(1 day, 10 hours ago)
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Lord Lucas
“(6A) A child is not required to be registered under this section if the parent has submitted a portfolio annually demonstrating suitable education and learning progress.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment allows an educational portfolio as an alternative to registration, offering a less intrusive way for parents to demonstrate their child is receiving suitable education.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I will move Amendment 231 on behalf of my noble friend Lord Wei, who regrets that he is not able to be here today, as he has to attend a close family member’s wedding.
The day looks as if it will be devoted to elective home education and, owing to my imminent defenestration and general crumbling health, I am in a position to say—since I shall be disengaging from this arena after 15 years in it—that I have found the home education community a total delight to work with. It is a collection of extraordinary people, and I find it very easy to understand how the Government do not find them easy to work with. I very much hope that, in the course of the Bill, we will help lay the foundations for a good, strong relationship.
I thank very much the Minister and her civil servants for all the time and effort they took over the Recess to work through the amendments in this section and to look at how we might gain a better understanding of them and share that with the home education community. I look forward to the continuance of that progress through Report. My approach today will be to be very concise where I can—I will await what the Minister says about individual amendments and respond to that. So much has passed between us and civil servants that rehearsing my amendments as if that had not happened would seem futile.
A large number of the amendments arise from uncertainty over the Government’s intentions, so it would be good to have something clear and unequivocal from the Minister that supports the rights of responsibilities of home educators; that celebrates the contribution they make both to the state—they save the state a great deal of money—and to the education of their children; and that requires local authorities to be supportive.
The role of local authorities is crucial here; it is clear that the role they play is vital. There are many instances where people are set on home educating for the wrong reasons or where home educating goes wrong. Looking after the children in those circumstances is hugely important. However, if the relationship between local authorities and home educators is to work, it must be based on trust and mutual appreciation. If you can get that to work, as many local authorities do, you get a strong information flow into the local authority on what is happening; you get really good support for the children involved; and it is much easier for a local authority to focus its efforts on the things that are going wrong.
As it is written—obviously, there is a lot to come in regulation—the Bill gives local authorities huge powers. Just a comma out of place in some detail on the education that you provide for your child and the local authority can tip your child back into school. That is the way it is written. I understand that that is not how it will work in practice, but it has raised considerable concerns in the home education community. Also, in talking to local authorities, I have found that their impression is that the Government’s wish is that they be much stricter on home education and push children back into school wherever possible. These are misapprehensions, I think, but I very much look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say on them.
Local authorities are thoroughly oversubscribed and financially stressed by adult social care and special needs. The home education department is usually small. Sometimes people have been pitched into it for the first time and are having to learn their way through it. Sometimes it contains people of supreme intolerance. Portsmouth gets mentioned frequently, but I know that the Minister has had shared with her a letter to home educators from Bristol Council, which shows, I think, a deep lack of understanding of how the relationship between local authorities and home educators should work. We need to come out of this Bill clear ways in which the Department for Education can steer local authorities, help them improve their practices and provide a method of recourse for parents who feel that they are being badly done by by their local authority. I also hope to see a way of celebrating the good practices that go unnoticed; too often, those local authorities that are really doing their job well go unnoticed.
I come now to the amendments in this group. We are looking at a request for information, which is very loosely described and might be interpreted at a really detailed level. What is the child doing for each five minutes of the day? With whom are they interacting? Home education can be a very varied, loose way of educating a child. It is often child-led, even if there is a lot of parental direction in there, and follows no clear, predetermined path. Recording that in the way the Bill seems to ask for would require a daily report being sent by the parent to the local authority. This cannot be what local authorities want to receive. They just are not set up for it. Here, we need something sensible and practical; understanding what that is will be really important. There is certainly an established practice in some local authorities of an annual report, which can vary in length from six to 60 pages and allows a parent to present a clear, consistent picture of the education that their child has been receiving to put everything in context.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, as this is the first time I am speaking in Committee, I declare various unremunerated positions in Gypsy, Traveller and Roma organisations. I wish just very briefly to comment on Amendment 322, on nomadic organisations. I should say that all the evidence I have seen, and many conversations, attest quite firmly to the fact that most Gypsies and Travellers, that small minority who lead a nomadic life, welcome registration and the offer of support from local authorities—although I shall have something to say about that later. This amendment does not correspond to the experience of Gypsies, Travellers, boaters or showmen. I just briefly add that it seems that most of these amendments are at odds with the reality of the situation of most children who are not in school, and with the intentions of the Bill, but I will not prolong the debate at the outset at this stage.
Lord Crisp (CB)
My Lords, I am delighted to have the chance to speak after the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and his eloquent and rather moving statement to the Committee about how he sees this. Echoing those important points, in the end this is about relationships, and about children and their needs and relationships. As the noble Lord said, with the Bill there is a real danger that this will be hugely disruptive for local authorities and parents, and in many ways could be a recipe for trouble to come if we get this wrong. But there are ways in which we can get this right and get proportionate reporting around the Bill. So there is a lot to get right here.
I will come back to various of those points later, but the simple point I wanted to make here was in relation to Amendment 238, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, which is about the requirement to know which parents are educating, how and for how long. We will come back to that point in various ways in later groups. There are two key points here. One is about safeguarding, where there is an issue with at least one of the parents, which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, has an amendment on, and there is one about the division of time between parents educating, which the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, has an amendment on.
This whole section needs to be rethought. What do we really need to know? We need to know which parents are taking responsibility, and where they are and how they can be contacted, but it seems that the rest of it is superfluous. I simply make those points in response to Amendment 238.
Lord Frost (Con)
My Lords, I support Amendment 234 in particular, to which I have put my name, and, more generally, endorse the views that my noble friend Lord Lucas and the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, just set out.
I have just begun to engage with home education as a concept and as a community, and it is clear right from the start that the community is very well motivated and, indeed, deeply reflective about education in this country and how it works, and it has a lot of expertise into which government should be trying to tap and learn from rather than regiment and regulate. If it should turn out that the worst happens and my noble friend Lord Lucas is indeed forced to step back from advocating support for this sector, I am sure that I and other noble Lords will be very willing to pick this up and continue the discussion.
I thank the Minister and her team for all the communication that there has been over the summer, as there have been some very comprehensive communications and emails that have been very helpful and will be very useful today.
I want to make just one brief point today, which is relevant to Amendment 234 but also to all those in this group, which is the point about trust. Trust is the way home education works—trust and mutual understanding. In many ways, the Bill as drafted gives huge powers to the Government which appear to be based on a lack of trust and a determination to regulate. They are very detailed and prescriptive and will cause all sorts of practical difficulties, and are based on a misunderstanding about how much of home education actually works.
Now, it is true that some local authorities are not as positively motivated as others. It is certainly true that all are extremely overworked in this area. It is difficult to see what is gained by generating vast amounts of paper and reporting which go into a drawer and are not much looked at.
To conclude, if it is not too late, a rethink in this area would be helpful. There could be a pulling back of some of the prescriptiveness and a better understanding from government—centrally and locally. There could be more support for local authorities and a clearer direction from the Government to get the approach right. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I look back to eight years ago, I think, when I had a very simple Private Member’s Bill, which said that home educators should register. That was it. It was as though I had ignited a bonfire of education, because the online abuse and letters that poured in were just unbelievable.
Together with my noble friend Lord Addington, I, perhaps stupidly, decided to organise a round table to discuss home education with home educators, teacher associations and anybody else who was interested. That was a real learning curve for me. Since that beginning, I have got to know many home educators. In fact, one recently sent me a wonderful, illustrated book on home education. However, when we met at the round table there were pointed and jabbing fingers; it reminded me a bit of the local city council. Nevertheless, we became quite good friends and I understood home education quite well. Since that time, we have all been on a very important journey. We have to ask ourselves why we want to do this. It is for one reason only—for our children and young people. If every home-educated child went to school, the system would not be able to cope.
The points made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, are correct. It is all very well our agreeing legislation, but we must always have at the back of our minds whether it will work. It is important not only to know where our children are and that they are being educated, but that there is a correct relationship between the local authority and the home educator. There are some fantastic examples where local authorities work closely and successfully with home educators to the benefit of both. There are some learning curves where local authorities do not have that good relationship with home educators—where they think that giving the cane and waving the statute is more important than trying to do what is in the best interests of the child.
There are thousands of wonderful home educators, but there are also children who are not being educated but are languishing at home for all sorts of reasons. As I have said, there are children who are being home-educated in a religious setting. This is not about giving them a wide education; it is about them understanding their particular religious texts. To my mind, this is not beneficial for the child as a whole.
