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Schools Bill forces Volunteers into State Registration, and to police Home Educators

Blog / January 1, 2026

The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is back in the House of Lords for debate in two weeks’ time, from January 14, 2026.

If enacted, the Bill would impose sweeping new data-collection duties on families who electively home educate (EHE) their children, and on and about any other persons who provide them with education, however limited, informal, or occasional.

Parents of children registered as being in elective home education would be legally required to report to their Local Authority the personal details of every individual who provides any element of an EHE child’s education, without their consent, regardless of:

  • the subject taught (including art, music, sport, or religious instruction),

  • the duration (even one hour a week),

  • the frequency (including one-off or annual activities such as nativity plays),

  • whether the provider is employed by contract, paid or a volunteer.

There is no exemption for religious education, Sunday schools, faith-based study groups, or equivalent activities. It will include unlimited online providers such as online student tutoring.

The Bill further empowers the Secretary of State for Education to require Local Authorities to pass this information on to national government, creating both local and national registers of the individual people who are “education providers”.

This will have profound effects for “Sunday schools” or equivalent in any branch of religion, and their helpers, in two obvious ways.

The first, is that each individual ‘provider’ of education (person and organisation), must be recorded in the register 436C(e) in connection with the child’s record.

The scope is for “out-of-school education” and means anything provided otherwise than as part of the education provided by a relevant school. The new Bill gives Local Authorities powers to collect and retain the names and addresses of any individuals and organisations involved in providing that education and unlimited more details, anything the Local Authority demands under 436C(3). This new data collection will start about hundreds of thousands of volunteers and staff who provide education to children and parents that Local Authorities must record and administer, and update as frequently as they change. It will grow into the biggest record of religious practice the UK has ever seen (among everything else), with powers to copy and keep the data at the national level. The new powers are without any meaningful limitation on its purposes, and this sets a highly dangerous precedent by building the infrastructure for the state to be able to interfere in religious life should any future local or national governments of any ideology choose to use the register in any way it sees fit.

Secondly, every individual deemed to be an “education provider” under the Bill also becomes legally responsible for reporting children to the Local Authority if they believe a family has failed to self-register, providing the child’s name, date of birth and home address with details of the education offered 436E(3). Nothing prevents the LA giving providers a blanket demand for all children’s data and the providers would need to know who was in state, private or home education and report on the latter. In effect, volunteers and faith leaders are turned into mandatory snoopers on family life. The Bill explicitly mandates a breach of any duty of confidence owed (436T). This risks breaking trust between families and religious communities and may deter parents from accessing religious instruction altogether. Under section 436E(8)–(9), Local Authorities may also impose financial penalties on any education provider who fails to supply the required information about an unregistered child or parent. The level of fines is left open-ended, to be set later in regulations.

As we have set out in our briefings, these databases already exist for the purposes given as justification for the new Bill powers to collect the data at named level rather than as statistics, as is done today.  The DfE itself publishes the fact, that already in 2024, 100% of local authorities reported their EHE numbers to the DfE and 100% of local authorities reported their CME statistics.

The Bill introduces seismic shifts in the increase of today’s volume of data collected at local level and away from the current statistical reporting at national level, to named, individual-level data collection, including religious educators and volunteers, with no meaningful reasons given for its purposes, without any safeguards, and no limits on data retention or onward use. Any breach of private and family life must be necessary and proportionate, and these excessive powers must be struck out.

History shows that registers of named individuals linked to religious activity are inherently dangerous.

Recent experience with the National Pupil Database demonstrates how assurances that named data would not be repurposed and put to broad uses can be quietly abandoned. It was a Labour Minister who built the infrastructure with promises that when the DfE started collecting named data, instead of statistics, that that government had “no interest” in using those names. But fast-forward twenty-five years later, and the Labour government today carries on the practices of passing named data to the Home Office, to the police, to the DWP and to the HMRC that the Conservative governments began after changing the law to distribute those identifying and sensitive data at individual level.

The Bill powers must be constrained to enable only what happens already, the transfer of sets of statistics to the national government instead of the named, individual level data of every person providing any sort of education to a child. The Local Authority powers must be constrained by the volume of data and narrow its purposes.

The Bill intentions are badly misplaced. It focuses efforts and resources on families already known to Local Authorities and already counted in EHE statistics, while diverting attention from the 39,000 children (2024) recorded as Children Missing Education, and from those not known to services at all, or those who actually need safeguarding who are most often in state education. Requiring families to submit constantly changing data about every provider will:

  • consume Local Authority time and resources;

  • create significant administrative burden with no duty to demonstrate any measurable benefit to children;

  • undermine trust in public services;

  • encourage some families to disengage entirely;

  • and is highly likely to discourage some volunteers from participating in religious or other educational activities.

Crucially, this database is not a safeguarding measure. Far from bringing children “into view”, it risks pushing some families further off the radar. The Child Safeguarding Practice Review: Sara Sharif, in fact said explicitly, “The measures in the forthcoming Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill (2025) contribute to improving the interface between the rights of parents to educate at home and safeguarding children. However, the key change of a national register of children educated at home would not have protected Sara.” (para 5.31 p.32)

So what is it actually for? The reasons remain opaque. Recent debate on National ID demonstrates just how divisive and damaging such systems can be. The Bill’s powers must be substantially constrained. At a minimum:

  • National government should receive statistical data only, as it does now, no more named data;

  • Local Authority data collection must be more strictly limited in scope, purpose, and retention, and requires a mandatory register of its use;

  • Educators and voluntary instruction must be protected from excessive and unnecessary state surveillance.

Without these changes, the Bill sets a dangerous precedent for state intrusion into family life, religious practice, and civil society—one that future governments of any ideology could exploit in all sorts of ways.

The entire premise of these database powers in the Bill requires urgent scrutiny, debate, and revision—if not complete abandonment. Local Authorities already have necessary data about children in home education. The national government doesn’t need to expand these, and national government should not get named data at all.

Defend Digital Me Briefing (v. January 1, 2026) https://defenddigitalme.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Defend-Digital-Me-Briefing_Childrens-Wellbeing-and-Schools-Bill-01012026.pdf