Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Lucas Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Lord Lucas
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to probe whether the wording of this paragraph is compatible with ECHR rulings regarding requirements to disclose religion.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, it is my intention not to speak to the amendments in this group but to await what the Minister will say about them in order to shorten the debate.
In view of the conversation before we had Questions, I want to reconfirm to noble Lords that, according to paragraph 4.31 of the Companion:
“When the House is in committee there is no restriction on the number of times a member may speak”.
Therefore, a Member may speak after the Minister, and the Minister may speak during the mover of the group’s response to the Minister. The back and forwards may involve as many sessions of conversation and ministerial intervention as possible; it is completely unnecessary to use the phrase “before the Minister sits down” in Committee. Committee is a free-for-all and a conversation. It is an opportunity to focus on the real issues of the group and to have the time to talk them out and get to the nub of them, even if that takes a certain amount of backwards and forwards.
The great advantage of this is that noble Lords do not need to speak until they are sure that the point they want to talk about has not been covered already by other people and satisfactorily answered by the Minister. They can wait to see who speaks and what the Minister says, and only then, if they feel that what they wanted to say has not been said, need they say anything. It is a great technique for focusing debate and shortening groups, which is something which I hope the Government will find helpful. On this group, I beg to move Amendment 255 and look forward to the Minister’s response.
The Earl of Effingham (Con)
My Lords, I shall speak to this group of amendments on the children not in school register, which seek to probe issues surrounding privacy. The children not in school consultation aimed to collate thoughts and views around local authority registers of children not attending school to ensure that all children receive a positive and beneficial education regardless of where that education might be taking place. There were close to 5,000 responses, predominantly from parents, but also from both local authorities and charities, and the findings will help to weave a gold standard of policy and guidance, which I am sure all noble Lords wish to be entirely fit for purpose.
On these specific amendments, it is of course acknowledged that the priority should be to find the right balance between privacy on the one hand and the safety of children who are not well looked after on the other. I am most grateful to my noble friend Lady Barran, who has already set out so well His Majesty’s loyal Opposition’s view on these issues in the previous groups, so I will not detain your Lordships’ House by repeating those same arguments.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
Amendments in group 4, which we have now got to, concern the inclusion of certain information in the registers and the delegated power for changes to be made to the operation of the registers. I turn to speak to Amendments 255, 256, 257, 258 and 259, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. Each amendment addresses an element of the information which the Secretary of State may prescribe for inclusion in the registers.
Just to reiterate, as I did on the last group, parents need to provide only certain limited information about their child: their name, date of birth, address and how they are educated. All further information which the Secretary of State may prescribe for inclusion in the registers is voluntary for parents to provide. This includes information on the child’s protected characteristics, which Amendment 255 would remove, current and historic child protection inquiries, which Amendment 256 would remove, current or previous child-in-need status, which Amendment 257 would remove, the reasons for the child having looked-after status on the registers, which Amendment 258 would remove, and reasons why the child is eligible for inclusion in the register, which Amendment 259 would delete.
As mentioned in the previous group, the Secretary of State may prescribe in regulations the information which the local authority shall be required to include in the “children not in school” registers, if they hold it or can reasonably obtain it. The intention is for this additional information to help local authorities better understand and support children who are not in school. My department will consult on the content of regulations following Royal Assent. I suggest to the noble Lord that the consultation process is the right approach to determine whether there is a case for omitting certain information or including details such as the reasons for a child’s looked-after status in the registers. On Amendment 255, I am happy to reassure the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that the relevant provision is indeed compatible with European Court of Human Rights rulings. The ECHR memorandum makes this clear.
Amendment 262, also tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, removes the delegated power for the Secretary of State and Welsh Ministers to prescribe how registers must be maintained. This power is intended to enable the Secretary of State and Welsh Ministers to provide for consistency among local authorities as to how their registers are maintained. This could include factors such as how and how often registers are checked for accuracy, how amendments are to be made, their format, and whether and how registers should be published. Most local authorities already voluntarily maintain a register of children not in school, developed based on their local needs. However, to ensure the accuracy of data and encourage consistency of practices across all areas, the Secretary of State and Welsh Ministers must be able to prescribe processes relating to maintenance and upkeep in the future.
As mentioned, we will consult on all regulations used to implement the “children not in school” measures, all but one of which will then be laid via the affirmative procedure. I hope that, for the reasons I have outlined, the noble Lord feels able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Lucas (Con)
I thank the Minister for that explanation and beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
“(6) Each local authority must establish a parental advisory board, composed primarily of home-educating parents, to advise on and scrutinise the authority’s home education policies and procedures.(7) Where a local authority acts in a way that is contrary to the formal advice of the parental advisory board, it must publish a written statement setting out its reasons for doing so and make that statement available to the public within 28 days.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment introduces a statutory requirement for each local authority to create a home education parental advisory board. It also requires authorities to provide public justification if they act against the advice of the board, ensuring greater accountability and transparency in decisions affecting home-educating families.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, on behalf of my noble friend, Lord Wei, I will move Amendment 270 and address other amendments in this group.
Amendment 270 would require a local authority to establish a parental advisory board. This is a useful structure for ensuring that parents and local authorities work together. Amendment 278 would allow parents to provide information in their own words. That may seem a small detail, but it is fundamental. The High Court in Goodred v Portsmouth City Council affirmed that the parents’ own statement is valid evidence of provision, but many councils insist on rigid forms that erase the richness of home education. When looking at the variety of home education, it is important that it can be expressed as it is and is not squashed into a mode of expression it is not suited to.
Amendment 280 would require that the information request be proportionate and relevant to education. Some councils issue broad, ill-defined demands, daily lesson plans and samples of child-generated independent work. Part of this is being able to demonstrate to local authorities what good practice is. As we will discuss in later groups, we need to work towards that.
Amendment 281 would introduce the word “substantial” to describe the information parents must provide. Without it, councils may request irrelevant minutiae under the guise of safeguarding; we all know which council I would use to illustrate that.
Amendment 282 would ensure that families are not bombarded with repeat demands. It is important that we look at the burden of the information provision on parents and indeed on local authorities. My understanding is that this will be addressed in the guidance, and I look forward to that confirmation.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, as I have said previously, the duty on parents to give information for children not in school registers is key to their operation. Information on where the child is being educated, and by whom, is vital in enabling local authorities to identify cases of potentially unsuitable or unsafe education.
The amendments in this group concern this requirement for parents to give information, and how local authorities must act in a transparent and accountable manner towards the home-educating families in their area. Amendment 277, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, seeks, in effect, to remove the requirement.
I want to respond to the broader points that the noble Baroness made about home-schooling. I completely understand—actually, I am not sure that I do understand—why she might have wanted to celebrate the election of her new leader. In any event, I recognise that she has a new leader, which was decided this morning. Had she been here this morning, she would have heard what were, I hope, important comments from me and others on the support that exists within the English and Welsh education system, precisely for parents to home-educate, and the reiteration by this Government that there is no intention in this legislation to remove that right. In fact, there is an intention to provide additional recognition and support while also ensuring that local authorities are able to carry out their functions, by knowing where children are being educated otherwise than in school. I hope that the noble Baroness will read the comments that I made this morning about that.
Without a requirement on home-educating parents to register with their local authority, authorities cannot be assured that they have fulfilled their education duties towards children not in school living in their areas. Parents having to provide required information is an absolutely crucial component for the success of the registers.
I bring my noble friend Lord Hacking back to the point that I made this morning. I was completely clear that it is not the case that failing to provide information to the register would lead directly to parents having to face fines and penalties. I hope that my noble friend will reread that contribution and find that it provides some assurance around the point that he made.
I recognise that there are home educators who are already known to local authorities and are captured on voluntary registers. However, that is not the case for all because there is currently no legal requirement for parents to tell local authorities that they are home-educating. Without placing this proactive duty on parents, local authorities will have no assurance that they have identified all children not in school in their areas. As I have mentioned previously, the duty on parents to give information for registers is separate from but complementary to the annual reports that some parents submit to local authorities for the purposes of providing in-depth information about their child’s education.
In terms of parents giving detailed information on the child’s learning objectives and progress towards them, we want parents to continue to have flexibility to submit information in a way that works best both for them and for the elective home education officer. However, for the basic information, such as where the child is being educated and by whom, it is essential that there is a level of consistency in how this is submitted, collected and maintained. Parents of home-educated children in almost all other western countries must, as a minimum, provide details for a register. Children in England and Wales deserve the same level of assurance.
Amendment 278, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seeks to allow parents to provide the required information in their own words. I appreciate how that approach would afford some flexibility to parents, but there needs to be consistency. That is why we are seeking a delegated power for the Secretary of State to prescribe how local authorities maintain and keep their registers, including the use of a prescribed registration form. We will ensure that the form is accessible and simple for families to use.
Amendments 280, 282 and 285, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, seek to restrict the duty on parents to provide information for registers, and the ability of local authorities to request information, by imposing time limits. Amendment 280 would restrict local authorities from requesting required information to once a year and impose a “reasonable cause to suspect harm” threshold for further engagement. Amendment 282 would provide a similar threshold so that parents did not have to provide information more than once every 12 months, and Amendment 285 would go further by introducing a civil penalty of up to £5,000 for local authorities for asking for information too frequently.
Twelve months would be too long a period for a local authority to be unaware of a change to a registered child’s education provision or personal circumstances. Education concerns can arise at any time, and local authorities must retain the ability to act proportionately without needing to meet a safeguarding threshold. The threshold risks conflating safeguarding with the separate duty to ensure that a child is receiving a suitable education.
Amendments 283 and 284, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seek to extend parental response times from 15 to 30 days, as well as alternative deadlines that would potentially extend the timeframe to 12 months. We are keen that the length of time to respond to a request is proportionate and balances the needs of the family with the risk of a child being out of education for too long. That is why the Bill already allows a local authority the discretion to extend the timeframe for response to requests for information. That discretion could be used by local authorities if they make the request at a time when, for example, it is likely that a family may be on holiday.
Amendment 281, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seeks to require parents of registered children to provide updates to their local authority only when there has been a substantial change to their information in the register. We share the noble Lord’s ambition that the burden on parents to provide information is kept to a minimum, but we have to ask: what would count as a substantial change? For example, a child attending a setting for an extra half an hour a week could mean that the child was then attending that setting for 18 hours or more, potentially indicating that the setting was operating illegally. Even though it was just 30 minutes more, it would be right that the local authority knew about it as the child might be attending an illegal school.
I know that the noble Lord is also concerned that families may overcomply with their duty to update information. I thank him and other noble Lords for detailing these concerns to my officials in the July meeting. We are committed to ensuring that the registers work for everyone and will continue to take into consideration the feedback that we have heard from your Lordships, home educators and local authorities.
I turn to Amendment 287, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei. In a situation where parents have not fulfilled their duty to give information for registers, the amendment would require a local authority to seek approval from a magistrate or independent tribunal before taking further steps to gather the required information. Requiring local authorities to seek approval from magistrates or a tribunal before making reasonable inquiries about a child’s education is disproportionate at best. At worst, it risks children being in unsuitable education for long periods.
If a parent of an eligible child does not provide required information for a register, local authorities may continue informal inquiries. They also have the discretion to issue a preliminary notice for a school attendance order. This notice would require the parent to provide information on the suitability of the child’s education. These are proportionate responses to ensure a child is in receipt of suitable education.
Amendments 270, 380 and 382 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, seek to establish new review processes, including in situations where it is believed that a local authority is acting outside guidance or law. Local authorities are required to act in accordance with the law and should follow statutory guidance. If parents feel that a local authority has acted unreasonably or has not followed the law, there are several existing complaints processes in place, such as the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman and the judicial review process; in some cases the Secretary of State has powers to intervene.
The guidance updated as part of the children not in school measures will build on existing non-statutory guidance to ensure greater consistency around complaint processing. The new statutory guidance will also be consulted on prior to implementation. Data gathered by the department as a result of the children not in school registers will also allow us to draw comparisons between local authorities, identify any outliers and offer further support to these local authorities where appropriate. For these reasons, while we fully support engagement and transparency between local authorities and home-educating families, we do not believe that these amendments are the right way to achieve that aim.
Amendment 388 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, seeks to set up an annual review panel made up of home-educated children to advise on legislation impacting home education. The voice of the child is an important consideration when developing and implementing education and safeguarding policies. There have been previous consultations on changes to home education and young people were able to feed in their views, including a call for evidence in 2018, a consultation on the children not in school registers in 2019 and updates to the elective home education guidance in 2023. We would also welcome input from children as part of the future consultation on the children not in school statutory guidance as part of the implementation of the measures in this Bill.
