Home schooling in the UK: what the law actually requires

The first surprise for most people is that no law in England requires a child to attend school. What the law requires — section 7 of the Education Act 1996 — is that every parent of a child of compulsory school age causes the child to receive an efficient full-time education suitable to their age, ability, aptitude and any special educational needs, "either by regular attendance at school or otherwise". Those two words, "or otherwise", are the entire legal foundation of elective home education, and they place the duty squarely on parents rather than the state.

The mechanics of leaving school are startlingly simple. A parent whose child is enrolled at a mainstream school writes to the head teacher stating that the child is being withdrawn for home education, and the school must delete the child's name from the admission register and notify the local authority. There is no application, no approval stage and no cooling-off period. The single exception involves children attending a special school under a placement arranged by the council, where consent is needed before deregistration. A child who has never been enrolled anywhere generates no paperwork at all, which is why nobody can say precisely how many home-educated children exist: the Department for Education's voluntary local-authority returns suggested somewhere around 90,000 to 100,000 children in England in recent counts, roughly double the pre-pandemic figure, but the true number is acknowledged to be higher.

What parents must then provide is defined loosely and deliberately so. "Efficient" and "suitable" have never been fixed in statute; case law treats an education as efficient if it achieves what it sets out to achieve, and suitable if it prepares the child for life in modern society. Nothing obliges a home-educating family to follow the national curriculum, keep a timetable, set aside a classroom, enter the child for GCSEs, or hold any teaching qualification. Structured curricula, tutors, online schools and exam entries as a private candidate are all common, but so is autonomous or child-led learning, and both are lawful. Exams are the one point where the system bites financially: private candidates pay their own entry fees, typically £40 to £60 per GCSE subject through an exam centre willing to host them, and finding a centre for subjects with coursework can be genuinely difficult.

What councils can and cannot do

Local authorities sit in an awkward position. Under section 436A of the same Act they must make arrangements to identify, so far as possible, children not receiving a suitable education — yet they have no general power to monitor home education. They cannot insist on entering the family home, cannot demand to see the child, and cannot require a particular style of teaching. Standard practice is an informal annual enquiry, to which parents commonly respond with a written report or samples of work; meeting an adviser is optional. If the council concludes, on the information available, that no suitable education is taking place, the escalation route is formal: a notice under section 437, then a School Attendance Order naming a school the child must attend. Breaching the order is a criminal offence, though parents can defend themselves in the magistrates' court by demonstrating that suitable education is in fact being provided.

Scotland runs a stricter version — consent is needed to withdraw a child from a state school, though not to home-educate a child never enrolled — while Wales and Northern Ireland broadly mirror the English framework.

The register fight

That light-touch settlement is now the most contested question in English education law. A string of serious case reviews involving children who were invisible to every agency — most prominently the murder of Sara Sharif, whose father withdrew her from her Surrey school months before her death in 2023 — pushed successive governments towards a statutory register of children not in school. The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill carries the current version: compulsory local-authority registers, a parental duty to supply information about how and where a child is educated, and a requirement for council consent to home-educate where a child is subject to child-protection enquiries or attends a special school. Councils and safeguarding bodies argue that a state which cannot count these children cannot protect them. Home-education organisations such as Education Otherwise counter that registration would not have saved the children invoked in its favour, since the families were already known to services, and that a consent regime quietly converts a parental right recognised since 1944 into a licensed activity.

Both sides are describing the same gap honestly. English law trusts parents by default and gives officials tools only after suspicion arises; a register moves the point of state visibility earlier, before anything has gone wrong. Whether that trade is prudent safeguarding or an unjustified intrusion into family life is a genuine value question, which is exactly why Parliament, rather than guidance, is being asked to settle it.