Report to the Secretary of State on the Review of Elective Home Education in England

questionnaire responses from local authorities (widely reported as 74 authorities), plus submissions from NSPCC, Ofsted, ACPO, the National Children's Bureau and home-education organisations, plus analysis of serious case reviews in which home education was a feature

Electively home-educated children in England, 2009

A government-commissioned policy review, not a study — no sampling frame, no comparison group constructed by the author, and the underlying local-authority returns are self-reported administrative counts against a denominator (the size of each authority's home-educating population) that England did not and does not measure, because registration was not required. Badman says so himself: he recommends categorised annual safeguarding reporting specifically to end "current speculation with regard to the prevalence of child protection concerns amongst home educated children which may well be exaggerated." Recorded here because it is the only population-scale non-US attempt at the maltreatment question and because the political afterlife matters — home educators mobilised against it, a Commons Select Committee inquiry criticised the evidence base, the resulting registration legislation was dropped, and England still does not require home-education registration. The much-quoted figures of 0.4% of home-educated children on child protection plans against 0.2% of all children come from the review's local-authority returns as reported in secondary sources (Luck et al. 2025 among others); they are NOT stated in that form in the published report text, which gives the qualitative claim only. Flagged so the number is not treated as a verified quotation.

Two conclusions, pointing in opposite directions, and the second is usually dropped when this report is cited. First, on the question Badman set himself — is abuse in the home-educating community disproportionately high relative to the general population? — he answers that in some local authorities the number of home-educated children known to children's social care is disproportionately high relative to the size of the home-educating population, while explicitly adding that this is "not to suggest that there is a causal or determining relationship." Second, on the specific harms the review was commissioned to investigate, he finds no evidence that elective home education is a particular factor in the removal of children to forced marriage, servitude or trafficking, a view he says is supported by the Association of Chief Police Officers. The mechanism claim is the durable part and matches the US literature exactly: the National Association of Social Workers in Education submitted that home education is not itself a safeguarding issue but removes "a very efficient method for monitoring and surveillance through attendance at school", and NSPCC argued that a child never seen outside the home has vanishingly small chances of being identified. On socialisation proper, the review records the Church of England's concern that home-educated children miss learning in community with peers and may not encounter social and cultural diversity — that is a submitted opinion, not a finding, and no social-outcome data are presented.

Not the operative confound. The operative ones are the missing denominator (England had no register, so the home-educating population size is an estimate), reverse causation (children already known to social care are disproportionately withdrawn from school), and detection asymmetry (attendance at school is itself the surveillance mechanism, so home-educated children are less likely to be counted at all).

The Welsh review (Forrester et al. 2017) reached the compatible conclusion that home education alone is not a factor in abuse or neglect but that it significantly reduces professional access and monitoring when a child's safety is at risk — two independent government reviews converging on detection rather than incidence. The prevalence figure itself has never been reproduced with a verified denominator, and the Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee inquiry that followed criticised the review's evidence base directly.