I am glad that we have almost got to the stage where we think we should register home-educated children—not least so that we know where they are and can, we hope, make sure that they are safeguarded. I am not sure that having an education portfolio is the same as registering; I am not sure that being a chess grand master entitles you to say, “I do not need to register”; and I am not even sure that teachers with formal educational qualifications should not have to register. That seems bizarre. We live in a society where one of the important words is “equality”—equality of opportunity, whoever and wherever you are.
I hope that, when we continue this journey on Report, we are not just mindful of home educators but—I speak as a local councillor mindful of the capacity issues for local education authorities—that we make sure that local authorities are able to cope with the legislation and that it works, not just for the family and the child but for the local education authority as well.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, all the amendments in this group in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, ably presented by my noble friend Lord Lucas, seek exemptions from or exceptions to the basic principle that there should be a register of children not in school. Rightly, my noble friend stressed the importance of the relationship between the local authority and home-educating parents. As other noble Lords pointed out, the Government need to take great care in this legislation so that the requirements set out in the Bill do not inadvertently damage that relationship and potential trust.
Having said that, I cannot support these amendments and their aim to find exemptions. First, at its simplest, the point of the register is to ensure that a local authority knows which children are not in school and, obviously, the amendments would undermine that. Secondly, one of the key points of the register, as I understand it, is that it would allow home-educating parents who need support from the local authority to access that support. Again, excluding these children would prevent that. Finally, these amendments assume that in these conditions it may indeed be preferable to educate the child at home. Even if this is the case in the majority, if not the vast majority, of cases, it remains reasonable and proportionate to record that that child is not in school.
With regard to Amendments 234 and 238, my noble friend Lord Lucas raised the important point of principle that the information collected should be proportionate, which, in simple terms, means that the local authority needs to actually use that information, as my noble friend said in his opening remarks, rather than just record it. The Government’s proposals for the information collected go a lot further than the legislation we brought forward in 2022. I share the doubts of my noble friend Lord Lucas and other noble Lords as to whether it is all necessary.
Going back to the point about the relationship between the local authority and parents, a good test for this legislation, and one I tried to use when we debated the 2022 Bill, is that the legislation needs to feel fair to parents. There is a risk that the amount of information and detail being requested could feel unfair and damage that relationship with the local authority, which is so important. I hope very much that when the noble Baroness closes, she will be able to reassure the Committee that that is not the case.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Wei, Lord Lucas and Lord Crisp, my noble friend Lord Hacking and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester for taking time over the summer to meet my officials. Having the opportunity to discuss in detail with noble Lords how the provisions for children not in school are intended to work in practice was extremely beneficial and instructive. I am giving careful consideration to some of the finer details of the provisions with which noble Lords have indicated that they are not wholly satisfied.
I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that in government we have worked well and closely with home educators, who are rightly challenging on many of the issues that noble Lords have raised in the debate. Just to be completely clear, we know that the home education community is diverse and varied. Home education can take place in all walks of life, in cities or the countryside, and be delivered by those with professional teaching experience and those without. It often delivers an excellent education to children, but it is important that the registers work as intended. They should not encroach on the ability to home-educate.
I have said previously in these debates and will continue to say that we wholly recognise the right of parents to educate their children outside schools. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, said, it must be possible for local authorities to identify all children not in school to ensure that they are receiving a full-time, suitable education. That oversight should be underpinned by local authorities engaging positively with home educators. That is why the Bill also places a new duty on local authorities to provide advice and information when requested to do so by parents. The registers should give us a clearer picture of not only how and where children are being educated but also how local authorities engage with and support children not in school and their families. This information will support the department to identify best practice and consider how it can potentially be replicated across authorities to build strong, trusting relationships with parents.
I recognise the point made by several noble Lords that it is important that we ensure that these relationships are maintained and built on the basis of trust and a sense that what is being asked for by the Government is reasonable. We will, as the noble Lord, Lord Frost, said, use this information to support and direct local authorities to ensure that that is happening, not, as I know some people fear, to prevent parents from home-educating, but to make sure that that relationship is based on a recognition of the best interests of children and of the right of parents to educate their children at home as long as they are providing a suitable education in doing that. The department will and has stepped in where local authority practice is wrong or overbearing.
Speaking in particular on the amendments in group one, these amendments seek to limit which children must be registered on local authority children not in school registers and to reduce the mandatory information that is requested from parents for the registers. This group seeks to do that on account of evidence provided by the parents or the circumstances of the child or parents. I will respond first to all the amendments dealing with which children should be included on registers: Amendments 231, 232, 233, 318, 321 and 322. As we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, a key objective of the registers is to aid local authorities in their existing duty to identify, as far as possible, all children in their areas who are not registered pupils in school and who are not receiving a suitable full-time education. Exempting eligible children from inclusion increases the risk of a local authority failing to identify a child who may be receiving an unsuitable education.
While I do not agree with the amendments, I appreciate the intention behind them, but I am afraid that the logic does not track even in terms of the arguments made by noble Lords. For example, to exempt children of parents with formal teaching qualifications from registration, as per Amendment 233, or children of parents who have submitted a portfolio annually demonstrating suitable education, as per Amendment 231, the local authority would need to know of the children and to record details of their parents, which might be even more cumbersome than the requirements that this legislation is asking for.
Amendments 318 and 322 seek to exempt children from rural areas, unless safeguarding concerns are present, or children from nomadic families as long as education is provided. This would still require the local authority having knowledge of these children in order to make these assessments. A registration system is the obvious solution to collect an appropriate level of information about a child’s circumstances, as my noble friend Lady Whitaker identified.
Amendment 231 seeks exemption for inclusion in the registers should the parent have previously demonstrated suitable education through an annual portfolio, while Amendment 232 seeks exemption if the parent has previously home-educated a child who progressed to university, employment or vocational training. Just because a parent has previously demonstrated suitable education, has previously home-educated a child who progressed to further or higher education, or holds certain qualifications, it does not necessarily follow that the child will receive a suitable education indefinitely or at all. Furthermore, exempting children on the basis of one measure of ability, such as achieving the status of a chess grandmaster, as per Amendment 321, offers little reassurance that the child is in suitable education overall or is safe.
I turn now to the amendments in this grouping concerning the mandatory information that is requested from parents to be held on local authority registers: Amendments 234 and 238. We will, in our debates on later groups, talk further about the nature of this information. The information required of parents is necessary to build an accurate understanding of who is involved in a child’s education and where this education is taking place. Let me be absolutely clear: the only information required to be held on registers is information which is easily available to parents and obtainable by local authorities and which is considered necessary for ascertaining suitability of education and safety of the child. This includes basic information such as the child’s name, date of birth and address, as well as high-level details of education provided by the parent and others. We will go into this in more detail but, to be absolutely clear in relation to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, of course this would not require daily, weekly or even monthly reports from parents. That is absolutely not the intention here. We do not believe that this basic information is overly burdensome for parents to provide or for local authorities to request and maintain.
Amendment 234, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would mean that parents would not be under a duty to provide information for registers. We know that many local authorities already maintain registers and that some parents voluntarily provide information for these, but the status quo is not good enough. It is currently too easy for children to slip under the radar. If a child has never attended a school or has recently moved to a new local authority area, for example, the local authority may be unaware that the child is in its area and not attending school. We need to be certain that local authorities are aware of all children not in school in their areas so that they can identify which children are missing education and are therefore in need of support. A parental duty to give information is the only way to achieve this. This requirement is proportionate and brings the process in England and Wales to the same level as that in the majority of other countries. In some cases, it would in fact be much less intrusive and much more supportive of home education than in many other countries.
I hope that noble Lords will permit me a brief digression to clarify a point of confusion—I know that this has been raised by and is concerning parents—regarding the consequence for parents failing to provide information for registers. If a parent does not supply the required information, they are not subject to a fine. Instead, the consequence of failing to provide information is that the local authority may, at its discretion, issue a notice requiring the parent to satisfy the local authority that their child is receiving a suitable education.
As is the case now, should the parent fail to do this and it is expedient for the child to attend school, the local authority must then issue a school attendance order, requiring the child to attend school. If the parent breaches that order and cannot prove in court that the child is being suitably educated, only then will they be found guilty of an offence and could be subject to a fine imposed at the magistrates’ court’s discretion. Again, it is important to reiterate that the school attendance order process that would be used here is an existing process and that the fines for breaching an order are completely avoidable through compliance. With this in mind, the number of families ultimately subject to a fine for breaching an order will be low compared to the overall number of orders issued.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for that reply, in particular her words on the relationship with local authorities. I will study that in Hansard and come back to her if I have any problem with it, but my first impression was that it was hugely positive and very helpful. I thank her very much.
