Regarding the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

This is the original, longer, version of a speech I was due to give in the House of Lords on 1 May 2025 but which had to be redacted due to time constraints. Link to Hansard is to follow.

My Lords,

It is with a heavy heart that I rise to speak today. Heavy, because the legislation before us cuts to the very fabric of our democratic society — a society built on freedom of thought, parental responsibility, and the rights of citizens not to be monitored by an overreaching state.

I thank Baroness Smith of Malvern for securing this debate. I only regret that the Bill she has brought to us today demands such urgent and serious opposition.

Our forebears fought two world wars, at unimaginable cost, to secure the freedoms we now risk so casually throwing away. They fought to defeat totalitarian ideologies that sought to control not only public life but private conscience — and, crucially, the upbringing of the next generation. They knew, as we should know, that the surest route to tyranny is to hand the state unchecked power over the education of children.

It is a matter of historic record that when Parliament passed the Education Act of 1944, it deliberately safeguarded the right of parents — not the state — to determine their children’s education. Those drafters had seen the rise of fascism and of Stalinism, and understood that a truly free society must trust its citizens to raise their children in accordance with conscience, not dictate their upbringing through bureaucratic edict.

Yet here we are.

This Bill, rather than building on more than a decade of progress in educational freedom, standards, and parental rights, seeks explicitly to reverse those hard-won achievements. And for what reason? Not because of new educational evidence. Not because of new safeguarding crises. No — but to satisfy union paymasters, and as an act of political revenge from a party that has finally returned to power after a long and bitter exile.

This is no way to govern a free society. Leadership must be founded upon vision, principle, and public good — not ideological vengeance or pandering to vested interests.

My Lords, I am a parent of home-educated children. And it is to the home education clauses that I now turn.

The Bill proposes a mandatory registration system for all home-educated children. On the surface, some may see this as benign. Yet it is far more than that. It represents an unprecedented intrusion into family life, granting local authorities sweeping powers to monitor, inspect, and ultimately veto the parental right to educate outside the state system.

Starting with children deemed vulnerable — a term dangerously undefined and open to broad interpretation — it imposes a presumption of state control where there should be a presumption of parental competence.

Moreover, many of those charged with making these judgments will have no specialist training or experience in home education. How can they assess what they do not understand?

The Bill proposes no proper mechanism for parents to challenge decisions that could devastate their children’s lives. No right of fair hearing. No independent appeal. No due process worthy of the name.

We are legislating to allow bureaucratic diktat over the most sacred responsibilities of family life.

The Government will argue that this intrusion is necessary for safeguarding. But I put it to this House that the supposed justification is flimsy at best — and sinister at worst.

I am informed from a reliable source that the team in charge of home education policy at the Department for Education now also oversees counter-extremism and Prevent delivery.

Here is a direct quote from a Department for Education Job Description posted in July 2023:

The Deputy Director role in our Counter-Extremism and Non-School Education Division will oversee the frontline and online Prevent delivery in education, and policy development on the prevention of extremism and other harms in out-of-school settings. The successful applicant will also manage a team responsible for working with partners to identify, investigate and disrupt extremism involving education practitioners and institutions. In addition to working on counter-extremism, the division also includes a unit working on out-of-school settings.

Am I right in thinking that, in seeking to address Islamist fundamentalist radicalisation, the Department is now engaged — without public consultation, without transparency — in mass information gathering against innocent families?

I would like to ask the Minister:

Has her department already classed all home-educating families, and indeed any alternative school, as potential hotbeds for terrorism?

Does this justify the indiscriminate targeting of home educators with invasive data collection far beyond anything required of mainstream schools?

And another question to the Minister:

Does she recognise that many Muslim voters — voters who loyally support Labour — will be shocked to see their communities surveilled en masse, treated with suspicion, under these measures?

And does she realise that countless parents of all faiths, or none, will feel equally aghast at being classed under suspicion of terrorism simply for exercising their legal rights?

This, my Lords, is how authoritarianism creeps into a society — not with jackboots at the door, but with forms and databases at the town hall.

And what evidence supports this vast new surveillance regime?

We are told it is necessary for safeguarding. But the data tells a different story.

Between 2005 and 2022, child protection investigations in England surged by 200 percent. Yet 70 percent of these investigations resulted in no child protection plan — up from 55 percent in 2005. Meanwhile, child death rates and serious harm rates remained unchanged.

The majority of investigations are false positives, wasting precious resources and needlessly traumatising families. And still, the truly abusive households evade detection.

