Home Education registration dropped

When I wrote my earlier post, the top reason in my mind why a Tory government would be slightly less unpleasant to me than a Labour one was that the Conservatives had promised to repeal the requirement in the new Education Act for home educators to be registered.

As I went through the “filling-in-the-links” stage of the post, I discovered that that clause had been knocked out by the Lords, and the bill had gone through without it.

I felt rather silly for having missed that. However, on checking I could not find one mainstream national news organisation had reported the change. Google News shows 19 stories on the subject, all of them either from specialists or not actually mentioning the home education part. It was also picked up by some local papers such as The St Albans and Harpenden Review

There is a conspiracy of silence on all sides about home education in the UK. Home educators prefer to keep a low profile, because of the risk of the government getting interested and putting in its big boot, particularly since Badman. The education establishment is equally quiet, because they don’t want to draw attention to the number of parents who value state education not merely at less than it costs the taxpayer to provide, but as so completely worthless that it is preferable to do the job themselves.