E. Calvin Beisner

Below is an email from my daughter in England that reports on a bill pending in the House of Lords that needs wide exposure and debate but is getting very little notice in the media. It represents a grave threat to parental authority and the integrity and centrality of the family as the basic building block of a free and virtuous society. Please do what you can to raise awareness, stimulate debate, encourage opposition. Above all, please pray.

…this piece of legislation is having its second reading in the House of Lords tomorrow and gets no coverage from any media. It would radically change and endanger our newly undertaken homeschooling venture.

The ’Schools Bill’ would force all school-aged children to be registered with the local authority, and failure to do so could land you several thousand in fines and potentially up to a year in prison. The local authority (county council) could then demand any information whatsoever (the limits on this are not specified in the bill) from home educating parents, and if the information was not provided within ten days (maybe 15 in some cases) to their satisfaction, or if it contained any errors, even clerical, again, thousands in fines and potential prison––in which case, children would be put into foster care. The local authority could determine at any point that you had not proved that your education was ’suitable’ and issue a school attendance order, failure to comply with which would again result in enormous fines, imprisonment, and the removal of your children. If the order were issued and the child were sent to school, the child could not be taken out of school again for the remainder of his education. Furthermore, the local authority would choose what school the child would have to attend, and since most schools with any vacancies are those which are in special measures because they are failing, the children would be put in the worst schools in most cases. All the sensitive information they collect on each individual child would be shared with the Department for Education, which has had several major and scandalous data leaks over the past years, releasing millions of schools' and families’ information. It would be at the discretion of the local authority with whom they share your personal, private information. Families with five or more children would be forced to register as schools, and then meet all the Ofsted criteria and standards, which of course would be impossible.

Here is the bill itself: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3156

Here are the relevant facts surrounding the bill’s treatment of home education: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1074512/Children_not_in_school_-_Schools_Bill.pdf

Here is a report on the bill from a home education support charity: https://wtw.educationotherwise.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Briefing-paper-final.pdf

Here is a good conversation about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_dMOw44cqQ

Please pray with us that it just dies in the House of Lords. And publicise it any way you know how. Maybe if people in America know what’s happening over here, people here will find out what’s happening over here.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 08:34 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 497 words, total size 3 kb.