Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she plans to provide additional funding to local authorities to (a) create and (b) enforce a register of children not in school.

The measures in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill for statutory Children Not in School registers in every local authority in England, and the accompanying duties on parents and out-of-school education providers to provide information for these registers, will support local authorities in identifying all children not in school in their areas, and ensure that they receive the education they deserve.

The department knows that the new duties created by the Children Not in School measures will create additional burdens for local authorities. Additional funding will therefore be provided to support local authorities to carry out these new duties. As part of our implementation strategy, we will conduct a new burdens assessment to determine the level of funding.

Parents will not be issued with monetary penalties for failure to provide information for Children Not in School registers. The consequence if a parent of an eligible child has failed to provide the required information for a local authority register is that the local authority has the power to commence the School Attendance Order process. Once an order has been issued, it is only if it is subsequently breached and the parent is convicted that this might lead to a monetary penalty not exceeding Level 4 on the standard scale for the parent. The School Attendance Order process is not intended to criminalise parents of home educated children, but to ensure that those children receive a suitable education.

In the autumn 2023 elective home education (EHE) data collection, local authorities recorded that 4.6% of the EHE population were known to them to be children from Gypsy, Roma, Traveller communities, which is in comparison to 0.4% of such children recorded to be in the wider school population. We will continue to engage with these communities as part of the implementation process, to ensure that their specific needs are identified and considered.