KATHY GYNGELL

NEVER underestimate Labour and their determination to wrest any final vestige of authority and concomitant responsibility from parents and endow it on the oh-so-caring state.

Labour’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill has its Second Reading tomorrow and given Labour’s thumping majority it will be voted through.

Even Sky News’s reporting of it has been mildly critical. A few days ago it led with ‘Parents of the most vulnerable children will lose their right to home education’. 

This is to understate it. It is a further assault on parents’ freedom from the state regarding the upbringing and education of their children, transferring even more powers from parents to the state – a process started by Tony Blair when he decided to centralise, control and regulate families by a programme which merged protection services and child care with the education system. All parents became potential abusers while abusing parents carried on being ignored. In fact it has failed abysmally to protect children. Now Labour are doubling down on failure with the last bastion of parental authority and autonomy from the state, home schooling, threatened.

So never mind how bullied your child is or how much you object to a school’s sex education, gender identity teaching or ‘trans’ policy, or how bad the educational ethos and standards are, your power to take your child out of school is to be heavily circumscribed.

I have to apologise on behalf of TCW for being asleep at the wheel on this one and letting it slide, despite the formidable Rabbi Asher Gratt keeping me copied in on his almost one-man battle with the Government and his various exchanges with Labour bigwigs over his understandable concerns (as well as to the worse than dismissive responses that he has received).

As Rabbi Gratt has pointed out repeatedly, ironically the Bill will undermine the very things you might have supposed the DIE minorities mantra stands for: the rights of minorities, cultural diversity and religious pluralism. In fact it never did. Diversity in ‘multiculti’ state education means one thing and that’s what the woke choose it to mean – as an example, to celebrate Diwali but ban Christmas nativity plays in favour of ‘Winterval’. Demoting Christianity in schools despite its being the country’s religion for nearly two thousand years.

The bottom line, however, as Rabbi Gratt detailed last month, is that this Bill is the most repressive and authoritarian of assaults on parents. The most repressive since Tony Blair instigated the nationalisation of children when he merged child protection services with the education system and put every child’s ID into a national computer database in order to monitor their use of services. Of course this did nothing to stop child abuse and neglect, rather it treated all parent as potential abusers.

What this Bill (planned under the last Conservative Governments) will once again introduce under the guise of child protection is a nationwide register of all children not attending school, a unique identification number for each child akin to a National Insurance number, and, most disturbingly, a requirement for parents to seek council permission to educate their own children at home if a child is under a child protection plan.

It is nothing less than the state seizing control over our children, Gratt says: ‘Under these draconian measures, the government assumes control over children’s education in ways that have never before been seen in the UK. Parents will be forced to “register” their children like property and submit to the authority of local councils to determine whether their education is “suitable”. The Bill not only criminalises conscientious parents who seek to provide an education aligned with their religious or philosophical beliefs, but it also sets a dangerous precedent for the erosion of fundamental civil liberties.’

Ironically again, the Bill appears to be in direct violation of parents’ rights as enshrined in Article 2 of Protocol 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which guarantees parents the right to educate their children in accordance with their own religious and philosophical beliefs.

Perhaps the most shocking measure is the introduction of a unique identifier for every child in England, a ‘child-tracking number’ which will be used across services to monitor and log the child’s every movement, akin to a social credit system.

Gratt cites civil liberties groups calling this provision ‘deeply chilling’ and reminiscent of surveillance measures seen in authoritarian regimes. The government claims that these measures are necessary for ‘child protection’. Critics argue it is state overreach on an unimaginable scale.

Rabbi Gratt is far from alone in his concerns. The activist education group Educational Freedom are concerned that the right to home educate is seriously at risk, pointing to the Children’s Commissioner’s chilling explanation of the purpose of the register: ‘If we get proper registers and we have our local authorities taking their responsibilities seriously to engage with these families, we may find that we can get lots of them back to school, which is where they need to be.’

Furthermore they point out that if you choose to home educate you now ‘have to demonstrate your home environment is safe even if your education provision is top notch’. So it proposes in effect to circumvent other legislation to remove parental responsibility by the back door. What constitutes ‘safe’ in a home? Their other concern is that it does nothing to support parents to protect their children ‘when the school environment is enabling them to be harmed’.

As Gratt points out in his article, for decades parents in the UK have been able to educate their children at home without interference, ‘a right that is rooted in centuries of common law. It is not just that if a child is under a child protection plan that the parents must seek council permission to continue home education, the measure effectively treats all home parents as suspects under constant surveillance, undermining the presumption of parental competence and good faith’.

Both Gratt and Educational Freedom believe the Bill has profound consequences for vulnerable families, particularly those dealing with medical or special educational needs (SEN) children: ‘By forcing parents to seek permission from council authorities, this Bill threatens to reduce the flexibility and personalisation that home education provides for children with complex needs.’

This is nothing less than a surveillance state in disguise. As Gratt says, it is not about education quality, but about control, ‘something you expect in authoritarian regimes, not in a democratic society’.