Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Storey

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Sewell of Sanderstead, gave us an inspiring scene-setter for the next groups of amendments that we are discussing. It was a taster of why the decisions that we make on this Bill matter to so many pupils and young people. This is why I urge the Government not to throw the baby out with the bath-water and, in many instances, to think again. I have my Amendment 506A in this group, which simply says that, before the Bill is passed or enacted, the Government’s own curriculum review needs to be published and consulted on.

The legislation before us requires that all schools follow the national curriculum, yet there is no agreed national curriculum. Instead, the Government want to review that curriculum, which is fair enough, but that review will not even be published before we are asked to vote “blind”. It is simply wrong for a Bill to force schools to follow a particular curriculum when we have not been told what is in it: cart before horse and all that.

More broadly, we have spent a long, long time on this Bill so far. Outside of here, the Bill is informally known as the Schools Bill, yet we have managed not to discuss the whole reason for schools—to educate children into the world of knowledge—until this point. Educating children requires us to agree on what the content of that education consists of. The curriculum is not, or should not be, an afterthought. It is key: the raison d’être for schools as vehicles used by one generation to pass on to the next the canonical knowledge of humanity. When taught well, it is our greatest tool for social mobility. It is neither a fixed body of knowledge nor frozen in aspic. It changes over time. It is often contested and can be challenged, but it is a key component of educating the young.

The argument epitomised by this group of amendments asks whether every school needs to follow the same curriculum that every school must follow, yet we do not know what curriculum we are talking about, despite how important the curriculum is. The Government recognise that, which is why they set up the review. Taking three of the amendments we have here gives us some sort of meat on what the curriculum bone might be or what the arguments might be. One calls for financial education in primary schools, which we have already heard motivated. There is one to come on education for growing food and food preparation and another on education for voting.

You might say that those curriculum-related amendments are “hobby-horse” amendments. I am not saying that in an insulting way: they suggest the interests of the people putting them forward. They could all be creative and positive in a particular head’s hands with certain groups of pupils, depending on how they were used. If you get any group of teachers, parents, adults or indeed pupils together at any time and ask what should go into the curriculum, there are always very lively and creative discussions about priorities, what should matter, and so on and so forth.

The point I am making is that, even at the best of times, the curriculum is something that is a source of dispute. It can be liberating, transformative and inspiring, but it can be—and we all know this to be true—overly ideological, propagandist, politicised and used as a device for social engineering. As I said at Second Reading, I worry when Professor Becky Francis says that her curriculum review will look at what is taught through a “social justice lens”, with an emphasis on inclusivity. I am afraid I think of some of the more divisive aspects of identity politics and some of the arguments that have been had over critical race theory in schools, decolonisation and so on. It fills me with dread.

This Government have already had to pick up the pieces of curriculum mis-steps in relation to RSHE, as parents across the UK have become shocked to discover that their children were covering highly sexualised and age-inappropriate content and that some schools were affirming children in their chosen gender identities, a form of social transitioning now broadly discredited. I commend the Government for tackling that and taking it on: the point I am making is that all of that was inspired by centralised curriculum diktats. I therefore think we have to consider what the centralised curriculum diktat for all schools will be after the curriculum review.

Professor Francis has apparently said that the review will look at the alleged problem that the curriculum is too heavy. My problem is that we are now being asked to vote on legislation in a “curriculum lite” way, with the curriculum absent, despite a hugely significant mandate that all schools must follow this curriculum.

We are told that the curriculum review will address barriers to attainment, but so far the hints we have been given into the review look to be blaming exams and a curriculum that is overly academic for creating too much stress and anxiety for pupils—something that I completely disagree with. This hints at a new assessment regime that will be less stressful, and I am afraid that that fuels genuine concerns among educators that the curriculum review might amount to a recipe for lower academic standards. As we have seen in both Scotland and Wales, which have completely upended their curriculum in recent years, attainment has plummeted, sometimes below the OECD average.

I have not yet decided whether the Bill’s Clause 47 is totally wrong-headed and should be dropped, although I thought that the noble Baroness, Lady Evans of Bowes Park, made a very good case that was worth considering. I am sold on the idea of a common entitlement for all children, and I am not opposed in principle to a national curriculum for all. But the Government should not be rigid and there should be more flexibility. Amendment 444 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, would allow for that, so I am very interested in that.

However, none of this is the point of my amendment. This Bill says that all schools follow a national curriculum but will not tell us what is in it before we are being asked to rubber-stamp it. It reminds me of one FE student I taught. He was a bit of a cheeky chap. He missed a deadline for his GCSE and he said out loud in the class: “Can’t you just pass me, miss? I’ll show you the essay when I’ve written it later”. I thought that was a bit of a cheek, and I am afraid the same cheek is being displayed by the Government. I urge them to get their essay in on time, or at least to allow us to not have to vote until we have seen the essay.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, for that. It has made me think, and I will come back to some of the points she made.

