Deregistration letters and educational philosophy statements: what you actually have to write

What is in front of you is paperwork, and the paperwork is genuinely smaller than it feels. Two documents matter. One is a letter that is legally required to contain almost nothing. The other is not legally required at all, but is worth writing carefully, because it shapes every conversation you have with your local authority afterwards.

This guide covers both. It is written by a parent who has been through it, for parents who are about to.

The only legal duty you actually have

Everything starts with one sentence of law. Section 7 of the Education Act 1996 says a parent must cause a child of compulsory school age to receive:

efficient full-time education suitable to his age, ability and aptitude, and to any special educational needs he may have, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise.

Those last two words carry the whole of home education in England. School is one way of meeting the duty. It is not the duty itself.

It is worth being clear about what section 7 does not say, because a great deal of anxiety comes from things people assume are required and are not. There is no requirement to follow the national curriculum. No requirement to keep school hours or school terms. No requirement to teach particular subjects, sit particular exams, or hold any qualification yourself. No requirement to have a timetable, a dedicated room, or a plan approved by anyone. And no requirement to seek permission. You are not applying to home educate. You are telling people that you are.

The duty is real, and it sits with you rather than with the state. But it is a duty to provide something suitable for your particular child, and that is a much wider space than most parents realise when they start.

Part one: how to deregister my child from school

When you need one, and when you do not

If your child has never been on a school roll, you do not need to deregister them from anything. There is no letter to write and no permission to seek. If your child is approaching five and has never attended, you simply do not apply for a place, or you decline the one you are offered.

If your child is currently on a school roll, you write to the school.

There are three situations where the ordinary route does not apply, and it is worth checking whether any describes you before you send anything.

If none of those apply, you write the letter.

What the letter has to contain

Less than you think. Regulation 9(1)(f) of the 2024 Regulations requires the school to delete your child's name from the admission register where:

a parent of the pupil has told the proprietor in writing that the pupil will no longer attend the school after a certain day and will receive education otherwise than at school

That is the whole test. In writing, to the school, naming a date, stating that education will now happen otherwise than at school. Once that letter arrives and the date passes, deletion is not a decision the school gets to make. It is something the regulations require it to do.

A letter that does the job

Dear [Headteacher's name],

I am writing to inform you that my child, [full name], date of birth [date], in [class or year group], will no longer be attending [school name] after [date]. From that date [he/she/they] will receive education otherwise than at school.

I am therefore requesting that [his/her/their] name is deleted from the school's admission register in accordance with regulation 9(1)(f) of the School Attendance (Pupil Registration) (England) Regulations 2024, and that the local authority is notified as required.

Please confirm in writing once this has been done.

Yours sincerely,
[Your name]

What not to put in it

This is where most people go wrong, and it is worth spelling out, because the instinct to explain yourself is very strong and it works against you.

Do not give reasons. Do not apologise. Do not describe your educational plans, your curriculum, your timetable or your philosophy. Do not ask for permission, or use words like "I would like to" or "I am hoping to", because they invite a response that treats the matter as open. Do not agree to a meeting before you send it, and do not let anyone tell you a meeting is required first. It is not.

The letter has one job. Everything else you might want to say belongs in a different document, sent to a different organisation, at a time of your choosing.

Schools sometimes push back. Occasionally you will be told the head needs to approve it, or that there is a form, or that someone will visit first. None of that is in the regulations. A polite second email restating the regulation and asking for written confirmation almost always resolves it.

Part two: what happens next

The school notifies the local authority. Within a few weeks, usually, a letter arrives from the elective home education team.

That letter will often ask for a written report on the education you are providing, sometimes with a deadline, sometimes with a form attached, sometimes with an offer of a home visit. It can read as though all of this is compulsory. It is not.

Local authorities have a duty under section 436A of the Education Act 1996 to identify children in their area who are not receiving a suitable education. To do that, they make what are called informal enquiries. You are not under a legal obligation to respond to informal enquiries, and you are not obliged to accept a home visit or to have your child seen or assessed.

That said, there is a practical argument, and it is worth putting honestly rather than ideologically. If a local authority receives nothing at all, it has no information on which to be satisfied, and its next step is the formal route under section 437: a notice requiring you to satisfy it that suitable education is being provided, and, if you do not, a school attendance order. Most families find that a short, confident, well-written response ends the correspondence for a year, whereas silence tends to generate more letters rather than fewer.

Plenty of experienced home educators take the opposite view on principle, and they are on solid legal ground. It is your call. What is not in doubt is that if you do choose to write something, it is much better to have it ready than to draft it under a two-week deadline.

That something is your educational philosophy statement.

Part three: the educational philosophy statement

What it is

It is a written account of how your child is educated and why. It has no statutory form, no required length and no template that authorities must accept. It is the document that answers, in your own words, the question the local authority is actually asking: is this child receiving an efficient, full-time education suitable to their age, ability, aptitude and any special educational needs?