For the reasons I have outlined, I hope that noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for that comprehensive set of answers, most of which amount to “wait and see”, which I shall be delighted to do. I would be very grateful if she would send me some information on what she thinks the scope of the Local Government Ombudsman is in this area. I had previously thought that they would not have jurisdiction, so I would be very grateful for the Department for Education’s understanding of what sort of questions they will feel able to resolve. Given that, I beg leave to withdraw.
Lord Lucas
“(6) The register of children not in school created under section 436B must be maintained solely by the local authority and must not be compiled into or made accessible through a national database.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment prohibits the creation of a centralised national database of home-educated children. It ensures that all data collected under section 436B remains under local control, in line with principles of data minimisation, family privacy, and proportionality.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, on this I think it would be best if I listened to the Minister’s responses. I beg to move.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, we are doing things in a slightly unconventional way today, but I agree that it is probably in order. These amendments come down to the use of information. I would hope that education policy follows information and knowledge. I am talking here about the groups of home educators who are doing it not because they like the idea but because they feel they have to because needs are not being met.
Earlier the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, spoke to an amendment specifying that you should find out certain things. Effectively, it is a reaction to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Wei. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has tabled rather subtler amendments about the use and storage of information. I hope the Government can give us at least an assurance that they will be collating information to make sure that those who are home-educating because they feel they have no choice have an answer going forward. This will be very important in the Government’s long-awaited—and, I hope, not just aspirational—changes to special educational needs. We are a large group. I would hope that they are collecting this information, making sure they do something positive with it, then telling us how they manage and distribute it afterwards. That is an equally valid point.
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for stepping in and moving the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei. I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to this short but thoughtful debate. I will not take it personally.
Fundamentally, the Government believe that the department’s understanding of children not in school can be improved through the measures in this Bill. Although we currently have collected and published aggregate data on home education and children missing education from local authorities since 2022, our understanding of this cohort of children can be enhanced further through improved quality of data collected by the department. This data will help identify trends among the cohort of children and help determine future policy needs. I assure noble Lords that any data handled by the department will be dealt with in accordance with data protection law and GDPR principles.
I turn to the substance. Amendment 271 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, would disallow data held on a local authority register from being stored on or shared with any other database that is held and managed by an organisation such as the Department for Education. We believe there is considerable value in the Secretary of State being able to receive data from local authority registers to improve oversight and understanding of this cohort on national and local levels. It will make it easier to identify when children have fallen through the gaps.
The information collected will be used for straightforward reasons, as outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Addington. Analysis to identify trends to feed into policy development, maintaining the integrity of the register and supporting safeguarding, education and welfare will allow us to identify why some children are moving out of mainstream education. The adoption of this amendment would therefore undermine our efforts, as outlined in the Bill.
Amendment 307 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would require certain public bodies that process data to create a transparency register. As we have heard, this would require those bodies to produce and maintain detailed records of all data processing including the form and publication of the record, retention period and disclosure circumstances. Transparency is an important principle, but current statutory accountability mechanisms and audit provisions already provide appropriate oversight. For example, as part of the department’s commitment to transparency, details of all organisations with which we have shared personal data are published quarterly on GOV.UK, alongside a short description of the project, which I hope the noble Lord considers to be an appropriate safeguard.
Amendment 308, also tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would, as written, make local authorities unable to share individual-level data with the Secretary of State unless it related to making a direction about a school attendance order. Other information concerning home-educated children or children missing education would be shared only at an aggregate level.
The data processed through children not in school registers is envisaged to have wider uses than just determining whether to issue a direction regarding a school attendance order. Allowing the Secretary of State access to individual-level data will provide for more robust data analysis and research and the join-up of functions aimed at promoting a child’s education or safeguarding. For example, the sharing of individual-level data will enable cross-referencing with departmental databases to locate children who have slipped under the radar due to relocation or changing educational provision.
The provision in the Bill for local authorities to share information from registers with Welsh Ministers could be used in a similar way to enable the location of children who have disappeared from registers due to moving from England to Wales or vice versa. This amendment would therefore undermine the purpose of the registration system, limiting the use of the data it could contain to statistics and exceptional cases concerning school attendance orders. For the reasons I have outlined, I kindly request that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, withdraw his amendment.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, that was a full and helpful answer, for which I am grateful to the Minister. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Lucas
“(6) The register established under section 436B shall expire two years after its creation unless the Secretary of State publishes evidence that it has demonstrably improved safeguarding outcomes.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment introduces a sunset clause to ensure the register remains under review and is retained only if shown to be effective in improving safeguarding outcomes.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, this group seeks to ensure that the most intrusive elements of the Bill, particularly the new register of children not in school and associated powers, are subjected to robust rolling checks and ultimately remain only if they demonstrably work. Amendment 274 from my noble friend Lord Wei would introduce a simple safeguard whereby the register will expire two years after its creation. This would make sure that the system does grow beyond its original purpose without a clear review.
The troubled families programme is an example of a programme that was sold as an early intervention, but which had very little effect and continued long after people knew it was not doing anything useful. Similarly, Prevent, introduced as a targeted strategy to counter radicalisation, was quietly broadened over time into schools, nurseries and local authorities. The UN special rapporteur described it as the systematic surveillance of Muslim families and their children under the guise of safeguarding. These systems do tend to drift, so having the ability to curtail the register, or at least a requirement to review it, would seem a sensible safeguard.
Amendment 330 calls for a two-year pilot scheme before the register is rolled out. We know from experience that local authorities are highly variable in their understanding, and we receive reports of wildly inconsistent demands. If we run this as a pilot, we will get a clear understanding of how the system is going to work before we have to try it nationally on a whole series of overstretched local authorities, some of which will be mid-reorganisation and not in a position to take on something new.
Amendment 320 proposes that every two years the Secretary of State must review the operation of Sections 436B to 436G and lay their findings before Parliament. If we are not going to actively renew these, as previously proposed, we should at least be sure that we review them.
Amendment 329 proposes an independent review board made up of home educators and education law experts. One reason why SEND tribunals overturn 95% of local authority decisions is that independent panels exist to scrutinise flawed local reasoning. If we do not have independent review, we will allow this new system, which we all wish to succeed, to decay unnoticed. The volume of complaints we have heard from families who say that their council simply does not understand autonomous learning, or that they keep applying a rigid “home at school” template and deem everything else unsuitable, demands some expert oversight. The document from Bristol shared with the Government would be an example of that. This board would ensure that decisions are not made solely by people who may have little real grasp of the varied pedagogies embraced by the home education community. Amendment 388, in another group, would give home-educated children a direct annual panel to advise the Secretary of State, as we have discussed.
These amendments are also about preserving the proper balance between state oversight and family privacy. We have heard families voice profound fears about how soft safeguarding powers have become heavy handed. In one county, a local authority insisted on seeing the family’s daughter alone to discuss why she was not in school, despite clear evidence of school-related trauma. The family reported that it felt more like an interrogation than support. Another council threated a school attendance order within weeks of deregistration, purely because it had no familiarity with unschooling approaches. My noble friend feels that these proposals would not harm the Bill but would strengthen it. I beg to move.
Lord Crisp (CB)
Rather foolishly in retrospect, I have added my name to several amendments proposed by Front-Bench Members of the parties opposite, and I therefore have to speak first on them, rather than just say that I agree. On this occasion, the noble Lord, Lord Storey, has proposed a new clause reviewing the impact on home-educators and the reduction of unnecessary reporting after the event. It also includes an assessment of the administrative and reporting requirements placed on local authorities as part of its proposed terms of reference.
Particularly in the light of this morning’s discussions, when we looked a great deal at the impact on home-educators but also on unprepared local authorities, and the expectation that local authorities should up their game considerably as a result of a number of measures in the Bill, it will be even more important to undertake a review such as this. The Minister has suggested that regulation will provide considerable flexibility. Some of us, including me, have been arguing that some of that flexibility needs to be put in the Bill and that there needs to be parameters around it. But even if there is flexibility, it will be interesting to see whether that actually works in practice. I am very much a supporter of the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Storey.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on that. I think it is an excellent amendment. To have the certainty of that review would be a great comfort. Home education legislation appears so rarely that it might be 10 years before some malfunctioning system was put right. To make it appear after two years would be a great comfort.
The Earl of Effingham (Con)
My Lords, as we have heard, Amendments 274, 276 and 425 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, seek to introduce different iterations of sunset clauses for the use of children not in school registers. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Wei, when he reads Hansard, will understand it would be relatively challenging for His Majesty’s loyal Opposition to support such an approach, as our long-standing policy has been to introduce these registers.
We do, however, see merit in Amendment 331 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which seeks a review of reporting requirements and the impact on home educators. It is vital that we achieve workable and realistic reporting requirements as this Bill passes through your Lordships’ House in line with Amendment 260 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, debated earlier, which we very much hope will be accepted by His Majesty’s Government and which aims to avoid adding additional information requirements for the children not in school register. We look forward to the feedback from the Minister.
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
My Lords, this has been a useful and considered debate. I thank noble Lords for their participation. Local authorities have existing duties under the Education Act 1996 to identify children in their area who are not registered at school and not receiving a suitable education and to intervene in such cases. The ability of local authorities to fulfil these duties has been undermined by there not being an obligation on parents to inform the local authority that they are home-educating. Statutory children not in school registers, along with duties on parents and out-of-school education providers to provide information, will support local authorities to identify those children not receiving a suitable education and take action to address this.
On Amendments 274, 276 and 320, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, and moved by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, these amendments would require the Secretary of State to publish evidence on the impact and operation of children not in school registers within two years of their creation in order for them to remain in place. In relation to Amendment 320, of course we will periodically evaluate the impact of the registers on local authorities and parents, following their implementation, and bring forward any necessary adjustments to your Lordships’ House as appropriate. In response to Amendments 274 and 276, the central objective of the registers is to support local authorities to identify children not in school in their area who are not receiving a suitable education. This is not just a tool for safeguarding. We therefore do not agree with Amendments 274 and 276, which suggest that solely looking at safeguarding outcomes would be an accurate measure of the register’s success.
On Amendment 329, also tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, which would require the Secretary of State to establish a board of home educators and educational experts to evaluate the impact of the registers, this amendment is unnecessary as we already intend to evaluate the impact of the registers. We have established a forum of home educators and other key stakeholders and are engaging with them on the registers. We will continue engagement post-implementation to evaluate the impact of the registers.
Amendment 330, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, would require that the Secretary of State delay the national implementation of children not in school registers until a two-year pilot scheme has been completed. A pilot scheme before implementation is unnecessary. The Bill already provides for adjustments to be made to the operation of registers where needed, including via regulations.
Amendment 331, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, would require the Secretary of State to review the impact of children not in school registers on parents and local authorities within six months of the Bill becoming law, and report the findings to Parliament. While we agree on the need for regular and transparent monitoring of the registers, six months is too soon to gather meaningful insights. We will begin analysing data from local authorities one year after the registers come into force and engage with parents and out-of-school education providers at appropriate intervals. This monitoring will demonstrate whether adjustments need to be made. Where this is the case, we will bring it to your Lordships’ House in the usual way.
Finally, Amendment 425, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, seeks to ensure that all laws concerning home education are reviewed and will automatically expire after five years unless reapproved by Parliament following a public consultation. We believe this would not be the most efficient use of parliamentary time and would only create uncertainty. Of course the impact of any legislation should be monitored and reviewed regularly. However, the timelines for evaluation should be tailored for each Act, statutory instrument and part of the Bill.
Therefore, for the reasons I have outlined, I kindly ask noble Lords not to press their amendments.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful for those responses. I am delighted to hear that the forum of home educators is to continue. Will the Government consider producing an occasional communiqué from that forum? I would not expect complete openness but something so that we can all know what is going on. The noble Baroness said she will start reviewing one year after. That seems a sensible timeline to me, but will she also commit to a baseline so that we know where they have started from and not just where they are in a year’s time? Might she also make a slightly firmer commitment to report to Parliament on how it is going?
Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)
I am happy to commit to write to the noble Lord and reflect on what he has said.
Lord Lucas
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment would enable discussion about new inserted section 436E.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, this is an area where we have had substantial conversations with the Government so, again, I would prefer to start by listening to the Minister. I beg to move.
Lord Crisp (CB)
My Lords, Amendment 288A is in my name. In a way, it is the counterpart to the amendment we debated this morning under which parents would have to provide information about providers. This is about the information that the providers need to provide. There are two points in it. I have used the same format as the earlier amendment to say
“a person or organisation is providing regular out-of-school education to a child not registered in school, for more than 10 hours in a week”
and used the words
“is not primarily social or recreational”
and
“takes place without any parent of the child being”
there. I will dwell for a moment on those two points: “regular” and “not primarily social or recreational”.