She said that the Department for Education has intervened with local authorities. I will ask for a better understanding of how that process works, because it is such an important part of making sure that local authorities that are not in the best place progress to a better one.
I understand the objection to my noble friend’s “do not register” amendments. I was wondering how he would have argued for Mozart—I think Mozart might have appreciated the intervention of a local authority in his education.
I should like to pick the Government up again on how nomadic families are to work with this legislation. Which local authority do they register with? How does that work? This is just so that it is clear. I know it is an item of detail and I will obviously not pursue an amendment on it, but knowing how that works for nomadic families and families not consistently in one place would be very helpful.
The Minister said some very helpful things about requiring high-level information, not every day or even every three months, which comes back to the proposition of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, about focusing on an annual report. I would love to see that. The Bill does not say that. The Government are relying on their ability in guidance to take what is in the Bill, which is a very detailed, “record every minute” requirement, and say, “Actually, if you give us a report once a year, that will be fine”. Very early on, I sent a message through the department to the Government’s legal draftsman to ask what the limits on this are. How far can guidance go against what is there in the Bill? Do the Government have the power to say in guidance that an annual report would be enough? I would really appreciate an answer on that. I should like to understand where that lies.
Similarly, that applies to things such as, where parents are together, the requirement to say who is providing how much of the education. Again, obviously, that can be dealt with in regulations, but is it within the Government’s power to put that in guidance?
When it comes to the consequences of failure, I am delighted—I thought it was the case that there were no fines involved—that the process is moving towards a school attendance order. In this sort of area, the process is the punishment; it has been tipped into this process. It is about the stress, worry and effort required to fight through that process. Therefore, again, it comes down to the importance of a strong, positive relationship and a well set-up local authority, and to how important all that is to the Bill working.
For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Lucas
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that data collection under section 436B respects rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, including Article 8 and Article 2 of Protocol 1. It prevents disproportionate interference with family life or educational convictions and upholds privacy and parental choice in home education.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, this group concerns data protection and sharing. Obviously, we are dealing here with some very personal data. People want to be sure that it is handled right and not shared with the wrong people. Where families are in the process of breaking up or where abuse is concerned, it is particularly important that the data does not get to the wrong people. By and large, the amendments in this group for which I am responsible are self-explanatory. It would be most helpful for me first to listen to the Minister responding on where the Government find themselves. I beg to move.
Lord Crisp (CB)
My Lords, I want to say a few words about Amendment 254A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, to which I have added my name. I want to spell out what I suspect noble Lords understand fully, which is that there are issues here. In certain cases, where perhaps one parent has been abusive to their child, partner or spouse, it is vital that addresses are not made available to that parent.
Perhaps I could just go back two or three steps and preface my remarks by saying, first, how much I appreciate the warm remarks on home education made by the Minister in opening. They set a much better tone than has tended to come through in this debate. Something else that I omitted to say at the beginning is that my thanks go to the Minister and her officials for the excellent meeting we had. It lasted much of the day and, frankly, they were very open and willing to discuss things; that was very helpful. I do not know how much movement we got out of it—we will see during the course of today—but it was helpful to have that meeting and to understand things clearly.
As all noble Lords have said, there is an issue of balance here between supporting the good people who are providing home education because it is best for their children, or for another good reason, and supporting the missing children who are abused or neglected or have missed out. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, made an important intervention on this. We need to get that balance right.
We discussed with officials the issue dealt with in Amendment 254A. It was said that this could be picked up in regulations or whatever, but there needs to be something in the Bill to help parents who are specifically worried about safeguarding. This amendment is probably as simple as it gets in pointing out that where there is a concern about abuse, or an order standing against one parent, this should be handled by an authority in an appropriate fashion.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 267 in my name and in those of the noble Lord, Bourne of Aberystwyth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, whom I thank for their support.
This amendment mandates local authorities not to keep the information they have on the register after the child has grown up, for two reasons. First, it is not necessary after the age of school education has passed. Secondly, many Gypsy, Traveller and Roma families have a well-founded mistrust of unnecessary scrutiny, targeting and intervention on the part of authorities. This amendment would allay their fears and ease liaison with the registering authority. It may be that discretion should be used in the case of SEND children, perhaps until the age of 25, but that is for discussion later. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will understand the need for this amendment.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendment 254A, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, for his comments. As a society, we can be proud that, over the years, we have carefully and proportionately brought in safeguarding procedures which really make a difference to the lives of children and young people. We know that, by and large, our children are safe. Occasionally, we find a gap in the regulations or in the provision, and we come together to try to sort that out.
In a sense, safeguarding information can be shared with parents. This amendment comes out of conversations with a number of organisations that have given thought to how, in some cases, this can be harmful for the child. If there is a safeguarding concern, details can be shared with both parents, but my amendment questions whether it is appropriate if it risks further harm to the child. In a sense, this is a probing amendment, and I will be interested to hear what the Minister has to say as it will impact my thoughts when we come to Report.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I will speak very briefly to this group, which, in common with some of the earlier groups, seeks to probe the Government’s position on some important, albeit quite technical issues. These include the right to privacy and family life, as covered in Amendments 235 and 297; the handling of data breaches, covered in Amendments 268, 275 and 375; and data removal, covered in Amendments 267 and 273. Throughout, the House is looking for reassurance and clarity from the Minister as to how these issues will be handled. Amendments 265, 272, 328, Clause 33 stand part and Amendment 504 all relate to data protection. Again, the points about relationships and trust, and families having absolute clarity as to how their data will be protected, who will have access to it and what will be public, are obviously important.
Finally, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Storey, Amendments 236, 236A, 254A—in the noble Lord’s name—266 and 305 relate to the delicate and difficult issues about sharing information in cases where abuse of a child by a parent has either been alleged or confirmed. Again, the more clarity the Minister can bring, the more helpful it would be for the House.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, as we have heard, the amendments in this group concern the sharing and protection of information on the registers. I can completely understand concerns about the collection and processing of data, and I hope to provide in my response some of the reassurances that noble Lords seek. But we must also be clear that we must not make them a barrier to legitimate information sharing. The recording and sharing of relevant information on children can be life-saving and, as we have discussed, children not in school registers will support local authorities to keep accurate records of eligible children, identifying those who require support and facilitating better co-ordination between support services, as well as enabling them to fulfil the requirement to understand where children are receiving education outside school.
Amendment 235, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, seeks to ensure that local authorities are not required to collect information on their registers that would be incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. Our published ECHR memorandum outlines the position on this, and we are confident that the provisions in the Bill are compatible.
I turn to Amendments 236 and 236A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and Amendment 254A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey. As with Amendment 238, which I spoke to on the previous group, these amendments seek to place exemptions on the requirement for registers to contain certain information on the child’s parents. I have outlined why that information is vital, but I appreciate that noble Lords have tabled these amendments based on concerns that some parents are estranged from their families for reasons such as domestic abuse. Recognising that concern, we have engaged with organisations that support domestic abuse survivors on our proposals and will continue to do so as part of their implementation.
Organisations like Women’s Aid have long called for the introduction of children not in school registers. Indeed, this is one of the recommendations it has made as part of its Nineteen More Child Homicides report published in June this year. If a parent could pose a risk to the child, it is even more crucial that authorities have this information. Holding information such as where the parent lives and whether they are providing education to the child, as well as time spent in such education, could help the local authority to identify the frequency and nature of the contact the child has with the parent. This could feed into a local authority’s assessment of whether a child is at risk of harm or is likely to be receiving an unsuitable education, so that further action can be taken if needed. Without evidence that a child may be at risk, it is difficult for authorities to intervene.
But I understand the concerns of parents, and I want to respond to that. Just to be clear, parents who have fled domestic abuse should be reassured that they will not be required to seek out the details of the other parent. They need to provide only the information that they know. But I will be clear about how we can ensure that the register will not reveal, for example, the whereabouts of a parent who has escaped abuse. Data protection protocols will help to ensure that all those on the register are safe. Specifically, in cases where a known abuser has made a subject access request regarding their child, the local authority, as data controller, can make determinations, considering the facts of the case, including safeguarding concerns.
I and my colleagues in the other place are clear on the importance of ensuring that all appropriate safeguards can be in place for victims of domestic abuse. We will continue to work with organisations with expertise in domestic abuse to ensure that all necessary protections can be built into the guidance that we will produce.
