@sahomeschoolers ... ah yes, and homeschooling is such an efficient form of education. This report showed very clearly how children outperform their schooled peers: https://www.hslda.org/docs/study/ray2009/2009_Ray_StudyFINAL.pdf
Homeschooling presents quite a threat to the conventional system and you are right about the threat of independent thinkers.

We have had quite a fight on our hands in the UK. Ironically, the Government's attempt to bring in registration and inspection in 2009-2010 really backfired.
I was part of a national team that managed to smash the parliamentary record for the number of MPs to read out the same petition in the parliament when we managed to get more than 300 constituency MPs to do so [ the previous record was 40 there abouts].
The Government was greatly surprised to discover how very difficult we were as a minority to deal with. Our community is rich with people from all professions, lawyers, social workers, and every other profession you can imagine ... and we all came together with great networking to stand up against what the Government was trying to do. :-)

I think they wanted to set a precedent to get into the homes of children under school age to have them have wellness checks. That would contravene our basic legal standpoint that you are assumed to be innocent [of child abuse for example] unless there is a reason to believe you should be checked.
If they could start to make these checks with a minority group, they would have a legal precedent to roll this out to the wider population.

So they tried just about every argument.
Their favourite was that our children were 'not seen' and therefore not safeguarded.
The home ed community in the UK collaborated to make freedom of information requests in order to gather all the data across the local authorities on the number of welfare plans [serious case reviews] put in place to protect children thought to be in danger of harm and the number of these that were for home educated children. We established that home educated children had 1/6th the number of plans in place and were also twice as likely to be known to the social services that made such plans [for reasons of being reported by the general public who were unaware home education was legal, by doctors, etc and because they often were having disability support].

Ironically, as it says in this Guardian article [https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/apr/12/home-schooling-parents-education-children-england]:

"In 2009, a review of home education for the Labour government by the former children’s services director Graham Badman prompted media coverage, meaning, says Reardon, that more parents became aware of the possibility of home education. The rise of social media has also helped to alert parents to the possibility of home education and to provide support networks."

and the UK subsequently was seeing a rise of 60+% a year until about 2015, when numbers exploded.

I was recently contacted by a reporter for the BBC who told me he was writing an article on the 500% rise in home education that's happening yearly in the UK. I can't find any source for that info, but I gather in my area [where I have worked for 2.5 years with the council to ensure they follow the law and the Government guidelines in their dealings with home educators] we have the population of a large high school currently in home education ... just in our county! They have quoted an 800% increase.

Not only do people know home education is legal, they are also deeply dissatisfied with schools.
I'm not at all surprised that home education on this scale makes Governments nervous! However, the council's response was to be attracted to the fact that that was a whole high school full of children they were not having to try to school with horrendous budget cuts!

Since the 'Badman' days, the UK home educators population has retained its knowledge and expertise and is still a strangely powerful lobby. There are plenty of people reading everything said in parliament and keeping a tight watch on them. They are VERY quick to fire off an entire mailbag of complaints to whoeveritmayconcern if they see something that they think is discriminatory. :-)
Meanwhile, locally, others are taking to working with their local authorities to ensure they are 'serving us' as they should be. We pull out their policy and procedure documents and scrutinize them for unlawful statements. We use freedom of information requests to get access to the contracts they have regarding home education with private companies. That has given us a LOT of leverage here in Staffordshire, where the contract to outsource home education services to a private company handed that company statutory duties the council didn't even have! By working with them, educating them and running workshops with local authority employees we've been able to turn the service into one that would be useful for supporting home educators rather than a covert policing outfit!

The way forward is definitely to work with the authorities at local level and then get a well-educated authority service invited to go to other authorities to educate them in turn. That means the Government is getting less lobbying from local authorities who are afraid they will be held responsible for a home educated child who is abused or fails to get an education. This is usually the main way in which home education is continually flagged up as a problem.

:-)