Home Education

(asked on 15th January 2024) - View Source

Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, what steps her Department is taking to identify the number of children that are home schooled.


Answered by
Damian Hinds Portrait
Damian Hinds
Minister of State (Education)
This question was answered on 22nd January 2024

The department collects termly data on home educated children from local authorities on a voluntary basis. This collection has achieved a high response rate to date, and the department has received data from all local authorities in England. The aggregate-level data collected has helped the department to understand for the first time numbers of electively home-educated children on a local level and to see breakdowns by sex, age, ethnicity and other demographics as well as an understanding of the reasons that growing numbers of parents are opting to educate their children at home. The data is available at https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/elective-home-education/2022-23.

The department remains committed to legislation for a local authority registration system for children not in school. The proposed measures would go further than mandating the information to be recorded and kept by local authorities. The legislation will also introduce corresponding duties on parents of home-educating children to register their children with the local authority, which is a change to the current situation where there is no parental obligation to notify a local authority that home education is taking place. Additionally, providers of out-of-school education would be required to supply certain information to local authorities for their registers, which will further help to identify home-educated children.

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