The state versus the family

This month, UK politicians agreed to vastly increase government power and oversight in child protection and education.

After four and a half hours of fierce debate, and a last-minute attempt by the Conservatives to railroad the bill, the Children’s Wellbeing and Education Bill passed to the committee stage without a formal vote.

In presenting the Bill, Labour Secretary for Education Bridget Phillipson was emphatic and inflexible:

Let us be crystal clear: a vote against this Bill today is a vote against the safety of our children, against their childhoods, and against their futures. Today, Conservative MPs have a choice: they can choose to back measures to protect children, or they can choose to chase headlines.

In saying this, she was referring indirectly to the recent death of 10-year-old Sara Sharif, killed by her father and stepmother after being removed from school. She was also disputing a Conservative amendment which proposed an “inquiry into historical child sexual exploitation, focused on grooming gangs”.

Yet, as was repeatedly argued from that moment onward, there was much more going on than this simple choice.

Contained within what the opposition called “an all-out assault on teachers, the education system, and standards” were: salary restrictions, compulsory curricula, expansion of free school meals, obligatory breakfast clubs, limits on branded uniforms, unique/shareable child identification numbers and a national register for home educating parents. 

A bit like the Online Safety Bill, a bill of such a large nature is bound to contain a lot of sensible amendments, and I don’t doubt this one does. Amidst the details, though, one must learn to identify the misguided and the outright wrong.

On the question of misguidedness, one peculiar feature of the debate was the repeated positive references to Tony Blair. The former prime minister haunted the debate like the ageless Ghost of Education Past. Strangely, it was Conservatives, not Labour MP’s, who were found spouting phrases like “education, education, education”, or quoting Blair when he said:

Education belongs not to some remote bureaucracy, not to the rulers of government, local or national, but to itself, for itself. The school is in charge of its own destiny.

 There is no doubt that this bill is a vast rejection of this way of thinking. Compulsory curricula, teacher pay caps, and crazy legislating on how many items of branded clothing a school can enforce are the educational equivalent of an over-regulated market. No matter how well-intentioned, it will stifle growth (and assuming good intentions might well be overgenerous). Time and again, it felt that the word “safety” was being used to provide a smokescreen for what is, in fact, untrusting, uncreative, and at points vindictive reaction to a free, corporate, high-pay, capitalist models of education that are working but simply, not liked. All the while, no mention was given to the fact that inner city secondary schools can be far from safe. Knives, drugs and bullying are sadly endemic in such places. In 2019 over 1000 weapons were found in schools with another report stating that 32 per cent of pupils carry knives.  Regarding drugs, a 2009 survey found that 58 per cent of pupils knew where to find them. Meanwhile bullying remains a constant reality in many schools with 43 per cent of pupils saying they experienced bullying in the last year and Ofcom saying that 74 per cent of pupils experience bullying online.

None of this was admitted or even discussed — instead the issue was pinned on marauding gangs of homeschoolers on the south coast. Take this contribution from the Labour MP for Hastings and Rye:

I was extremely concerned to find out that in the last academic year, 800 children in Hastings were being home-schooled—that is one in 16 children, or 27 classrooms of children. While there will be parents providing a good-quality education at home, I know from speaking to teachers and to local shops who see these children in their establishments that some are not necessarily getting a good education. We need to get those children back into school.

This brings me finally and most importantly to what was morally wrong about the bill — its implications for home education families. For all of the rhetoric around wrecking balls and educational vandalism, the proposed restrictions on academies, free schools, and pay caps are fundamentally state-on-state impositions. They may not be liked, but so long as schools are funded by the state, their ability to resist is limited. The equation with regard to home-educating is altogether different because it refers to a state-on-family imposition — and a gigantic one at that.

While multiple MPs tried to reassure home-educating parents that this was not an “attack on home-educating,” the platitudes offered little concrete comfort, especially when one considers the background and wording of the legislation. Firstly, this bill is not new. The home-education register, is a long time ambition of nameless civil servants within the Department of Education, and has been proposed 8 times since 2009.  In the summer of 2022, under Conservative rule, a less extreme version of the legislation was being pushed in the Lords. At the time, I had the privilege of introducing some London home-educating parents to a Labour Lord, who also happens to be my Dad, to discuss their concerns. After two hours of discussion — including a hilarious moment when my Dad sought to argue, using The Lord of the Flies that unbridled peer interaction was character building — my dad was persuaded. A week later, he proposed an amendment to scrap the whole home-educating section line by line, much to the vexation of the Labour chief whip. Lacking the momentum and scandal on which to hook it, the bill was binned.

Fast forward two years, a Labour landslide  and the tragic death of Sara Sharif provided the perfect opportunity for its reintroduction. The first event speaks for itself, the second needs to be addressed head on. The notion that Sara Sharif was killed as a result of home-education is erroneous in the extreme. As MP Graham Stuart so incisively asked:

Can the hon. Lady provide a single instance where a child who was in home education—we must remember that children at school spend about 86% of their time out of school—was harmed and not already known to social services?

