As homeschooling increases, so do attempts to restrict it

Michelle Zaher lives in London and began educating her son Daire at home about seven years ago after he asked her to. Now 13, Daire’s school days may involve trips to the Natural History Museum, taekwondo classes, or lessons in Arabic via Zoom.

Zaher uses some textbooks to guide Daire’s education, but she describes the curriculum as “flexible,” allowing for unscheduled visits to the library or the Victoria Tower Gardens beside the Houses of Parliament. “We do a lot of this informal learning that actually ends up [turning] into bigger learning,” said Zaher, who is also the co-owner of Educational Freedom, a home education support group.

Because of her approach to home education, she’s concerned about the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill scheduled for a second reading in the House of Lords on May 1. Pending approval, the legislation would, among a host of other stipulations, require homeschooling parents to provide extensive documentation of their curriculum plans and notify authorities of any changes within 15 days. “My home education journey will be completely changed,” said Zaher, pointing to the time-consuming burden of reporting all education plan adjustments to the government.

Legislation increasingly targeting homeschooling parents isn’t unique to the United Kingdom. As parent-led education has grown in popularity, lawmakers in the United States and the U.K. have called for heightened accountability due to concerns that the homeschooling movement has compounded the risk of child abuse. But homeschooling advocates say added documentation hasn’t proven an effective countermeasure to abuse and it makes home education more tedious for law-abiding families.

In the U.K., Section 7 of the 1996 Education Act says that parents must provide a suitable education for their children “either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.” Children who have never been enrolled in public schools are automatically considered home educated.

In the United States, although homeschooling became officially legal in all 50 states by the early 1990s, laws differ by state. According to the Home School Legal Defense Association, 34 states have low homeschooling regulation, while four have rigorous restrictions. Parents in Pennsylvania, for example, must notify local school superintendents of their intent to homeschool and provide immunization records in some districts.

On the whole, states have become more lenient about homeschooling since the method’s early days, according to Kevin Boden, director of HSLDA International. But that may be changing. “What we’ve seen recently is kind of a swinging pendulum from deregulation towards maybe an increase in regulation,” Boden said.

In January, legislators in New Hampshire introduced a bill calling for home education programs receiving state tax credits or scholarships to participate in criminal background checks. An Indiana bill also introduced this year would prevent chronically absent students from withdrawing from public schools unless parents submit a curriculum plan and progress reports to the school superintendent.

In Illinois, which currently has no notification requirements, lawmakers are considering a bill that would require parents to provide local school districts with a declaration of intent to homeschool. Failure to file could result in truancy charges if the Homeschool Act, introduced in February, passes the state legislature. An Oklahoma bill also requires parents to declare intent to homeschool and disclose the names of everyone involved in their child’s education, similar to the U.K.’s Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.

The legislation under consideration across the pond also allows local authorities to serve school attendance orders if parents are under investigation by social services. Parents must notify authorities of any changes to instruction within 15 days. “The level of intrusiveness into the family privacy is extreme,” said Wendy Charles-Warner, chairwoman of the home education advocacy group Education Otherwise.

Supporters of homeschooling oversight legislation often argue that the measures will prevent child abuse. In a January briefing to members of Parliament, the office of the U.K. children’s commissioner wrote in favor of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. The government agency cited the death of Sara Sharif, whose parents removed her from school in April 2023 after teachers asked about visible bruises. Authorities found Sara’s body the following August, and a court later convicted her father and stepmother of her murder.

Similar cases have propelled legislation in the United States. Last week, West Virginia’s House of Representatives approved a bill preventing parents from homeschooling if they are subject to unresolved child abuse investigations. Legislators named the measure after Raylee Browning, who died from abuse at age 8 in 2018 after her parents withdrew her from public school due to a teacher’s report of possible abuse. An abuse case similarly influenced Illinois’ Homeschool Act.

