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Home Education Alliance · Jun 22, 2026

22nd June 2026 - Data Sharing Webinars, Social Media Ban and Protecting Our Children's Rights

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Home Education Alliance · Home Education Alliance

First, a huge thank you to everyone who has contributed to the judicial review fundraiser. Hitting that initial £30,000 target was a massive relief because it allowed the legal team to formally get to work.

We are challenging the primary legislation of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act on several fronts, including Article 8 (Right to Family Life), Article 2 of Protocol 1 (Right to Education) and Article 14 (Protection Against Discrimination). Taking the government to court is not a cheap or quick process. We are now trying to push the total towards the £50,000 mark so we are fully prepared to react as soon as the respective governments of England and Wales issue their substantive responses.

If you can spare the cost of a coffee, please consider donating. We are also planning a big national fundraising event on 18 July 2026 with local bake sales and community events to support the cause, so please mark that in your diaries.

One of the most alarming updates this week surrounds the new statutory guidance for the information sharing duty. The government is currently consulting on this guidance and holding webinars to explain how it works.

If you can attend these sessions, you will see exactly how loose the criteria have become. In the past, information was primarily shared when a child was considered actively at risk. Now, under this new legislation, any professional with a safeguarding duty can share your child’s data if they simply think it promotes their welfare or is in their ‘best interest’.

Crucially, the duty of confidence no longer exists when sharing data under these new rules. Parental consent is entirely bypassed. They can attach irrelevant information about a child’s family members or peers to a file, and correcting false information once it enters this expanded network is going to be incredibly difficult. Please get involved, attend the webinars and respond to this consultation from your own family’s perspective. Our children deserve privacy.

Webinars are being held on Monday and Tuesday this week and details of how to join the Teams calls are available on the consultation page.

We have also received a pre-announcement that a new consultation on EOTAS SEND provision is imminent. EOTAS (Education Other Than In School) is a vital provision for children who cannot attend mainstream schools for medical reasons or due to severe anxiety.

Many of you in our community did not initially plan to home educate but were forced into it because the system failed to provide EOTAS for your child. It appears the government, eager to save money, is looking to reduce this already scarce provision even further. Education is supposed to be free at the point of delivery and tailored to the child. When this consultation formally opens, we will need everyone to weigh in and remind them that forcing children into a one-size-fits-all schooling environment simply does not work.

You have likely seen the headlines regarding the government’s landmark move to ban social media for under-16s. While everyone agrees on the need for online safety, this blanket approach is fraught with problems.

The legal definition of social media is incredibly broad. It includes any user-to-user platform with a search engine. This means incredibly useful educational tools like YouTube or social spaces where neurodivergent children comfortably interact, like Minecraft, could be swept up in the ban.

Furthermore, to enforce this, adults will be forced into a digital ID system just to prove they are over 16 to access the internet. Rather than mandating family-friendly ISP filters that put control in the hands of parents, the government is stepping in to parent the nation.

We are seeing a similar overreach in schools right now with the blanket phone bans. Instead of just removing phones, some schools are stripping away vital reasonable adjustments for SEN children, banning ear defenders and MP3 players that help them cope with the school day. We must fiercely protect these essential accommodations.

Finally, the media has been running stories expressing shock over the rising number of home educators. Headlines were flying this week pointing out that the Isle of Wight has the highest proportion of home-educated children in England at 4.1%.

While the Isle of Wight is an outlier that naturally attracts families seeking alternative lifestyles, the national average is actually just 1.4%. The figures are growing, but they are not the crisis the media portrays. Interestingly, we are finally seeing MPs ask the right questions about the true financial burden of all these new regulations. We recently saw a fantastic question regarding the annual cost estimates of the new statutory duties on local authorities for home education support. If you do not have a Labour MP, please encourage them to keep asking how much taxpayer money is being diverted to police families rather than fixing leaky school roofs.

Despite all the noise, home education continues to yield incredible results for our young people. Just look at this lovely story of a family who home educated their children from a tent in Botswana who have now grown into successful university graduates. Our children thrive when given the freedom to learn in ways that suit them best.

Keep sharing your stories, keep writing to your MPs and keep pushing back.

Read the original on homeeducationaction.substack.com ↗

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