Get it right once and it becomes the backbone of every annual return you write afterwards.

What "efficient and suitable" actually means

These words are not defined in the Act. They come from case law, and the definitions are considerably more generous than the phrase suggests.

An education is broadly regarded as efficient if it achieves what it sets out to achieve. Not what a school would set out to achieve. What you set out to achieve.

It is broadly regarded as suitable if it prepares the child for life in modern civilised society and equips them to function within the community of which they are a member, while not precluding them from adopting a different way of life later if they choose to.

Full-time has no fixed hour count for home educated children. One-to-one learning is simply not comparable to a classroom of thirty, and no court has ever held that home education must mirror school hours.

Read those together and you can see the shape of a good philosophy statement. You are not being asked to prove you are running a school at home. You are being asked to show that there is intention behind what you do, and that it is working for this child.

A structure that works

Six parts, two to four pages in total. Longer is not better, and a very long document invites scrutiny of the detail rather than confidence in the whole.

Your approach and why. Open with what you are doing and the thinking behind it, in plain language. Structured, semi-structured, autonomous, project-based, some blend of all of them. Name it, describe it in a paragraph, and say why it suits this child. If you moved a child out of school because something specific was not working, you can say so briefly and without heat.

Your child. A short portrait. Age, strengths, interests, how they learn, anything relevant about special educational needs or wellbeing. This matters more than any other section, because suitability is measured against this child rather than against a general standard. It is also the section that makes an official reading forty of these remember yours.

What is covered. Set out the breadth of the education without pretending to be a school. Whatever framework you use, show that literacy, numeracy and a wide view of the world are all present, and show how they connect. If you work through projects, describe a project and pull out what sat inside it. Breadth demonstrated through real examples is far more convincing than a list of subject headings.

How it happens in practice. A realistic picture of a week. Resources, tutors, groups, online courses, museums, workplaces, sports, music, the library. Include the people and places outside your home, because this quietly answers the socialisation question before anyone asks it.

How you know it is working. You do not need tests, and you should not invent them. Describe what you actually observe: work produced, projects finished, books read, skills that were not there in September and are there now. If you keep a portfolio or a journal, say so. This is the section that turns assertion into evidence.

Where it is going. A short paragraph on the next year and, for older children, on qualifications, college or vocational routes. It shows you are thinking beyond the present term.

Common mistakes

The most common is over-promising. A document that describes a rigorous six-hour timetable creates a standard you will be measured against next year, and home education rarely looks the way it did on paper in September. Describe what you genuinely do.

The second is defensiveness. A statement that argues with the local authority, cites legislation in every paragraph or bristles at the request tends to generate exactly the attention it is trying to avoid. Know your rights, and then write warmly. The two are not in conflict.

The third is writing about home education in general rather than about your child. Anyone can write six pages on the philosophy of self-directed learning. Only you can write two pages about a nine-year-old who taught herself to solder.

The fourth is vagueness. "We follow her interests" is true of most home educating families and tells a reader nothing. "She spent the autumn on a project about the Mary Rose, which took in Tudor history, the physics of buoyancy, a trip to Portsmouth and a 2,000-word write-up" tells them everything.

What is changing, and when

The Children's Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 received Royal Assent this year and contains the most significant changes to home education law in decades. Sections 37 to 42 provide for compulsory local authority registers of children not in school, a duty on parents to provide certain information, local authority consent requirements before some children can be withdrawn from school, changes to school attendance orders, and new duties on authorities to provide support where parents request it.

The important point for anyone deregistering right now is that these provisions are not yet in force. An Act receiving Royal Assent is not the same as its provisions commencing. The children not in school measures depend on secondary legislation, regulations and statutory guidance that have still to be consulted on and made, and implementation is widely expected no earlier than 2027.

Until then, the law described in this guide is the law that applies. Deregistration works as set out above, informal enquiries remain informal, and there is no statutory register you are required to join.

It is worth watching, though, and worth building good habits now. Families who already keep a clear philosophy statement and a light record of what their children have done will find whatever arrives in 2027 considerably less disruptive than families starting from a blank page.

Where Noeva fits

Noeva was built because of exactly this problem. Not the letter, which takes twenty minutes, but everything after it: the quiet worry about whether you are covering enough, the difficulty of showing progress when learning does not come with a report card, and the annual scramble to write something for the local authority.

The platform maps each child's learning across eight pillars, so breadth is visible rather than hoped for. It records what your child actually does day by day, which means the evidence for your annual return builds itself instead of being reconstructed from memory in a panic. And the Open World Curriculum gives you a structure to describe, with real projects to point at, if a philosophy statement is something you would rather not write from nothing.

From £35/month, usually £85. Introductory offer, limited time. This is deliberate. Cost should not be the reason a family cannot home educate.

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