Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what estimate he has made of the link between the number of pupils that are home schooled and the number of school exclusions.

The information requested is not held centrally. The department does not hold information on the number of children who are home educated. It is not possible to make any overall assessment of the number of children who are educated at home and of those, the number who have been excluded from school.

Parents have a right to educate their child at home. That choice should be one made freely by the parent, without pressure from a school whether by exclusion or other means.

Head teachers can only exclude pupils, either permanently or for a fixed period, for disciplinary reasons. The process that head teachers must follow is set out in statutory guidance, which can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/school-exclusion.

Data on fixed period and permanent exclusion decisions is published annually and can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/statistics-exclusions.