In February 2025, the Office for National Statistics published analysis of suicide risk factors among children and young people in England. The findings should have fundamentally changed the national conversation around education, safeguarding and children's mental health. In many quarters, they did not.
The ONS analysis identified groups of young people at significantly higher risk of dying by suicide — including disabled young people, those with complex needs, and those whose distress had been visible to services for years before their death.
Pause on that for a moment.
These are not abstract numbers.
These are children.
Many are children whose distress has repeatedly been interpreted as "behaviour". Children whose unmet needs have been answered with attendance pressure, sanctions, isolation rooms, exclusions, emotionally dysregulated responses, and systems designed primarily around compliance rather than understanding.
For years, many families have described the same pattern: their child deteriorates in school, they raise concerns, they are told attendance must improve, behaviour must improve, routines must improve, parenting must improve.
Meanwhile the child becomes more anxious, more dysregulated, more withdrawn, or more distressed. Sometimes profoundly so.
The Act, and the question it raises
Now the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 has received Royal Assent. One provision has received far less public scrutiny than it deserves.
Under the legislation, some families may require local authority consent before withdrawing a child from school to home educate — including circumstances where a child is subject to a Child Protection Plan, a child protection enquiry, or has been subject to a Child Protection Plan within the previous five years.
On paper, this is framed as safeguarding.
And of course safeguarding matters. No serious professional would argue otherwise.
But from the frontline of children's services, SEND support, alternative provision and family support, there is a question we urgently need to ask:
What happens when the environment itself is part of the harm?
Because many families do not choose home education casually. Often they arrive there after months or years of trying to hold a child together within systems that are no longer emotionally safe for them.
Sometimes home education is not ideological at all. Sometimes it is protective action taken in desperation.
And yet we may now be entering a position where:
- A child becomes distressed in school
- The family removes the child to protect them
- The system interprets removal as risk
- The same system gains increased power to refuse that removal
- The child may ultimately be returned to the source of distress
That is an extraordinarily serious ethical position for any system to hold. Especially when national data already tells us the potential consequences of prolonged emotional distress among vulnerable young people.
What safeguarding actually requires
This is where safeguarding becomes more complicated than policy language allows.
Because safeguarding is not simply about physical visibility. It is not merely about attendance. And it is certainly not achieved through control alone.
Real safeguarding requires us to ask:
- Does this child feel psychologically safe?
- Is this environment helping or harming them?
- Are we listening to distress early enough?
- Are we distinguishing between defiance and dysregulation?
- Are we protecting systems, or protecting children?
The uncomfortable truth is that some children experience school not as a place of safety, but as a place of chronic threat.
That does not mean schools are "bad". It does not mean home education is always the answer. And it does not mean every parental decision is automatically correct.
But it does mean nuance matters. Trust matters. Relational safeguarding matters.
And families who have spent years trying to be heard should not automatically be viewed through a lens of suspicion because they reached a point of educational rupture.
The cultural risk
The risk here is not only legal. It is cultural.
If we create systems where distressed children are pushed back toward environments that professionals and parents already know are causing harm, we may unintentionally deepen the very risks safeguarding is supposed to reduce.
The children at the centre of this debate are often the least able to articulate what is happening to them clearly. So their behaviour becomes the communication.
And far too often, systems still answer communication with compliance measures.
That should concern all of us.
Especially now.