The point about “regular”, as we have touched on but not fully discussed, is that this should not apply to one-off or occasional items, some of which will come up at short notice and cannot therefore be included in the register because the parents did not know about them in time to give notice. It would be extremely useful to have this in the Bill and not just in guidance. As I argued earlier, we need some parameters around what will come out in regulation. The word “regular” is not a particularly difficult one for the Government to include and would clarify that this refers only to people who are providing regular activities—maybe a definition of regular would be needed.
The other point on which I want to dwell a little more is saying that these activities are “not primarily social or recreational”. The Minister will correct me, but I think that at some point she said that it was not expected that activities that are not educational should be included in the register. The trouble is that a lot of activities—such as rugby training or swimming lessons, where they are carried out by a school—are educational, or could be, and, for example, the Girl Guides is an educational charity. It would be easy enough to label these organisations and activities as educational, which is why I am trying to turn it the other way up and say that activities that should not be registered are those which are primarily social or recreational. That is a fairly simple judgment to make and it would allay quite a lot of fears, including, perhaps, the example I used this morning—although it may be regarded as more educational than social and recreational—of the Wildlife Trusts. It has already stood down its activities because of concerns about the data that it will have to provide on all the children that use its services as part of its home education programme, which has been going on for some time.
In looking at this, I ask the Minister to reflect a bit more on those two descriptions: “regular” and “not primarily social or recreational”, as opposed to the “not educational” aspect.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
I was listening. I would just like to thank the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, for speaking on my behalf so eloquently. I hope that he supports the rest of my amendments as well.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for her comprehensive reply and I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Nash (Con)
My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 306 in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran. Given that this country has the joint lightest-touch approach in Europe in relation to the oversight of home education, I would have thought this is a no-brainer to enable us to understand more about the performance of these children. I also hope that those in the home education lobby will welcome and support the amendment, as it would give them the opportunity to show their paces.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I have Amendment 317 in this group, which would rather expand the range of reporting to other groups of children who are under the care of the state and not in a specific school. It is really important for the governance of education in this country that we understand how all our children are performing. I would expect a local authority to take an interest in the examinations of home-educated children and these other groups of children in Amendment 317 in their local area. I would expect the Department for Education also to be interested, not for year-to-year panicking but in a determination to understand what the difficulties and differences are and how, over time, to drive the results up. The basic starting point of that is to get the data out.
Particularly if you are reporting at a national level, you are not reporting anything that has any element of personal or identifiable data to it, but you are putting a bit of data down on the table to draw people’s attention to what the state of affairs is. That is a very important part of the way in which the state should have responsibility for what it is providing to our children.
Equally, I agree with those who are saying, particularly as we are bringing home education within the scope of the state so much more, that we should take responsibility for making sure that home-educated children find it easy to take crucial examinations. At the moment, it is extraordinarily difficult. They may have to travel hundreds of miles to find an examination centre and pay thousands of pounds to have access to an exam. The Prime Minister is borrowing a flat so that his child may have a quiet environment in which to study for his examinations, so one would hope that the Government realise that making it easy to take exams within a reasonable distance from home and without undue stress on the family’s finances is an objective we should have—particularly when, as my noble friend says, home-educated children are saving us so much money.
Lord Crisp (CB)
My Lords, I support the proposal on GCSE results from the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. It is very important, for the reasons she suggests. I have seen some interesting results from home-educated children, which show them performing well in these areas. The results would be interesting to see and may improve the score, as it were, for the country as a whole.
Secondly, I entirely support the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I will say nothing more except that this is perhaps the biggest single practical obstacle in the current regime that home-educating parents have reported to me. I will leave it to the noble Lord to press that case.
Lord Lucas (Con)
I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her response to Amendment 317. I understand her reluctance to publish information as if home educators were a school, but I urge her to think how useful it would be to have that information for understanding what is happening in home education.
It is one of the long-running criticisms of home education that there is no information as to how these children are doing—you say they are doing well, but you cannot show me any information as to that. It would be really useful in understanding, as the noble Baroness has said, whether an internationally liberal approach to home education is justified. Even if it is only for the Government’s own policy formation, I very much hope they will make sure that they can put together the sort of information I have detailed in this amendment, so that they can understand the effects of policies as they are at the moment.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, on behalf of all noble Lords who have spoken in this short debate, I thank the Minister for her response. I absolutely support the sentiment just expressed by my noble friend Lord Lucas about the importance of understanding the outcomes for children who are home-educated.
In relation to my Amendment 306, the reasons that the Minister gave for not aggregating and publishing, or even aggregating and not publishing, their GCSE results was—as I wrote down—that, first, it was hard to do and, secondly, it would not produce the results that we expect. It feels curious to me that someone could not put a box on the form—that a child could tick, to say that they were home-educated—that could be aggregated.
On the expected results, the whole point, or part of the point, was to understand how many home-educated children were taking public exams and how many were not. I think that would be a useful bit of information. So I do not accept the argument that it would not produce the results that we expect; we do not have an expectation because we do not know what they are. More widely, when there were very small numbers of children who were home-educated, it was perhaps—
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My amendments so far have tried not to put further administrative burdens on families who home-school. It can be vast, complicated and very difficult for them to achieve. However, my Amendment 315 follows on very nicely from the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, because, at the moment, there are huge financial pressures on local councils. We know that local authorities are struggling. I am told that the special educational needs and disabilities system is creaking at the seams—some people are using the words “breaking point”. So the premise that local authorities are best placed to judge the needs of any child, especially over and above their own families, is perhaps foolish, because local authorities vary enormously in expertise and understanding of alternative education approaches.
Officers who visit families might be very unfamiliar with the sort of experience they see. They may be unfamiliar with home education and special educational needs, and they may not know much about child development. They might make subjective and perhaps inconsistent judgments about the family they are seeing and might penalise families who are supplying excellent education simply because it does not look like “school”.
It is quite important that we understand that local authorities have to exercise extremely difficult judgment. Putting a further burden on families is really unwise.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I very much support what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. This is really the nub of things—how we can make support work.
I also support what the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has just said. It is absolutely clear that some local authorities take any opportunity to tip home-educating parents into getting their children back into school. We want to be encouraging parents, at all times, to approach local authorities to say that they need some help—that is a perfectly ordinary thing to do. If you as a solicitor are sued by someone else, the first thing you would do is find another solicitor. Even if you are an expert, you go and ask for help. It should be regarded as ordinary. No one should take on something such as home education without looking all the possible sources of advice, because there will always be someone who has insights that go beyond your knowledge. Protecting against the misuse of that approach is important to making sure that we have a strong relationship between local authorities and parents.
My Amendment 311 would require local authorities to explicitly take account of the needs of the child and the educational preference of the parents. That is a very important part of the attitude; the local authority should understand the parents and work with them, not try to impose its own formula.
I will also speak to a number of amendments in this group tabled by my noble friend Lord Wei. Amendments 390, 401, 402, 407, 419 and 422 address the financial asymmetry borne by home-educating families. Every child educated at home saves the state around £7,500 a year. However, the entire burden of curriculum costs, exam fees, tutoring and lost parental income falls on the families themselves. Amendment 390 would introduce tax relief for education expenses, while Amendment 401 would grant rebates when families home-educate due to a lack of suitable school places.
Amendment 402 would adjust council tax to reflect that home-educating households are not drawing on local school budgets. Amendments 407 and 419 explore models for direct funding, whether through per-pupil allocations for individual families or co-operatives, which would bring a measure of parity to a system that otherwise risks confining high-quality home education to the affluent.
Amendment 422 recognises another imbalance: where the state compels parents to spend hours compiling reports or attending overnight meetings while simultaneously providing the labour of teaching, they should not do so entirely unpaid. Compensating that time, at least to the level of the minimum wage, is not only fair but respects the immense commitment that parents undertake on society’s behalf.
Amendment 396 presses the Government to fund independent research into home education practice. It is striking how much policy in this area proceeds on assumption and anecdote rather than robust data. What does successful autonomous learning look like across different family contexts? How do educational outcomes compare when we look beyond narrow test metrics to include well-being, creativity and lifelong resilience?
Speaking with my own voice now, that is something that I would very much support. As the Minister said, it is difficult to get a grip on how education is doing just from incomplete exam statistics. Doing some proper research would not only benefit the Government and their policies but enable the home education community to become a self-improving community and to do better by their own children, which is a huge motivation for them.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I am afraid that my noble friend Lady Garden was beaten by the rapid progress that has been made by recent standards, so I shall just draw the House’s attention to her amendment, which says that if someone does not have English as a first language, they should receive some help in understanding the requirements, and that that should be appropriate to them when they are dealing with this field. It is not a big thing, but it is important to get it and the Government’s response on the record.
Looking down this very eclectic list of amendments, I come to one from the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, about sports education, and I wonder if there is some way of linking in there. One of our challenges is how much we should help people with sporting education. Physical fitness is an important part of that; it is a great way of asserting degrees of confidence in certain groups of people, and we could put the arts down here as well. Are the Government looking at ways in which certain aspects that cannot be provided in a small setting might be done by the education establishment? Is any thought going into this? We have sport on the list, and we could easily put something like the performing arts down too.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful for the Minister’s response to my amendments, but may I pick up briefly the question of exam centres for home-educated children? The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, was kind enough in early 2024 to allow me to start exploring what was required to reverse the trend that we have seen for many years of a reduction in availability of exam centres. This was rudely interrupted in July—sadly, for us—but it was clear to me that there was no lack of good will.
We have a collection of about half a dozen organisations, each of which has sets of individual requirements and ways of looking at things that do not quite mesh and that make it difficult for a school to continue the provision. This includes the Equalities and Human Rights Commission. One of the great difficulties is that, if you allow any outside candidate, you have to admit all outside candidates, and if any of them have special needs and require particular provision in separate rooms and you do not have that, you do not know where to provide it and you do not have the budget for the staffing, you just say, “We cannot do this because we cannot handle the exceptional circumstances”. It is a question of getting people together and saying, “We, the Government, have an objective: we want home-educated children to have reasonable access to exam centres. Please sit down together, sort out your differences and give us the answer”. And they would, because it is perfectly possible; it just requires a series of small compromises.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I am not convinced that the Equality and Human Rights Commission is the reason why there are difficulties in the way that the noble Lord outlined, but I take his point that we could make progress on this were there to be some brokering of arrangements. I would be willing to give further consideration to information about access to examinations and how to overcome some of the issues.
Lord Crisp (CB)
My Lords, I was going to speak to Amendment 365, which is about appeals against a local authority’s decision not to revoke an attendance order. However, in light of the discussion we had about appeals in an earlier session in July, I had intended to withdraw this amendment, so I will not speak to it.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I have several amendments in this group. My noble friend Lord Wei is concerned that we are not getting the balance right between the state and family, and I agree with him. It is the parents who have the primary responsibility for upbringing and the best interests of their child, and intervention by the state should be justified only in exceptional circumstances and must be proportionate. My noble friend feels that Clause 32, as drafted, risks tipping that balance the wrong way. Families already tell us that school attendance orders cause stress, anxiety and a sense of powerlessness. One parent said they were forced to send their child to school against her will, where her needs were not going to be met. They said, “We felt trapped, unheard, threatened and fearful for our daughter’s safety”. Another described a child with severe anxiety and seizures who has thrived only when withdrawn from school.
For many, home education is not elective but a response to systemic failures. I am sure the Government are aware of that, and what a mess the SEND system is at the moment. Many of the parents who home educate are doing so in response to a less than ideal system. I know we tried to improve the system, and that this Government are going to have another go; it is not easy. We must expect a continued flow of parents who choose to look after their own child because the state is not doing a good enough job, and be humble enough to recognise that that deserves our support and not continual harassment.
Amendment 334 would change the duty on local authorities to serve a preliminary notice from “must” to “may”. In the context of all the other discretions that local authorities have, it would be sensible to allow them to see that issuing a notice in a particular set of circumstances would do more harm than good. It would allow them to focus on the child’s welfare and not force them down a rigid path.
Amendment 335 would require that all relevant support be offered before issuing such a notice. This goes back to an earlier amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. The first reaction of the local authority ought to be to ask if support is possible—can it help make this succeed?—as well as looking at whether school is a better option. It ought to come at this with support; families should not be threatened with orders without help being tried. The Square Peg campaign, supported by over 130 organisations, has called for a “support first” duty. One parent told us, “We asked for counselling and support, but what we got was a school attendance order. It only made my child’s anxiety worse”.
Amendment 338 asks in what circumstances a “best interest” test will be applied. Amendments 339 and 340 ask why just the existence of a Section 47 investigation is the trigger, rather than a consideration of whether that investigation has any relevance. Many Section 47 investigations are entirely unconnected to the suitability of a family for home education.
