Governing Education: Athoritatriansm, Surveillance and Resistance Across Schools Families and societies: From Exclusion to Surveillance: Home Education, State Governance, and Educational Control

This paper examines the expanding governance of home education in England through the proposed national register (Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill) and associated monitoring frameworks, situating these developments within broader regimes of state control, normalisation, and educational surveillance (Foucault, 2007; Ball, 2013). Drawing on participatory research with home-educating families and a paper currently under review, the analysis shows how home education is increasingly framed by the state not as a legitimate educational choice, but as a risk to be managed and policed.

The paper argues that contemporary home education policy emerges from systemic exclusion rather than parental refusal. Many families in this study turned to home education after their children, particularly those with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), were effectively denied their human right to education through inadequate provision, institutional non-compliance, and school environments structured around an “ideal” compliant learner (Norwich, 2013). Drawing on theories of risk and governance (Myers & Bhopal, 2017, 2020), families who fall outside state-sanctioned norms of race, ethnicity, and ability are pushed out of formal schooling, only to be recast as deviant, irresponsible, or suspect once education moves beyond institutional control.

Using a participatory methodology, the research centres how home educators understand their position within society, the education system, and the state (Kovach, 2009). Participants articulate home education as an act of protection, care, and resistance rather than withdrawal or neglect. The proposed register is widely perceived not as safeguarding, but as an extension of surveillance that collapses educational care into compliance, rendering families visible only through deficit and suspicion.

Situated within critical theories of governance and racialised and ableist state control (Gillborn, 2015), the paper shows how responsibility for systemic educational failure is displaced onto families. In alignment with the symposium’s focus on ethical refusal, it argues that resistance to the register constitutes a refusal of governance that polices difference rather than addressing structural exclusion, and calls for educational justice approaches centred on children’s rights, parental knowledge, and relational accountability