Top schools forced to consider passport checks amid immigration rule chaos That means that instead having to vouch for 20,000 non-EU pupils, those schools have a new legal responsibility extending to 325,000 children, the vast majority of them born in the UK. The Home Office guidelines do not specify exactly what would now constitute "reasonable steps" leaving schools unclear as to whether that means mass passport checks. The Independent Schools Council has been lobbying the Home Office behind the scenes to clarify the issue and hopes to have additional guidelines agreed in the next month. But, without clear legal guidelines in place, it has written to its members warning them that they now have new legal responsibilities to ensure that "all pupils have valid permissions" and that they could lose their licence if they fail to do so. Lancing College in Sussex has already written to all parents asking for passports to ensure any legal difficulties are avoided. Other schools are thought to have done the same. Matthew Burgess, chief executive of the ISC, said that while he did not believe that the Home Office intended to impose mandatory passport checks he could "completely understand" if schools felt obliged to do so. "The message we are trying to get out, possibly unsuccessfully, is that we are in active dialogue with the Home Office to work though this but at the end of the day it is their licence, it is their risk and if that is the approach they want to take I can completely understand that," he said. Describing the Home Office approach, he added: "You can see where this is coming from but most of my members would just say you need to be slightly more intelligent and slightly more discriminating about where the risks are - frankly they are not coming from our sector." Richard Williams, who has two children at Lancing, said: "I am concerned that there is a creeping movement by the Government to turn lots of our institutions into arms of the Home Office in terms of immigration control. It does seem to be a Big Brother society. Jonathan Gillespie, Head Master of Lancing, said: "It is an inequitable system requiring people in some schools to prove they have a right to be in the UK and others do not."