Parents of pupils subject to child protection enquiries or plans will need permission from their local authority to home educate their child, under new plans due to be unveiled by the government this week.
Bridget Phillipson, the education secretary, has announced plans to legislate for a number of new powers and protections for children in the social care system, but there are some elements relevant to schools.
For example, the government said it would legislate to create a “new duty on parents where if their child is subject to a child protection enquiry, or on a child protection plan, they will need local authority consent to home educate that child”.
Every council will also be required to have “multi-agency child safeguarding teams”, involving children’s schools and teachers, aimed at “stopping children from falling through the cracks”.
It is not clear whether this legislation will be separate to, or part of the upcoming children’s wellbeing bill, which is due to introduce sweeping reforms to the schools sector.
Home education on the rise
It comes as a growing number of parents are choosing to educate their children at home.
Labour has already pledged to create a register of children not in school, and a single unique identifier so children can be tracked across different services.
A Schools Week investigation found the rate at which children left the classroom for home education doubled last year, with big increases in some of the country’s most deprived areas.
A Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel report in May warned that children in home education had died or were abused because “the protective factor that school can offer was missing from their lives”.
It added that most children in home education were “safe, thrive and live happy lives”.
The panel which exists to conduct reviews of serious child safeguarding cases, published a report about 27 referrals received between August 2020 and October 2021 about 41 children who were not in school.
Some harmed children known to social care
The children at the focus of the reviews were “subjected to sexual abuse, physical abuse, and neglect”. Six children died and 35 others were “seriously harmed”.
The panel found that home educated children who were the focus of safeguarding reviews were “less visible to safeguarding agencies than those who attend school”.
Twenty-three children were previously known to children’s social care as children in need or were subject of a child protection plan. But half of the children “appear to have been kept out of sight of any agency”.
However, home-educating families have increasingly warned that they are being forced to take their children out of school because their needs are not being met.
Child protection enquiries are made when councils have “reasonable cause to suspect that a child who lives, or is found, in their area is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm”.
A child protection plan sets out the action that needs to be taken to keep the child safe.
