Rose Childs

In April 2019, the Department of Education released its consultation document Children not in school: proposed legislation. One proposal is that Local Authorities should be under a statutory obligation to maintain a register of all children of compulsory school age in its area. This would be complemented by a proposed new parental duty to register their child if the child is not in specified education (for example, where a child is home schooled).
These proposals are a significant departure from the existing law which places no obligation on Local Authorities to maintain such a Register or on parents to register their children as being educated otherwise than at a school. This is despite s436A(1) of the Education Act 1996 requiring Authorities to ‘make arrangements to enable them to establish (so far as it is possible to do so) the identities of children in their area who are of compulsory school age but are not registered pupils at a school, and are not receiving suitable education otherwise than at a school’. The proposed register and parental duty may enable Local Authorities to better meet this obligation.
In this paper, I will discuss the Government’s proposals and their implications for monitoring those children who are educated otherwise than in school. In particular, I will examine the significance of these proposals for what might be called ‘invisible children’ (eg: children who have never attended school and, consequently, are not on the Local Authority register). I will also consider the meaning of the phrase ‘suitable education’ and whether, as it currently stands, this phrase has any useful meaning at all.