Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure and an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, who has done so much, of course, for the rights and well-being of children in her work.

It will probably not surprise colleagues to hear that I do not think that this is a good Bill. As other noble Lords have said, it is shot through with the spirit of “the state knows best”, of state control, of seeing education as a vehicle for indoctrination and children almost as the ward of state rather than as the property of their parents. The centralisation that the Bill is going to bring in will squeeze out good performance in schools and undo the progress that has been made over the past 20 years.

However, others have said that, and I do not want to dwell on it. I want to spend a moment or two speaking about the provisions in the Bill for home education, which are in Clauses 32 to 35. These are represented as pragmatic changes to the current set-up, but actually they are not; they are going to be a major change to the current home-education arrangements and a big change in practice to what happens currently under the 1996 Act.

The core provision in the Bill is a register for children who are being educated at home—so far, so good—but there is much more to this register than the word suggests. Those educating at home will have to provide a vast amount of very detailed data about their children, set out in great depth in the Bill. To add to that, new Section 436B(3), to be inserted by this Bill, says that the register

“may also contain any other information the local authority considers appropriate”.

In other words, there is no real limit to it. It also requires data on “education providers”—which is very widely defined as anybody who provides any sort of teaching to children—to be submitted to the local authority. Here, we see some of the hostility to anybody teaching privately that we have come across in other situations as well. This is going to make a huge change.

I did not home-educate my own children, but I have come across a lot of home-educating parents in the last few months. Some do so by choice, some because their local schools are failing, some because their children have special needs, and some because their children simply cannot deal with the environment that the local schools provide. It is right that home-educating parents should be able to look to their local authority for support. Often, they do not get it, and come close to being harassed by local authorities that are completely out of sympathy with home education. I wonder what the problem is here. In 2023, only 1.4% of home-educated children got a school attendance order. In the same year, 10% of state schools were considered by Ofsted to be inadequate or requiring improvement. Where is the actual problem in the system?

Home education is a vital safety valve in a system that will become more and more state controlled as a result of the Bill. It is a safety valve for those who cannot afford the increased fees for private education. It is the last area where there is an element of experimentation and freedom in the system. I hope the Government will consider whether it really is necessary to bring in these huge changes. There is a risk it will be regulated to death. If that happens, it will be parents and children who are the losers.