FOR YEARS now, ‘safeguarding’ has enjoyed near-sacrosanct status in policy circles. Rightly so: protecting children from harm is one of the most vital responsibilities of any civilised society. But as with all noble causes, it is susceptible to distortion.
The government’s latest guidance, titled Unregistered Independent Schools and Out-of-School Settings: Guidance for Local Authorities(May 29, 2025), reveals a troubling shift. It reads not as a neutral technical manual, but as a blueprint for steering public perception,and by extension public consultation, towards a foregone conclusion.
This isn’t about protecting children from actual harm. It’s about redefining what constitutes harm, and then using that redefinition to cast suspicion on educational and cultural practices that lie beyond the state’s preferred framework.
Let’s be clear: this is not consultation. This is conditioning.
The tone of the document is unmistakable: it strongly implies that any educational setting operating outside the formal registration system is inherently unsafe and by extension illegal.
From the outset, ‘unregistered’ is presented not as a neutral legal status but rather as a warning sign, conflated with risk, non-compliance and safeguarding failure.
References to ‘illegal settings’ and institutions ‘operating outside the law’ are repeated throughout the text, yet no legal clarification is offered to distinguish between truly unlawful operations and legitimate, lawful alternatives such as supplementary education or home education.
In fact, under Section 96 of the Education and Skills Act 2008, it is only unlawful to operate a full-time unregistered school that provides full-time education to five or more pupils of compulsory school age. This does not apply to part-time settings, supplementary education or home education. Yet the guidance fails to make this distinction, creating the misleading impression that any non-registered setting is automatically illegal or dangerous.
By linking unregistered provision with safeguarding failures, radicalisation and extremism, without distinguishing between isolated failings and the vast majority of lawful, peaceful community-led initiatives, the document constructs a narrative of inherent risk. The implication is clear: if it’s outside the system, it’s a problem.
This isn’t just misleading. It’s deeply unfair to the thousands of parents, faith groups, tutors and volunteers who run responsible, culturally rich, and educationally effective out-of-school settings across the UK.
Perhaps the most significant departure from established safeguarding norms is the guidance’s instruction proactively to identify and investigate settings, even where there have been no complaints and no signs of harm.
In a rule-of-law society, we expect intrusion into family or community life to be based on ‘reasonable cause’, as laid out in Section 47 of the Children Act 1989. That bar exists for good reason. It ensures that interventions are not driven by ideology, preference or vague concern but by actual risk.
Yet this guidance quietly lowers that bar, encouraging authorities to use web searches, community referrals, planning breaches and even fire safety codes to map, monitor and pressure settings that may be operating perfectly lawfully.
This isn’t safeguarding. It’s a strategy of administrative pressure, cloaked in the language of child protection.
Nowhere is the government’s predisposition more evident than in its treatment of children who attend out-of-school provision during school hours. The guidance flatly asserts that such children are ‘unlikely’ to be receiving a suitable education.
This is not a legal finding. It’s a presumption, and one that subtly delegitimises home education and faith-based alternatives, despite their clear protection under UK law.
It’s worth recalling the UK Supreme Court’s remarks in Re B (a Child) [2013] UKSC 33, which reaffirmed that the state must tolerate a broad range of parental decisions, even those it does not prefer. There is no ‘officially approved’ method of child-rearing or education in a free society.
By treating deviation from the mainstream as a red flag, this guidance undermines not only pluralism, but parental authority itself.
Perhaps the most concerning feature of the guidance is its potential role in shaping the very consultation it is meant to inform.
Local authorities are advised to create referral pathways, establish information-sharing mechanisms, and monitor online content to detect ‘settings of concern’. But what happens if these unverified, anecdotal or ideologically loaded findings are fed back into the government’s own consultation analysis?
It would amount to a closed feedback loop: data generated by suspicion becomes the justification for further suspicion. In such a model, the consultation is not an open question: it is a curated script, designed to validate decisions already made.
This risks not only undermining the credibility of the process, but also eroding public trust in the entire framework of safeguarding policy.
Let’s not mistake this for a fringe issue. The consequences of this guidance extend far beyond any one group. It touches on fundamental questions:
- Who defines educational legitimacy in a free society?
- Is parental diversity a right to be protected or a problem to be managed?
- Do we want safeguarding to be rooted in evidence or in ideology?
If the state insists on intervening in family or community life, it must do so with humility, legal clarity and a genuine openness to dissenting voices.
That means:
- Resisting the urge to frame alternatives as threats;
- Recognising the difference between non-conformity and non-compliance;
- Ensuring that consultation is shaped by genuine engagement, not engineered consensus.
This is not an argument against safeguarding. It is a call for safeguarding safeguarding – protecting it from becoming a tool of institutional groupthink.
To conflate independence with illegality, or cultural difference with danger, is to betray the very principles that underpin both liberty and law.
We must not allow guidance documents, no matter how administrative they appear, to reshape the boundaries of lawful behaviour and legitimate parenting. Because when the rules of the conversation are written in advance, consultation becomes theatre. And when suspicion replaces trust, pluralism itself is put on trial.
Let us safeguard what truly matters: children, yes, but also truth, fairness and the freedom to live and learn differently.
This article appeared in Rabbi’s Substack on June 1, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
