By
Mary Hardy
August 2, 2025
The Online Safety Act has already limited free speech; the Crime and Policing Bill awaiting its Second Reading in the Lords saw last-minute changes in the Commons to allow the retrieval of data via any seized device; ahead of it in the Upper House is the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill which, unless amended, will enable the state to collect and connect data on every child. IN 2023 Tony Blair and William Hague co-signed a report called A New National Purpose in which they reasoned: ‘With science and technology as our new national purpose, we can innovate rather than stagnate in the face of increasing technological change. This purpose must rise above political differences to achieve a new cross-party consensus that can survive any change of government.’
Now, just over a year into a Starmer-led administration, it is striking how many of Labour’s Bills are steroid-enhanced replicas of those proposed by previous Tory governments. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Bridget Phillipson’s inappropriately named Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. Alongside some measures similar to Boris Johnson’s 2022 Schools Bill, its pernicious Clause 4 enables much wider information-sharing through ‘consistent identifiers’ (CI) for every child. These will be assigned to children from birth, and the Department for Education (DfE) is presently trialling the use of their NHS number for this purpose.
Anyone who cares about children’s rights and the wise use and protection of personal data should be highly dubious of the kind of ‘wellbeing’ that this Bill looks set to advance.
The proposed consistent identifier will serve to drive a larger wedge of state oversight between parents and their children, promoting as it does not wellbeing, but surveillance. Be in no doubt, it will weaken children’s rights to privacy, family and home. It will facilitate the state’s underlying desire to oversee the whole of a child’s life.
Handing unrestrained powers to any government is never wise! Leaving important details to be decided by this or subsequent ministers leaves a door wide open for abuse of that power, with no safeguards to restrain a future government from taking oppressive advantage of them.
Prominent academics and children’s rights organisations have come together with the help of Reclaim Rights for Children (RRfC) to express their shared concerns in an open letter to Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson. Collectively, they have expertise and experience from different fields of safeguarding and child protection. Their letter opens thus: ‘We write to sound an urgent alarm about the grave threat posed by measures included in the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. Not only does the Bill create a dangerous expansion of powers to store and distribute children’s information, it involves an unprecedented shift of power from families to the state which will negatively impact individual children, their families and society more widely.’
RRfC’s website https://rightsforchildren.uk/ provides a wealth of well-documented material relevant to the authors’ common concerns, including important information on two dangerous Bills introduced by this government. The website also references research co-ordinated by Southampton University Professor Rosalind Edwards. Her research team found that ‘public confidence in administrative data practices is weak’. Their concerns about administrative data linkage (or, as will be the case if the CI provisions are enacted, data lakes) inspired them to produce this short video which is a must watch for all parents and anyone who wants to be better informed about how data on families and their children is ‘collected, shared and used by local and national government services.’ Edwards hopes their work will equip parents to challenge cases where automated systems may have mislabelled them and their children.
There are other instances too where the Bill mistakes oversight, control and restrictions for protection, and is unable to distinguish between consent and coercion. It is vital that unintended consequences and potential harms are properly investigated at this stage.
RRfC’s open letter also sounds the alarm in regard to later clauses in the Bill enabling local authorities to set up registers of ‘Children Not in School’ [CNiS]. Such measures first saw the light of day in Ed Balls’s 2009 Children, Schools and Families Bill. There they were more honestly named for what they were – registers of home-educated children. Now Balls’s successor as Secretary of State for Education takes the data collection much further than he could have imagined. Relevant clauses read like a ‘Prevent’ interrogation question sheet, and there is good reason to believe that is exactly what they are!
The collective wisdom of these child safeguarding experts warns: ‘Let us be clear that the power being created is for the state to require, store and distribute extensive volumes of information about children. Even MPs supportive of the measures expressed shock at the extent of this, which will include what children do at weekends. Also granted is a blank cheque for local authorities to store information on anything they deem “appropriate” as well as extraordinary powers for the Secretary of State to require and share information about all children, including on an individual named basis . . .
