When Safeguarding Becomes Spin: Are We Being Consulted, or Conditioned?

The State Is Listening—But Only to Itself

For years now, “safeguarding” has enjoyed near-sacrosanct status in policy circles. Rightly so—protecting children from harm is one of the most vital responsibilities of any civilised society. But as with all noble causes, it is susceptible to distortion.

The government’s latest guidance, titled “Unregistered Independent Schools and Out-of-School Settings: Guidance for Local Authorities” (29 May 2025), reveals a troubling shift. It reads not as a neutral technical manual, but as a blueprint for steering public perception—and by extension, public consultation—towards a foregone conclusion.

This isn’t about protecting children from actual harm. It’s about redefining what constitutes harm, and then using that redefinition to cast suspicion on educational and cultural practices that lie beyond the state's preferred framework.

Let’s be clear: this is not consultation. This is conditioning.

Guidance That Frames Before It Informs

The tone of the document is unmistakable: unregistered = unsafe. References to “illegal settings” and “operating outside the law” are repeated throughout, without adequate legal clarification. In reality, the law criminalises the operation of full-time unregistered schools, not all informal educational settings. Yet the guidance offers little to distinguish between the two.

By linking unregistered provision with safeguarding failures, radicalisation, and extremism—without distinguishing between isolated failings and the vast majority of lawful, peaceful community-led initiatives—the document constructs a narrative of inherent risk. The implication is clear: if it’s outside the system, it’s a problem.

This isn’t just misleading. It’s deeply unfair to the thousands of parents, faith groups, tutors and volunteers who run responsible, culturally rich, and educationally effective out-of-school settings across the UK.

From Risk-Based Oversight to Suspicion-Led Surveillance

Perhaps the most significant departure from established safeguarding norms is the guidance’s instruction to proactively identify and investigate settings, even where there have been no complaints and no signs of harm.

In a rule-of-law society, we expect intrusion into family or community life to be based on reasonable cause, as laid out in Section 47 of the Children Act 1989. That bar exists for good reason. It ensures that interventions are not driven by ideology, preference, or vague concern—but by actual risk.

Yet this guidance quietly lowers that bar, encouraging authorities to use web searches, community referrals, planning breaches, and even fire safety codes to map, monitor and pressure settings that may be operating perfectly lawfully.

This isn't safeguarding. It’s a strategy of administrative pressure, cloaked in the language of child protection.

Policy by Presumption

Nowhere is the government’s predisposition more evident than in its treatment of children who attend out-of-school provision during school hours. The guidance flatly asserts that such children are “unlikely” to be receiving a suitable education.

This is not a legal finding. It’s a presumption—and one that subtly delegitimises home education and faith-based alternatives, despite their clear protection under UK law.

It’s worth recalling the UK Supreme Court’s remarks in Re B (a Child) [2013] UKSC 33, which reaffirmed that the State must tolerate a broad range of parental decisions—even those it does not prefer. There is no “officially approved” method of child-rearing or education in a free society.

By treating deviation from the mainstream as a red flag, this guidance undermines not only pluralism, but parental authority itself.

The Risk of Manufactured Evidence

Perhaps the most concerning feature of the guidance is its potential role in shaping the very consultation it is meant to inform.

Local authorities are advised to create referral pathways, establish information-sharing mechanisms, and monitor online content to detect “settings of concern.” But what happens if these unverified, anecdotal, or ideologically loaded findings are fed back into the government’s own consultation analysis?

It would amount to a closed feedback loop: data generated by suspicion becomes the justification for further suspicion. In such a model, the consultation is not an open question—it is a curated script, designed to validate decisions already made.

This risks not only undermining the credibility of the process, but also eroding public trust in the entire framework of safeguarding policy.

A Call for Intellectual Honesty

Let’s not mistake this for a fringe issue. The consequences of this guidance extend far beyond any one group. It touches on fundamental questions:

·         Who defines educational legitimacy in a free society?

·         Is parental diversity a right to be protected—or a problem to be managed?

·         Do we want safeguarding to be rooted in evidence—or in ideology?

If the State insists on intervening in family or community life, it must do so with humility, legal clarity, and a genuine openness to dissenting voices.

That means:

·         Resisting the urge to frame alternatives as threats.

·         Recognising the difference between non-conformity and non-compliance.

·         Ensuring that consultation is shaped by genuine engagement, not engineered consensus.

In Defense of Procedural Integrity

This is not an argument against safeguarding. It is a call for safeguarding safeguarding—protecting it from becoming a tool of institutional groupthink.

To conflate independence with illegality, or cultural difference with danger, is to betray the very principles that underpin both liberty and law.

We must not allow guidance documents—no matter how administrative they appear—to quietly reshape the boundaries of lawful behaviour and legitimate parenting.

Because when the rules of the conversation are written in advance, consultation becomes theatre. And when suspicion replaces trust, pluralism itself is put on trial.

Let us safeguard what truly matters: children, yes—but also truth, fairness, and the freedom to live and learn differently.