Accusations that homeschool communities facilitate child abuse have surfaced within the past decade. In a widely circulated 2020 Arizona Law Review essay, Harvard Law School professor Elizabeth Bartholet wrote that “abusive parents can keep their children at home free from the risk that teachers will report them to child protection services.” Amid a 2023 series of articles on homeschooling, The Washington Post highlighted the case of a child who was murdered after being removed from public schooling.

Last year, the U.S.-based Coalition for Responsible Home Education reported 423 cases of “abuse and neglect in homeschool environments” since 2000. To put that in perspective, the American Society for the Positive Care of Children estimates that nearly 2,000 children died from abuse or neglect in 2022 alone.

Experts have tried to probe the relationship between prevalence of child abuse and home-based education, and the results are somewhat complex. The International Society for Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect published a study in March concluding that “the lack of reliable data and highly politicized nature of the topic have produced a body of mixed and inconclusive research.”

In 2022, there were roughly 3.1 million homeschoolers in the United States, up from 1.69 million in 2016. Many U.K. families also decided to home educate after the pandemic. Last fall, U.K. authorities documented over 111,000 home educated children, a 37% increase since fall 2022.

“If you have 6 million kids that are educated at home versus 2 million, the chance of something happening … that’s just a numbers game,” said HSLDA’s Boden.

But research suggests that homeschooling isn’t the culprit behind child abuse, according to Brian Ray, president of the National Home Education Research Institute which is based in Salem, Ore. In a 2022 study, Ray found that, after controlling for factors such as parent education level, household income, years in foster care, and ethnicity, “there’s no difference in the abuse and neglect rates between the institutionally schooled and the homeschooled,” Ray told WORLD.

Homeschool researcher Rodger Williams concluded in a 2017 study that, at least in the US, “legally homeschooled students are 40% less likely to die by child abuse or neglect than the average student nationally.”

Some advocacy groups claim that requiring parents to report their homeschooling plans could curb abuse. Last July, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education released the Make Homeschool Safe Act, a 23-page model bill offering guidance for states to structure more restrictive homeschool laws.

There’s very little evidence that such legislation would be effective, according to Ray. He cited a 2022 study by Angela Dills, a professor of economics at Western Carolina University and a fellow with EdChoice, a nonprofit advocating for educational freedom.

Dills’ research, published in the Journal of School Choice, analyzed child abuse–related deaths from 1979 to 2008. During that time frame, many states made legal provisions for homeschooling. “I can look at the effect of those laws that led to an increase in homeschooling and see if there’s a change in child fatalities during that period,” Dills told WORLD. “And mostly, what I see is not a whole lot.”

When it comes to the claim that homeschooling creates an environment for abuse, “empirically it’s a claim that’s just not substantiated with research,” said Dills.

Criticisms of homeschooling have come in waves, according to HSLDA’s Boden. Decades ago, some argued that parents couldn’t provide a quality education. Then opponents focused on claims of homeschooled students’ lack of socialization. “The issue with neglect is kind of the latest attack on home education,” said Boden.

Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute said that concerns about neglect carry a lot of emotional weight, but he thinks responses to the issue point to a difference in worldview. “It basically comes down to philosophy that they think that the civil government should control all of us more to somehow try to reduce bad behavior,” he said.

It’s unclear if government control of home education in the U.K. will crack down on abuse, but it will complicate the lives of home educating families, according to Zaher. If local authorities have reason to believe a child isn’t being suitably educated, the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill requires them to inspect all learning environments. Zaher jokes that authorities would have to accompany her son, Daire, while he reads on the bus ride to archery practice. “I don’t know where they got their advice from to draft this,” she said. “But it certainly wasn’t someone who’s ever spent more than 15 minutes with a variety of home-educated families.”

Still, if the bill passes the House of Lords, she doesn’t plan on allowing authorities into her home. “Then technically I could end up under attendance rules when my child had no intention of ever attending,” said Zaher. “So I’m sort of left between a rock and a hard part.”