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.