Amendment 341 looks at the question of how the local authority is in a position to judge best interests. What resources has the local authority got to enable it to do this? Why should the decision as to what a child’s best interests are be so hard for a parent to challenge? If it is not to be hard to challenge, what should the routes be?
Amendments 343, 344 and 345 are all concerned with the threat of a school attendance order not being a penalty for a minor infraction. I gather that the Government intend to put that in guidance, but it is important that parents understand that they are being judged by reasonable standards and are allowed to make ordinary mistakes—that they are walking a path and not a precipice.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
There are quite a lot of tweaks in this section, which suggests that it is perhaps not quite right and that it needs to be rewritten in some ways.
We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Storey, just now that school is a very safe place, but I am sure he is well aware that school is not a safe place for everybody. Young people get bullied and it can be extremely distressing for some children, specifically if they have prior trauma, special educational needs or unmet needs, or have never attended school. There are all sorts of people for whom school is not the best and safest environment. I am trying to protect families who have already indicated that school is not meeting their child’s needs.
I hope we understand that local authorities sometimes judge in a completely erroneous way what families are doing with home education. We have discussed this, but I think Clause 32 is perhaps not fit for purpose.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
To continue where the noble Baroness finished, a child receiving unsuitable education for as little as a day could be detrimental for their educational development. The measures in the Bill seek to make this process more efficient, minimising the time in which a child may be receiving unsuitable education.
We have heard many speeches that highlight the rights of parents to educate their children how they wish. Parental choice is important, but it is crucial to remember that with rights come responsibilities. All children have a right to a suitable education, and parents have a responsibility to secure that education for their children. Where parents fail in this responsibility, there must be a consequence for the parent and a swift route to suitable education for the child.
The amendments in this group are focused on the school attendance order process. I turn first to address the opposition from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, to Clause 32 standing part of the Bill. We believe that Clause 32 is essential. Without it, local authorities would have no power to act when parents refuse to comply with the children not in school registration duties, or where a child is not receiving a suitable education. Clause 32 allows local authorities to require school attendance where a child is subject to child protection investigations or plans and where school is deemed to be in the child’s best interests. This is a vital safeguard for some of our most vulnerable children.
As part of school attendance order proceedings, local authorities will be empowered to request to visit the child inside their home, so that they can fully consider the environment in which home education is being provided. Parents have the right to refuse the local authority’s request. If access is not given, this will be a relevant factor for the local authority to consider when deciding whether to serve an order.
The clause strengthens the current system by introducing timelines to make enforcement more efficient and to reduce prolonged periods in unsuitable education. It allows parents convicted of breaching a school attendance order to be prosecuted again if they continue to breach it, without requiring local authorities to restart the enforcement process. Aligning school attendance order fines with attendance fines will further incentivise parents to ensure children are registered at, and continue to be registered at, the named school.
I turn to Amendment 333A, tabled by my noble friend Lord Hacking, and Amendment 334, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. Amendment 334 seeks to make the issuing of a preliminary notice when a child is not receiving suitable education, or when home education is not in the best interests of an eligible child, a discretionary act for local authorities. I will not respond to Amendment 333A, as I had intended to, given what my noble friend said. Making the process discretionary would create inconsistency. A mandatory preliminary notice ensures that there is definitive action when a local authority has reasons to believe that home education is not suitable for, or not in the best interests of, an eligible child.
Amendment 335, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would require support to be offered before a preliminary notice could be issued. In cases where concerns about the suitability of education are serious or urgent, local authorities must be able to act without delay. Making support a legal precondition could inadvertently shield unsuitable provision from scrutiny. However, I appreciate that the noble Lord is concerned that a formal notice can be daunting for a parent to receive. We will consider what further guidance can be issued to parents and local authorities as part of the implementation of these measures to ensure that they can engage confidently with the process.
Amendments 338 and 341, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seek to prevent local authorities considering whether it would be in an eligible child’s best interests for them to receive education by regular school attendance as part of the preliminary notice for school attendance orders. It is important for me to explain the reasoning behind the best interests test in this context. Currently, local authorities have no recourse to require a child on a child protection plan or inquiry to attend school unless they can identify that the child is receiving unsuitable education. The best interests test requires local authorities to take action when they identify children subject to child protection inquiries or plans whose interests would be best served by regularly attending school, regardless of whether the education provided at home is considered suitable. Statutory guidance, Working Together to Safeguard Children, provides clarity on what making best interests decisions means and will be further updated as part of the implementation of these measures.
Amendments 339 and 340, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seek to remove or limit the ability of the local authority to issue a preliminary notice when a child is subject to an active Section 47 child protection inquiry. Local authorities will be able to issue a preliminary notice under the relevant subsection only if it appears to them that the child subject to the Section 47 inquiry is not regularly attending school and that it would be in that child’s best interests to do so. A preliminary notice will not automatically result in a school attendance order.
It is also important to remember that such inquiries take place because Section 47 of the Children Act 1989 puts a duty on local authorities to make inquiries where it considers that a child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm. These formal inquiries are not initiated lightly; their use signals serious concerns about a child’s welfare. Section 47 inquiries should not be initiated based purely on the fact that a parent is home-educating, as we are clear that home education is not in itself an inherent safeguarding risk. It is vital that local authorities have the means to gather information on the circumstances of at-risk children and determine whether their interests would be better served by regularly attending school.
Amendments 342 and 346, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, and Amendments 336, 337, 343, 344, 345 and 347, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seek to remove the ability of local authorities to issue a preliminary notice when a parent has not provided information, or has provided incorrect information, for a children not in school register. This power is discretionary, and local authorities should not normally issue a preliminary notice in response to a genuine error by a parent but instead continue informal inquiries. However, without a consequence on parents for not providing the required information, the duty on them to provide information would be, in effect, redundant. This duty on parents is necessary to ensure that local authorities have the required information to ensure that education is suitable and safe. Local authorities must act promptly once it appears that action should be taken so there is no delay in providing appropriate support to children who need it. The timeframes in the school attendance order process strike the right balance between urgency and operational practicality. Removing them could lead to inconsistent and slower responses across different authorities, resulting in children potentially spending more time in unsuitable education.
I recognise that the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, does not seek to press his Amendment 365. It would perhaps be best for me to deal with the set of amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wei—which concern penalties for parents in a range of circumstances—by writing to noble Lords with some assurances about each of the amendments, rather than going through them all in this debate.
Finally, I address the stand part notice from the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, which seeks to remove Clause 35 from the Bill. Clause 35 introduces Schedule 2, which makes consequential amendments to existing legislation so that the new school attendance order process for local authorities in England and Wales is reflected in the Children Act 1989, the Education Act 1996 and other relevant legislation. The clause is necessary to ensure proper functioning of the process, and I urge that it stands part of the Bill.
For the reasons I have outlined, I hope that noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments, and I urge that Clauses 32 and 35 stand part of the Bill.
Lord Lucas (Con)
I am grateful, as ever, for the Minister’s responses, but I would be additionally grateful if she could write to me, between now and Report, to give me a much clearer idea of what the parental experience will be. For example, when faced with a best interests determination by a local authority that the parents consider to be seriously damaging to their child, how do they appeal it? What is the process for taking that through? Assuming that the local authority has it wrong, what is the full process that results in the parents being able to help the local authority understand the reality of their child’s circumstances and where their best interests really lie. With all the help that has been given, I still fail to get a grip on what that process will be and will feel like, and I would love to share that with home educators.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
Is the noble Lord clear that the best interests requirement relates to cases where children are subject to child protection inquiries or plans?
Lord Lucas (Con)
Yes. It is only in about half of Section 47 where one would judge that that is a real problem. I understand and accept what the Government are saying about the need not to find that we are not covering children whom we need to cover, and that means that there are children going through the system for whom the dangers are not absolute, but if, for example, the child has deep school anxiety, or has really been bullied in the school, or the school has taken against them for some other reason and they have a horrid experience, and the local authority says, “Go back in”, what is the experience of the parent in appealing that? I do not have the grip on the details of the system that I would like.
Lord Lucas
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to facilitate debate of school attendance orders
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, this is another group that would be best served by my listening to what the Minister has to say: there are a lot of detailed bits and pieces in here. I would like to give the Minister comfort that, where I have put down an amendment such as Amendment 348 and the Member’s explanatory statement says
“to facilitate debate of school attendance orders”,
that is what I mean—I do not mean to wipe them out of the Bill. Sometimes her replies sound as if the civil servants regard me as Attila the Hun bearing down on them. No, it is just because of earlier comments made from the Bench opposite that they would like to have an amendment to debate and to stick to that amendment, so I have tabled amendments to enable us to debate, with no other malevolent intention towards the Bill. I beg to move.
Lord Hacking (Lab)
My Lords, since I joined the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, in Amendment 348, I feel I should stand in repentance again, because this is a bad case of overreach and I regret it.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
Right. I will turn then to Amendments 368, tabled by my noble friend Lady Whitaker, and Amendment 369, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei. These amendments seek to amend the maximum fine for a breach of a school attendance order. I understand that the prospect of fines is worrying for parents. However, a parent runs the risk of a fine only if they breach the order. The consequence of breaching a school attendance order must be brought in line with the offence of unauthorised school absences. This removes the perverse incentive for a parent to remove their child from school under the guise of home education to avoid higher school attendance fines.
Amendment 371, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would require the court to consider the best interests of the child when sentencing a parent for breaching a school attendance order. Courts in England and Wales must already consider the impact on the child when determining sentences, as per Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
There is a series of amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, that have not been addressed in the debate. As I did previously, I will write to noble Lords responding to those amendments. I hope that, given the assurances that I have provided, the noble Lord will withdraw his amendment, and other noble Lords will not move theirs.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, that was a thoroughly satisfactory set of answers. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, again, this is a group of amendments on which I would largely prefer to wait for the Minister’s reply. However, I have a particular interest in where the Government find themselves when it comes to visiting children at home, how that should be done and the circumstances in which it need not be done. A lot of what we have been discussing is about producing a system, a set of relationships between home educators and the local authority, meaning that most children get seen anyway in the course of activities in which the local authority is involved—by professionals who are qualified to make judgments on how the child is flourishing and to flag if there seems to be a problem. I am confident that, in a well-run local authority, the need to visit at home should be much reduced. None the less, there will be circumstances where this seems to be necessary, and it always produces conflict.
I am interested in the Government’s thoughts on how they will approach this. How will a well-run local authority deal with circumstances when it feels that it needs to see the child? How will a parent who feels that their child will react extremely badly to this intrusion have their voice heard? I am also interested in the potential role of third parties, such as the family doctor —for those who still have one—to mediate in that process.
For the rest of the amendments in this group that I am responsible for, I look forward to the Minister’s reply. I beg to move.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I will weigh in just on Amendment 417. Home-educating families having a flexible school term calendar will mean they benefit financially for holidays because, as we know, during school holidays, holidays shoot up in price. Would it not be nice if all schools had the luxury of cheap holidays for their children? Maybe the Government could look at the eminently sensible suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Wei, on holidays, and see whether in some way holiday companies could be equitable with all school families and not hike up their prices during the holiday period.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, the voice of the child is key in creating a supportive, responsive and effective safeguarding and educational environment. I believe that the best way for a local authority to ensure that a child’s education is both suitable and safe is to meet with the child in the child’s home. We want to ensure that local authorities are able to capture and appropriately consider the views of children, so advice on how to conduct these visits sensitively, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, rightly suggested is required, will be a key focus of our statutory guidance.
In terms of the ask on parents, we have aimed for this to be proportionate and at the right intervals. The purpose is to minimise the duration any child is in receipt of unsuitable education. The compulsory information is what is required for a local authority to undertake existing responsibilities related to education suitability and safeguarding. It is not intended to be disruptive to the parents, who will still be able to focus on providing a suitable education for their child.
The amendments in this group seek to make changes to the ability of a local authority to request to visit the home and to limit the potential impact on home-educating families. They also seek to make provision concerning how home educators may engage with and would like to be treated by national and local government.
I am going to suggest that the amendments brought by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, beginning with Amendment 406, might be suitable for me to write to noble Lords about. Several of them fall within the category defined by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, as being at the “speculative end” of the spectrum. I hope I would be able to either reassure noble Lords or identify why they would not be suitable to be carried forward.
The noble Lord, Lord Storey, makes a broader point with respect to Amendment 417 about holidays, and I am sure this is something that we cannot solve here this evening, but I recognise the concerns that parents have.
