The terrible murder of Sara Sharif by her father and step-mother is being exploited shamelessly by Keir Starmer and his totalitarian government. Labour have long planned to use Lenin's "salami tactics" to steadily destroy the right of parents to home-school their children, and they have seized on the vile murder as an excuse to cast suspicion on home-schooling and to begin the process of first regulating and then abolishing it.
Under Labour's plan, being promoted by exploiting Sar'a case, parents who home-school their children in England will have to register with their local council.
The Government’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which includes mandatory ‘Children Not in School’ registers, was introduced into Parliament yesterday.
Under the legislation, parents will no longer have an automatic right to educate their children at home if they are undergoing a child protection investigation. In addition, local authorities will be allowed to require school attendance if a home environment is deemed to be unsuitable.
The Bill also allows for the specification of unique identifiers for children for use by organisations working in child safeguarding, in an attempt to improve data sharing to protect child safety.
According to statistics based on this year’s census, the number of home-educated children in England has risen more than 20 per cent since last year.
Of an estimated 111,700 children in Autumn 2024, the most common reasons provided for educating them at home were for “mental health” (14 per cent) and “philosophical or preferential reasons” (14 per cent).
The Christian Institute’s Head of Education John Denning stated: “Lots of families home educate for all sorts of reasons: they may find local schools are not providing properly for their child’s special needs, or not effectively protecting them from bullying, or they may be unhappy with what the school is teaching on controversial social issues.
“It may simply be that during lockdown, they taught their child at home, it was a positive experience for them and their children, and they’ve decided to continue with it.
Mr Denning continued: “This is a decision parents must remain free to make. We should be very careful about the state interfering in that decision – unless of course the child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm in which case the state rightly already has the power to intervene under the 1989 Children Act.
“A compulsory register of home educators implies parents need permission from the state to educate their own children.”
He concluded: “It’s not hard to imagine it turning into a scheme to impose conditions for registration, where a parent effectively has to educate in a state-approved way.”