Linked to this but on a slightly different issue, Amendment 266, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, and Amendment 265, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, concern information from local authority registers being published. Let me be clear that local authorities will not be able to publish from their registers the name or address of an eligible child or their parent or any information that could lead to their identities being deduced. The Bill contains a provision in new Section 436C(5) explicitly preventing it. However, it is important that local authorities can publish information relating to their home education cohorts—in fact, I think that in later groups some noble Lords will be asking for further information along these lines—in terms of numbers, reasons for home education, and demographics. That will aid transparency in terms of how each local authority is undertaking its duties. We will ensure that regulations made in relation to this setting out whether and how registered details may be published will be subject to public consultation, and they will also be subject to the affirmative procedure.
Amendment 267 in the name of my noble friend Lady Whitaker and Amendment 273 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, would require the destruction of all data in relation to a child held on children not in school registers upon that child turning 18 or re-enrolling in school. I assure noble Lords that data protection laws are clear that data must not be kept longer than necessary and must be retained only when there is a lawful basis. Entries on the register will therefore be deleted prior to a child turning 18 as a child is eligible to be included on the register only if they are of compulsory school age. As my noble friend alluded to, some information may need to be retained on other local authority records for a longer period; for example, a looked-after child remains with their local authority until they are 25, and it is crucial to hold some historical information as part of education and safeguarding inquiries. Current laws already allow this.
Amendment 275, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, and Amendments 268 and 375, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seek to ensure that parents are notified of any data breaches that occur as part of the children not in school measures and are able to claim compensation, and that local authorities are liable for the consequences of breaches. UK GDPR already sets out that a local authority must report a notifiable personal data breach to the Information Commissioner’s Office within 72 hours and to the affected individuals “without undue delay” where there is high risk that they are adversely affected by the breach. Families who have suffered damage as a result have a right to claim compensation from the local authority, which may also face fines or regulatory action.
Amendment 305, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and Amendments 272 and 328, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, seek to restrict or remove the powers relating to the use and sharing of data on the registers. As I suggested earlier, local authorities and the department need to collate and share register information, often at speed, with relevant persons, to fulfil duties related to the education, safeguarding or welfare of a child. Requiring written parental consent in every case, as Amendment 272 would do, would potentially prevent children receiving support in situations where swift action is vital. New Section 436F inserted by the Bill makes it clear with whom data from the registers may be shared and under which circumstances.
For example, local authorities may share information with those persons and organisations listed in Section 11(1) of the Children Act 2004 if appropriate to do so for the purposes of promoting or safeguarding the education and welfare of children. These include organisations, such as the NHS, which are a central component of either local multi-agency safeguarding arrangements or national efforts to protect children. If there is information on registers that can aid these organisations in protecting or promoting the welfare of a child, I am sure noble Lords will agree that it is important that it is shared. In relation to Amendment 328, I reassure noble Lords that immigration authorities do not feature in any of these categories.
Amendment 297, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seeks to remove the requirement for out-of-school education providers to provide local authorities with the names, dates of birth and home addresses of children who are attending their provision above a prescribed threshold. We will talk about the provider duty in more detail later but, in effect, this amendment would remove the provider duty, which is, we argue, crucial in supporting local authorities both to identify children who should be on registers but are not and to cross-check records for children already on registers. There is no way for local authorities to achieve this without asking for basic identifying information.
Amendment 504, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would delay the commencement of the children not in school registers until the National Cyber Security Centre or an equivalent body certifies them. The Government already conduct extensive internal and external assurance processes to ensure that systems are safe and secure before launch. To support local authorities in meeting their data protection obligations under the measures, we will issue guidance that promotes best practice for keeping parents’ and children’s information secure.
Finally, I turn to the stand part notice in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, which would oppose Clause 33 standing part of the Bill. As I have outlined in responding to this group, Clause 33 ensures that the processing of personal information as required or enabled by the Bill does not contravene the Data Protection Act 2018. It promotes the highest standards of data security and transparency. I hope that that provides your Lordships—and parents—with some assurance. I also hope that noble Lords will feel able to agree that this clause should stand part of the Bill and that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, will withdraw Amendment 235.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that thoughtful response. I will pick up anything with which I disagree—I did not notice anything —later.
I want to say just one thing on Amendment 504. The Government created this cybersecurity centre—because the risks, the techniques and the availability of those techniques are moving so quickly, particularly with artificial intelligence—so that the best possible expertise is available to government departments. Time and again, though, they do not use it. In a recent case with which I have been dealing, DSIT got a chunk of its vital core code developed in Romania. It is not secure to do that; you do not know what it is doing and who it is doing it for. The way in which devices were secured was not up to scratch either. This resource is there as part of government. It should be used by departments, which cannot in all reason keep up with the latest threat and techniques, to be sure of what they are doing when it comes to security. It really is the best thing that can be done, so I encourage the Minister to get the department to take advantage of that facility.
I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Hacking
“(b) the names and home addresses of the parent or parents who are taking responsibility for the education of the child;”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to identify the minimum requirement for providing information for the register and ensures that information is only included on parents who have responsibility for educating the child.
Lord Hacking (Lab)
My Lords, the grouping of these amendments is becoming a bit confusing. This amendment and Amendment 237 are directed to the protection of sexually abused children, but so are Amendment 236A, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and Amendment 254A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I will therefore be addressing the problem of protecting sexually abused children at this stage in this group. I did not intervene earlier because I thought it sensible to collect all my words dealing with the same issue together. Before I go any further, I should like to refer to when my noble friend the Minister got to the Dispatch Box at the beginning of this stage of the Committee and kindly mentioned my name and the names of the noble Lords, Lord Crisp and Lord Lucas, and other noble Lords who have participated in this Bill. She also referred to the meetings that have taken place at the Department for Education with her officials and with her colleague the Minister, Stephen Morgan. I wish to express extreme thanks to my noble friend and the officials for their helpfulness. On this Bill, the Government are listening. This has not been exactly a feature of recent Bills, either from the Conservative Benches or my Benches. On this Bill, however, the Government are listening and we are grateful.
My attention was drawn to this problem by a mother who had a serious problem with her husband abusing her son. That kind lady has been very objective and forceful in presenting her case. She spoke to the noble Lord, Lord Frost—I am sorry that he is not in the Chamber. She also came to speak to the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. I do not know whether she came to speak to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, but he has certainly been in contact with her. It has been helpful to have the evidence that she provided. I am not going to identify her, although I should also mention that the Minister himself, Stephen Morgan, met her. My noble friend’s officials also met her and exchanged emails with her. A lot of information has been exchanged, which has been helpful.
In brief, her son was sexually abused by her husband, I think from the age of four. It went on for several years. When the mother found out, she was absolutely horrified and wanted, as do all mothers who face the same situation, the maximum protection. That is what these amendments are trying to do. My submissions on this issue are not based on just one case. I am afraid that a number of cases of sexual abuse of children are undetected, unreported or both. This brings me back to many years ago, when I was a barrister appearing at the Lincoln Assizes. I was involved in a case of incest. The prosecution case against the accused was that he was committing incest on the complainant, who was both his daughter and granddaughter. That illustrates how horrific the problem of sexual abuse can be.
Under these amendments, the protection sought is that the misbehaving husband should not have access to any information, particularly, as my noble friend identified, as to the whereabouts and address of the abused child. He should be entirely separated from that poor child. One can do that in a number of ways —that suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, in Amendment 236A, or by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, in Amendment 237. Amendment 235A was his amendment, not mine, but somehow his name was lost from the Marshalled List. I apologise but I hope he has forgiven me. He is a very forgiving Peer. The position, which is the point I really wanted to establish, is that the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, is still with the amendment and supportive of it. I did not quite get a nod from him but I will work on that basis because it is a very sensible amendment.
The Minister was quite right—she referred to data protection too—when she said that there is a strict rule in new Section 436C(5) that puts a strong prohibition on the publication of any information in the register and on it being made “accessible to the public”. I keep calling the Minister my learned friend—she is very learned, but I should stick to the correct parliamentary description of her as my noble friend. Anyway, new Section 436C(5) provides a strong prohibition, but of course that means that the officials with access to the register have to be trusted to follow new Section 436C(5).
The lady to whom I just referred, who has been so helpful in our deliberations on this issue, recalls a situation when a husband, who had been convicted of the sexual abuse of his child—actually, in that case it was two girls—had been sent to prison but had rung up to collect information from the register, which was given. The only way that we in this House can properly protect the abused child from being traced by the abusing father is by making sure that the information is not in the register. Of course, if it is not in the register, it cannot be released. I suggest that that is the best approach.
