Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Crisp Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly and positively about good home education. I disagree with some of the assumptions that the noble Lord, Lord Nash, has just made about the majority of people being home educated, and I will come to that in a moment.

I absolutely understand and—like all other noble Lords—support the Government’s ambition to protect children and deal with the very real problems of non-attendance, disappeared or abused children, and children at risk. However, these laudable intentions as presented in the Bill will risk damaging the education of thousands of children who are currently receiving good home education.

There are two distinct populations here: those children at risk who need protection and those who are being lovingly cared for and educated by their parents, whose efforts deserve support. The Bill treats both groups in the same way. Several parents in the second group said to me, “We are already too often treated with suspicion, as though we are criminals, even before the provisions in the Bill are introduced”.

More than 110,000 children are being home educated, of which about 60% have special needs. Many are diagnosed or non-diagnosed autistic or have learning disabilities or difficulties. More than half the increase in recent years is of children who have been enrolled in schools which have failed them. It is these children I am particularly concerned with. Their parents have acted in their children’s best interests, often at great personal cost, emotionally, time-wise and financially, and many are on benefits. They provide education themselves but also use online resources, joint sessions with other children and support from museums and other institutions which run programmes for home-educated children.

The Bill, however, puts many obstacles in their way. A register may be a useful tool in tackling risk, but my concern is with the detail of the register. Its requirements for information are intrusive and unnecessary and create bureaucracy for authorities as well as parents, and all changes must be reported within 15 days.

There are also some other unintended consequences of the Bill. Similar demands for information are being put on any organisation or person providing activities deemed to be educational, so organisations such as Cubs and Brownies and sports clubs, for example, which provide elements of education, may stop taking home-educated children because of these sorts of demands.

Education is not defined in the Bill, nor is leisure time. A great deal of this is left to the discretion of education authorities as the sole arbiters of these and other matters, including, most importantly, what is in the best interests of a child. There is plenty of evidence from the past that some, though not all, authorities have been very heavy handed and sometimes directly hostile to parents who are home educating, treating them with deep suspicion.

Home-educating parents need to know what they can expect from authorities in support, and I will be tabling amendments—some of them very simple—to address some of the detail of the register and to redress the balance by proposing a code of practice for authorities on what they should be doing to support home education.

There are very many good schools, but there are also too many which are overwhelmed and fail the most vulnerable children. With time and improvement and resources, they may be able to offer the sort of flexibility and personalised approach that many of these children need. In the meantime, we need to offer the sort of positive, effective home education which in many cases is delivering what the schools cannot. Many are in effect helping authorities with their responsibilities for special educational needs provision in a system that is failing. We need to recognise that many parents are doing a very good job and playing a very good role in doing this. There are two distinct populations here, and we need to create appropriate legislative frameworks to deal with them both differently.