Steve Beegoo analyses the proposed Children’s Welfare and Schools Bill and explains the risk it poses for Christian parents and home-educators
The government, with its huge majority, will be seeking to quickly push through its 128 page Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill over the coming weeks. Just as we have seen an unprecedented raid on parental freedoms and finances through the introduction of a tax on education, so we now also see the trajectory of an increasingly invasive socialist state into the private lives of Christian parents under the guise of safety and welfare. In general, are parents or local authority monitors better placed to decide on children’s wellbeing? What should the law legislate for, on pain of fines or imprisonment for those who don’t comply?
Rushed
Given the sudden publishing of this bill as the Christmas season began, MPs have been given very few sitting days to consider it, and as with the assisted suicide bill or the VAT legislation on private schools, many inexperienced MPs will be being rushed into making decisions which will profoundly affect the nation, on the basis of superficial levels of scrutiny. Home education groups have been shocked by the content and have had little time to reach out to their parliamentary representatives about the issues arising.
The issues
In our recent article, Paul Huxley, our Communications Manager, shared his experience of home educating his children, and questioned what implications the kind of ‘crackdowns’ on home educators which are being proposed in the bill could have for all faithful Christian parents. We are already seeing how activist safeguarding officers from schools or local authorities’ social workers question and sanction parents who will not align themselves with a child’s belief that they could have been ‘born in the wrong body’.
Combined with a potential ban on ‘conversion practices’, parents could be seen as damaging their children’s wellbeing if they do not endorse trans ideology, or where they seek to remove their child from a school where a social contagion of transgenderism has taken hold. Local authorities are already understaffed and unable to protect the many children who are already on their books who are in real danger of harm, as the Sara Sharif tragedy demonstrated. If the state begins to do the following, with stretched and LGBT indoctrinated staff, through schools and local authorities, what will be the result?
A number
The bill proposes to assign a unique number to every child and to keep a local register, so state agencies can hold and share personal data about children and their families, without any parental knowledge, on the pretext that this is required to keep them ‘safe’.
This data will include ‘protected characteristics’, which of course include sexuality, race and religion. If this can be required for all home educating parents, why not for all children? Historically, when states have decided to record the details of the religion being practiced in the homes of families, this has always been for the purposes of monitoring those families – as is the case with this legislation for home educating families. Many Jewish organisations are also understandably alarmed by these proposals, given how such policies were used in the 1930’s, when certain groups were seen not to fit into the state’s agenda.
Presumed guilt
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. The bill states that the local authority will be able to deny certain parents the right to remove their child from a school, presuming parents are guilty of harming the wellbeing of a child, and therefore enforcing that a child be kept in a school where they may be less safe.
Indeed, the legislation also requires that local authority inspectors have the right to enter the family home so that the parents can justify that they are providing a safe environment and a ‘suitable education’ where they choose to home educate. Parents, who know their child best, will be superseded by others who become the arbiters of what is suitable for their child, from the evidence of a home investigation.
Discrimination
Should a parent who sends their child to a state school also send their child to a music or sports club, there is of course no requirement placed upon them to report this to state authorities. However, this bill requires a certain set of parents, home educating parents, to provide high levels of details of any place where their children receive any education, including the locations, names and addresses of any person delivering such provision.
At any point should the family have someone else bringing tuition to their child or choose to adjust these arrangements, they would have 15 days to formally report this to their local authority officer or face the threat of having broken the law. This could include any religious instruction that a child receives from a church, including on Sunday. Never before has there been such an intrusion into the private lives of families by authorities, where there is no evidence of any harm or abuse.
“Any other information”
One particular section, 436C(2), provides a wide ranging list of other categories of information that may be legislated to be required by authorities. Concerningly, it includes the all-encompassing statement, “any other information about the child’s… circumstances… that the Secretary of State considers should be included… for the purposes of promoting or safeguarding the education or welfare of children”. The state would be given the ability to demand any information it deems necessary from home educating Christian families, or any organisation that educates them, if it decides it is for the wellbeing of their child for the state actors to know this. For the safety of the child of course. Monetary fines and prison sentences are provided in the bill.
Suspicion
Paragraph 37 of the explanatory notes to the bill highlights the inherent suspicion that exists from the state to anyone who does not send their child to a state school, and especially those who home educate: “For many children who may be at risk of harm, education settings are a protective factor.” The truth is that children are far more likely to be unsafe in the local state school, where bullying, violence, sexualisation, peer-on-peer abuse are already expected to be occurring by any trained state school inspector. Even the buildings themselves can be unsafe!
This statement and the whole tenor of the bill suggests that all home-educated children are at risk of harm, simply because they are at home. In truth, for the vast majority of children, being at home with parents is the safest place for a child to be. This statewide suspicion of parents is something all parents, not just home educating parents should be deeply concerned about. Family life was designed by God, so that children would be born to a mother and father who would love, nurture, feed and educate their child in a way that no state should oppose.
Prayer and action
If this legislation proceeds without significant amendment, the state will now decide from a starting point of presumed guilt, if certain parents are fit to educate their children. Christians who seek to live a counter-cultural life, where they home educate their children in line with traditional Christian beliefs, will have to prove that their homes and their education is suitable, to a vague standard of suitability. If parents do not meet undefined council standards, they may be given a school attendance order and to be forced into what may be an unsafe environment for their child, on pain of fines or imprisonment.
At Christian Concern we pray and work that Jesus Christ may be honoured in every aspect of life including education, and the freedoms for Christian parents. Write to your MP, join our movement, book for our Education Revolution conference, and most of all pray. Pray that our legislators see the issues before draconian state over-reach damages the freedoms we still have in the UK to disciple our children into following Christ.
