The Children Not in School register

Every local authority in England will have to keep a register of children of compulsory school age in its area who are not registered pupils at a school. That includes home educated children, and children in some alternative provision.

The stated purpose is safeguarding: making sure a council knows which children are not in school, so that a child who is not being educated at all can be noticed. Home educating families are not the target of it, but they are inside it.

• It does not require permission to home educate. Section 7 of the Education Act 1996 is untouched. The duty to educate stays with the parent, and school remains one way of discharging it rather than the only one.
• It does not impose the national curriculum. There is no requirement for a home educated child to follow it, before or after the register.
• It does not mean inspections. A register is a list, not a visit.
• It does change deregistration in some cases. The Act adds a consent requirement for children in defined higher-risk circumstances, such as those subject to a child protection enquiry or plan, or attending a special school by local authority arrangement.
• It does make refusing to give information an offence in due course. That is what the regulations will define, and why the wording of them matters more than the Act itself.

1. Nothing urgent. There is no register to join and no deadline to miss.
2. Keep deregistering the normal way if you are taking a child out of school. The process has not changed: how to deregister in England.
3. Start keeping a record, if you do not already. Not because a register demands it, but because the cheapest moment to start a record is the first week, and the most expensive is the day somebody asks for one.
4. Read anything dated before May 2026 carefully. A great deal of what is written about this describes the Bill rather than the Act, and some of it describes clauses that changed on the way through.