State Clampdowns On Homeschoolers In Britain

The UK government has signalled long-term hostility to homeschooling with the announcement that parents making this choice will be forced to sign a register. As always, keeping a list is the first step in a planned rolling clampdown.

The excuse is the growth of unofficial schools run by ‘religious fundalmentalists’. As far as anyone knows, these are exclusively Muslim and Jewish, and involve significant numbers of pupils from different families. So it is completely illogical for the State to use their existence to demonise and coerce Christian and secular British parents homeschooling their own families.

But parents who homeschool their children will be forced to sign a register or face possible prosecution, according to government proposals.

The Department for Education plans to hold a register of all children not in mainstream schools in a bid to protect them from ‘dangerous influences’.

The move is supposed to crack down on religious fundamentalists who send youngsters to secret schools where they are at risk of radicalisation.

In reality, including homeschoolers – as opposed to parents using unregistered schools – will turn out to be the precursor to pressure on parents to include teaching their children ‘liberal values’, particularly the promotion of homosexuality and transgender lunacy.

This is the very issue pushing the rapid growth in homeschooling in Britain and, needless to say, the liberal elite find it intolerable that a growing number of families are using homeschooling as their escape route from the liberal mania for sexual perversion.

The DfE said the register would provide a ‘clear picture’ for the first time about where children are if they are not attending mainstream schools. Estimates suggest almost 60,000 are being educated at home – a figure that is thought to be rising by about a quarter every year.

Education Secretary Damian Hinds said: ‘The term “home education” has now acquired a much broader meaning than it used to.

‘It is now a catch-all phrase, used to refer to all children not in a registered school.

‘So while this does include those actually getting a really good education at home, it also includes children who are not getting an education at all, or being educated in illegal schools where they are vulnerable to dangerous influences – the truth is, we just don’t know.

Under the plans, it will be parents’ legal duty to put their children’s details on the register if they are not being taught in a state-funded or registered independent school.

They could be made to state what provisions they have in place for their child, such as being educated at home or at a religious school.

The consultation document, published today, is expected to ask for views on what penalties parents should face if they refuse to comply with registering their children.

This could include councils escalating to school attendance orders (SAOs) that compel families to send their children to school. Parents who refuse to co-operate with SAOs can be prosecuted.

Ofsted’s chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, said: ‘Ofsted has long had concerns about the increasing numbers of school-age children not attending a registered school.”

‘We are especially concerned about children off-rolled from schools and those in illegal schools. The new register will make it easier to detect and tackle these serious problems.’

Self-evidently, if the problem is illegal schools run by religious extremists, then the law should address that problem. To use the issue as an excuse to record and regulate genuine homeschoolers is to show the bad faith and deception for which the liberal elite are all too well-known.

Homeschooling remains for now by far the best option for loving parents to protect their children from liberal insanity and intolerance, but the window is being closed.

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