I will deal with the amendments put forward by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. Amendment 353 seeks to remove the local authority’s power to request to visit a child at home to determine whether a school attendance order should be served. I hope I have already identified the approach that we will expect local authorities to take with respect to visits. This ability to request to visit the child at home allows the local authority to see the environment in which home education is being provided and to meet the child. Without this, local authorities may not be able to form a comprehensive view of whether the home environment is conducive to the child’s education. Parents will be able to refuse such a request, but, if they do, the local authority must consider this refusal to be a relevant factor when determining whether to issue a school attendance order.
Amendments 354 and 355 would require a local authority to obtain a court order to request to visit a child at home and to consider a child’s reaction to persons in authority when determining whether to serve a school attendance order. A court order would be unnecessary as the local authority would only be making a request, which parents have a right to refuse. On the point about sensitivity, though, I can assure noble Lords that our statutory guidance will provide further steers to help local authorities sensitively conduct visits, and we will consider whether additional support is needed, such as training for local authority staff.
I hope that I have assured noble Lords that the ability to request a visit is an important opportunity for the local authority, but that these visits will be carried out sensitively, and, if necessary, we will provide further statutory guidance on how that should happen. I will respond to the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Wei, in writing to noble Lords.
Lord Lucas (Con)
I am grateful for the Minister’s response to my amendments. I would be grateful for a brief response to the amendments put down by my noble friend Lord Wei—just a confirmation, I suspect, when it comes to Amendment 387, of the recognition that there is a lot to say about the methodology of home education and the curriculum, and similarly, on Amendment 393, confirmation that the timing of educational progress, which should in principle be respected, can form part of a suitable education.
I have met a very capable young Oxford undergraduate who did not begin to write until they were 13. Having learned entirely through other methods and found writing extremely difficult, he was able to move on to a keyboard aged 13 and get himself eventually to Oxford. The generality, which is picked up in my noble friend’s amendment, of not beginning formal education until seven is very common on the continent. There are structures which do not impose reading, writing and arithmetic before that age and which succeed on a national level.
The understanding that the Government recognise that there are other routes to educational success, and that this is something that local authorities do not understand, is of general interest, rather more so than some of my noble friend’s more focused amendments.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
On those points, I hope I can reassure the noble Lord that the law is already clear. We have discussed during the course of the debate that parents have the right to educate their children using the methods, approaches and content they think best, provided that the education being received is suitable and safe. The point, though, is that local authorities must be able to assess that education to establish whether or not it is. The Bill does not give local authorities any additional powers to regulate the content of home education.
On the point about the nature of education, we believe that a child must be provided with a suitable education from the age of five. Of course, the point about home education is that it would be up to parents, assuming that that education is suitable, to determine what sort of education was being provided to a child of five.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I have just confirmed that, and we have talked about it at various different times with respect to home education. I completely accept that one of the reasons why parents want to home-educate is to provide different and more flexible approaches to the way in which children learn. The most appropriate methods for learning and teaching will have to be at the heart of not just the Government’s reforms to special educational needs and disabilities but the very hard work that teachers and schools do for those children.
Lord Storey (LD)
I think I have already spoken on Amendments 359A and 366A, albeit in the wrong grouping, so I will leave it there, except to ask the Minister if the letters he writes to the noble Lord, Lord Wei, will be available in the Library for all of us to see.
Lord Lucas (Con)
In the spirit of previous groups, I would very much like to listen to the Minister’s replies.
Lord Lucas
“Protection of home education rights during emergency or authoritarian rule(1) In the event of a national emergency or authoritarian governance, the courts shall have the final authority to safeguard the right to home educate in accordance with this Act.(2) Authoritarian governance shall be defined as any period during which emergency regulations or executive actions suspend, limit, or derogate from rights protected under the Human Rights Act 1998 or the European Convention on Human Rights.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to protect the legal right to home educate in exceptional national circumstances by placing judicial oversight above executive restrictions.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I apologise that my final remarks will be slightly negative in tone, but I cannot support this amendment. It is not appropriate to have such a measure in primary legislation. I do not agree with my noble friend’s definition of authoritarian rule, nor with his prioritisation, if we were in a time of genuine national emergency.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Lucas Excerpts(1 month ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Lucas
“(6A) A child is not required to be registered under this section if the parent has submitted a portfolio annually demonstrating suitable education and learning progress.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment allows an educational portfolio as an alternative to registration, offering a less intrusive way for parents to demonstrate their child is receiving suitable education.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I will move Amendment 231 on behalf of my noble friend Lord Wei, who regrets that he is not able to be here today, as he has to attend a close family member’s wedding.
The day looks as if it will be devoted to elective home education and, owing to my imminent defenestration and general crumbling health, I am in a position to say—since I shall be disengaging from this arena after 15 years in it—that I have found the home education community a total delight to work with. It is a collection of extraordinary people, and I find it very easy to understand how the Government do not find them easy to work with. I very much hope that, in the course of the Bill, we will help lay the foundations for a good, strong relationship.
I thank very much the Minister and her civil servants for all the time and effort they took over the Recess to work through the amendments in this section and to look at how we might gain a better understanding of them and share that with the home education community. I look forward to the continuance of that progress through Report. My approach today will be to be very concise where I can—I will await what the Minister says about individual amendments and respond to that. So much has passed between us and civil servants that rehearsing my amendments as if that had not happened would seem futile.
A large number of the amendments arise from uncertainty over the Government’s intentions, so it would be good to have something clear and unequivocal from the Minister that supports the rights of responsibilities of home educators; that celebrates the contribution they make both to the state—they save the state a great deal of money—and to the education of their children; and that requires local authorities to be supportive.
The role of local authorities is crucial here; it is clear that the role they play is vital. There are many instances where people are set on home educating for the wrong reasons or where home educating goes wrong. Looking after the children in those circumstances is hugely important. However, if the relationship between local authorities and home educators is to work, it must be based on trust and mutual appreciation. If you can get that to work, as many local authorities do, you get a strong information flow into the local authority on what is happening; you get really good support for the children involved; and it is much easier for a local authority to focus its efforts on the things that are going wrong.
As it is written—obviously, there is a lot to come in regulation—the Bill gives local authorities huge powers. Just a comma out of place in some detail on the education that you provide for your child and the local authority can tip your child back into school. That is the way it is written. I understand that that is not how it will work in practice, but it has raised considerable concerns in the home education community. Also, in talking to local authorities, I have found that their impression is that the Government’s wish is that they be much stricter on home education and push children back into school wherever possible. These are misapprehensions, I think, but I very much look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say on them.
Local authorities are thoroughly oversubscribed and financially stressed by adult social care and special needs. The home education department is usually small. Sometimes people have been pitched into it for the first time and are having to learn their way through it. Sometimes it contains people of supreme intolerance. Portsmouth gets mentioned frequently, but I know that the Minister has had shared with her a letter to home educators from Bristol Council, which shows, I think, a deep lack of understanding of how the relationship between local authorities and home educators should work. We need to come out of this Bill clear ways in which the Department for Education can steer local authorities, help them improve their practices and provide a method of recourse for parents who feel that they are being badly done by by their local authority. I also hope to see a way of celebrating the good practices that go unnoticed; too often, those local authorities that are really doing their job well go unnoticed.
I come now to the amendments in this group. We are looking at a request for information, which is very loosely described and might be interpreted at a really detailed level. What is the child doing for each five minutes of the day? With whom are they interacting? Home education can be a very varied, loose way of educating a child. It is often child-led, even if there is a lot of parental direction in there, and follows no clear, predetermined path. Recording that in the way the Bill seems to ask for would require a daily report being sent by the parent to the local authority. This cannot be what local authorities want to receive. They just are not set up for it. Here, we need something sensible and practical; understanding what that is will be really important. There is certainly an established practice in some local authorities of an annual report, which can vary in length from six to 60 pages and allows a parent to present a clear, consistent picture of the education that their child has been receiving to put everything in context.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for that reply, in particular her words on the relationship with local authorities. I will study that in Hansard and come back to her if I have any problem with it, but my first impression was that it was hugely positive and very helpful. I thank her very much.
She said that the Department for Education has intervened with local authorities. I will ask for a better understanding of how that process works, because it is such an important part of making sure that local authorities that are not in the best place progress to a better one.
I understand the objection to my noble friend’s “do not register” amendments. I was wondering how he would have argued for Mozart—I think Mozart might have appreciated the intervention of a local authority in his education.
I should like to pick the Government up again on how nomadic families are to work with this legislation. Which local authority do they register with? How does that work? This is just so that it is clear. I know it is an item of detail and I will obviously not pursue an amendment on it, but knowing how that works for nomadic families and families not consistently in one place would be very helpful.
The Minister said some very helpful things about requiring high-level information, not every day or even every three months, which comes back to the proposition of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, about focusing on an annual report. I would love to see that. The Bill does not say that. The Government are relying on their ability in guidance to take what is in the Bill, which is a very detailed, “record every minute” requirement, and say, “Actually, if you give us a report once a year, that will be fine”. Very early on, I sent a message through the department to the Government’s legal draftsman to ask what the limits on this are. How far can guidance go against what is there in the Bill? Do the Government have the power to say in guidance that an annual report would be enough? I would really appreciate an answer on that. I should like to understand where that lies.
Similarly, that applies to things such as, where parents are together, the requirement to say who is providing how much of the education. Again, obviously, that can be dealt with in regulations, but is it within the Government’s power to put that in guidance?
When it comes to the consequences of failure, I am delighted—I thought it was the case that there were no fines involved—that the process is moving towards a school attendance order. In this sort of area, the process is the punishment; it has been tipped into this process. It is about the stress, worry and effort required to fight through that process. Therefore, again, it comes down to the importance of a strong, positive relationship and a well set-up local authority, and to how important all that is to the Bill working.
For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Lucas
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment ensures that data collection under section 436B respects rights under the European Convention on Human Rights, including Article 8 and Article 2 of Protocol 1. It prevents disproportionate interference with family life or educational convictions and upholds privacy and parental choice in home education.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, this group concerns data protection and sharing. Obviously, we are dealing here with some very personal data. People want to be sure that it is handled right and not shared with the wrong people. Where families are in the process of breaking up or where abuse is concerned, it is particularly important that the data does not get to the wrong people. By and large, the amendments in this group for which I am responsible are self-explanatory. It would be most helpful for me first to listen to the Minister responding on where the Government find themselves. I beg to move.
Lord Crisp (CB)
My Lords, I want to say a few words about Amendment 254A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, to which I have added my name. I want to spell out what I suspect noble Lords understand fully, which is that there are issues here. In certain cases, where perhaps one parent has been abusive to their child, partner or spouse, it is vital that addresses are not made available to that parent.
Perhaps I could just go back two or three steps and preface my remarks by saying, first, how much I appreciate the warm remarks on home education made by the Minister in opening. They set a much better tone than has tended to come through in this debate. Something else that I omitted to say at the beginning is that my thanks go to the Minister and her officials for the excellent meeting we had. It lasted much of the day and, frankly, they were very open and willing to discuss things; that was very helpful. I do not know how much movement we got out of it—we will see during the course of today—but it was helpful to have that meeting and to understand things clearly.
As all noble Lords have said, there is an issue of balance here between supporting the good people who are providing home education because it is best for their children, or for another good reason, and supporting the missing children who are abused or neglected or have missed out. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, made an important intervention on this. We need to get that balance right.
We discussed with officials the issue dealt with in Amendment 254A. It was said that this could be picked up in regulations or whatever, but there needs to be something in the Bill to help parents who are specifically worried about safeguarding. This amendment is probably as simple as it gets in pointing out that where there is a concern about abuse, or an order standing against one parent, this should be handled by an authority in an appropriate fashion.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, as we have heard, the amendments in this group concern the sharing and protection of information on the registers. I can completely understand concerns about the collection and processing of data, and I hope to provide in my response some of the reassurances that noble Lords seek. But we must also be clear that we must not make them a barrier to legitimate information sharing. The recording and sharing of relevant information on children can be life-saving and, as we have discussed, children not in school registers will support local authorities to keep accurate records of eligible children, identifying those who require support and facilitating better co-ordination between support services, as well as enabling them to fulfil the requirement to understand where children are receiving education outside school.
Amendment 235, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, seeks to ensure that local authorities are not required to collect information on their registers that would be incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights. Our published ECHR memorandum outlines the position on this, and we are confident that the provisions in the Bill are compatible.
I turn to Amendments 236 and 236A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and Amendment 254A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey. As with Amendment 238, which I spoke to on the previous group, these amendments seek to place exemptions on the requirement for registers to contain certain information on the child’s parents. I have outlined why that information is vital, but I appreciate that noble Lords have tabled these amendments based on concerns that some parents are estranged from their families for reasons such as domestic abuse. Recognising that concern, we have engaged with organisations that support domestic abuse survivors on our proposals and will continue to do so as part of their implementation.