If you build this registration system, it will produce the same outcome: bureaucratic drag, overwhelmed services, and genuine abusers slipping through the cracks.

Those who intend harm will simply refuse to register — or disappear. It is innocent families who will be crushed under the weight of suspicion.

Indeed even under the current law, without these new powers, local authorities are already engaging in coercive, unlawful overreach. Family A in Bradford faced repeated threats, School Attendance Orders, and even referrals to Children’s Social Care — not because of any concern about the education provided, but purely to coerce compliance with monitoring they had lawfully withdrawn from. Freedom of Information evidence confirmed the Council’s motive was not safeguarding, but control.

Meanwhile, Family M in Bromley faced the issuance of Orders despite the council internally recording that the children were receiving “excellent education” — merely to satisfy administrative process, not to protect children’s welfare. Both families suffered unlawful data sharing, fabricated records, breaches of the Education Act 1996, and blatant disregard for legal procedure.

If councils behave this way already, how much worse will it be when you hand them sweeping new powers without safeguards?

The mandatory register demands deeply intrusive personal data: names, addresses, health histories, special needs status, even child protection records. It will create a honeypot for hostile actors and internal infiltrators.

And let us not delude ourselves: the Government cannot guarantee data security. Only recently, our national electoral register was breached, exposing millions of citizens to hostile use abroad.

I ask the Minister directly:

What specific, detailed steps will she take to protect this register from attack?

Will she and her Department accept personal responsibility — and apologise to families — if this sensitive data is leaked, as is likely given the rise of quantum computing?

The burden of proof lies with those proposing the surveillance — not with the families whose lives they seek to invade.

But even worse, my Lords, is the future this Bill opens up.

Let me speak plainly: you are handing on a platter to a future hard right Coalition or extremist government, the very legal machinery to rip socialist, trade union, progressive and environmental ideals from the curriculum — and replace them with a hard-right patriotism, with no escape through home-education. You are destroying blindly the loyalty of future generations of voters, abandoning them to a nationalism that will never look back to Labour with pride or memory.

Where will left- or liberal-leaning families turn when the state enforces such a purge in schools? They will have nowhere left to go. Home education will have been neutered, corralled, controlled. Anyone attempting to escape can just be classed as under investigation, with no right to appeal.

This is not mere theory. Only last month, Mr Farage said:

That’s what you get, folks, when teaching unions in this country are poisoning the minds of young people, not just against Reform, but against everything this country has ever stood for. I’ll make it clear: when we’re in a position of power, we will go to war with these leftwing teaching unions and make sure our kids are taught properly.

My Lords, socialism, progressive values, environmentalism — everything many in this House hold dear — will not be taught properly if at all under such a regime.

You are handing the tools for that very future to your political opponents — just as Biden, by pursuing a progressive ideological shift without the people’s true consent and crossing constitutional lines once thought sacrosanct, handed Trump the means and populist mandate to strike back without restraint: tariffs, anti-terrorism powers, and emergency measures now turned against Democrats and citizens alike.

R. H. Tawney, one of the moral architects of British Labour, once declared that:

Democracy is not the end of history, but a means by which men and women can shape their destinies for themselves.

If we destroy the democratic rights of parents and communities to shape education, if we allow bureaucrats and future authoritarian populists to dictate thought, then you betray not only Tawney’s vision — but the entire Labour tradition of democratic socialism itself.

You are betraying the trust our forebears placed in us. You are betraying the memory of those who gave their lives to fight tyranny abroad only to see it reborn at home.

Home education has long thrived not because of regulation, but because of trust. Trust that parents, not bureaucrats, are best placed to know what their children need. Trust that diversity of thought strengthens society rather than weakens it.

If the state had trusted parents and invested properly in SEND support, in trauma recovery, in flexible learning, we would not be here today. Instead, the Department proposes to waste energy, goodwill and treasure chasing in most cases phantom threats while those families genuinely struggling are left adrift.

This very likely unlawful Bill, according to a recent opinion by KC Aidan O’Neil, weaponises education. It dismantles decades of careful progress. It threatens parental freedom, undermines data privacy, burdens already overstretched social services, and endangers diversity of thought in our nation.

It will not catch the abusers it claims to target. It will not protect children. It will protect only the ambitions of those who crave uniformity and control.

I urge this House:

Reconsider. Challenge. Resist.

Let us not sacrifice liberty on the altar of political vengeance. Do not harden your hearts.

Let us not betray the past — or the future.

It is time to stop this Bill, pause, think again, to radically amend or kill it, before it is too late.