Elective Home Education Call for Evidence: What Welsh Families Need to Know

The Welsh Government's 2022 Call for Evidence on elective home education did not pass quietly. The responses it generated, the guidance it ultimately produced, and the campaign by Education Otherwise to walk back some of its more intrusive provisions have had a lasting effect on how home education is treated in Wales. If you are a parent currently home educating in Wales, considering it, or thinking about forming a shared learning pod, understanding this legislative backdrop is not optional — it shapes what local authorities can and cannot ask of you right now.

What the Call for Evidence Was Asking

In 2022, the Welsh Government launched a formal Call for Evidence on elective home education. The core concern driving it was whether current local authority oversight mechanisms were adequate to safeguard children who are not in formal school settings, while simultaneously protecting the right of parents to provide a suitable education under Section 7 of the Education Act 1996.

The consultation sought evidence on several interlinked questions:

• Whether local authorities had sufficient powers to monitor the quality of home education.
• Whether a formal registration or notification system should be created for electively home-educated children in Wales.
• Whether the existing guidance documents issued to local authorities were clear enough to prevent inconsistent treatment of families.
• How the additional safeguarding obligations introduced by the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 should interact with home education oversight.

This was not merely an academic exercise. By 2022, Wales was already seeing a sharp upward trend in EHE numbers that showed no sign of slowing. The rate of home-educated pupils in Wales stood at a reported 15.3 per 1,000 pupils in the 2024/25 academic year, up from just 1.6 per 1,000 in 2009/10 — nearly a tenfold increase in fifteen years. Local authorities were dealing with an exponentially growing caseload with guidance that had not been substantively updated to reflect that scale.

What the Guidance Produced — and What Families Pushed Back On

Following the consultation, the Welsh Government issued updated Elective Home Education guidance that significantly expanded what local authorities were expected to do when a family deregistered from school. The draft guidance, in particular, included language that critics argued would effectively treat the act of home educating itself as a potential safeguarding concern, requiring routine welfare visits and regular monitoring that went far beyond what the law actually mandates.

Education Otherwise, the main charitable body supporting home educating families across England and Wales, mounted a vigorous challenge to these provisions. Their specific objection was to the guidance's tendency to conflate monitoring educational provision with child protection — two distinct legal duties — in a way that licensed local authorities to be far more intrusive than the statutory framework required.

The result of that challenge was meaningful. The Welsh Government amended the guidance to make clear that each family's case must be considered individually. A local authority cannot simply apply blanket monitoring requirements to all EHE families on the basis that some home-educated children may be at risk. The threshold for a welfare visit must be triggered by specific indicators, not by the mere fact of home education.

For families in Wales, this matters because it sets the boundary for what a local authority can reasonably ask of you. They may ask to see evidence that your child is receiving a suitable education. They cannot, absent specific cause for concern, demand access to your home or treat you as a default safeguarding case.

What "Suitable Education" Actually Means in Wales

One of the persistent ambiguities that the Call for Evidence exposed is that Welsh law, like English law, requires parents to provide a "suitable" full-time education but does not define precisely what that means. Section 7 of the Education Act 1996 requires education that is efficient and suitable to the age, ability, aptitude, and any special educational needs of the child.

In practice, Welsh local authorities assess suitability against the broad aims of the Curriculum for Wales — the new framework that replaced the National Curriculum for Wales from 2022 and is organised around six Areas of Learning and Experience (AoLEs) — rather than against a rigid subject checklist. This gives home educating families considerable flexibility in how they structure learning. It also means that families who have incorporated a mixture of project-based learning, community activities, and structured subject work are on firm ground, provided they can demonstrate purposeful educational activity.

The Curriculum for Wales explicitly frames education around four purposes: developing ethical, informed citizens; healthy, confident individuals; enterprising, creative contributors; and ambitious, capable learners. A well-documented home education portfolio that maps activities against these purposes is generally what local authority officers are looking for when they make enquiries.

The Specific Complications for Learning Pods and Shared Settings

The Call for Evidence and its aftermath also threw into sharper relief a problem that no amount of revised EHE guidance fully resolves: what happens when a group of families moves beyond solo home education into a shared pod or micro-school arrangement?

This is where the legal landscape in Wales becomes genuinely complex — and where the guidance produced in response to the Call for Evidence is essentially silent.

Under Section 463 of the Education Act 1996, an educational establishment must register as an independent school with the Welsh Government if it provides full-time education for five or more children of compulsory school age, or for just one child who is looked after by a local authority or holds an Individual Development Plan (IDP) under the Additional Learning Needs and Education Tribunal (Wales) Act 2018. The IDP trigger is a specifically Welsh provision with no direct English equivalent — it creates a registration requirement for even a single-child pod if that child has a local authority-maintained IDP.

The EHE guidance addresses individual family arrangements. It does not map out how a group of families can structure a shared pod to remain legally on the right side of the independent school threshold. That operational question — which many families in Cardiff, Ceredigion, and the South Wales Valleys are now actively grappling with — requires a different kind of resource entirely.

If you are at the stage of thinking through how to structure a shared learning arrangement without inadvertently triggering registration requirements, the Wales Micro-School & Pod Kit covers the legal threshold in detail, including the specific IDP complication and the part-time scheduling models families use to remain below it.

How EHE Numbers Are Being Tracked After the Consultation

One concrete legacy of the Call for Evidence is a more systematic approach to collecting EHE data across Welsh local authorities. Annual pupil-level data collections now capture electively home-educated children with greater granularity, allowing the Welsh Government to publish comparative figures by local authority.

The variation this reveals is striking. Ceredigion consistently reports the highest density of EHE pupils in Wales — 32.6 per 1,000 pupils in 2024/25. Cardiff's EHE population increased by 59.5% between 2021 and 2025. Rural areas with historically strong community ties and limited school choice have high rates of uptake; urban areas driven by private school VAT pressures are catching up fast.

For families considering whether home education in Wales is a fringe choice, these numbers make clear it is not. It is a mainstream and growing option, supported by an active community, a reasonable body of parental rights established through Education Otherwise's ongoing advocacy, and a regulatory environment that — following the adjustments secured after the Call for Evidence — respects the distinction between monitoring education and conducting safeguarding investigations.

What to Do With This Information

Understanding the policy landscape gives you a clearer picture of your rights and your obligations. The practical steps for most families remain the same regardless of the political background:

• Notify the school in writing when deregistering. The school cannot refuse deregistration, and local authority confirmation is not required before you begin home educating.
• Keep records of your educational activity that you can draw on if the local authority makes enquiries. The standard is "suitable education," not adherence to any specific curriculum.
• If you are forming a shared group with other families, take the legal threshold for independent school registration seriously. The part-time model — keeping sessions to a level that does not constitute your child's entire educational provision — is the most commonly used structure for staying below it.
• If any child in your proposed group holds or is in the process of obtaining an IDP, seek specific advice before proceeding. The single-pupil IDP trigger in Welsh law means the registration threshold can be crossed regardless of group size.

The Call for Evidence did not resolve every tension in Wales's approach to home education. What it did do was establish that the legal framework should work with families, not against them — and that local authorities must treat home educators as individuals exercising a lawful right, not as a category to be managed.

For structured guidance on the legal, logistical, and curriculum requirements for running a compliant pod or micro-school in Wales, including template documents built around Welsh law rather than generic UK or US frameworks, the Wales Micro-School & Pod Kit is designed specifically for that purpose.

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