In the 1970s, we did not have a national curriculum and schools could teach whatever they liked. There was only one subject they had to teach, and that was RE. Along came the William Tyndale School in London, which decided that its curriculum was going to be progressively radical and its teaching methods very child-centric. Relationships at the school broke down completely between staff and children, and the Government of the day had to step in. Then came along a Mr Ken Clarke—the noble Lord, Lord Clarke—with his national curriculum, which said that we as a society have a duty to spell out what we expect our school children to learn. The national curriculum was born. But it is not a national curriculum, because it is not taught in Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales, and, as we know, it is not taught in over half of our schools, because they can choose what they want to teach.

These amendments make us question what we should teach. Do we think we should teach financial education in school? I think we should, but why should it be left to an individual school to decide that? Should we not, as a society, decide that? I firmly believe that water safety should be taught in schools, but it is not down to me; it is down to individual academies to make that decision. Should we insist that every primary school pupil should have swimming lessons and be able to swim 25 metres before they leave primary school? I think that is really important—I wonder how many other people think that is important. But it is not down to us; it is down to individual academies.

I welcome the curriculum review. I did not put down an amendment saying that water safety should be included because I am not carrying out the curriculum review, but the organisation I am a patron of has written and given evidence as to why that should be the case, as I think a number of people have for financial education. We wait to see what the review suggests.

I believe that one of the strengths of academies has been that they have built flexibility into the curriculum of their choice. I am just making the case—it will not be for me to decide—that there could be an opportunity for all schools to have some flexibility when deciding their curriculums.

I will end by discussing what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, said. She is right, but each individual academy that is deciding its own curriculum does not come to us and ask whether we agree with it. They just get on with it—they are just allowed to do it. Maybe the noble Baroness is right that there should be a political decision about what is taught in our national curriculum. That is a very interesting thought, and I will leave the Committee with it.

Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Storey

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 18th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I am very supportive of Amendment 64A. Amendments 65, 66, 66A and 94 are also ways of reassuring and protecting home-schoolers in the Bill.

The noble Lord, Lord Soley, made the point that, over his many years in politics, many have threatened to go to prison for their beliefs and rarely do. We all recognise that point. But it is also true that, over the many years that I have been involved in politics, I have been reassured that many a law is supportive and not a punishment or threat, and I have learned not to take much notice of that either. The notion that if you are a good actor you have nothing to fear is actually quite chilling, because then you have to ask who decides who the good actors are—who will define what a good parent is, in this instance. It is a little unfair that people who feel so strongly that they say they would go to prison are dismissed, because it speaks to the fact that this Bill has created uncertainty. The Minister has gone out of her way to be reassuring—I do not dismiss that; that is something to be taken seriously—but all that these amendments are trying to do is to codify that reassurance in a variety of ways, rather than just having it on word of mouth.

It is not helpful to say whether it is a minority of home-schoolers who are worried about the register or a majority. In a way, who cares whether it is a majority or a minority? It is the principle, and the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has made that very clear. I emphasise that there is a principle of freedom here that we should not just throw out or dismiss as some sort of inconvenience to more pragmatic concerns.

The problem with the register is that it is not just a register; it ends up looking as though it requires far more on details of means, as the right reverend Prelate just explained—more than you need in a register. It does not just tick a box. That is why many home educators are very anxious about it. I am not a home educator and have never been home educated; to be frank, I am not interested in home educators per se, but I am interested more broadly in a situation where the state collects so much data and information—a database of children—and interferes in our freedom in a democratic society to home educate, if that is what we want. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle explained, the cloud of suspicion being created that this is a potential assault on deeply held religious and philosophical freedoms is something we should all take seriously as democrats who support a free society.

The suspicion that some home educators have of the state and the way that education is conducted is what we should be discussing in relation to this Schools Bill—if it were not such a basket case of a Bill that we cannot get anywhere on what we ought to be discussing, which is irritating. We have a problem when many parents believe that the state cannot be trusted to educate their children. All sorts of controversial issues come up. I do not think it is a criticism of home educators that they do not trust the state or think that it does not provide the kind of education that their SEND child or bullied child needs, or that they do not want someone to be exposed to the kind of materials in sex and relationship education that we will probably discuss later, which have been all over the news. These are reasonable philosophical ideas to hold; they, and religious freedom, are things that we should be protecting in this House.

