Education Secretary Damian Hinds is planning to create a register for home-educated children of compulsory school age. He said that this was to “identify and intervene” where the standards of home education were either not good enough or non-existent or if they were receiving solely a religious education.
Nearly 60,000 children in England were being home educated at any one time in 2018. However, the precise figure remains unknown because parents do not currently have to register home-educated children. New data produced by Children’s Commissioner, Anne Longfield, on 4 February 2019 showed that many pupils who were being home-educated were off-rolled.
She hinted that this was happening in a “small number” of schools and academies. The 11 councils that were scrutinised showed that there was a 48% rise in the number of children disappearing from schools/academies to be educated at home between 2015/16 and 2017/18. A few schools and academies “off-rolled” pupils who were disruptive, threatening them with exclusions because they could spoil their institutions’ positions in the test and examination league tables. More children were moving out of academies than schools to be home-educated, but schools were catching up.
Longfield is now calling for a compulsory register of “off the grid” children, stronger measures to tackle off-rolling, more support for families who home-educate and decisive action against unregistered schools.