Do not require parents to register home educated children with local authorities
11,116 people signed this petition to the UK Parliament after it opened on 31 May 2022; it closed on 14 December 2022. The Government responded on 8 August 2022. MPs debated it in Westminster Hall on 27 March 2023.
The petition
The petition's creator is not named in the Petitions site's published record. Quoted in full from the UK Parliament petitions site.
Do not require parents to register home educated children with local authorities
Remove the clauses relating to 'Children not in school' from Part 3 of the Schools Bill, and do not pursue compulsory registration of all home-schooled children. We see no evidence that this would be beneficial, and we believe the proposals place a discriminatory burden on supportive parents.
This proposal would allow a local authority to obtain any information it considers appropriate about the family or child, but without specific or sufficient safeguards in place around the use and protection of that data. Home educating parents would be subject to penalties and answerable to unaccountable individuals under no clear standards, with less time to satisfy their demands than a failing school under Ofsted. None of this is reasonable.
The Government's response
The Government published its response on 8 August 2022; the petitions site lists the Department for Education as responsible. Its summary:
The registers will help local authorities support home educating families; identify children not receiving a suitable education, children missing education, and children otherwise at risk of harm.
The opening 386 words of the 816-word response:
Many parents who educate their children at home provide a high-quality education and do so in the best interests of their child. We support parents’ right to home educate when this is the case.
The Association of Directors of Children’s Services estimated in their 2021 Elective Home Education survey that there were 115,542 children who were electively home educated at some point during the 2020-21 academic year – an increase of 34 per cent on the previous year. However, responses to the government’s 2019 Consultation on Children Not in School (CNIS) suggested that not all children educated at home are being educated suitably.
Therefore, the CNIS system of registration outlined in the Schools Bill is not just necessary to aid LAs to undertake their existing responsibilities to safeguard children and ensure they are receiving a suitable education; but also to help them to discharge their new duty in the Bill to support home educating families.
The new registration system is not intended to undermine parents’ existing rights to home educate in the way that they choose, nor will providing information for the registers be overly burdensome for parents. LAs may only require parents of eligible children to provide them with the information prescribed in legislation - the child’s name, date of birth and home address, the name and address of each parent (where known), and the means through which they are being educated, for example whether the child is being educated at home or in other out-of-school education settings, and the proportion of their education received there.
The legislation will allow LAs to record any other information in their registers they consider appropriate and have collected through other channels, but they cannot make families provide any additional information they consider appropriate.
We take data protection seriously. All LAs will be required to process the personal data they collect and store on their registers in accordance with UK-GDPR. Further safeguards are built into the Bill, including requiring that no individual-level data be published or made accessible to the public. The Secretary of State will also make regulations prescribing specific categories of persons with whom LAs may share information from their registers, when they consider it appropriate to do so for the purpose of promoting the education of or safeguarding children, such as the NHS, other LAs, etc.
Read the full response on the petitions site.
Where the signatures came from
Signatures came from 644 constituencies on the boundaries used until the 2024 general election. The largest number, 234, came from Hackney North and Stoke Newington.
11,068 of the signatures were from the UK and 48 from elsewhere, by the location signers gave.
| Constituency | Signatures |
|---|---|
| Hackney North and Stoke Newington | 234 |
| Somerton and Frome | 78 |
| Bethnal Green and Bow | 72 |
| Stroud | 63 |
| Tottenham | 62 |
| Chippenham | 59 |
| Hereford and South Herefordshire | 56 |
| Blackley and Broughton | 55 |
| Salisbury | 55 |
| Hastings and Rye | 54 |
| Region | Signatures |
|---|---|
| South East | 1,853 |
| London | 1,742 |
| South West | 1,576 |
| East of England | 1,187 |
| North West | 1,018 |
| West Midlands | 903 |
| Yorkshire and The Humber | 860 |
| East Midlands | 784 |
| North East | 408 |
| Wales | 375 |
| Scotland | 262 |
| Northern Ireland | 40 |
Debate in Parliament
MPs debated the petition in Westminster Hall on 27 March 2023. Read the debate in Hansard. House of Commons Library debate pack.
Source and receipt
- https://petition.parliament.uk/archived/petitions/617340.jsonUK Parliament Petitions API · read 2026-10-15 · SHA-256
2489cb8e3d65b404… - The petition on petition.parliament.uk
The petition's words are its creator's and the response is the Government's; this site quotes both and gives no view on either. Signature counts can still change while a petition is open. To report an error, send a correction request.