HED0688 Written Evidence Submitted by Humanist UK
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HED0688 Written evidence submitted by Humanist UK EDUCATION SELECT COMMITTEE: CALL FOR EVIDENCE ON HOME EDUCATION & ILLEGAL SCHOOLS RESPONSE FROM HUMANISTS UK, NOVEMBER 2020 ABOUT HUMANISTS UK At Humanists UK, we want a tolerant world where rational thinking and kindness prevail. We work to support lasting change for a better society, championing ideas for the one life we have. Our work helps people be happier and more fulfilled, and by bringing non-religious people together we help them develop their own views and an understanding of the world around them. Founded in 1896, we are trusted to promote humanism by over 85,000 members and supporters and over 100 members of the All Party Parliamentary Humanist Group. Through our ceremonies, pastoral support, education services, and campaigning work, we advance free thinking and freedom of choice so everyone can live in a fair and equal society. We are an active member of many organisations working on education and children’s rights. These include the Children’s Rights Alliance for England (CRAE), the PSHE Association, the Sex Education Forum, and the Religious Education Council for England and Wales (REC). We provide materials, resources, and advice to a range of education stakeholders including parents, governors, students, teachers, and academics. We lead the national campaign for action on unregistered religious schools and work closely with former pupils of such settings, as well as current members of closed religious communities, to highlight their experiences and provide evidence to the authorities. We are motivated to do so because we recognise that children have a right to education and should be able to form their own opinions on matters of religion and belief. Further, as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) makes clear, children are entitled to an upbringing that prepares them for a ‘responsible life in a free society, in the spirit of understanding, peace, tolerance, equality of sexes, and friendship among all peoples, ethnic, national, and religious groups’.1 Our work in this area includes consulting directly with community whistleblowers as well as our apostate support programme Faith to Faithless.2 It has generated substantial and significant media coverage on the issue of illegal schools, including features on Newsnight3 and BBC News at Six and Ten.4 This coverage prompted the creation of Ofsted’s unregistered schools team. We were the first external group to meet with that team, and the first to introduce them to pupils who had attended such schools. It also prompted Hackney Council’s own review of the issue in the local area. Our work has led us to conclude that the law surrounding both home education and illegal schools needs to be entirely overhauled to ensure that the latter can be shut down once and for all. SUMMARY ● Home education in England is hardly regulated at all and the lack of adequate information on the number, identity, and location of children who are educated outside of school means that the rights and welfare of children cannot be properly safeguarded; ● All policy in this area should be approached from the perspective of children’s rights, including the right to an education and the right to be protected from violence, abuse, and neglect. However, it is fundamentally clear that this is not currently the case; 1 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) <https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx> [accessed 2 November 2020]. 2 Faith to Faithless (2020) <https://www.faithtofaithless.com/> [accessed 2 November 2020]. 3 BBC Newsnight, ‘British Humanist Association exposé on indoctrination by illegal Jewish schools which are registered charities’ (2016) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACgWIZLxhBw> [accessed 2 November 2020]. 4 Humanists UK, ‘Joint BBC/Humanists UK investigation: abuse at illegal religious schools’ (26 February 2018) <https://humanism.org.uk/2018/02/26/joint-bbc-humanists-uk-investigation-abuse-at-illegal-religious-schools/> [accessed 2 November 2020]. ● Loopholes in the law pertaining to home education enable unregistered and illegal schools to continue to operate by claiming to provide supplementary education for home-educated children. This is the case even when those children are receiving all or most of their education in such settings; ● While the Government has proposed to amend the law on what constitutes a school as well as provide a legal definition of full-time education, these changes will not be sufficient to prevent the operation of illegal and unregistered schools in the absence of better regulation of home education; ● The Government has consulted on such changes, including a register of home educated pupils with a legal duty on parents to register their children which we fully support. However, progress has been far too slow and no announcement has been made regarding when these changes are likely to be implemented; ● We therefore think it is imperative that the Government now acts quickly to protect the thousands of children at risk in illegal and unregistered settings by closing all of the legal loopholes that allow them to operate in a coherent and joined-up manner. INTRODUCTION At present, home education in England is extremely poorly regulated. Indeed, owing to the absence of a register of home educated children, the Government does not even hold accurate information on the number of children who are purportedly being taught at home,5 let alone whether they are receiving a suitable education. In our view, this is a problem for two key reasons. First, it means that children’s rights, including the right to an education as enshrined by Article 8 the UNCRC,6 are not being adequately safeguarded. Second, this lack of adequate regulation and oversight limits the ability of a number of authorities – including Ofsted, local authorities, and the Department for Education (DfE) – to tackle the problem of illegal and unregistered schools, many of which use home education as a cover for their activities. HOME EDUCATION & CHILDREN’S RIGHTS All policy pertaining to education should, first and foremost, be approached from the perspective of children’s rights as set out in the UNCRC. However, the serious lack of proper oversight and regulation of home education means that, in this area, the rights, interests, and welfare of children are almost entirely ignored and often subsumed by the interests of parents. For instance, under Article 8 of the UNCRC, children have a right to an education which states parties have a duty to uphold. However, owing to the fact there is no requirement for parents whose children have never attended school to inform the local authority that they are home educating, there is no real way to establish how many such children there are, let alone whether they are receiving a broad and balanced education (or any education at all). What’s more, despite having a legal duty to identify children who aren’t receiving a suitable education, local councils have no right to visit home educated children to check whether this is the case, with parents permitted to decline such visits. Further, although councils may enter homes if they have a welfare concern, the lack of a register of home educated pupils makes it less likely that such concerns will be raised in the first place. Vulnerable ‘off grid’ children may never come into contact with authorities or those outside their household, and may also be allowed to slip unseen 5 Recent estimates suggest that between 55,000 and 58,000 children are known by local authorities to be home-educated – see House of Commons Library, Home Education in England (July 2019) <https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research- briefings/sn05108/> [accessed 2 November 2020]; and Association of Directors of Children’s Services, Elective Home Education Survey 2019 (November 2019) <https://adcs.org.uk/assets/documentation/AD CS_Elective_Home_Education_Survey_Analysis_FINAL.pdf> [accessed 2 November 2020]. However, owing to the voluntary nature of registration, these are acknowledged to likely underestimate the true figure (thought by the ADCS to be closer to 80,000), and since the start of the pandemic the number is thought to be rising – see Sally Weale, ‘Rise in pupils in England being home-schooled due to Covid fears, says Ofsted chief ’The Guardian (30 September 2020) <https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/sep/30/rise-in-home- schooling-is-partly-down-to-misinformation-says-ofsted-chief> [accessed 3 November 2020]. 6 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989) <https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx> [accessed 2 November 2020]. through the cracks in regulation if their parents move between local authority areas.7 This clearly flies in the face of the duty of states to protect children from violence, abuse, or neglect outlined in Article 19 of the UNCRC. None of this is to suggest that home-educated children are necessarily at greater risk of harm or of receiving a poor education than other children – as an organisation, Humanists UK does not take a stance on whether, in principle, it is more or less desirable for children to be educated at home than at school. However, the absence of an adequate system of regulation does mean that there is no way of adequately identifying the children who are at risk and, therefore, of taking steps to protect them and their educational development; a situation that should be addressed as a matter of urgency. UNREGISTERED SCHOOLS & THE HOME EDUCATION LOOPHOLE In 2019, Ofsted revealed that approximately 6,000 children are at risk in illegal or unregistered schools.8 Ofsted has investigated 694 suspected illegal schools since its unregistered schools unit was set up in January 2016. Of these, 109 were known to be places of religious instruction.