Out-of-school Education Settings

Debate between Edward Leigh and Graham Stuart

Wednesday 20th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the proposed regulation of out-of-school education settings.

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Turner, and to welcome such an excellent Minister, dedicated to school standards, and an even more excellent Opposition spokesman—I say that in the hope that they might be nice when they sum up.

How have we come to a situation in which a Conservative Government are proposing that a parish church must register with Ofsted before it can teach children the Bible for more than a few hours? The Department for Education’s consultation—I emphasise that it is a consultation—on its plans for out-of-school settings is well intentioned enough. Nobody denies that. When Sir Michael Wilshaw goes on the radio to defend them, he tells us about children

“at risk of abuse and at risk of radicalisation.”

We all have those concerns, but why does tackling abuse and radicalisation in a very tiny number of madrassahs mean that every voluntary group in England that instructs children for six or more hours a week has to register with the state? My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Education told Radio 4 that she thought the number of problem institutions could be numbered in the tens. Why, then, are we requiring tens of thousands of totally innocent groups to register with the state?

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend remember that when we were in opposition, we opposed the then Labour Government’s ContactPoint database precisely because it sought to capture information on every child in the country? We said, “No, it should be proportionate. We should capture the information on children at risk, not every child.” Why does he think that that principle is not being applied in this case?

[Sir Edward Leigh]

My hon. Friend makes his point very well, and I agree entirely that the Government should capture information only on the very small number of children who are at risk.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

I am struck by the parallel with the registration proposals of the previous Labour Government for home education. The thought was, “There could be a problem. We don’t have enough data. We don’t know what’s going on. There could be issues—children could be being abused in their homes. So we must register every single parent,” even though the long-standing settlement was to respect that parents have the duty to educate their children, not the state. This is creeping statism.

I asked my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) not to add me to the list, but I am someone of no faith and there are lots of people in the Chamber with faith. This proposal seems to me a gross infringement of so many rights, including the rights of Muslims, and in a free society we need to respect families of whatever denomination and recognise where the line should be drawn by the Government, notwithstanding the risks.

If we go back, we think of the reds under the bed. It was not that there was not a clear and present danger from communism; it was the fact that a disproportionate, illiberal and un-American response was inappropriate. We can think back to when the leader of the Catholic Church—Islam has no such leader—was clearly opposed to the society and Government of this country, yet we recognised that Catholics were predominantly law-abiding and needed to be respected.

[Sir Edward Leigh]

Only predominantly?

[Graham Stuart]

Nearly exclusively. It is exactly the same issue.

I make one final point. If we go ahead with this, it will have the opposite effect on safety to what is intended. Forget all the other points my colleagues have made about how it will break down volunteering and all the rest of what is good—what about targeting Islamic extremism? If we take an organisation such as Ofsted, whose budget has been falling consistently over time—local authorities are in the same position—and ask it to register everyone, it will spend its entire time trying to do that and it will fail to get to the real problem.

With the Labour proposals on home education, we knew that the people who were really troublesome would never register and would evade the authorities with ease. Everyone else—every law-abiding, committed family—would be put through the hoops and subjected to a state imposition that was clearly and utterly inappropriate. That is what we risk here.

I have changed my mind on this proposal. At first, I thought it could be proportionate and reasonable, but I do not think it can be, so let us not do it. ContactPoint was wrong, and so is this—let us put a stop to it.