We should remember the Telford report, which I just finished reading over the weekend. We have to be careful when the state starts saying that the people acting suspiciously are the parents. I also read the Oldham report, in which state actors—councils, schools, the police and all sorts of people—ignored in plain sight the sexual grooming and abuse of thousands of young people. I am not prepared just to say that I trust the state. It is perfectly reasonable when people do not, but we at least have to reassure them about their freedoms to withdraw from state schooling. After all, it is not the law that you have to school your child, simply that you have to educate them. I trust those parents to educate them as much as I trust the state. Where there are bad actors, you act, but you do not treat everyone all the time as potential bad actors.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I said at Second Reading, putting the register aside for a moment, that we as a society have a responsibility to ensure that all our children are safe, secure and educated. If that is not happening, we need to ask why and what we can simply do to make sure that every child is safe and educated.

Over the last seven or eight years, I have put down a whole series of Written Questions asking how many children are missing from our school rolls, such that we do not even know where they are. The answer is that we do not know. The best we can do currently—this goes back to 2018-19—is information from the National Crime Agency, which, by the way, identifies as missing anyone whose whereabouts cannot be established and who may be the subject of a crime or at risk of harm to themselves; examples include child trafficking, getting involved in drug pushing, et cetera. It concluded that there are 216,707 children missing whose whereabouts we do not know. That is a very low figure. I think it is considerably higher than that.

For me, that is what this debate is about: protecting children and making sure that they are safe, secure and educated. That is why I welcome these measures on home education and congratulate the Government on having the courage to pick up this political hot potato and try to do something about it—it is not perfect; I take it for granted that there are some concerns—and about unregistered schools.

Of course, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Carlisle was right about parents’ rights and values, but society has to make sure that, when children are in schools which are not subject to any checks or inspections, they are not being taught the most appalling practices, which Ofsted highlights in its reports. There have been a couple of cases where it has taken those schools to court and managed to close them down—the right reverend Prelate would be horrified if he knew. One such school, which was not unregistered, was a Christian school as well; I am happy to talk to him privately about it.

Let us understand where we are coming from in this debate. We all have anecdotal evidence of home tuition and teaching. I listened with great interest to the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, and his worries about what might happen. I accept that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is absolutely right that there have been some appalling practices by local authorities; there have also been some fantastic practices by them, which should be the model for how we behave. That is why I will suggest in the next group that local authorities appoint home school co-ordinators.

I have been struck by the number of emails I have had—I think it was 82 at the last count—from home educators. They have concerns, of course, or they would not be emailing me, but I come away thinking, “Wow, what a tremendous job you’re doing.” I have met some of them. I met one last week, who told me about how she had ignited an interest in the Tudors in her daughter. I thought again, “What a tremendous job you’re doing.” However, those actually doing the work of home tuition are perhaps seeing problems that will not be there.

We need a simple register which collects some simple information. I did not know and was quite surprised to learn that independent schools do not provide any data—that is a new one on me. They should be doing so. As the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, rightly said, we should know where all our children are—whether they are in school, home educated, in an unregistered school or in the independent sector. Let that be the rallying call from these amendments.

Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Fox of Buckley and Lord Storey

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I add my congratulations to the noble Lord, Lord Soley, on his work in the area of home education. I would have thought that the duty of society is to ensure that its children and young people are educated or have the opportunities to be educated, and that we keep them as safe as we possibly can. I will be disappointed if anyone disagrees with that. Yet, in our desire to have everybody educated, we have arrived at a situation where, if you ask any Government, “How many children are missing from school?”, they would not be able to tell us. They would not know the number of children who are not in school. How is it that we as a society are trying to ensure that every child is educated and safeguarded?

We have unregistered schools, and over the years we have tried to discourage them and to close them down. We have had some success—I pay tribute to the Government in that regard. If you hear the stories of some of the pupils in those unregistered schools—a boy who was locked in a cupboard because he admitted that he was gay, for example—you would be absolutely horrified. This has gone on in some radical religious schools, and it is just not acceptable. We have had our hands tied behind our backs and have not been able to do anything about it.

Because of the fear of getting a poor Ofsted or poor examination results, our maintained sector has off-rolled children—it has taken children off the registers at a stroke. If you tried to find out where those children had gone, you would not know. Then we have home education. Home educators do an absolutely fantastic job and I praise them for the work they do. I remember that during the passage of the Bill in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Soley, I met a number of home educators and I was just so impressed. For example, did noble Lords know that in the London area they have an annual weekend camp of all home educators and get specialists in to come and talk to those children and young people? It is fantastic.

But there are some very poor home educators as well, and some situations where children are not being safeguarded. It may be that a parent cannot adequately cope with a situation, so they take the child out of school and say that they are going to be home educated—and that is not happening at all. They are just being left at home, maybe in front of the television, if they have one. That is just not acceptable. We cannot allow that to happen in the 21st-century UK.

