The Department for Education recently launched a consultation called ‘Children not in school‘ which seeks to gain public opinion on how to keep track of children who aren’t attending mainstream school during normal school hours.
The government wants to start a register, maintained by local authorities, of children not in school and also of ‘proprietors of certain education settings’.
It is proposing that there should be a duty on local authorities to check where local children are, and on parents in providing this information. The same could also apply to those who provide other ‘education settings’, which some Christians fear could include churches.
The EA, which represents thousands of Christians across the country, says it’s not clear who ‘proprietors’ are and that what counts as an ‘educational setting’ is vague. It fears it could include places like youth clubs, prayer meetings and Bible studies.
The Department of Education (DfE) told Premier it will not include Sunday schools as they would count as ‘supplementary education outside normal school hours’.
Simon McCrossan, head of public policy at the Evangelical Alliance, told Premier’s News Hour: “Whilst churches take registers of things like trips, the idea of a state register of religious attendance is unprecedented in the Western world and time and again we see that registration begets regulation.
“Why else…
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