Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Wei Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wei (Con)]

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, which was built on freedom of thought, parental responsibility and the rights of citizens not to be monitored by an overreaching state.

Our forebears fought two world wars, at unimaginable cost, to secure the freedoms we now risk throwing away so casually. 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 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 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.

I am a parent of home-educated children, and it is to the home education-related 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. We are legislating to allow bureaucratic diktat over the most sacred responsibilities of family life. The Government 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 by a reliable source that the team in charge of home-education policy at the Department for Education has overseen counter-extremism and Prevent delivery. The following is a direct quote from a Department for Education job description from 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 ... 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 and other fundamentalist radicalisation, the department is now engaged, without public consultation or transparency, in mass information gathering against innocent families?

I 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 in mainstream schools? Does she recognise that many Muslim voters—who loyally support Labour—will be shocked to see their communities surveilled en masse in the way proposed, and treated with suspicion under these measures? 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?

Authoritarianism creeps not with jackboots but with forms and databases. We are told this is necessary for safeguarding, but the data tells a different story. Child protection investigations surged 200% from 2005 to 2022, yet 70% led to no action. Meanwhile, serious harm rates stayed unchanged. The majority of investigations are false positives, wasting precious resources and traumatising families—and still the truly abusive evade detection. If you build this registration system, it will produce the same outcome: bureaucratic drag, overwhelmed services and innocent families crushed under suspicion.

There is so much more to take issue with: from the lack of any appeal mechanism to the use of untrained officials to assess home education, to shocking real-world overreach by local authorities today, with families already documented under the current regime. Let us not forget the deeply intrusive personal data this Bill collects—names, health histories, special needs records—stored indefinitely, with no credible guarantee of security as we enter the age of quantum computing. The consequences of a breach would be devastating, yet the Government appear willing to roll the dice, putting our children’s sensitive data in one place to be hacked by bad actors.

But worse 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 machinery to rip socialist, trade union, progressive and environmental ideals from the curriculum—remember the Henry VIII clauses—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.

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 left-wing teaching unions and make sure our kids are taught properly”.


You are handing the very tools for our future to your political opponents, just as Biden, by pursuing a progressive shift without the people’s true consent, handed Trump the means and populist mandate to strike back without restraint.

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; and trust that diversity of thought strengthens society rather than weakens it. I urge this House to reconsider, pause to think, and resist—before it is too late.