I end by thanking my noble friend again for how she has conducted this entire Bill, with helpfulness, a willingness to listen and, above all, a willingness to work with this House. That is a matter deserving of great congratulations and great thanks. I beg to move.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Geddes) (Con)
My Lords, I must apologise: I should have advised the Committee that, as the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, alluded to, Amendment 237 is in an incorrect place on the Marshalled List—hence my calling Amendment 235A now.
Lord Crisp (CB)
My Lords, this is the point at which I will make one of the two main interventions that I propose to make today, on my Amendment 254B. Before I come to that, I will comment on two other amendments. I added my name to Amendment 239, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, which would leave out the bit about the split between parents of how many hours are provided per week. This seems completely redundant information and is not necessary. I understand the point that the register should include some reference to the fact that parents are providing the education—it is not all being done through a private tutor—but it seems to me that the split is unconvincing.
When the Minister responded, essentially to this point, in an earlier group, she said something about wanting to know the number of hours of education taking place during the week. I may have misinterpreted but I think that is what was said, and it prompts me to ask a question of the noble Baroness. Does she have a number of hours per week that are expected to be covered by education? I should be interested to know if there is some number that the department has in mind.
The second amendment to which I have added my name, Amendment 260, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, is about local authorities being able to ask for any other relevant information. That is too much of a catch-all; enough information is already provided. I should be keen to hear her arguments on this and hope that the Minister will accept them.
My main intervention is on Amendment 254B, which concerns the first point at which parents are asked to provide a lot of information about who is providing the education. My amendment picks up the point that this is a large set of possible providers. As written, it could include the occasional organised event. It could include regular visits to the Guides, which is an educational charity, I understand. It could include a rugby club and other such things—anything that has an educational component as the amendment is written. I should say in parentheses here that I have received one reference from a provider of home education, a wildlife trust in the Midlands—I will provide the name to the Minister—which has already written to the people for whom it provides home education, saying that it will put this on hold until the Bill’s impact is clear. Already this wildlife trust—I do not know what level of education it provides—has stopped providing education to home-educated children because of its fears of what the Bill might mean for it in terms of the amount of information the trust has to provide in future.
However, my intervention here concerns the information that the parent or parents need to provide. In our useful discussions with officials, they made it clear that they would put in regulations something that implied that there was a certain amount of time beyond which one-off events would not count, and that events that happened once a week but were only three hours long, or primarily social and recreational, would be taken into account. That is fine in regulations but you need some parameters in the Bill to state:
“The requirement to provide the information set out in subsection (1)(e) only applies to providers which are providing regular education sessions amounting to 10 hours or more a week, which are not primarily social or recreational in nature, and”—
importantly, a point that we have not discussed at all—
“where the information has not already been provided to the authority in other formats, such as an annual report.”
Let me pick up that point about duplication. I am as keen as anyone to weed out fake or failing home-educating parents or arrangements. However, this register is not the way to do it. Form-filling will not catch the diversity of a child’s needs and of educational methods. It is the match between the two that is so vital, particularly as we know that more than half of those who are home educated have special needs of different sorts. This really is not one size fits all, yet the Bill seems to be treating it as though it is. Nor, I believe, will inspection of a child’s work and timetable, without the wider context of a parent’s own assessment of their child’s needs, be an effective method of doing so. The Bill misses out the most important evidence of all: the reality of that particular child and their circumstances. That is why the attempt to use the register to make any meaningful assessment of the quality of education provided is fundamentally flawed. There is an existing alternative.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, having listened to the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, he has totally persuaded me that Amendment 254B should be adopted, and I hope the Minister will respond sympathetically to it.
Amendment 257A in my name would require the statutory local registers of children not in school to include whether a child is a young carer, and whether a young carer’s needs assessment has been carried out. It is a revised version of Amendment 251 in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and the noble Lords, Lord Russell and Lord Storey. The wording is identical, but by amending new Section 436C(2) rather than new Section 436C(1) it makes it easier for local authorities to comply, because new Section 436C(1) is compulsory with no exceptions, whereas new Section 436C(2) refers to information that the local authority has or might reasonably obtain.
I thank the Minister’s officials for the constructive discussions that they had with the Carers Trust and local carer services on this issue. They led to this new amendment, which I hope improves its chances of acceptance. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, for indicating their support for this revised amendment. The amendment is closely related to Amendment 209, which we discussed on 3 July. That would require local authorities to ensure that they have offered a young carer’s needs assessment if they are notified of a pupil who is being withdrawn from school. Amendment 257A, which we debate now, complements that by including such information on the register.
I will not repeat the arguments for improving the protection for young carers, but I mention very briefly the case of Salma, who is caring for her mother, who has physical and mental health issues, and her father, who has physical health issues. She was taken out of school after being subject to bullying. The parents stated that they were home-schooling her while always working towards getting her back into specialist provision. After Salma returned to that specialist provision, she admitted that no home-schooling had taken place and she had been caring around the clock. She had missed one and a half years of school before she was given a permanent placement in that specialist provision. So, repeating what I have said before, I am not saying that a young carer should never be home-educated—I have listened to the powerful arguments from my noble friends and from the noble Lord, Lord Crisp—but we need safeguards for the reasons I have just given so that children do not slip off the radar, to use a phrase that the Minister used in an earlier debate.
Related to the previous amendment and this one are delays in carrying out a young carer’s assessment. I raised this in July and the Minister wrote to me on 9 July—I am grateful for that. She told me that the Care Quality Commission is currently assessing how well local authorities perform their relevant duties under the Care Act 2014 and that every local authority will have been assessed by next March. She also strongly urges all local authorities to sign up to the No Wrong Doors for Young Carers initiative. Following the CQC report, I hope that the Government will take strong action against local authorities that are underperforming.
Turning specifically to the amendment, the addition of young carers to the school census is helping to increase the visibility and understanding of young carers within schools and of the impact that caring can have on educational opportunities. For example, we now know that young carers in our schools are missing over a month of their education each year. So including young carers on this register will help ensure that local authorities can comply with their statutory duties under the Children Act 1989, which requires them to take reasonable steps to identify young carers who might be in need of support. By including young carers on the education not in school register, local authorities will be better able to work with families and local young carers services to ensure that caring responsibilities do not mean that the child misses out on education.
Finally, to put it in perspective, there are around 15,000 children who are caring for an alarming 50 hours each week, including over 3,000 children aged between 5 and 9. A further 21,000 children are caring for 20 to 49 hours a week. This has a huge impact on their health and their future life chances. Young carers taking on significant caring responsibilities are 86% less likely than their peers without caring responsibilities to obtain a university degree and 46% less likely to be in employment. Currently, it takes far too long for these young carers to get the support they need—on average three years, with some going more than 10 years without support. That is why this amendment seeks to ensure that this group of children is at the front of our thinking when we are talking about children not in school.
The clause, if amended, would mean that young carer status would be included on the register only if the local authority knows that the child is a young carer or could reasonably obtain such information. But, given that the majority of young carers are not identified, will the Minister say what steps the Government are taking to ensure that local authorities are complying with their duty to identify young carers outside education?
This simple amendment is an important small step to help ensure that all young carers are able to have the same educational opportunities as their peers, whether they are educated in school or elsewhere.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)
My Lords, I rise briefly in support of the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham. I added my name to his original amendment. I am afraid I was a bit slow off the mark in adding it to his revised amendment, to which the noble Lord has just spoken. I strongly support it. The noble Lord has set out the case for it extremely well.
I want to emphasise a couple of points. I have always had concerns about young carers being withdrawn from school for home-education. I am concerned that they do not get the necessary breaks from caring responsibilities. We all know how important respite care is for all carers, particularly young ones. Young carers can find themselves taking on ever-increasing levels of caring responsibility. Some of the case studies I have been looking at may well be at the extreme end of the spectrum, but they were talking about young carers who were looking after mum and dad with multiple physical and mental health needs, as well as looking after two or three younger siblings. I really do not know how on earth they can take on that caring responsibility and still ensure that they are educated.
I was also very struck by the statistics mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Young. He said that over 15,000 children were caring for 50 hours or more per week. This is not compatible with a child receiving the degree of education that we would all want them to have for their own life chances.
I am also concerned that they will be missing out on the support that can be provided for young carers just because they are not in school. I know that some schools are very good at running groups for young carers, such as peer support, mental health support and additional academic support. It is critical that young carers can still access this kind of support if they need it and are being educated at home.