Organisations like Women’s Aid have long called for the introduction of children not in school registers. Indeed, this is one of the recommendations it has made as part of its Nineteen More Child Homicides report published in June this year. If a parent could pose a risk to the child, it is even more crucial that authorities have this information. Holding information such as where the parent lives and whether they are providing education to the child, as well as time spent in such education, could help the local authority to identify the frequency and nature of the contact the child has with the parent. This could feed into a local authority’s assessment of whether a child is at risk of harm or is likely to be receiving an unsuitable education, so that further action can be taken if needed. Without evidence that a child may be at risk, it is difficult for authorities to intervene.
But I understand the concerns of parents, and I want to respond to that. Just to be clear, parents who have fled domestic abuse should be reassured that they will not be required to seek out the details of the other parent. They need to provide only the information that they know. But I will be clear about how we can ensure that the register will not reveal, for example, the whereabouts of a parent who has escaped abuse. Data protection protocols will help to ensure that all those on the register are safe. Specifically, in cases where a known abuser has made a subject access request regarding their child, the local authority, as data controller, can make determinations, considering the facts of the case, including safeguarding concerns.
I and my colleagues in the other place are clear on the importance of ensuring that all appropriate safeguards can be in place for victims of domestic abuse. We will continue to work with organisations with expertise in domestic abuse to ensure that all necessary protections can be built into the guidance that we will produce.
Linked to this but on a slightly different issue, Amendment 266, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, and Amendment 265, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, concern information from local authority registers being published. Let me be clear that local authorities will not be able to publish from their registers the name or address of an eligible child or their parent or any information that could lead to their identities being deduced. The Bill contains a provision in new Section 436C(5) explicitly preventing it. However, it is important that local authorities can publish information relating to their home education cohorts—in fact, I think that in later groups some noble Lords will be asking for further information along these lines—in terms of numbers, reasons for home education, and demographics. That will aid transparency in terms of how each local authority is undertaking its duties. We will ensure that regulations made in relation to this setting out whether and how registered details may be published will be subject to public consultation, and they will also be subject to the affirmative procedure.
Amendment 267 in the name of my noble friend Lady Whitaker and Amendment 273 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, would require the destruction of all data in relation to a child held on children not in school registers upon that child turning 18 or re-enrolling in school. I assure noble Lords that data protection laws are clear that data must not be kept longer than necessary and must be retained only when there is a lawful basis. Entries on the register will therefore be deleted prior to a child turning 18 as a child is eligible to be included on the register only if they are of compulsory school age. As my noble friend alluded to, some information may need to be retained on other local authority records for a longer period; for example, a looked-after child remains with their local authority until they are 25, and it is crucial to hold some historical information as part of education and safeguarding inquiries. Current laws already allow this.
Amendment 275, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, and Amendments 268 and 375, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seek to ensure that parents are notified of any data breaches that occur as part of the children not in school measures and are able to claim compensation, and that local authorities are liable for the consequences of breaches. UK GDPR already sets out that a local authority must report a notifiable personal data breach to the Information Commissioner’s Office within 72 hours and to the affected individuals “without undue delay” where there is high risk that they are adversely affected by the breach. Families who have suffered damage as a result have a right to claim compensation from the local authority, which may also face fines or regulatory action.
Amendment 305, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and Amendments 272 and 328, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, seek to restrict or remove the powers relating to the use and sharing of data on the registers. As I suggested earlier, local authorities and the department need to collate and share register information, often at speed, with relevant persons, to fulfil duties related to the education, safeguarding or welfare of a child. Requiring written parental consent in every case, as Amendment 272 would do, would potentially prevent children receiving support in situations where swift action is vital. New Section 436F inserted by the Bill makes it clear with whom data from the registers may be shared and under which circumstances.
For example, local authorities may share information with those persons and organisations listed in Section 11(1) of the Children Act 2004 if appropriate to do so for the purposes of promoting or safeguarding the education and welfare of children. These include organisations, such as the NHS, which are a central component of either local multi-agency safeguarding arrangements or national efforts to protect children. If there is information on registers that can aid these organisations in protecting or promoting the welfare of a child, I am sure noble Lords will agree that it is important that it is shared. In relation to Amendment 328, I reassure noble Lords that immigration authorities do not feature in any of these categories.
Amendment 297, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seeks to remove the requirement for out-of-school education providers to provide local authorities with the names, dates of birth and home addresses of children who are attending their provision above a prescribed threshold. We will talk about the provider duty in more detail later but, in effect, this amendment would remove the provider duty, which is, we argue, crucial in supporting local authorities both to identify children who should be on registers but are not and to cross-check records for children already on registers. There is no way for local authorities to achieve this without asking for basic identifying information.
Amendment 504, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would delay the commencement of the children not in school registers until the National Cyber Security Centre or an equivalent body certifies them. The Government already conduct extensive internal and external assurance processes to ensure that systems are safe and secure before launch. To support local authorities in meeting their data protection obligations under the measures, we will issue guidance that promotes best practice for keeping parents’ and children’s information secure.
Finally, I turn to the stand part notice in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, which would oppose Clause 33 standing part of the Bill. As I have outlined in responding to this group, Clause 33 ensures that the processing of personal information as required or enabled by the Bill does not contravene the Data Protection Act 2018. It promotes the highest standards of data security and transparency. I hope that that provides your Lordships—and parents—with some assurance. I also hope that noble Lords will feel able to agree that this clause should stand part of the Bill and that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, will withdraw Amendment 235.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for that thoughtful response. I will pick up anything with which I disagree—I did not notice anything —later.
I want to say just one thing on Amendment 504. The Government created this cybersecurity centre—because the risks, the techniques and the availability of those techniques are moving so quickly, particularly with artificial intelligence—so that the best possible expertise is available to government departments. Time and again, though, they do not use it. In a recent case with which I have been dealing, DSIT got a chunk of its vital core code developed in Romania. It is not secure to do that; you do not know what it is doing and who it is doing it for. The way in which devices were secured was not up to scratch either. This resource is there as part of government. It should be used by departments, which cannot in all reason keep up with the latest threat and techniques, to be sure of what they are doing when it comes to security. It really is the best thing that can be done, so I encourage the Minister to get the department to take advantage of that facility.
I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, I was going to rise very briefly to speak to Amendments 243, 249 and 260 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to which I added my name, but the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, has put it far better than I possibly could. I was going to talk about concerns about the home-schooling fraternity, but my noble friend Lord Crisp has put it far better than I could. I have also been persuaded by my noble friend Lord Russell and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, that Amendment 251 is extremely powerful. I am greatly looking forward to the Minister’s reply to these powerful arguments.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I should just say “ditto” to that, should I not? What the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, said is hugely important, as is the response from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the words of my noble friend Lady Spielman. It is unclear how this set of amendments is going to work. It unclear whether they are proportionate. We would like to get a good understanding. We can see that there is a purpose and that they are important, but we have concerns about how the demands of this Bill fit with reality and are going to work in particular circumstances. I will not go into the detail of the amendments that I have in that space—I will wait for the Minister’s reply—but I will pick up on some of the points made by my noble friend Lord Wei on his amendments. Amendment 245 provides that, if a private tutor teaches online and never sees the child in their home, there should be no need for that tutor to supply a private address. There are other aspects. It appears that a company has to provide details of all the people it employs. What happens with online companies where you are not interfacing with anyone at any obvious location but are just interfacing with the software? It is really hard to read what you are supposed to produce and why it is reasonable to produce it.
Amendment 248 highlights the absurdity of trying to quantify every minute. Many parents rightly say that their children learn continuously through conversation, trips and hobbies, without rigid slots. Precise time-logging is trying to force home education into a classroom straitjacket.
Amendment 260 and, in particular, Amendment 261, which my noble friend Lord Frost has supported, seek to address what is breathtakingly open-ended stuff. What is required here and why? What is the underlying purpose being served? We have to be careful about going in for open-ended data collection. Those of us who have been here for a while will remember what happened after we passed RIPA, and the way in which local authorities started using it to find out parents who might be cheating when it came to saying what their address was in school applications. Anything that is collected under such a register does not just sit quietly in a database; it becomes available throughout government and will be swept up into the profiling systems used by the police and the security authorities.
We know from history and from the work of those such as Professor Eileen Munro that these systems tend to record deficits, not strengths, and to build up negative pictures of people. This results in children from black and other ethnic minorities being racially profiled as being bad. People worry about them and so something appears in the database, and then they are seen as a problem. That information will appear everywhere that the authorities look them up. We need to be really careful about how we allow information to be collected.
I do not see any practical provision that would allow anyone to know what is on the register or to correct what is on it. There must be some process for making it accurate when the local authority has added stuff of its own volition—it does not have to tell anyone that it has done so, and the information might be completely daft and inaccurate. There is no provision for how information should be assessed and removed. We need to look carefully at this. Dr Stephen Crossley’s work on the troubled families programme illustrates that this leads to intrusive interventions justified by mass data trawling and families being
“bullied to no good effect”,
with little evidence of positive outcomes.
In this area, we should legislate with humility about what the state can know and manage and about what is useful and practical. We should be careful about turning supportive families into defensive ones, educational flourishing into compliance anxiety, or safeguarding into a byword for intrusive bureaucracy.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, this group is about gathering information, and I am struck by certain things. Are we collecting the right type of information? Are we ignoring other information?
I was particularly struck by the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, which seeks to include on the register why the child is being home-educated. That would be a useful addition, though I am fully aware that others are saying that we might get a sea of information that ignores the key reason. As somebody who comes at home-education from a special educational needs background, I am familiar with lots of people who have removed their children from school because the school simply did not have the capacity to teach them accurately; teachers are trained to teach those who more closely conform to the norm and these children’s learning patterns do not correlate with that.
The same will be true about the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, when she said that blocks of time sitting down and studying is what education is. This is the type of education that has failed that group. For instance, many schools say, “We are going to give them extra help”. If you do not give them the right help, for this group, because the learning patterns are different, it still will not work. There are lots of little things in here that I would like the Minister to start to clear up. Too much information and the wrong sort will not help.
Even then, there are certain other bits that probably should be there. Are we going to review this periodically? Are we trying to get a feel of it? If we do not do so, there is a danger that we overload. But the register should be there because every child—it comes back to this—is entitled to an education. As was movingly put and supported by my noble friend Lady Tyler, who is a carer, that child is entitled to some support. Carers are entitled to function as an adult in the outside world after they have finished their caring duties—indeed, if they ever finish them. If we do not get away from that, I should like to know a little more on how we are going to use this information. It is a difficult subject, and I do not envy the Minister when she comes to answer on this group, but it is one we are entitled to extract the information from.
There are lots of situations here where we need to get an approach more than we need to get the detail—something that says whether it will be flexible enough. Is it going to understand the types of situations involved? We have heard they are variable, and anybody who has looked at this knew they were variable. So I look forward to the Minister’s reply and do not envy her her task.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I will come back to the noble Baroness about whether that provides the flexibility I am arguing potentially needs to be in the Bill. The fear is that, as several noble Lords have argued, there are arguments for the inclusion of information that could be very helpful in identifying whether a child is receiving a suitable education, and, furthermore, what support it is possible to provide and should be provided for those children. We would not want to reduce the usefulness of the registers due to that lack of flexibility.
The point I was going to come on to, which I think is important, is that I must stress that parents are under no obligation to provide any further information, even if local authorities ask for it. I think there has been concern by some parents about the extent to which they will be expected to provide that information. That is not the case; it is, as several noble Lords have rightly argued, simply about how we can ensure that these registers are effective and useful while being as unburdensome as possible. That is what we are all striving to achieve here. I hope that, for the reasons I have outlined, noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments at this point.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I shall pick up on a couple of points that the Minister made, I think this would be a very interesting point—
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)
My Lords, I am sorry, but I do not think this is in order. We have heard from the Minister, and now it is for the person who moved their amendment—
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, this is Committee. You can have as much backwards and forwards as you wish. That is basic Committee rules.
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)
I am advised that it is unusual—very unusual. Could the noble Lord keep his contributions exceptionally brief? Many other noble Lords intervened on the Minister at the pertinent points during her speech. It really is now the time for the noble Lord, Lord Hacking. The noble Lord’s Front Bench is agreeing with me.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, having been in this House for 30-plus years, no—you listen to the Minister, understand what they are saying, and perhaps that requires some further questioning. On the business of interrupting the Minister in the middle of her speech when you have not heard the full speech, I agree that it is relatively modern but it is clear that Committee is a conversation, and the place where that is restricted is on Report. I do not intend to be long but want to ask a short question. This is what Committee is. It is not, “Before the Minister sits down” but the basic process of Committee. I will take the advice of the clerks over lunch.
