Home Education Transparency by Local Authority — 2026

Of the 134 councils (of 153 total) whose EHE resources page could actually be read by this probe, 3 (2.2%) score Opaque (0-1/5) on this baseline transparency index, 100 (74.6%) score Partial (2-3/5), and 31 (23.1%) score Transparent (4-5/5). A further 19 councils (12.4% of all 153) could not be verified at all — their page blocked the automated check with a bot-challenge, a 403, or a network error — and are excluded from these figures rather than counted as failing. Weighted by DfE's autumn-2025 census counts of home-educated children, 1.9% of the 108,470 children recorded as home-educated across the 134 verified authorities live under a council whose EHE page scores Opaque.

This index measures whether five specific, checkable transparency signals are observable on one page. It is not an index of council support, service quality, or how well home-educating families are actually treated — a council could run an excellent EHE service through a page that scores Opaque here, or vice versa.

Band distribution (verified councils only, n=134)

Unverified councils

19 of 153 councils' pages could not be read by the automated probe. These are almost certainly reachable in a normal browser: the block is a bot-detection artefact of automated fetching, not evidence the page is down. The probe sends the full header set a real browser sends on a navigation, and these councils refuse it anyway, so clearing them would need a JavaScript-executing browser rather than better headers. They are listed here, not scored, and not counted in the band distribution or the children-weighted share above.

Criterion pass rates (verified councils only, n=134)

hasNamedRoute (not scored, see Method): 100% across all 153 councils, including unverified ones, since this criterion comes from the ledger rather than the fetch.

Top 15 by score (verified councils only, ties broken by EHE children, descending)

Bottom 15 by score (verified councils only, ties broken by EHE children, descending)

Method

Probe timestamp: 2026-08-22T02:50:06.348Z. Each council's resourcesUrl (from data/strategy/council-ehe-ledger.json, generated 2026-07-30) was fetched with a single GET request carrying the full header set a real browser sends on a navigation (Chrome user agent, Accept, Accept-Language, Sec-Fetch-*, Upgrade-Insecure-Requests), following redirects, 12-second timeout, concurrency 6. No forms were submitted and no JavaScript was executed; scoring is based on the raw HTML response only.

Score is 0-5, one point per criterion, band cut at 4-5 Transparent / 2-3 Partial / 0-1 Opaque, applied only to verified councils (reachable = true). A council that is not reachable is banded Unverified instead of being scored, because an unread page cannot honestly be marked as failing the other four criteria:

• reachable: HTTP 200 and the response is not a bot-challenge/CAPTCHA page. (Also the gate for verified vs Unverified.)
• html: ledger status is not pdf-only (i.e. the resource is presented as a normal web page, not solely a PDF).
• linksExternalResources: ledger records the page as linking out to external learning-resource sites (Bitesize, Oak, Twinkl, etc.), captured 2026-07-30.
• linksDfEGuidance: the fetched page body contains a link to gov.uk/government/publications/elective-home-education, or another gov.uk URL/text mentioning "elective-home-education".
• pageHasDate: the page body contains "last updated" / "updated on" / "reviewed" near a date, or a <time> tag, or a JSON-LD dateModified field.

hasNamedRoute (recorded in the CSV, not scored): the ledger's contactRoute text resolves to a specific email, form, or phone route rather than being blank or "none". The CSV records the TYPE only (email/form/phone/none), never the address. It was dropped from the score because it passed for 100% of councils in this ledger snapshot and so carries no discriminating information here.

mentionsRegistration (recorded but not scored): the page text mentions the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act home-education register, "register of children not in school", or "home education register".

Limitations

• Single automated probe at one point in time; council pages change without notice and a page that failed today may be fine tomorrow, or vice versa.
• linksExternalSites and format (html/pdf-only) come from the council-ehe-ledger.json snapshot dated 2026-07-30, not from today's probe; a page could have added or removed links since.
• All text-presence checks (dates, DfE guidance links, registration mentions) are regex-based automated detection on raw HTML, not human reading. They will miss content rendered only by JavaScript and may mis-fire on unusual phrasing.
• Of the 11 councils whose contactRoute was deep-probed on 2026-08-13, only 3 resolved to a genuine dedicated form with a message field; the rest led to generic site-search or feedback boxes. hasNamedRoute="form" is taken at ledger face value across all 153 and is likely optimistic for a subset.
• The Unverified group is not a random sample: it is the set of councils running the strictest bot detection, which skews towards larger authorities (Kent, Hampshire, Norfolk). The verified-set percentages should not be assumed to hold across it.
• The 19-council Unverified group is likely mostly false negatives from bot detection, not really-broken pages; treat the verified-set figures as a lower bound on how many councils are actually reachable, and do not read "Unverified" as "worse than Opaque".
• This index measures the presence of specific, checkable transparency signals on one page. It is not a judgement of the quality, accuracy, or adequacy of a council's EHE service, nor of how home-educating families are actually treated.
• No outreach fields, contact names, or other person data from the ledger are included in this output.

Data source: DfE elective home education counts

Elective home education at census date, release 2025/26 Autumn term, published 2026-01-15, last updated 2026-01-29, retrieved 2026-08-05. Local-authority counts are rounded to the nearest 10 and cover compulsory-school-age children known to the authority on the autumn 2025 census date; high or low counts must not be interpreted as good or bad practice. Source dataset: https://explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/data-catalogue/data-set/af1af85d-05cf-423e-acab-75ad1023943c