My main concern is the inappropriate or excessive levels of care that these young people are being asked to take on, because of the feeling of isolation and the emotional impact it has on them. This amendment is essential to protect them. The word the noble Lord, Lord Young, used was “safeguards”. We need strong safeguards if we are to be satisfied that young carers with significant caring responsibilities at home are also being home-educated.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 250 in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, whose support I greatly value. This amendment would oblige schools to ask for and record why the child is to receive home-education. This is not done at present and the Department for Education lists the reasons as “unknown” in 42% of cases. The current census estimates that 111,700 children are being home-educated, a 20% rise since last year—hardly an endorsement of what has been going on in some schools. The reasons must be collected to get a better understanding of why children abandon the advantages of school and where feasible, deal with them. We know there are many reasons, some of which, like the bullying which so many Gypsy, Traveller and Roma children endure, must be more effectively and specifically tackled; among those reasons, regrettably, is the desire of some schools to ensure their exam pass rates reach a certain level, thus neglecting the children who most need their education to work. I hope my noble friend the Minister can accept this amendment.
Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)
My Lords, I will contribute very briefly to this debate. I thought that the amendments by the noble Lords, Lord Young and Lord Crisp, showed the difficulty of the Bill in that very different groups of young people are being referred to and both sets of needs need to be met. Therein is the difficulty of getting the legislation right. I very much took the point about children with caring responsibilities and hope that we can take this opportunity to improve that; it is something about which I have been concerned for a while.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest: I am now a member of the Northern Ireland Curriculum Taskforce Advisory Committee. I support amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran, and I support and echo some of the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, my noble friend Lord Young and others.
To put it in context, we are one of the most permissive countries in the world on home education. We have a strong default presumption that parents should be able to home-educate if they choose and no expectation of tight supervision of that. When I was chief inspector, my counterparts in other countries were often astonished at the degree of freedom that parents in this country have. There are countries where home education is simply illegal, and there are many countries where there are quite significant controls on quality.
To take just one example, in Belgium, I recently talked to the Flanders chief inspector. Parents must have their child do the end of primary school test. If they fail, they have one further opportunity; if they do not pass either time, they must be registered in a school. Similarly, there are provisions that if parents repeatedly refuse to allow a local authority employee to visit them at home, the child must be registered at school. I am not advocating these things specifically, simply putting it in context.
The noble Lord, Lord Storey, made a important point that this is not a single community. People have referred a number of times to communities. There are communities of what you might characterise as the archetypal home-schoolers, many of them excellent, which include many parents of children with special educational needs of various kinds. They are strongly represented in forums, support groups and lobbying, and they are valuable and important people. There are also many parents who do not take part in these kinds of forums. They are the parents of children in illegal schools where children are nominally home-educated but actually in illegal institutions. They are parents of children who have been essentially forced out of school and off-rolled, who typically have substantial behavioural problems and often significant educational needs, whose parents are disproportionately unlikely to be able to give them a suitable education. There are parents who have simply withdrawn their children to avoid prosecution for non-attendance, and there will always be a few sad exceptional cases, but I will not go into that.
My Ofsted work made me strongly supportive of a register, and I spoke regularly about this over many years, but it is important to be clear about a couple of things. My understanding is that this is not reversing that historic presumption that parents are free to home-educate. So, if we draw out the questions that a register helps local authorities to answer, they are, first: “Is there any reason to think that this child will not be getting a suitable education?” It is not microassuring that, yes, it is definitely suitable; it is slightly the other way. Secondly and similarly, it is not aiming to provide absolute certainty around safeguarding; it is asking, “Are there warnings or flags that suggest that some more work might be needed?” Thirdly, it is about gathering some of the administrative data that central and local government need in order to understand what they need to provide and where rules and incentives need to change.
Quite a lot of what we have heard today has been on the assumption that this is about completely reversing that presumption and moving to microjudgment of the quality of what every parent is doing at every stage. I do not think that that is there, but it would be helpful for it to be explicit that that is not the case. It is important that this does not become just a register of concerns. The requests for exemptions are, sadly, a little misguided because they would narrow this down to being a register of concern. Broadly, it is much clearer if it is simply an objective that the register of children in school plus the register of children not in school adds up to the totality.
I started today intending to support the pragmatic amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran around limiting the information that has to be collected to the things that genuinely support those purposes. What I have heard has led me to think that there is a simplification that the Government might consider that would help to draw together and streamline the thrust of the points that have been made on carers, for example, and those made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. It is that if it is information that we would normally expect to be collected in the administrative data section of a school register, it should also be in the not in school register. We are perhaps over- complicating it.
On what is collected about the education itself, I have another point. It is important not to push this too far. To the extent that this register contains subjective information about how children are being educated and about how much time children who are being educated with flexible models spend on maths, English or whatever it might be, it will not work well. Different parents will interpret it very differently. It is the kind of information that it is hard to do well even when constructing a research study. I suggest that there is room to take this back a bit in the light of the purposes I outlined and to commission research studies and sample studies where appropriate.
Similarly, lovely as it would be, the register will never provide all the information that a social work department might need to decide that an investigation is necessary. We need to think about what is straightforward to collect and not subjective to answer and what will help to create the join-up we expect, while not creating an administrative monster with information that turns out to have relatively little value in practice.
That is all I wanted to say. I support this register strongly, as I said, but one iteration further could be done with these provisions to make the register as clean, effective and supportive as it should be.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I wish to follow on; in fact, my noble friend has given an introduction to the comments that I wanted to make in relation to Amendment 260 in the names of my noble friend Lady Barran and the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. She mentioned phrases such as “not push it too far” or “take a step back from this”, and the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, outlined on a previous group that this should be proportionate reporting and information collection, which is really important.
On Amendment 260, we get down to the clauses— I am a lawyer by training and have been in government as a Minister, and I know that government loves such clauses—which require the collection, if it is reasonable to obtain it, of
“any other information about the child’s characteristics, circumstances”
or needs. The only caveat to that is that those should be included in the register
“for the purposes of promoting or safeguarding the education or welfare of children”.
My first point in relation to that is that that is new paragraph (m), so we have already asked for an awful lot of information before we have our lovely “scoop it all up” clause. But is “characteristics” limited to protected characteristics? That is a separate paragraph in Clause 31, so I suspect it is not. What kinds of characteristics will be asked of families in relation to their children, what kinds of circumstances and what limit on that or on their needs? Obviously, we are not talking about special educational needs because that, again, is somewhere else. It is an enormously wide power for them to be able to reasonably obtain this information.
The only limit on it is
“for the purposes of promoting or safeguarding the education or welfare of children”.
Part of that limitation is well known. It apes the Children Act, which says that we are there to promote and protect the safeguarding of the welfare of children. But here it is about the safeguarding of education, a slightly new concept that is there as a key limitation, in the way the paragraph is put together, on what local authorities can ask of families.
So I strongly support Amendment 260 on that kind of “scoop it all up” information about parents in these circumstances, particularly parents who may have, for good reason, withdrawn their children. I can see all kinds of headlines and problems if this kind of information, on such a broad basis, is asked of parents by the local authority. I think that there will be legal challenges to define such a broad clause that the Government seem to want, and that it will be the subject of complaints of intrusion. Although I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, obviously this is not to take back that presumption that it is the parents’ right, but such a wide clause that gives the local authority such extensive powers to ask for basically any other information risks changing that presumption, or at the very least it creates a perception for parents that it has been changed.
Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, I rise briefly to add to the support given to Amendment 257A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young, from all sides of the Committee, and just to emphasise almost the moral case for it.
Earlier on in Committee, when we were talking about the important role of kinship carers, I think we recognised the enormous debt that we as a society owe to them for the burden that they take on and the large number of young children they keep out of the care system, at disproportionate cost financially and to themselves socially and developmentally. The same is true of young children who end up being carers. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, said, we have 15,000 children caring for 50 hours or more a week, of whom 3,000 are between five and nine years old. If I remember dimly myself at that age, and if I think of my children at that age, the idea of taking on the responsibilities that some of these young carers take on, through no choice of their own, is extraordinary.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, I was going to rise very briefly to speak to Amendments 243, 249 and 260 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to which I added my name, but the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, has put it far better than I possibly could. I was going to talk about concerns about the home-schooling fraternity, but my noble friend Lord Crisp has put it far better than I could. I have also been persuaded by my noble friend Lord Russell and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, that Amendment 251 is extremely powerful. I am greatly looking forward to the Minister’s reply to these powerful arguments.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I should just say “ditto” to that, should I not? What the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, said is hugely important, as is the response from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the words of my noble friend Lady Spielman. It is unclear how this set of amendments is going to work. It unclear whether they are proportionate. We would like to get a good understanding. We can see that there is a purpose and that they are important, but we have concerns about how the demands of this Bill fit with reality and are going to work in particular circumstances. I will not go into the detail of the amendments that I have in that space—I will wait for the Minister’s reply—but I will pick up on some of the points made by my noble friend Lord Wei on his amendments. Amendment 245 provides that, if a private tutor teaches online and never sees the child in their home, there should be no need for that tutor to supply a private address. There are other aspects. It appears that a company has to provide details of all the people it employs. What happens with online companies where you are not interfacing with anyone at any obvious location but are just interfacing with the software? It is really hard to read what you are supposed to produce and why it is reasonable to produce it.
