Highlights

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 ...