Breakfast Clubs: Early Adopters

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend’s point about school food standards is a broader one and very important. I have previously told the House that, during my first time round in the Department for Education, I had the joy of being heavily lobbied to introduce school food standards in the first place, and I am very glad that we did. However, my noble friend makes the legitimate point that it is important that we keep those school food standards under review. There may be some learning from this scheme. I know that my colleagues in the department are keen to ensure that we have not only the right standards but the right ways of ensuring that they are delivered universally across schools. That is something that my noble friend will have the opportunity to badger me about in future months and years.

[Lord Desai (CB)]

My Lords, there seems to be uniformity, in that everybody has to have breakfast. Why cannot some schools have breakfast and others have lunch? I always went to school in the morning and always had lunch at home, so I did not have breakfast. I do not think my concentration was affected at all. It is a matter of choice, and one that should be given to students.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

Choice depends on there being provision. At the moment, there is not universal free provision of breakfast clubs for those children—probably their parents, frankly, at that age—who choose that to be the right thing for them. There will not be compulsory attendance at these breakfast clubs, but they will be available for anybody who wants them. I come back to the point about lunch, and reiterate that the Government are already rightly spending a considerable amount of money on providing free school meals at lunchtime for around 3.5 million children and young people. That will remain for those children.

Home School Education Registration and Support Bill [HL]

Lord Desai Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 15th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the Bill, which is long-needed. It is possible to say that there are some fantastic examples of home education. My education started when I was two years old and continued at least until I was six, by which time I had been taught almost everything I needed to learn in primary school. But I had to waste one year in primary school, because that was required.

Even the best education a family can give does not prepare the student for civic life. It does not prepare the student to mix socially or behave like a responsible adult. They may know the Talmud, the Koran or the Bible very nicely, but that is not enough. You have to know something else as well in life.

I think that, while we are playing around with this thing called home education, it is really about religious education. Let us call a spade a spade. Very often, children are educated at home because the religious beliefs not of the children but of their parents insist that they be taught only what is essential from a religious point of view, and not to be literate, mathematically informed or anything else.

On the one hand, you might say that that is religious freedom—of course, parents have the religious freedom to do anything they like for their children—but, on the other, their children have to grow up to be citizens of our society and know what it is like to be in this society. For that reason, we have to monitor, from the beginning, whether these children will be harmed for ever and prevented from being good citizens, or whether they will be all right. Again, I do not doubt that, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, some children are getting a fantastic family education, but the majority of such children are not getting the education they deserve—not only academic knowledge but civic training in being part of society.

I very much welcome the Bill and hope that, in registering who is home-educated, we will have strict standards and not take any excuse, such as someone saying, “The kid is backward”. It is the girls who suffer much more than the boys; boys somehow get better in terms of social background, but the girls really do suffer. I hope that the Bill speeds through, and that we absolutely get rid of the education that is holding our children back, and who, having been held back, will be handicapped for their entire adult lives.