There's no curriculum you have to follow, no test you have to sit, and no single person who checks your child's work. Here's what the law actually requires, and what's about to change.
Most new home-educating parents ask the same question in their first month: am I doing this right? It's a reasonable question. It's also one the law doesn't fully answer.
The legal bar is lower, and vaguer, than most parents expect
Under the Education Act 1996, a parent's duty is to make sure their child receives an education that is "efficient," "full-time," and "suitable to their age, ability, aptitude, and any special educational needs." That sounds precise. It isn't.
None of those three words — efficient, full-time, or suitable — is defined in statute. DfE guidance offers a comparison point rather than a rule: children in school typically get around five hours of teaching a day, 190 days a year. But it says home education doesn't need to replicate that structure. There's no requirement to follow the national curriculum. There's no requirement to sit exams. There's no requirement to teach at a particular pace, in a particular order, or in a particular way.
For families who chose home education to escape a one-size-fits-all system, this is the whole appeal. For families who arrived here less by choice than by circumstance — a child struggling with anxiety, or a SEND need the school couldn't meet — that same openness can feel less like freedom and more like being handed a blank page with no instructions.
Who's actually checking, and how
Local authorities have a duty to make enquiries if it appears a child isn't receiving a suitable education, and separate safeguarding powers they can use if a lack of education looks likely to harm a child's development. In practice, this usually means an annual, often informal, check-in: a report from the parent, sometimes a home visit, sometimes just a written summary of what's being covered.
There's no national standard for what that check-in involves. It varies by local authority. And because registration with the council is currently voluntary rather than mandatory, some children in home education are never checked on at all — not from deliberate neglect, but because the local authority doesn't know they exist.
What's changing: the register
The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 introduces a mandatory register of children not in school, which includes children who are home educated. It has passed into law, but the specific measures aren't yet in force, and a consultation on exactly how the register will work in practice is still expected.
Once it lands, the shift for home-educating families is likely to be about visibility more than restriction. The Act doesn't touch what parents are required to teach. What it changes is whether the local authority knows a child exists at all. For families already registered and used to an annual check-in, not much changes. For the estimated tens of thousands currently invisible to any local authority, it means appearing in the system for the first time — and, likely, a first-ever check-in.
The gap this leaves families to fill themselves
Strip away the legal minimum and what's left is this: no fixed curriculum, no fixed benchmark, no scheduled way of finding out whether your child is keeping pace with where they'd be in a classroom, and, for most families, no consistent check-in from anyone outside the house.
That's not a criticism of the law. A flexible framework is what allows home education to serve wildly different families for wildly different reasons — a child with severe anxiety, a family that travels, a child whose needs a mainstream classroom genuinely can't meet. But flexibility without structure puts the entire weight of curriculum design, pacing, and progress-checking onto one or two parents who typically have no training in any of it.
The real gap is practical, not legal. And it's the gap that a growing number of tools, ed-tech among them, exist to fill without trading away the flexibility that made home education work in the first place.
Sources
Education Act 1996, s.7. Available at: legislation.gov.uk (Accessed: 16 August 2026).
House of Commons Library (2026) Home education in England. Research Briefing SN05108, 10 June 2026. Available at: commonslibrary.parliament.uk (Accessed: 16 August 2026).
Department for Education (2026) Elective home education: autumn term 2025. Explore Education Statistics. Available at: explore-education-statistics.service.gov.uk (Accessed: 16 August 2026).