What is the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2025?
The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2025 received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026 after a lengthy passage through Parliament. For UK home educators, it is the most significant piece of legislation affecting elective home education (EHE) in decades — and it introduces several requirements that families need to understand and prepare for.
The Act does not change the fundamental legal position: parents in England retain the right to educate their children at home, and there is no requirement to follow the National Curriculum or to have qualifications as a teacher. What it does change is the accountability framework around that right.
Children Not in School registers
The most immediately practical change is the introduction of statutory Children Not in School (CNIS) registers, which local authorities (LAs) in England are now legally required to maintain. This replaces the previous patchwork of voluntary EHE notification practices that varied enormously between LAs.
Under the Act:
- Parents who are educating their child at home must notify their LA within specified timescales (the exact timescales will be set in regulations, expected in late 2026)
- The LA must record the child on its CNIS register
- The LA has a duty to make enquiries about every child on the register to establish whether they are receiving a suitable education
- LAs may make annual visits or contact parents annually — the Act gives them a duty to offer support but also a duty to follow up if concerns arise
Critically, registration on the CNIS register does not mean the LA is approving your education or issuing you a licence to home educate. The right to home educate exists independently of registration. What registration does is create a formal channel through which the LA can discharge its duty of care toward children educated outside school.
What "suitability evidence" means
The Act uses the phrase "suitable education" in the same sense as the Education Act 1996: an education that is "efficient full-time education suitable to [the child's] age, ability, aptitude and to any special educational needs." This definition has not changed. What is new is that LAs are required to make enquiries — and if they are not satisfied that a suitable education is being provided, they must take specified steps.
Suitability evidence is not a formal document type defined in the legislation. It is whatever you present to your LA to demonstrate that your home education programme meets the "suitable education" standard. In practice, this means:
Curriculum coverage: Evidence that you are covering a broad range of subjects appropriate to your child's age — not necessarily the National Curriculum, but something equivalent in breadth.
Progress evidence: Some demonstration that your child is actually learning — this might be work samples, a portfolio, a mastery log from a digital platform, or a narrative account of projects and activities completed.
Teaching approach: An explanation of how you deliver instruction — whether structured lessons, project-based learning, autonomous learning, or a hybrid. LAs cannot require a specific approach, but they can ask for clarity.
Responsiveness to the child's needs: Evidence that your programme takes account of your specific child's age, ability, aptitude, and any special educational needs.
How to write a compelling LA letter
A well-constructed LA letter following the Act should include the following sections:
Opening statement: State clearly that you are educating your child at home pursuant to section 7 of the Education Act 1996, that you are registering the child on the CNIS register as required, and that you welcome the opportunity to demonstrate the suitability of your programme.
Your child's profile: Brief, factual description of your child's age, year equivalent, any relevant learning needs, and any particular strengths or interests. This personalises the letter and signals that your programme is tailored to this specific child.
Curriculum coverage: For each learning area, describe what you cover and how. This does not have to follow the National Curriculum strands, but should demonstrate equivalent breadth. Science, Mathematics, English language and literature, humanities, creative arts, and physical education should all appear.
Teaching approach: A one-paragraph description of your general approach — structured lessons, Socratic questioning, project-based inquiry, etc. Describe how you decide what to cover next (curriculum sequence, child-led interest, mastery-based progression).
Evidence and records: Describe how you document progress — portfolios, digital learning logs, mastery data, dated work samples, assessor visits. This is important: LAs under the new Act have a duty to satisfy themselves that enquiries are answered. An explicit evidence strategy reassures them they can come back to you.
Availability for further contact: Offer to meet, correspond, or share samples if the LA has specific questions. A cooperative tone is far more effective than an adversarial one, even when your legal position is strong.
What happens if the LA deems education unsuitable?
If the LA, having made enquiries, is not satisfied that suitable education is being provided, the Act creates a more structured escalation pathway than existed previously.
The LA must first issue a notice requiring information and give the parent a reasonable opportunity to respond. If, after receiving the response, they are still not satisfied, they may issue a School Attendance Order (SAO) requiring the child to attend a named school. The parent can appeal an SAO to the magistrates' court.
It is important to understand that an SAO is not a criminal sanction — it is an administrative order. Failure to comply with an SAO is where criminal liability arises, but that requires a further escalation step. The process has multiple stages, each of which gives you an opportunity to provide evidence and make representations.
The single most effective thing you can do to avoid this pathway is to respond promptly and substantively to any LA enquiry. Many cases that escalate to SAOs do so not because the education was genuinely unsuitable, but because the family did not respond to LA contacts. Silence is invariably interpreted negatively.
How Docent generates your LA letter automatically
Docent's compliance module includes a UK LA Letter generator aligned to the CW&S Act 2025 requirements. When you complete your child's profile and have at least one term of lesson data, the platform can:
1. Pull your child's mastery data across all curriculum areas the AI tutor has covered
2. Map it to the National Curriculum equivalents — Docent tracks NC-aligned codes alongside ACARA codes, so cross-jurisdiction mapping is automatic
3. Generate a draft LA letter using your actual lesson data as the evidence base — not template language, but specific references to what your child has studied and demonstrated
The generated letter includes a Source Telemetry Hash in the appendix — a SHA-256 digest of your child's mastery vector at the time of generation. This hash allows an assessor to verify that the evidence cited in the letter corresponds to real platform data, adding an audit trail that word-processed letters cannot provide.
You review and personalise the draft, then sign it before sending. Docent never submits documents to LAs on your behalf — the letter is always a parent artefact. But what would previously have taken an afternoon to write now takes fifteen minutes to review.
Key dates and what to do now
The CNIS register provisions will come into force on a date set by the Secretary of State — expected to be no earlier than January 2027, to allow LAs time to establish their registration systems. Guidance from the Department for Education on the precise notification timescales and the format of LA enquiries is expected by October 2026.
What you should do now: document your home education programme thoroughly. If you are using a digital platform, make sure your lesson logs are current and your child's mastery data is up to date. Write a draft LA letter using the structure above, or use Docent's generator to create one, and update it each term. When the registration requirement comes into force, you will be ready.