I make the point here: the noble Baroness is saying that she will put things in guidance. This is a good illustration of wanting to understand the limitations of the guidance. Can guidance definitively define a term in the Bill, such as “receiving education”, which is not defined in the Bill, in a way that is legally protected? Can guidance go against those terms? The Bill clearly says that everything must be recorded. The noble Baroness is saying, “No, only some stuff needs to be recorded”. Is there power in guidance to do that? Otherwise, the structure of the Bill needs adjustment. Also, I encourage her, if she does not want to go the whole way that the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, does, at least to make it clear, probably in guidance, that doing this in an annual report is an option. Otherwise, the Bill is saying that it should be done within 15 days.
Lord Hacking (Lab)
My Lords, this has been a good debate, as my noble friend recorded in her remarks, and it has now gone on for over one and a half hours. I have always been a supporter of registration, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, was wise to remind us of the large absenteeism of children who are not receiving any education at all.
I make a request of the Minister on only two points. First, after the productive discussions we have had with her officials, and indeed with her colleague Stephen Morgan—I hope we have persuaded her and her officials of the important amendments that the Government could make following those discussions. I put in the request therefore to see the drafts of those amendments before we go to Report. It would be helpful and enable us to know what to do on Report.
My second comment arises out of Amendment 251 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young, and Amendment 254 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. We heard the replies of the Minister on those amendments. The reason for me drawing attention to them is that they were both valuable and should be given close consideration. The Minister replied that we can clear it all up in provided statutory guidance. I have always been rather nervous about leaving things to the guidance notes after the Bill because the terms of the Bill are those that the nation has to follow. One is worried about what statutory guidance will say and how it will change the application of the Bill. But that said, I withdraw my amendment and thank all noble Lords for the now over one and a half hours of debate. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Hacking (Lab)
My Lords, my noble friend was a most distinguished Secretary of State for Education, and I am very grateful to her for intervening in this debate. To answer her questions directly, she said that she was focusing only on new Section 436C(1), which is indeed the subsection that I particularly drew to your Lordships’ attention in covering paragraph (e). I have to disagree with my noble friend saying that it is okay; I do not think it is okay at all.
My noble friend asked what the onward obligation is to provide further information when, let us say, an extra teacher or the like is brought in. The answer according to the Bill is that there is a duty to inform the register every time, within 15 days, so that is the onward responsibility.
My noble friend is quite right that new Section 436C(2) refers to the local authority, not the parents. I pointed it out because there is an enormous number of requirements on the local authority in the registration process; they actually number 27. That is an illustration of how complicated the Bill has become and how unworkable it is in its present state.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I very much support what the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, has said, as the Minister will know from my numerous amendments later in the Bill, which I look forward to discussing with officials.
I have three amendments in this group. Amendment 204 inquires after the process in subsection (3) describing condition A. I hope that the Minister can describe today what the Government’s reasoning is in making this change. When it comes to what the process is going to be and whether there is the capability in system to do it, I am happy to leave that to discussions with officials.
Amendment 210 questions the meaning of “without undue delay”. If the hereditary Peers Bill was amended to say that we were leaving without undue delay, I would regard that as a plus. Such phrases in the mouths of government tend to mean quite a long time. I would have thought that in these circumstances, where the education of a child is concerned, something tighter might be advisable.
Amendment 221 says that, if this is what it looks like, the parent really needs access to a tribunal. If a local authority is on song and doing things quickly and it all goes smoothly and fairly, fine, but there are a lot of local authorities—my noble friend Lord Wei named the most notoriously worst of them—where this is not the case, often just temporarily because of staff changes or short-staffing. In those circumstances, the parent needs some recourse, because it is the child that matters.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I have two amendments in this group. Amendment 204 in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Lucas would narrow the scope of local authority powers to withhold consent to home education, in this case to exclude children in special schools. The driver of this—I looked at the Explanatory Notes but could not see anything that explains why special schools are all included—is that we seem to be treating parents of children with special needs in the same way as parents where there is an active investigation from children’s services and that feels disproportionate. There is also a risk of a conflict of interest where home education could be discouraged if the costs of providing therapeutic support to a child might be higher in that setting than in a special school, even if that was in the child’s best interests.
My Amendment 219 is a sort of common-sense amendment on an issue that I hope the Minister can clarify at the Dispatch Box. It seeks clarification that, if a local authority was to refuse consent to a parent to educate their child at home, it would need to provide the parents or carers with a statement explaining the reasons why, including the costs and benefits to the child. I assume that this would be good practice anyway, but if the noble Baroness can confirm that, that would be helpful.
I am sympathetic to the clarity that Amendment 210 in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas would bring in terms of timings, but I think that Amendment 215A would be unduly onerous for local authorities. The noble Lord, Lord Hacking, expressed concerns about the complexity of Clause 30. I am with him in that I think there is work to be done on Clause 30. He also focused on Clause 31 in his remarks, but I will cover those points in the next group.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
Can I just clarify whether my noble friend is concluding the group or intervening on me?
Lord Lucas (Con)
In Committee, noble Lords may talk as many times as we like. We will try to keep it short though.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The questions that my noble friend asks are, I think, the subject of amendments in later groups, which is when I had presumed we would come to those details. I will stick to that, if that is okay.
Lord Lucas (Con)
I am very grateful to the Minister for what she said. I entirely understand the limitations of discussions with officials, which is why I want to talk to her again about tribunals. Tribunals are an established part of mediating between the citizen and the state. In situations like this, or in many circumstances similar to those we are talking about—and this is by no means the only time we will discuss this; the next time will be when we are talking about best interests—when you have a hard-pressed local authority that may have a particular prejudice against home education and may be making life extremely difficult, as some of them do, you want an effective right of appeal. The system of appeal to the Secretary of State has existed in various forms in various bits of legislation for a long time. I am aware of one occasion when the Secretary of State agreed with the complainant. It does not work as an effective forum. It is not set up to be an effective forum. It does not allow for balanced and deep argument. The department is just not set up as a tribunal: it is not staffed as a tribunal, nor skilled as a tribunal. It is not the right place. I just say to my noble friend Lady Barran that I would very much appreciate her support for a tribunal amendment at Report, because that is what this appears likely to come to.
Lord Wei (Con)
We have heard in discussing this group of amendments a number of excellent suggestions for trying to take the edge off these complex—as the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, said—and, in my view, quite heavy-handed requirements on families. On the previous group, the Minister was very kind in offering discussions so that we can move forwards. Even though I have said that I oppose the register totally, that does not mean that I am shirking my responsibility as a legislator to help improve this legislation and to make it practical, based on the experience of someone from a home-educating family and having heard what was said by many Peers who have contributed to the debate. We are trying to make this practical and to make it work, so that people can get on with educating their children and local authorities can catch the perpetrators they want to catch.
There have been discussions about the tribunal, appeals and the fact that the department’s appeals process generally does not seem to behave in the way you would expect of a proper appeals process when parents complain directly. We have heard some quite sensible amendments in this group and the Minister has not indicated that she is willing to adopt any of the ideas in them. We will see later on. We appreciate the clarification that, when we meet officials, we will be told what the Bill is about and why it has been written in this way, but I hope we can also improve the Bill, which is the intent of us all. There have been suggestions on ways to improve its wording, in order to treat children in special schools and their parents with a bit more care and to have a statement of costs and benefits. These do not seem unreasonable.
I am afraid I am hearing a bit of a “state knows best” argument—that it should have 28 days to give a reason for its decision whereas parents should have only 15. That does not sound very fair to me and I am not sure it will sound fair to the British public, let alone to home-educating families. However, in the interests of time and given that we will discuss in further groups and potentially over the summer more of what we have talked about today, I will reflect on what has been said. I may return to this on Report but, for now, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Lucas
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to allow a debate on the effects of this clause and of the reasons for section 47 enquiries, and the intersection with abusive relationships.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I will also speak to Amendment 206. My concern here is that Section 47 has a very broad class of orders. Some are extremely serious and some, frankly, are irrelevant to whether someone should be concerned about a child being home educated. The amendment is to get some sense, which I am very happy to leave to further discussions, of how one deals, for instance, with spurious complaints from a former abusive parent who just wants to mess up the other parent’s life.
The overall statistics show that home-educated children are twice as likely to be referred to children’s social services, yet are much less likely to have a child protection plan result from that referral. There is a prejudice towards referring children who are home educated or whose parents are thinking of home educating them. We need to understand that in order to provide some circumstances that allow officials in local authorities to feel comfortable about taking informed professional decisions, rather than feeling vulnerable doing anything other than refusing. I look forward to discussing this at a later opportunity. I beg to move.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 207. Ever the optimist, I hope the Government will take it seriously and bring it back on Report with a “g” in front of it.
The amendment has two parts: the first extends the right of a local authority to withhold consent to home education for a child or their family who is in receipt of services under Section 17 of the Children Act 1989; the second extends this to children who have ever been classified as a child in need of protection under Section 47 of the Act. To be clear, both parts would give local authorities just the discretion to withhold consent on a case-by-case basis. Clearly, I am not proposing a blanket refusal, but, as drafted, the Government’s position is not altogether clear, although I suspect that the noble Baroness will tell me that my drafting is not altogether clear either.
All children who are in special schools would now be within scope, as we debated in the earlier group, of the local authority’s right to withhold consent, but not those under Section 17 where there are safeguarding or neglect concerns. That just feels the wrong way round in terms of priorities. I appreciate that my drafting could focus more narrowly on those children defined under Section 17 of the Act to focus on safeguarding and neglect, but it is curious not to focus on those children. Unlike my noble friends, I do not think it is easy to get either Section 47 or Section 17 status and I worry that the bar is too high with just the current Section 47.
On the inclusion of children who have ever been subject to a Section 47 child protection plan, we talked earlier about the tragic case of Sara Sharif. The Minister in the other place said that
“we cannot say for sure what might have made a difference, but we will learn lessons from the future … local child safeguarding practice review”.—[Official Report, Commons, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill Committee, 30/1/25; col. 297.]
I think I am right in saying that Sara Sharif had been put on the child protection register at birth. She came off the register and, as we know, was removed from school and died, tragically. Without the changes in my amendment, the one thing we can be sure of is that the proposed law as drafted would not have made any difference to her.
I know that both Ministers on the Front Bench want to get this right; I am just trying to state the reality that if a child has ever been considered to be vulnerable enough to be subject not to a Section 47 investigation but to a child protection plan at any point in their short life then that is a massive red flag that needs to be removed before consenting for them to be educated at home. I respect the probing Amendments 205 and 206 in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas, but I support the Government’s approach to giving local authorities the power to withhold consent in cases involving child protection.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
Yes, I recognise that. There are still questions about burden there, but I understand the noble Baroness’s point, and particularly her reference to the Sara Sharif case. On that case, we are still awaiting the detailed review from the safeguarding panel in order to be able to determine the causes there, but I understand her point and will write to her about that specific group of children.
On that basis, I hope noble Lords will feel able to withdraw or not move their amendments.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness for her replies. I look forward to meetings after today to go into these matters further, but I very much understand what my noble friend Lady Barran is saying with her Amendment 207. It convinces me that, if we can insert a tribunal into this process, we will make all these difficult questions flow much more easily for everybody. However, for now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Lucas
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to probe how school proprietors have knowledge of the information referenced in this paragraph.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, my Amendments 208, 216, 217, 220 and 225 seem eminently appropriate for discussing between today and September. Amendment 222 again raises the need for a tribunal to deal with tricky cases. We need something effective, we need something fair and open, and that is what tribunals are. I beg to move.
Lord Young of Cookham (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 209 in my name and those of the noble Lords, Lord Russell, Lord Storey and Lord Watson.
Amendment 209 would require local authorities to ensure that they have offered a young carer’s needs assessment if they are notified of a pupil who is a young carer being withdrawn from school. This is to ensure that withdrawing a young carer from school does not result in increases in their caring responsibilities to the extent that it prejudices their education.
I am vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Young Carers, an active APPG producing reports on the challenges facing young carers and enabling parliamentarians to meet young carers, virtually and physically, to hear at first hand the challenges that confront them. A recent report told us of the difficulties that they face when their responsibilities as carers are not recognised by school and others, and that too many young carers cannot thereby access the support they need.
By way of background to this amendment, there are more than 15,000 children caring for parents or siblings for more than 50 hours a week. That is more than the average working week—and of course, they have to squeeze in their education on top of that. One issue that young carer services have shared with the APPG is that there are cases where a young carer is caring for a parent—for example, with a severe mental illness—and is withdrawn from school. Not being in school then results in greater responsibilities falling on those young shoulders, and in even more isolation from the support that a school can give them.
