no legal right.
Yet parents who do know their rights are making more use of them than ever. According to government statistics, the total number of UK children in elective home education as of December 2024 is 111,700, around 1.4 per cent, up from 92,000 just a year earlier and double the 2019 figure.
Why such growth?