Amendment 248 highlights the absurdity of trying to quantify every minute. Many parents rightly say that their children learn continuously through conversation, trips and hobbies, without rigid slots. Precise time-logging is trying to force home education into a classroom straitjacket.
Amendment 260 and, in particular, Amendment 261, which my noble friend Lord Frost has supported, seek to address what is breathtakingly open-ended stuff. What is required here and why? What is the underlying purpose being served? We have to be careful about going in for open-ended data collection. Those of us who have been here for a while will remember what happened after we passed RIPA, and the way in which local authorities started using it to find out parents who might be cheating when it came to saying what their address was in school applications. Anything that is collected under such a register does not just sit quietly in a database; it becomes available throughout government and will be swept up into the profiling systems used by the police and the security authorities.
We know from history and from the work of those such as Professor Eileen Munro that these systems tend to record deficits, not strengths, and to build up negative pictures of people. This results in children from black and other ethnic minorities being racially profiled as being bad. People worry about them and so something appears in the database, and then they are seen as a problem. That information will appear everywhere that the authorities look them up. We need to be really careful about how we allow information to be collected.
I do not see any practical provision that would allow anyone to know what is on the register or to correct what is on it. There must be some process for making it accurate when the local authority has added stuff of its own volition—it does not have to tell anyone that it has done so, and the information might be completely daft and inaccurate. There is no provision for how information should be assessed and removed. We need to look carefully at this. Dr Stephen Crossley’s work on the troubled families programme illustrates that this leads to intrusive interventions justified by mass data trawling and families being
“bullied to no good effect”,
with little evidence of positive outcomes.
In this area, we should legislate with humility about what the state can know and manage and about what is useful and practical. We should be careful about turning supportive families into defensive ones, educational flourishing into compliance anxiety, or safeguarding into a byword for intrusive bureaucracy.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this group is about gathering information, and I am struck by certain things. Are we collecting the right type of information? Are we ignoring other information?
I was particularly struck by the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, which seeks to include on the register why the child is being home-educated. That would be a useful addition, though I am fully aware that others are saying that we might get a sea of information that ignores the key reason. As somebody who comes at home-education from a special educational needs background, I am familiar with lots of people who have removed their children from school because the school simply did not have the capacity to teach them accurately; teachers are trained to teach those who more closely conform to the norm and these children’s learning patterns do not correlate with that.
The same will be true about the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, when she said that blocks of time sitting down and studying is what education is. This is the type of education that has failed that group. For instance, many schools say, “We are going to give them extra help”. If you do not give them the right help, for this group, because the learning patterns are different, it still will not work. There are lots of little things in here that I would like the Minister to start to clear up. Too much information and the wrong sort will not help.
Even then, there are certain other bits that probably should be there. Are we going to review this periodically? Are we trying to get a feel of it? If we do not do so, there is a danger that we overload. But the register should be there because every child—it comes back to this—is entitled to an education. As was movingly put and supported by my noble friend Lady Tyler, who is a carer, that child is entitled to some support. Carers are entitled to function as an adult in the outside world after they have finished their caring duties—indeed, if they ever finish them. If we do not get away from that, I should like to know a little more on how we are going to use this information. It is a difficult subject, and I do not envy the Minister when she comes to answer on this group, but it is one we are entitled to extract the information from.
There are lots of situations here where we need to get an approach more than we need to get the detail—something that says whether it will be flexible enough. Is it going to understand the types of situations involved? We have heard they are variable, and anybody who has looked at this knew they were variable. So I look forward to the Minister’s reply and do not envy her her task.
Lord Storey (LD)
I have listened to Members talk on all these amendments, and it raised some thoughts in my mind, which I just want to mention before dealing with the amendments. One of the things that we will perhaps appreciate even more as a result of having a register is that, never mind home education, there are currently 100,000 children missing. They are not in home education or schools but are missing. I hope that when we have established—if we establish—a register for home-educated children, we will know the exact number of missing children and have a similar opportunity to work out how we do something about it. It is one of the highest levels in western Europe. That is my first thought.
My second thought is that we constantly hear from schools about the workload that teachers have to have, and maybe some of the discussions about what we are requiring of home educators in terms of the information from them would be music to teachers’ ears as well. In my days as a probationary teacher in my first school, I remember that the head did not require me to keep any records at all. He trusted me as a teacher. There was a single school syllabus and you just got on with it. After five years, I moved on to my second school. It was a huge culture shock because the head teacher demanded that we all had our record books and that we wrote down in great detail a paragraph for every subject from maths, literacy and numeracy right through to technology on what we were doing in that week. Perhaps this discussion also relates to issues for schools as well. Each of these amendments has important things to say. I thought that the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, was absolutely right to ask, what in these amendments adds value and what adds little value?
Sometimes it is not in plain sight. For example, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, dismissed Amendment 244 as more bureaucracy. I am surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, did not get up. His later Amendment 333ZA is about safeguarding. I do not think that many parents know that, currently, under UK law, an individual barred from working with children due to safeguarding risks or serious offences—including imprisonment—can legally offer one-to-one tuition to children when hired directly by the provider. So the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, which seeks to avoid having to provide details of staff at, for example, online schools, is a mistake. We should know the details of individuals who are not parents and who come into schools to do tutoring. That is hugely important.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I will keep my remarks brief and focus on my own amendments in this group as I know that we have a very ambitious target to complete today; that noble Lords came in early to do this; and that we have had a well-informed debate already. My Amendments 239, 243, 249 and 260 were supported and elegantly introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, with support from the noble Lord, Lord Crisp.
Amendment 239 would remove the requirement to specify the time spent by each parent educating their child, which was described by your Lordships as potentially redundant information.
Amendment 243 would set a minimum threshold of six hours weekly to avoid parents having to record every piano lesson and burdening local authorities with a volume of information that they cannot realistically assess. It has many similarities to Amendment 254B. I would not quibble with the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, as his amendment was very well drafted, but the spirits of the two amendments have much in common.
Amendment 249 would exclude weekend and holiday activities so that we bring home-educated children into line with those at school, where we would not dream of asking how they spend their weekends and holidays. Again, we do not want every visit to the Royal Institution —however fascinating—or every swimming lesson being shared with the local authority.
Finally, Amendment 260—the “scoop it all up” amendment, as my noble friend Lady Berridge described it—seeks to remove the ability of the Secretary of State to require any additional information that they see fit to be included in the register. This is an important point of principle because it leaves the door completely open for a future Secretary of State to behave in a way that many of your Lordships might consider unreasonable and unfair. It is excessive—belt and braces—and the Minister may want to reconsider it.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, we have had a good debate on this group—interestingly, with some rather different perspectives on the nature of the extent to which information should be included on the register. Let me deal with the range of points, I hope, as reassuringly and informatively as I can.
Amendment 235A was introduced by my noble friend Lord Hacking, although it seems that it had several parents—I will try to respond to the principles of it—and Amendment 239 is in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. These amendments would mean that registers would be required to contain the names and addresses of only the parents who are taking responsibility for the education of the child, rather than details of all parents of the child. Parents would also not need to provide information on how much time their child spends receiving education from each parent.
As I said in relation to Amendment 238 from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, the reason why both parents’ details are needed is because, by law, each parent has an equal responsibility for securing a suitable education for their child. This remains the case even if a parent is not providing the education themselves and is instead securing other providers to do so. Although I understand the intention behind these amendments, I worry that they would result in local authorities being unable to obtain necessary information.
My noble friend Lord Hacking gave a harrowing example in relation to access to information on the registers. I had hoped that my comments in our debate on the previous group had given some assurances around the control of and requirements for confidentiality around the register, which will provide some reassurance on that. Additionally, I am concerned that Amendment 239 would make it more difficult for local authorities to identify children who may not be receiving a suitable full-time education. Without having the time that a parent spends educating their child on the registers, how are local authorities to know whether the six hours that a child spends at a supplementary school each week is just part of their education or their whole education?