Noble Lords will all have received a very good campaign from some sectors of the home education lobby. I have also received some different emails, so let me try to balance that a little. One says: “Home educating parents are having views put forward by a small minority that they do not agree with. Most home educators are too busy home educating children and are not concerned with the proposals that are being made”. Here is another one: “I would like the people who will be making the decisions related to the Schools Bill to be aware of this handful of people who appear to speak for the majority of home educating parents … They encourage an aggressive stance towards local authorities, advise parents against face-to-face contact and encourage them to write reports instead”—and it just goes on.

The fear that has been put into genuine home educators is frightening. I am happy to share these emails with the Minister so that we can see the other side of what has been going on. I will not read any more of them but it is not a very good situation to be in, so what are we going to do about it? Are we just going to leave it as it currently is? No—we cannot go on like this.

We need to ensure that we know where every pupil is. That is why the sorts of measures we have heard about on registration are important. That is why it is important to close down unregistered schools. By the way, one of the ways in which unregistered schools get around being closed down is suddenly to transform themselves into home educators as well. That is what happens, so we need to tackle unregistered schools as well. There is a third issue that we have talked about, and I think we have dealt with it: the off-rolling of pupils must not continue.

I congratulate the Government on having the integrity to grasp this difficult situation. Some of the issues that we have heard about perhaps need to be thought through a little more carefully between Committee and Report, given how they relate to each other. Some of the amendments bring a bit of realism to this issue, but I thank the Minister for, at long last, tackling what has been an appalling situation.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

This has been an interesting debate and I suppose I am a bit nervous about speaking, inasmuch as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, assures us that he sees this register, in his work, as supportive and not punitive for home schoolers. But if that is the intention they have not got the message, because there is great concern at the moment. In the previous contribution, the noble Lord said that not all the emails that one receives represent all home schoolers. That is true, but there is sufficient anxiety created by the Bill that it would be wrong for the Government not to take note of it.

Personally, I am with Professor Eileen Munro, who has been raised already. I am opposed to a large amount of Part 3 but, in trying to intervene more specifically on this section of amendments, it is important to keep stressing the key point that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, raised: that parents have a right to home education. They do not have to apologise or explain in a free society. It is not something to be ashamed of. It might be a minority pursuit and a lot of us might think it a bit quirky, but in a free society, unless the Government are changing that, it is their free right. I think they feel as though they are being told that they have to explain why they are doing it and are going to be intruded upon—and, in the course of it, are being demonised as well.

That is why I supported a lot of the qualms that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, raised. It is also why I support Amendment 172 in this group from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, as a review of home education would at least give us an opportunity to look at it in the round a bit more. It feels as though there might be some dangerous unintended consequences here.

I am afraid that, despite the assurances of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, his first and second groups feel as though they are being punished for fears that are concentrated on the third group, as it were. He described one part of that small group who might not be in schools as being radicalised. We had some images and we all know what we are talking about in terms of madrassas and fundamentalists of Christian, Jewish or Islamic faiths, which is no reflection on those faiths per se. But there is a danger here that this small group is then used to attack the reputations of everybody else.

Even in relation to those groups, we have to be careful about using the term “religious fundamentalist” as a dismissive and dangerous model as well. As an atheist, I happen to stand for religious freedom. We have to be careful that we do not just dismiss that. It is also the case that “fundamentalism” is used promiscuously these days to describe people with a different set of values or ideology, whether religious, political or philosophical. They are the kinds of things that I am concerned about.

My greatest fear, which I talked about in my Second Reading speech, is of an unintended slur: that this is all about safeguarding and the welfare of children. In some of the contributions so far, we have gone from loneliness to physical abuse and cigarette burns, and the idea that there are children being kept at home so that they can be abused and will not be seen by social services. We have to be careful not to simply make safeguarding a matter of the children who are not in school, because many children who are in school and in plain sight are missed by social services and the authorities in terms of their abuse. This seems to be the greater problem.

There is an irony that some children are being withdrawn from schools precisely for safeguarding reasons. The parents, for whatever reason, feel that their children are not safe in school because of bullying or particular ideas of how they are taught—things that we are familiar with. I am no fan of de-schooling. I do not like the de-schooling movement and have argued against it many times. School is a hugely vibrant and important part of socialising children and our passing over to the generations but, in a free society, we have to be careful.

Finally, while a register sounds sensible it is right that we raise concerns about data tracking and surveillance. There are those who have indicated that we cannot just allow data collection to happen without asking some questions about why it is needed and how it will be used. I know that the obsession with data collection in schools themselves—turning people into data points and often replacing actual professional judgment with data collection—drives lots of teachers mad. I do not think it necessarily always helps. I also feel that in the name of the autonomy of home education, we have to be careful that this does not become yet another centralising part of the Bill with unintended consequences.