Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, how many and what proportion of children are home schooled in each local education authority area.

The department publishes information on children in elective home education (EHE), which can be accessed here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistics/elective-home-education.

The number of children in EHE, at any point in the 2022/23 academic year, by local authority can be found here: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-tables/permalink/3a87f0ae-7cfd-4b6c-b8de-08dcab23db45.

Please note that approaches to recording of EHE vary across local authorities. This is a new data collection since 2022/23 and, as such, the department expects the quality of the data returns from local authorities to continue to improve over time. In the latest term, data was received from 95% of local authorities. The data is adjusted for non-response and combined with population data for comparable ages to produce the national rate of EHE published in the release, which was 1.1% in autumn 2023.

The Children’s Wellbeing Bill will legislate for local authority registers of children not in school. This will include a duty on parents to provide the necessary information for these registers if their child is eligible, which would improve the accuracy of data and ensure that fewer children slip under the radar when they are not in school.