It has subsequently been revealed that the social services knew of Sara’s undesirable circumstances a few days after birth. Ten years later, she had not been removed from harm’s way, and yet are we to believe that the final four month period of so-called “home education” was what killed her? For Phillipson to link the two issues so deliberately in a spree of December headlines was deplorably misleading. To go on and then lampoon the Conservatives for chasing headlines regarding a much more relevant scandal was the height of hypocrisy.

Deep down, we know such cases speak infinitely more of moral and societal decay, of ineffective laws, weak politicians, cowardly church leaders, tired teachers, unprincipled judges, overworked social service employees, underpowered police officers and the pervasive paralysis of wokeism — and yet we look to the very same systems to solve the problem. The ideology of home-educating is not just not the problem but actually a very valuable means of building stable citizens who will live and work for the wellbeing of society. And yet it is the ideology of home-educating that this bill specifically targets.

The bill, in its current form, will require parents to gain the consent of the local council to remove their children from school if they are already enrolled. Phillipson repeatedly said this would only be in the event of a child already on a child protection plan. However, from my reading of the bill, it makes no such distinction. Even if I am mistaken and this were the case, the fear is that home educated children will simply be put on protection plans and forced back into school. 

This is not the only grave concern in the bill. The bill also insists that local authorities maintain a register of home-educated children, including not simply names but addresses, descriptions, websites, emails, of everyone providing the child’s education, including a record of the time spent with each. This should be expected to some degree when a state institution is being entrusted with other people’s children, for example a parent or local authority requesting information from a maintained school. However, parents are not institutions — they are sovereign individuals vested with rights, including their right to have and bring up their children as they see fit, and the right to do so privately. As Article 8 of the European Convention on Human rights states: Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

The unique child identifier outlined in the first section of the Bill attacks this principle. Seeking to establish “better join-up between children’s social care, police and health services with education,” the number is being presented as a novel idea to stop children falling through the net. However in reality it will allow the local council to track all children “aged under 18 … or  aged 18 or over and at risk” without the consent or knowledge of parents. Again this stuff is not new. In 2013, Scottish legislation euphemistically entitled Getting It Right For Every Child [GIRFEC] attempted a similar number. However the legal battle that ensued going all the way to the London Supreme count found that it was “in breach” of Article 8 for obvious reasons.

Allan Norman, the solicitor who wrote the original opinion that triggered the case, subsequently wrote  “When Protecting Wellbeing Is Totalitarian”. In it he examines how measures that appear “legitimate and benign” can be at the same time “totalitarian.” He cites Lady Hale’s judgment:

 The first thing that a totalitarian regime tries to do is to get at the children, to distance them from the subversive, varied influences of their families, and indoctrinate them in their rulers’ view of the world. Within limits, families must be left to bring up their children in their own way. [Para.73]

In view of this, it is not surprising that  many see Phillipson’s Bill not as a safety measure but as a surveillance tool and “a calculated first step toward greater control of families who educate outside of state-controlled settings”.

One of the best things to come out of this gross imposition is the Parent Pact. This Civil Covenant for Educational Liberty & Responsibility that has been painstakingly brought together by UK home education parents and seeks to reaffirm the role of parents in the “nurture, protection, and education of children” and “defend the freedom of all our fellow parents, of all creeds and none, to educate their sons and daughters according to conscience and conviction.” The covenant, which reaffirms the God-given parameters of education from a Christian perspective, is a diamond formed under the pressure of opposition and is well worth reading, especially for those fortifying themselves for what is ahead.

One point I hope we can all agree on is that the state is not, and has never been, a good parent

Ultimately, the universal benefit of bills of this nature, complete with all of its deceptive, stifling, socialist, surveillance and totalitarian trimmings, is that they force a conversation about the fundamentals. Questions like: what is education? Who should provide it? Where ultimately does authority lie? What risks are we, as a society, willing to take in order to have a truly free democracy? All such questions flow out of bills like this, and these are questions that need to be settled round the dinner table long before they can be imposed centrally. 

One point I hope we can all agree on is that the state is not, and has never been, a good parent. For all of the allergic reactions to the Conservative amendment requesting an inquiry into grooming gangs one awkward truth does ring out. The young girls of Rotherham, Telford, Oldham and four dozen other towns, were not taken from round a kitchen table’s science experiments, or snatched from front room read-a-loud — they were taken from care homes, exploited, and returned to those very same homes, with no parental oversight. It’s an unsavoury note to finish on, but how can we not, when the abuse and murder of a 10-year-old was used to push this legislation in the first place? Let us question: if statism leads to care, and care to Rotherham, and if education and social services couldn’t stop it, why bring the state down on the best people and places where education can be administered safely — parents in the home.