In relation to Amendment 235A, what if no parent claims responsibility for the education of the child? Unfortunately, we must face the reality that some children in England and Wales are receiving no education at all from their parents or from anybody else. Where this is the case, how can local authorities even begin to intervene if they are missing basic information, such as an up-to-date address for both parents?
Amendments 240, 241 and 247, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seek to restrict or remove completely the requirement on parents to provide information on the amount of time their child spends receiving education from individuals other than the parent. I will come back in a moment to the point about hours and time, raised—appropriately—by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and my noble friend Lady Morris. But it is important that local authorities understand whether other persons are involved in the education of the child. This, alongside information on for how much time a child is educated by their parent, will support the authority to establish whether education is full-time or not and to fulfil their existing duty to identify children missing education. This is an important point, which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, also brought to our attention.
Lord Crisp (CB)
Will the Minister answer my supplementary question about whether the department or she have in mind a number of hours that make up full-time education that they are trying to get to through this process?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I said I will come to that—I am coming to it. I will also answer the other point about the annual report.
Once again, on this, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and other noble Lords for taking the time to meet my officials and to outline in detail their concerns about the nature of the information that we are requesting. I understand the concern not to limit the wide range of activities that effective home education may well involve, the range of different organisations that might be contributing to it and the burdens that might be placed. I reassure noble Lords that I am reflecting on the points raised.
Amendment 253, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seeks to define what constitutes education for the purposes of for which activities parents must provide information on the registers. I anticipate that the noble Lord tabled this amendment to reduce parental burden, but it will actually do the reverse. It would bring a broad list of activities into scope of the duty to provide information, as any activity that results in the child learning would be classed as education. It is not the policy intention that registers will need to contain information on such a wide range of activities. The accepted definition of “education” is that it should contain elements of supervision and instruction that work towards defined objectives. This is supported by case law.
I recognise that noble Lords are concerned about the burden that the duty to provide information on a child’s education provision places on parents and local authorities. We will ensure that those burdens are kept as low as possible. Parents will not be required to give details on non-educational activities, for example, and we will outline this in detail in statutory guidance and, obviously, consult on the details.
Amendments 243 and 249, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and Amendment 254B, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, seek to place limitations on the providers that parents must provide information on. They set a threshold so that parents need to provide information only on organisations that offer more than six or 10 hours of education a week, that educate their child during the school day, or that are one-off or largely social and recreational activities. Although I appreciate that these amendments seek to reduce burdens on parents, the exemptions would potentially leave large gaps in the overall picture of a child’s education. This is particularly true if a child is attending multiple providers or does not follow the school timetable. In relation to Amendment 254B, as I mentioned, we will make it clear in statutory guidance that parents will not be expected to give details of non-educational activities for the register.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
I apologise for interrupting my noble friend in her very helpful answer. My amendment would require that schools get this information so that they can learn how they could educate children better. Of course, it is excellent that the local authorities have it, but should not schools have it too?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I understand the point my noble friend makes. When children’s parents ask for their child to be taken off the roll of a school, which of course is absolutely their right, and the school should do that, it should also, as my noble friend says, reflect on the reasons why the parents are wanting to home educate that child. More broadly, in policy terms, I think we all need to reflect on the points made by my noble friend and others about where the reason is less a positive decision about home education and more a concern about provision for children with special educational needs or otherwise. I think my noble friend is aware that the department already collects information on reasons for home education, but, as she has highlighted, there are gaps in the data. That is why the Bill already allows for this information to be prescribed for inclusion.
For example, recording whether a child is a young carer could be prescribed under new Section 436C(2)(m) of the Education Act,
“any other information about the child’s characteristics, circumstances, needs or interactions with a local authority”.
If prescribed, local authorities will need to record this information if they have it or can reasonably obtain it. We will consult on the content of these regulations, and they will be subject to the affirmative parliamentary procedure. I hope that this will help to ensure that the information prescribed for inclusion in local authority registers is appropriate and useful. However, it is necessary that the information outlined in the noble Lord’s and my noble friend’s amendments remains voluntary for parents to provide. For some parents, the reason they have chosen to home-educate is deeply personal. Requiring it could cause parents to try to avoid registration altogether, making it more difficult for local authorities to identify and support those children who need it.
Amendments 260 and 261 in some ways reverse the argument being made in the previous two amendments, a point also made by the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge. These amendments aim to restrict any further information being prescribed for inclusion or recording by local authorities on their registers other than that which is set out in the Bill. To be clear, the purpose of these powers is to ensure that local authorities can include useful information in their registers that has not been explicitly mentioned in primary legislation or prescribed through regulations. It will allow that information to be recorded. We do not want local authorities prevented from making their registers a productive tool due to a lack of flexibility but, just to reiterate once again—
Baroness Barran (Con)
Very briefly, in new Section 436C(3) local authorities already have the power in legislation to include,
“any other information the local authority considers appropriate”.
My Amendment 260 limits the power of the Secretary of State to expand it in any way that the Secretary of State sees appropriate.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I will come back to the noble Baroness about whether that provides the flexibility I am arguing potentially needs to be in the Bill. The fear is that, as several noble Lords have argued, there are arguments for the inclusion of information that could be very helpful in identifying whether a child is receiving a suitable education, and, furthermore, what support it is possible to provide and should be provided for those children. We would not want to reduce the usefulness of the registers due to that lack of flexibility.
The point I was going to come on to, which I think is important, is that I must stress that parents are under no obligation to provide any further information, even if local authorities ask for it. I think there has been concern by some parents about the extent to which they will be expected to provide that information. That is not the case; it is, as several noble Lords have rightly argued, simply about how we can ensure that these registers are effective and useful while being as unburdensome as possible. That is what we are all striving to achieve here. I hope that, for the reasons I have outlined, noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments at this point.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I shall pick up on a couple of points that the Minister made, I think this would be a very interesting point—
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)
My Lords, I am sorry, but I do not think this is in order. We have heard from the Minister, and now it is for the person who moved their amendment—
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, this is Committee. You can have as much backwards and forwards as you wish. That is basic Committee rules.
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)
I am advised that it is unusual—very unusual. Could the noble Lord keep his contributions exceptionally brief? Many other noble Lords intervened on the Minister at the pertinent points during her speech. It really is now the time for the noble Lord, Lord Hacking. The noble Lord’s Front Bench is agreeing with me.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, having been in this House for 30-plus years, no—you listen to the Minister, understand what they are saying, and perhaps that requires some further questioning. On the business of interrupting the Minister in the middle of her speech when you have not heard the full speech, I agree that it is relatively modern but it is clear that Committee is a conversation, and the place where that is restricted is on Report. I do not intend to be long but want to ask a short question. This is what Committee is. It is not, “Before the Minister sits down” but the basic process of Committee. I will take the advice of the clerks over lunch.
I make the point here: the noble Baroness is saying that she will put things in guidance. This is a good illustration of wanting to understand the limitations of the guidance. Can guidance definitively define a term in the Bill, such as “receiving education”, which is not defined in the Bill, in a way that is legally protected? Can guidance go against those terms? The Bill clearly says that everything must be recorded. The noble Baroness is saying, “No, only some stuff needs to be recorded”. Is there power in guidance to do that? Otherwise, the structure of the Bill needs adjustment. Also, I encourage her, if she does not want to go the whole way that the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, does, at least to make it clear, probably in guidance, that doing this in an annual report is an option. Otherwise, the Bill is saying that it should be done within 15 days.
Lord Hacking (Lab)
My Lords, this has been a good debate, as my noble friend recorded in her remarks, and it has now gone on for over one and a half hours. I have always been a supporter of registration, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, was wise to remind us of the large absenteeism of children who are not receiving any education at all.
I make a request of the Minister on only two points. First, after the productive discussions we have had with her officials, and indeed with her colleague Stephen Morgan—I hope we have persuaded her and her officials of the important amendments that the Government could make following those discussions. I put in the request therefore to see the drafts of those amendments before we go to Report. It would be helpful and enable us to know what to do on Report.
My second comment arises out of Amendment 251 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young, and Amendment 254 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. We heard the replies of the Minister on those amendments. The reason for me drawing attention to them is that they were both valuable and should be given close consideration. The Minister replied that we can clear it all up in provided statutory guidance. I have always been rather nervous about leaving things to the guidance notes after the Bill because the terms of the Bill are those that the nation has to follow. One is worried about what statutory guidance will say and how it will change the application of the Bill. But that said, I withdraw my amendment and thank all noble Lords for the now over one and a half hours of debate. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.