Starting to put some of my comments made on media discussing registration of home educators here, this is for those who have swallowed The Badman Report whole.

Graham Badman's report was thoroughly debunked by far sharper minds than his including Graham Stuart in the select committee inquiry into the report.

 Q13 Mr. Stuart: In any case in which a child is known to be on a child protection plan, will it, by necessity, mean that that child is known to the local authorities?

Graham Badman: Yes.

 Q14 Mr. Stuart: So, if the numbers that were formally known about were approximately double your best estimate, it would take us back to almost precisely where we started, at the average of the population as a whole.

Graham Badman: I'm sorry, I don't understand the question.

 "Q15 Mr. Stuart: Well, if there are twice as many children in home education than are formally known about, which by definition includes all those for whom there is a child protection plan, it would suggest that, roughly speaking, you were back to 0.2% of the home-educated population having a child protection plan, which would put them in line with the national average.

Graham Badman: I think that it propels the figures the other way. It would actually make the proportion higher, because they are already included in the overall population and in the subset of the population, which would mean that the percentage will be fractionally higher. It works the other way."

Worrying that he was a maths teacher in a previous life.

"AFTER the report had been issued and roundly criticized by home educators, Badman conducted a third survey of LEAs to try to get a larger sample size.  Badman claimed that this third sample was representative, but Stafford argues that it in fact was biased toward urban areas.  Stafford here pulls out all the stops, for his concern is not so much about what all this means for home education but that government policy is being made on such flimsy grounds."

I could produce many many other links, the report was trying to produce policy based evidence and used quotes in a very misleading and dishonest way.

This is the submission by the church of england.

"24 Our submission was, naturally, designed to be read as a whole, but following the publication of Graham Badman's report, officers in the Education Division were disappointed with the impression left by the selective use of our submission.

25 We are concerned that the quotation from our submission used in the report appeared to have been selected to support the terms of reference of the review, which, whilst acknowledging that parents have a well-established right to educate their children at home and indicating that the Government had no plans to change that position, appeared overly concerned with the possibility of home educating being a cover for abuse, barriers to safeguarding responsibilities and possible changes to the regime of monitoring and support of LAs.

26 In fact, we specifically stated that in making prevention of abuse under the cover of home education the main reason for the Review has the effect of tarnishing the reputation of the many parents who choose to home education their children from the best of motives."

Even the police are not allowed to force a child to see them alone, social workers are only allowed to with evidence of harm.  To allow council workers with no training in either home education or child welfare to have the same power would be very dangerous and open to abuse. 

There is nothing in the law around home education that stops social services doing their job, a register would not help when social services already know that the child exists and have been warned about it and do not act on the information.