Blanket Safeguarding: When Protecting Children Becomes Overreach

This is what home education really looks like” — calm, safe, and nurturing

The Government’s latest Call for Evidence on safeguarding in out-of-school settings (OOSS) announced today has triggered renewed concern across communities, especially among families who home educate or rely on religious or cultural supplementary education.

Let’s be clear: everyone agrees children must be protected from harm.

No reasonable person disputes that. But when safeguarding policy strays into vague, expansive territory—treating families as suspects merely for existing outside the standard system—then it’s time to ask some serious questions.

What Are We Actually Protecting Children From?

Safeguarding is a noble term. It conjures up images of shielding the vulnerable from danger.

But when stretched too far, it becomes a catch-all justification for suspicion, surveillance, and even coercion—regardless of whether harm has occurred, or is even likely to occur.

The legal literature draws a vital distinction between three levels of safeguarding:

• Primary safeguarding: the natural and lawful responsibility of parents to keep their children safe.

• Secondary safeguarding: voluntary support to help parents do so.

• Tertiary safeguarding: State intervention—sometimes forcibly—where there’s real evidence that a child is at risk.

Troublingly, today’s policy proposals blur these lines, allowing interventions to creep into areas where no harm exists. As any good barrister (or perhaps even Lord Sumption) would remind us: the more intrusive the State’s action, the higher the legal threshold must be.

Yet here we are, with blanket frameworks being floated that imply parents who teach their children at home—or who send them to a church youth club or Hebrew class—are inherently suspect.

Safeguarding Without Cause is Not Protection. It’s Prejudice.

No less than the Supreme Court has made it clear in cases like Re B (a Child) [2013] UKSC 33 that the State must tolerate a broad spectrum of parental approaches—even those it might not prefer. There is no single “approved” lifestyle or method of education. That, frankly, is the essence of liberty in a free society.

And yet, guidance documents continue to equate non-mainstream education with potential neglect. The assertion that "lack of suitable education" could rise to the level of "significant harm" (a key threshold in child protection law) is legally shaky and ethically unmoored. The Children Act 1989 was not written to pathologise difference.

If safeguarding is everybody’s business, then so too is clarity. Vague notions of “moral obligations” and speculative risks have no place in policy that might empower authorities to knock on doors—or worse, knock down doors—without cause.

What’s Really Going On?

Let’s not be coy. The current obsession with safeguarding in OOSS settings is, in part, driven by unease with religion, tradition, and anything that doesn't fit the ideological norm. Families who educate their children in accordance with their values are being recast as potential threats.

But society doesn’t benefit from a one-size-fits-all model of education. It thrives when diversity, creativity, and local ownership are allowed to flourish. The late Sir Ken Robinson, a global education thought leader, often spoke of the danger of rigid systems that ignore the child in favour of bureaucracy.

We must ask: Is this really about children’s welfare—or about institutional control?

The Legal Test Still Stands

Legally, nothing has changed: unless the stringent criteria of Section 47 of the Children Act 1989 are met—“reasonable cause to suspect significant harm”—there is no lawful ground for compulsory intervention.

Safeguarding powers are there for genuine, evidenced risk—not for ideological hunches.

Using child protection frameworks to monitor peaceful, well-functioning families isn’t safeguarding. It’s overreach.

As Lord Lucas recently warned in the House of Lords, “The state should be respectful and humble in its dealings with parents who educate their own children… If they are doing well, why should the state not applaud that?”

A Better Way Forward

Instead of using safeguarding as a sledgehammer, the government could engage constructively:

• Offer opt-in support for families that want it.

• Improve training for local authorities to distinguish between education issues and welfare concerns.

• Promote educational pluralism as a strength, not a threat.

Support. Don’t stalk. Empower. Don’t impose.

What Can You Do?

Respond to the consultation. Challenge the assumptions. Defend your rights—because they are also your children’s rights.

At UKParents.org, we’re gathering stories, insights, and legal expertise to respond robustly to this consultation. If you'd like to contribute, email us at info@ukparents.org.

Let’s keep protecting children—but let’s also protect parental responsibility, family diversity, and legal sanity while we’re at it.