Do I Need to Register to Home Educate in England?

The council already has our details — is that the register?

Almost certainly not. Councils have kept their own records of home-educated children for years, and there are two ordinary routes onto one. Neither is the register the 2026 Act creates.

• Your child left a school. When a pupil's name is deleted from a school's admission register, the school must send the council a deletion return under regulation 13(4) of the School Attendance (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2024. It includes your child's name and address, your details as parents, and which ground the deletion was made on. You never signed up for anything — the school's return put your child on the council's records.
• The council was looking. Local authorities have a duty under section 436A of the Education Act 1996 to make arrangements to establish the identities of children in their area who are not registered pupils at a school and are not receiving suitable education otherwise. In practice most authorities maintain a home-education record and contact families they know about.

Being on a council list of this kind places no new legal duty on you and carries no penalty. It is an administrative record, not a statutory scheme, and it is not evidence that you have done something wrong or missed a deadline. The national figures for elective home education are compiled from exactly these council records — which is why our home education statistics guide describes them as children known to local authorities rather than a count of every home-educated child.

One honest limit: section 436A is worded as a duty to identify children who are not receiving suitable education. It is the provision authorities generally point to when they keep home-education records and make enquiries, but the section does not itself say a council must maintain a home-education database.

What the law actually asks of you today

Your duty as a parent sits in section 7 of the Education Act 1996: you must cause your child to receive efficient full-time education suitable to their age, ability and aptitude, and to any special educational needs, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise. Home education is the "otherwise". It is a different lawful way of meeting the same duty, not an exemption from it.

What that means in practice depends on one thing — whether your child has ever been on a school roll:

• If your child has never been enrolled at a school, you do not have to tell anyone that you are home educating. There is no form, no application and no deadline.
• If your child is at school and you want to withdraw them, you send the school a written deregistration notice. It is a notice, not a request: you do not need the school's or the council's agreement, though special schools attended under local authority arrangements and children subject to a school attendance order are exceptions. Our guide to deregistering from school in England covers the process, the exceptions and what to expect afterwards, and there is a printable deregistration letter template with the exact wording.

Your local authority may make informal enquiries about the education you are providing. Replying helpfully is usually the easiest path, but those enquiries are informal — they are not an inspection, and you are not required to follow a curriculum, keep school hours or admit anyone to your home.

Exactly where the 2026 Act has got to

This is the part most pages get slightly wrong, so here is the precise position as at 10 August 2026.

The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 29 April 2026. Sections 37 to 42 contain the children not in school measures, including section 38, which creates the registers.

Those sections are technically in force already — but only in a narrow sense that does not affect you. Section 78(1)(a) of the Act brought provisions of Parts 1 and 2 into force on Royal Assent only "so far as [they confer] or relate to a power to make" regulations. In other words, the government may now write the regulations that will operate the register. The duties on parents are a separate matter, and they begin only when a commencement instrument says so.

Two commencement instruments have been made under the Act. Neither touches sections 37 to 42:

So the register duties are not in force, there is no deadline to meet, and no parent in England is currently required to provide information under the new scheme. You can confirm both instruments yourself: SI 2026/551 and SI 2026/803.

Commentators have suggested various start dates for the registers. No official commencement date has been set, so we are not repeating any of those estimates here as though they were fact.

What will change when the registers do begin

Section 38 inserts new sections 436B to 436G into the Education Act 1996. When they are commenced, the shape of the scheme is this:

• Every local authority in England must maintain a register of children in its area who are eligible to be registered.
• Parents of an eligible child must tell the authority the child is eligible and provide specified information about the child's education, within 15 days of becoming eligible.
• Certain out-of-school education providers may also have duties to share information.
• Authorities will have duties to provide advice and information to home-educating families who ask.

One point worth holding on to, because it causes a lot of unnecessary worry: this is a duty to provide information, not a licensing scheme. Section 38 does not give a council power to approve or refuse your home education in advance. The change is that the state will know about your arrangements, not that it will authorise them.

That said, the detail will sit in regulations that have not been made yet, and the commencement position may have moved since this page was checked.

How to check whether this page is still current

This is a page about a law that is mid-implementation, so its value depends entirely on being current. You do not have to take our word for it — you can check the same sources we did in about two minutes:

1. Open section 38 of the Act and scroll to the Commencement Information note at the foot of the section. Today it reads that the section is in force at Royal Assent for specified purposes, referring to section 78(1)(a). If it names a new statutory instrument, the position has changed.
2. Check GOV.UK's elective home education guidance for an announcement.
3. If the two disagree, the legislation record is the one to trust — guidance pages are often updated later.

If you find that this page has fallen behind, please tell us and we will correct it. A page like this earns its place by being right on the day you read it, and the date beneath the title is the only honest measure of that.