Parents could be forced to report Sunday School attendance

A statutory obligation could be imposed on parents to report if their home-schooled child is attending Sunday School and other forms of church education, under the wide-ranging Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

The bill, which details plans for compulsory registration of home-schooled children, has also been criticised by some for a suggested implication that ‘all home-educated children are at risk’.

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill 2024-25 passed its second reading on 8 January 2025. The proposals include a range of reforms aimed at improving the safeguarding of children, including a single numerical identifier for every child, and at raisng educational standards.

Under the provisions, registration on Children Not in School registers will be required in England where a child is receiving all or part of their education outside of school. The register will require parents to specify the amount of time the child spends receiving education from each parent. The register ‘must’ also include the names and addresses of any individuals and organisations that provide the child with education.

Simon Calvert, deputy director at the Christian Institute, comments: ‘It appears that home-educating parents will have to report if their child attends Sunday School, including names and addresses of the Sunday School teachers.’

‘Echoes of totalitarian states.’

Under the current framework, home-educated children may be invisible to the authorities. Munira Wilson MP said in the parliamentary debate: ‘This is not an attack on home education; it is about ensuring that all children are safe.’ However, there are concerns about overregulation should the bill become law.

Steve Beegoo from Christian Concern (CC) says home-education groups have been shocked by the content of the bill, saying ‘the whole tenor of the bill suggests that all home-educated children are at risk of harm, simply because they are at home’.

Writing on the CC website, he said: ‘For some parents, they will not be permitted by authorities to take a child out of a school where there may have been spurious or malicious allegations made about them on the basis of their faith or their choice to remove a child from a school. A presumption of guilt over such parents will remain as soon as any records or investigations are begun.’

John Denning, education officer at the Christian Institute, said: ‘Lots of families home educate for all sorts of reasons … This is a decision parents must remain free to make. We should be very careful about the state interfering in that decision – unless of course the child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm in which case the state rightly already has the power to intervene under the 1989 Children Act.

‘A compulsory register of home educators implies that parents need permission from the state to educate their own children. It’s not hard to imagine it turning into a scheme to impose conditions for registration, where a parent effectively has to educate in a state-approved way.’

According to government statistics, local authorities reported 111,700 children in elective home education on census day in Autumn 2024. It is not known how many Christians are home schooling, but numbers are rising.