Home education laws must be tightened to protect children

Dylan's short life was apparently lived out of sight of anyone from who might have been able to help him, seemingly without contact from a health professional, teacher or social worker much after his first birthday.

Dylan, along with his brother, was being home educated. It appears that despite education officials visiting Dylan's Pembrokeshire home, they were prevented from seeing the child by his parents.

In England and Wales, parents can remove their child from school with a simple letter to the head teacher. School support for such a significant decision is not required. They are usually just asked to pass the letter on to the council's education team.

What happens next depends on local arrangements, but councils do not have a legal duty to monitor the quality of home education on a regular basis and certainly are not funded to do so.

Parents might be required by law to provide an "efficient" and "suitable" education, but what these terms actually mean in relation to home education is undefined and open to interpretation.

If there are concerns, local authorities might be able to request "informal contact", but there is no right of intervention. Parents are not under a duty to respond to local authority enquiries about the education their children are receiving or let anyone talk to a child. It is only if there is a specific safeguarding concern that the local authority is able to insist on seeing children.

The current arrangements can hardly be described as robust. Some of the legislation around home education is now 20 years old. There have been attempts to update it. In 2009, the government tried to introduce measures in the Children, Schools and Families Bill that would have changed the law on home education.

Graham Badman, the former director of children's services at Kent County Council, conducted a review that recommended the introduction of compulsory registration to be renewed annually, and for those registering for the first time to be visited by a local authority officer within one month of registration.

He also concluded that the government should strengthen oversight of home education, giving properly trained local authority officers a right of access to the home and to speak with the child alone.

Lacking sufficient cross-party support, and with considerable opposition from home education campaigners, the proposals were not successful and the Children, Schools and Families Act received Royal Assent without the home education clauses.

But Dylan's death has once again reopened the debate.

Sally Holland, the Children's Commissioner for Wales, has spoken out, highlighting that although this is a "rare case", Dylan is unlikely to be the only child under the radar in Britain, urging that we should be learning from this case.

Ofsted, which does not have the power to monitor or inspect home education, is reported to support a registration scheme for home-educated children and the NSPCC has already called on the government to significantly increase powers to monitor the welfare of home-educated children, including compulsory registration.

The charity acknowledges that the overwhelming majority of parents who home educate provide a safe learning environment for their children, but as a spokesperson has pointed out, "a register would help to ensure this is the case for every single home-educated child".

Some of the families who home educate have had bad experiences of the education system, and so it is hardly surprising that they might distrust authority and resist calls for regulation or, as they might see it, interference.

But it cannot be right that children being educated other than at school are not properly registered, with timely and proportionate checks being carried out to monitor a child's educational progress and wellbeing.

To hold this view is not to denigrate home education as "second class" or as presenting an unacceptable risk to children. It does not confuse home education with neglect and abuse or undermine parents' rights to educate their child at home.

It is simply about doing our collective best to ensure all children, whether they are being educated at school or at home, get the best start they can.

Michael Bracey is corporate director for people at Milton Keynes Council