‘This demand for routine state oversight of children includes expectation of a home inspection and access to children. We know that even for families who have actively sought support, such as for a disabled child, that these are intrusive, traumatising and harmful. There is every reason to fear that home visits carried out under threat of school attendance orders, or even of social services investigations, will have similar effect. So too might we fear the extension of the harmful logic of parent and child blame which families of children with complex needs already experience, with the Bill empowering local authorities to decide what is in the “best interests” of specific groups of children.’
Recording, storing and distributing children’s personal information without informed consent for reasons other than child protection is Orwellian to the core. Parental consent should always be held in high regard unless the threshold of a child ‘being or believed to be in danger of significant harm’ is met.
The proposed transfer of the responsibility of determining what is in the best interests of a child from parents to state employees should ring alarm bells for all concerned about a child’s right to a private life. Naturally and historically, parents have been considered the prime determiners of the best interests of their children. Now, agents of the state, so-called ‘children’s professionals’, are trusted more than family. Given that the intuitive knowledge of what is best for a child actually arises from that enduring familial relationship, this feels dangerously unsafe, not least because it is widely recognised by those with eyes to see that the state makes a bad parent.
Children’s rights and parental rights are complementary. A child’s rights are defended by their parent. But in recent years they been weaponised one against the other, and we are now seeing children’s rights built into child protection in a way that sidelines parents. Mike Wood, founder of the Home Education UK website, argued this effectively in his short piece entitled Children Need Parents:
‘Children have the right to parents, and parents can only be parents if they have the powers to act as parents enabling them to carry out their duty. So parental rights are really children’s rights. One cannot, or should not, be offset against the other.’
Any duty to share information in the interests of unspecific ‘wellbeing’ inevitably results in more referrals below the proper threshold. In what universe does expanding the size of the haystack make finding the needle easier?
Nowhere is this more evident than in the flawed Prevent programme, apparently now seeking to supervise every home-educated child in England. Returning to the open letter, the authors state clearly the dangers of over-invasive state surveillance: ‘Black and racialised children, especially boys, where mere inclusion without substantiation on databases about gang connection is enough to send ripples of harm across their lives. Children excluded from school, young people barred from employment, families denied housing. The chilling impacts of Prevent duties to share information on Muslim children, their families and communities – under a system claimed to be safeguarding but widely evidenced as policing – leaves children scared to talk in classrooms and puts families “protesting against our government” under suspicion. Even six-year-old children can end up on counter terrorism police-controlled databases, their information spread across services.’
RRfC cite Southampton University’s Ros Edwards’s observations about where state surveillance measures will lead if citizens, that is parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, do not guard against them. Warning about how every child’s NHS number could become a standard ID across every database, she asserts: ‘The data generated by schools, police, housing, health, work and pensions and so on can already be linked and merged to identify individuals. Databases have become largely irrelevant. It’s the consistent identifier that will be the “national database”. The child is the database and will be available nationally.’ (emphasis added)
There are other dangers embedded in this misnamed Children’s Wellbeing Bill which I have not explored. Suffice it to say that the erasure of a child’s right to privacy, family and home cannot be the way. Since the creation of the English state education system, there has been an escape route open for children and parents when they deem the state’s educational provisions unsuitable. This was embedded in the 1944 Education Act, and remains firmly in place in the 1996 Act. British law recognises that it is the duty of parents, not the state, to provide their children with an education suitable to their needs. Lord Frost sounded the alarm about this Bill in January when he wrote that ‘Home-schooling helps us resist indoctrination’. I agree, and encourage you to consider how vital it is for that freedom to be maintained for the sake of all. This dangerous Bill must be stopped.
End Note: If you are motivated by this article to help protect children from the growth of the surveillance state, a first step would be to consider signing a petition calling on the government not to introduce unique child identifiers and increased home education regulation. It was started by a young home-educated person, and is very close to receiving enough signatures to guarantee a response from the government before it closes on August 11. It would be something special if TCW readers could help increase its impact by sharing it with their contacts so that it secures a Parliamentary debate.