Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to (a) support home educators and (b) protect children removed from mainstream schools for malicious reasons.

The department is introducing the first ever duty on local authorities to provide support for home educating families as part of the Children not in School measures of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. The support duty ensures an established baseline level of support across all English local authorities, to ensure that wherever home educating families live they can have access to a reliable level of support from their local authority, if they choose to access it.

The department’s existing elective home education guidance for parents already sets out to help parents understand their obligations and rights in relation to elective home education.

This government is clear that any form of off-rolling is unacceptable, and we will work with Ofsted to tackle this. We are committed to strengthening accountability through reforming Ofsted to enhance the inspection regime by replacing a single headline grade with a new report card system, telling parents clearly how schools are performing, and introduce a new annual review of safeguarding, attendance, and pupil movement, including off-rolling.