Private Members Bills, which allow MPs and Lords to propose new legislation very rarely become law, however they are interesting clues about  current thought inside government.

Two Bills caught our attention.

The first Bill, The Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill, proposed by Labour Peer Lord Soley, asks for measures that would allow home schooled children to be monitored by local authorities so that they could assess their educational, physical and emotional development. The measures would be inserted into the Education Act 1996, the go-to piece of legislation on education provision.

Home schooling is a growing trend in the UK.  It makes sense that home schooling should be addressed in this Act, as all other forms of education are detailed there, however this Bill concerns us a great deal. Local authorities already have powers to investigate home schooled children. Many parents also choose home schooling for their children because they wish to be free from the limited curriculum currently doing the rounds in our generic school system. This Bill could have a profound effect on that freedom.

The Bill sets out a list of requirements on parents who elect to educate their children at home. They include an annual review by social workers on each home schooled child, which includes not only an educational assessment, but emotional and physical assessments as well. In order to do this, social workers would be allowed to visit the child’s home, see their work, and interview parents as well as any children involved. This could lead to social workers querying the content and style in which parents are choosing to educate their children, without having proper training in this area, and profoundly distorting the potential benefits of this kind of schooling.  

Researching Reform has also assisted on cases where home schooled children were being targeted by at least one local authority through the production of policy documents which invited social workers to treat home schooling as a form of neglect and gave them permission to remove home schooled children from their families and place them in care.

It’s also likely that the requirements in the Bill would place an enormous amount of strain on already stretched local authorities, and would lead to a clumsy doubling up of services, especially as many home schooled children will be attending doctor’s surgeries for vaccinations or medical conditions where GPs would already be assessing their welfare, for example.

The Bill had its first reading on 27 June. The next reading has yet to be announced.

The second Bill we spotted aims to do something really rather wonderful. The Refugees (Family Reunion) Bill, sponsored by Lib Dem peer Baroness Hamwee, aims to reunite refugee families and provide them with legal aid where needed. The Bill would do this by:

“[Making] provision for leave to enter or remain in the United Kingdom to be granted to the family members of refugees and to refugees who are family members of British citizens and settled persons, to provide for legal aid to be made available for refugee family reunion cases.”

You can read the clauses of this Bill here. 

The first reading of this Bill was also on the 27 June. A date for the second reading hasn’t yet been set.

It’s taken ten years for us to get here, but finally it seems the most senior minds inside the Family Court are starting to actively push for change.

Suggesting people would be forgiven for thinking the system was, “neither compassionate, nor even humane”, President of the Family Justice System, Sir James Munby was passing judgment in a case which involved two parents unable to access legal aid to fight to stop their three year old child from being adopted. Munby also touches on the human rights principles this case raises – the right to a fair trial is a well known and basic human right, which is currently being eroded by the government’s ongoing cutbacks to the child welfare and legal sectors.

These cutbacks are preventing parents and children from accessing legal support and this, to our mind at least, is a direct breach of Article 6. 

Munby’s observation that the Family Court is a place devoid of compassion and humanity does not just apply to access to legal aid. It applies in every corner of the system where support services are being pared down, where training is not up to par and where working culture allows child protection processes to be ignored and even illegally circumvented.

Researching Reform supports Munby’s continued efforts to speak out about these issues, many of which he has touched upon in previous judgments – now we need Sir Munby to push a little harder. We have seen him talk about other controversial issues, such as male circumcision, but much like his comment on access to legal aid in the current case above, his wording is typically sheepish and cautious.

And whilst some might argue that judges should not be political nor allow their personal views to intertwine with their work (which for the most part we agree with), when it comes to government policy and legislation, the moment they begin to impact on basic human rights, every judge in the land has a duty to speak out.

The family justice system does not need more armchair philosophers or half hearted sentiment. 2016 is the year in which we must tell it like it is – and demand change.