The Bishop of St Albans asked a question on increasing numbers of families choosing home education for their children, during a debate on alternative educational provision on 15th December 2021:
The Lord Bishop of St Albans: My Lords, returning to home schooling, I have been very struck by the number of people I have met in the last year or two who have decided to take their children out of mainstream schooling to educate them at home—often, from what I hear, with spectacular academic results. But what assessment has been made about the trends of whether this is increasing, and what assessment has been made about the reasons why people are doing this? We need to listen to what is happening at a grass-roots level to understand this phenomenon.
Baroness Barran (Con): The right reverend Prelate asks about the trends. One of the reasons we plan to introduce a register of home-educated children is exactly that: it is very difficult to track those trends today. There has been a lot of anecdotal evidence about the increase in the number of children who are electively home educated during the pandemic, but we do not have hard data on that, and we need to. As the right reverend Prelate knows, there are many reasons why parents choose to take their children out of school. Some children will benefit from being home educated, but we also know—to go back to the Question from the noble Lord, Lord Storey—that there are parents who are concerned that their children will end up in alternative provision and want to avoid that, and therefore choose to educate them at home.
The Church of England in Parliament 
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