Georgia Gilholy and Nat Wei Labour’s attack on homeschooling is a cynical state power grab
Originally posted in the Telegraph on 2 September 2025 [telegraph.co.uk]
Today peers will consider plans that would change Britain forever: Labour’s ironically named Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. This legislation would turn thousands of home-educating families into surveillance targets by handing sweeping new powers to local authorities to intrude into family life and dictate what counts as “suitable education”.
Britain has long stood out for its light-touch approach to home education. Many countries ban the practice entirely. In 2013 in Germany, where it is effectively illegal, police with weapons were sent in to forcibly place four children into social care because their religious parents refused to stop homeschooling them.
Our approach to education, where parents, not government, bear primary responsibility for their children’s upbringing, has been forged by more than a thousand years of common law. Under our system, everything not explicitly forbidden is supposed to be permitted.
This is not so with the civil law of the continent, which the European Union sought to muddle with our traditions and that typically grants rights only with the approval of the state.
Labour’s plans would remove the automatic right to homeschool children, force parents to register their offspring with local councils and surrender sensitive information such as medical records. The Government is yet to explain how this would not breach data protection law and the European Convention on Human Rights’s privacy guarantees.
If the new bill becomes law, councils will be able to enter homes and interrogate families on their teaching without evidence of neglect or abuse. Refuseniks could face fines, prosecution and even imprisonment. Those that manage to convince authorities to let them homeschool their children would be forced to log every single hour of teaching.
Labour cynically justifies this power grab by citing tragic cases like the murder of Sara Sharif and the so-called “grooming gangs” scandal. But neither of these were related to home education. Sharif’s teachers saw her bruises while she was still attending school, and her killers simply pretended to homeschool in the months before she was killed.
If Bridget Phillipson, the Education Secretary, actually wanted to prevent child abuse, why did she dismiss Conservative attempts secure a national grooming-gangs inquiry as “political opportunism”? And why is she with the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill trying to hand Orwellian powers to the same councils that ignored the racially-driven rape of British girls?
Whatever Phillipson’s logic, her plans arrive at a pitiful time for her. Labour’s VAT hike threatens private schools with closure and many British children are functionally illiterate when they start secondary school. Is it any surprise that a recent survey found that one-third of British parents are considering homeschooling? Or, that over 50 per cent of English adults reportedly think schools do not prepare kids for work or adult life? Phillipson must admit that our system is a disaster, rather than penalising the people rightly desperate to escape it.
This bill doesn’t simply threaten a handful of hippies or traditional Christians, but anyone who might seek to remove their kids from our failing and inflexible state system.
By allowing inept councils to snoop on whether parents are teaching “suitably”, Labour risks further politicising the curriculum. Today, parents who object to critical race theory, transgenderism or sex education might be denied the right to teach. Tomorrow, a hard-Right government could use the same powers to outlaw classes on climate change or diversity.
In the Soviet Union, homeschooling was outlawed and children were brainwashed to worship the state from birth. Under German National Socialism, curricula were completely rewritten to serve the regime’s sordid agenda, and families who objected were brutally silenced.
Seeing the horrors of totalitarianism elsewhere, the 1944 Education Act enshrined protections against such state overreach.
These safeguards were widely backed by the Labour Party at the time, but Phillipson seeks to vandalise this.
This bill’s fate does not merely concern schooling, but whether Britain remains a free country for parents and families. We must trust the instincts of those who know and love their children best – parents not nitpicking bureaucrats.
Originally posted in the Telegraph on 2 September 2025 [telegraph.co.uk]