Lord Crisp (CB)
My Lords, I support Amendment 209 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and others, in part for the reasons given so eloquently by the supporters of the amendment, but also because it provides the opportunity for the child concerned to be home-educated if that is the right thing for them. It is not just about ensuring that being home-educated is in the child’s best interest, but about providing the opportunity for that to happen. This is an important, and presumably relatively small, concession in terms of numbers, because here we are talking only about people who are in special schools, although I know there is another amendment later. I hope that the Minister will consider this amendment favourably.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I very much support what my noble friend said about young carers. We ought to be much better at collecting information on what is going on with young carers. The whole business of collecting information is getting easier with AI. The government AI team is a sight to be seen. I have not, in government, come across such an enthusiastic and effective team. I very much hope that the Department for Education will make contact and make use of the blockers. When you are faced with a difficult problem and need to find a way of collecting data that does not put a burden on the organisations that are having to do that data collection, and it is diverse and complicated, AI is a really good approach. I urge the Government to help look after young carers by taking that step.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, there is a large number of probing amendments in this group and, in the interests of making progress, I will not comment on most of them. I am very sympathetic to the intent behind Amendment 209 in the name of my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham. I would hope very much that a child who is a young carer would be supported to stay in school, given the obvious risk that their education would suffer and conflict with the care needs of their parent if at home, but I have no further comments on the other amendments in this group.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I certainly think it is right that we should attempt to ensure that people with lived experience are a key part of all areas of policy. That is why, for example, I talked earlier about the home educators’ forum that the department has brought together to help to inform our work here and the guidance. The point that the noble Lord was making went well beyond that. The suggestion that you could not make a professional social work or education decision in this area unless you had lived experience would make this area wholly different from any other area that professionals were making decisions about, and that is the stumbling block for this amendment.
We have a workforce of trained, dedicated practitioners who understand and champion the needs of the children they work with across schools and children’s social care. These amendments, in effect, would exclude around 99% of the population and, of course, would assume that one professional’s experience of home education is reflective of all parents. Working Together guidance is clear which practitioners should be involved in safeguarding decision-making and the importance of including children and families in that as well. We are confident that the Bill measures, and wider children’s social care reform that strengthens the protection of children, will mean that local authorities can draw on a range of expertise when making decisions—and so they should.
Amendment 220 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and Amendment 224 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, would allow a child not to attend school prior to receiving consent from the local authority. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, who was not here for the earlier parts of the debate—for which I do not condemn her—that the points she made about the very successful home education experience of the children she was talking about who are close to her has very much been reflected in the comments that other noble Lords made earlier. We are clear that there are many children for whom home education has been a very fulfilling and successful process, and there is nothing in this legislation that removes, for example, the right of parents to make that decision to educate their children at home.
With these consent provisions, however—and in wanting to ensure that if a child is being educated at home, they are at least seen and understood to be being educated elsewhere than in school—we want to make sure that every child is seen. That is the expression that we were using earlier, and that is what we are aiming to do here. Also with respect to the consent provisions, we are concerned about those children for whom there might be particular reasons for a local authority to look carefully at the decision to grant consent by virtue of them being subject to a Section 47 inquiry, under a child protection plan or requiring the specific facilities of a special school.
For many children, a school is a protective environment and a means of offering essential support. I know that the noble Lord and the noble Baroness share our desire to reduce the risk of children falling through gaps and potentially going missing. It is therefore important that a child continues to attend school until a local authority has determined the consent request. Removing a child before this could subject them to unsuitable education or increase the risk of harm. I am sure that the noble Baroness could envisage a situation where, for legitimate reasons, a Section 47 inquiry is instituted where there are concerns about a child being at risk of very significant harm and—I am afraid that we have seen examples of this—a parent, thinking that this would be a way of avoiding it, decides at that point that they want to remove their child from school. In those circumstances, I do not think that any of us would want that child to be removed from what may well be the protective environment of a school before the decision had been made about consent.
For all children who are not subject to the consent process, which will be the vast majority of children whose parents want to home-educate them, all we are expecting is that the parent notifies the school that they want to remove their child from the roll and that the school has the opportunity to check, therefore, whether they fall within the criteria of a child for whom consent would be necessary or whether they are subject to a school attendance order. It would not be unreasonable to expect a child to carry on attending school while that relatively straightforward administrative check was made.
Amendment 222, also tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would require consent decisions to be revisited sooner than six months after the previous request when new evidence becomes available or the child has been disadvantaged by the decision. This six-month timeframe is proportionate and is provided to reduce multiple requests regarding the same child. There will be situations where it may be appropriate for the local authority to consider applications sooner—for example, if there has been a substantial change in the child’s circumstances. A local authority can do this under the clause as drafted, if it so wishes. I am sure that the noble Lord could also envisage a situation where a parent who was unhappy about the consent decision made by a local authority expected the decision to be revisited perhaps every week. That is the reason for setting this timeframe.
Amendment 223 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, is about establishing an independent ombudsman. I understand the theme that is developing here about independent review capacity. Notwithstanding that, the Government do not believe that it is necessary. I note that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, uses almost every opportunity to push his tribunal suggestion. I am interested in whether the proposition now is that we should have both a tribunal and an ombudsman in these cases. Of course it is right that there should be a process for referring local authority decisions that parents are not satisfied with; however, it should be uncomplicated. It is right that the final decision should rest with the Secretary of State, or Welsh Ministers, who will fully and objectively consider the merits of the case.
Amendment 225, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would remove the definition of the “relevant local authority” that is responsible for making a home education consent decision. For children subject to a child protection inquiry or plan, the local authority where a child lives is responsible for making the consent decision. They will have the information needed to make informed decisions and should therefore determine consent. For children in special schools, who are not also subject to child protection processes, consent is needed from the local authority that maintains the plan, just as is the case under existing legislation. This new subsection provides legal clarity for parents, schools and local authorities.
Amendment 403, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, requests emergency court hearings for parents where a local authority seeks to remove, or removes, a child from their parents due to concerns arising from home education. To reiterate, the Children Act 1989 is clear that the threshold for care proceedings is significant harm. Home education as a singular factor would not reach the threshold for care proceedings. Child protection concerns about a home-educated child must be addressed through the same process as any other child facing harm. This includes parents’ rights to challenge decisions about the removal of a child into care.
Finally, Amendment 418, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, would require local authorities to refer individuals who file false or malicious allegations against home-educating parents, who then may be subject to civil penalties. There is a concern that this could deter valid concerns about home-educated children being reported, potentially leaving children at risk. Local authorities have robust processes in place to identify whether a child is suffering, or likely to suffer, harm and appropriately respond to malicious allegations, regardless of a child’s educational status.
I said earlier that it would not only be in the case of home-educated children that a local authority might have to make a decision about whether a complaint about a child’s parents was well founded or malicious. Home-educating parents have the same rights as other parents. Families can seek support from the local authority or police advice if intentional false reports are being made against them.
For the reasons I have outlined, I hope that noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments.
Lord Lucas (Con)
I am grateful for the Minister’s extensive responses to the amendments. She is right that I will keep coming back about tribunals. I am not attached to any particular form—a tribunal, an ombudsman or what the Government propose. My concern is that it should be effective, and my experience of the Secretary of State route has been that it is not. I am very happy to take the opportunity of the gap between now and 1 September to learn more about the Government’s proposals as to how the Secretary of State route should work, and it may be that I will come to love it as much as she does—that would be nice.
On Amendment 208, knowing a child’s address is not the same as knowing their local authority. There is nothing in the address that says what the local authority is; you need to have a lookup. Local education authorities are not necessarily coterminous with what we think, so the Government would have to provide a lookup. Also, in circumstances where children are in joint custody, the question of their address can be complicated and moot. In both circumstances, there needs to be some help from the Government to enable a school to be sure that, in all circumstances, it determines the right local authority with responsibility. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Lucas
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to restore the current relationship between state and parents with regard to education.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 211 goes to a much deeper part of this Bill: the assertion in lines 39 and 40 on page 51 that those in a local authority are the right people to determine what is in the best interests of a child. For the past 150 years it has been accepted that it is the parents who are the first people to determine what the best interests of a child are, so this is a fundamental change in education legislation, which may run out into all other aspects of the relationship between parents and children. If the local authority is the best judge in this space, why is it not also the best judge of which school a child should attend, or many other aspects of the child’s educational journey—what exams they should take or which university they should go to? Why is the local authority’s judgment being inserted here against all precedent?
Who in the local authority is making this judgment? Local authorities used to be staffed with a big school improvement department and lots of people who knew their way around education. They are much thinner now. How on earth is a local authority staffed to take this decision? Is it guaranteed to have the expertise? Will there be a special cadre of people capable of taking this sort of decision, and trained and experienced in it?
I find it very hard to understand why the Government wish to take this role away from parents. It is a big, fundamental change and something that gives me great cause for concern. Again, it brings me back, as the Minister will expect, to the idea that, if we are to have something like this, there has to be an effective right of appeal to someone who has access to a much wider and deeper pool of information and judgment.
My other amendment would mean that, if a local authority is making the judgment, it must make it as a real judgment—how the school they are thinking of placing the child in actually does for children like the child concerned. It must be a careful, individual judgment, and not a judgment in principle from someone in a local authority who believes that, in almost every circumstance, education in school is better than home education. There are people in local authorities like that.
I find these two lines in the Bill really disturbing and I hope the Government will reconsider them. I beg to move.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Morris of Bolton) (Con)
My Lords, if Amendment 211 is agreed to, I will be unable to call Amendment 215 by reason of pre-emption.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
Amendment 212, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, seeks to raise the threshold for the local authority to refuse consent to home-educate. This would mean that, if a parent was concerned that their child was being harmed by attending their current school, the local authority would be unable to refuse consent unless it provided evidence of a standard sufficient to satisfy a court that withdrawal would result in greater harm.
Let me be clear that parents’ concerns regarding bullying or their child’s mental health are serious, and these issues should be discussed with the school and local authority. I can quite understand why parents might want to remove their child from school in those circumstances.
However, it is important to remember that the requirement for local authorities to consent to home education relates to a specific set of children who are subject to a child protection plan or inquiry or who are in a special school. This measure is intended to ensure that the local authority takes a considered, proportionate and informed decision for these groups. Eligible children should not be withdrawn from school for home education if it is not in their best interests or if education outside school is not going to be suitable. I want to be clear that local authorities must evidence their decision-making, but requiring it to the degree that the amendment suggests is totally impractical. Local authorities are well placed to make this best interests and suitability judgment. They possess the required information and have access to multi-agency expertise as part of their child protection and education duties, and parents’ views will be taken into account by local authorities as part of their decision-making process.
Amendment 215, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seeks to ensure that a refusal to grant consent to home-educate is taken against the background of the characteristics of the school that the child might attend. Just to be clear, the consent process is not intended to keep children in a specific school or to keep children in a school that is not right for them. Parents remain free to remove their child from one school to attend a different school that they believe can better support their child’s needs, for example. I hope that assures the noble Lord that there is no intention that a child could or should be forced to remain in a specific school, so the need to compare different schools is unnecessary. I hope noble Lords feel that I have provided sufficient assurance and that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, will withdraw his amendment.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her reply. Yes, I would very much like to pursue some of the details of this in meetings. The practicalities of what she described do not coincide with my experience of trying to get children moved from one school to another, particularly special schools. I do not see how it works. She described local authorities as fountainheads of expertise in this area. That is not my experience. It used to be, but not now. These are areas in which I really want to understand more about the Government’s reasoning and how they are approaching things.
There is a deep principle here. It is only a small footprint on the first bit of beach, but the direction is clear. If it applies to children with SEN, why does it not apply to everybody? If the local authority’s judgment is better for those children, why is it not better for everybody? If the local authority’s judgment is best for children who are being taken out of school, why is it not best for children who never go into school? There is no edge here. Once this direction has been taken, it will carry on, and we must question it hard at its first instance and not shy away from that just because it is small. But for now I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 months ago)
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Lord Meston (CB)
My Lords, Amendment 226 in my name differs from others in this group, which are more concerned with children not attending school because they are not registered at any school, and the amendments we have discussed so far are more concerned with home education in its various forms. My amendment concerns those who are on a school roll but not attending and focuses on the responsibilities of local authorities in such situations. I apologise, therefore, if my amendment seems to be somewhat out on a limb, but I think it is quite an important limb.
There is no doubt that the Government are working hard to address the problem of what has been described as an epidemic of school absences. It is well understood that such absences disadvantage children educationally and socially and deprive them of the value of education and of opportunities, in both the short and the long term. I will not attempt any analysis of the many explanations for failures to attend school, but they clearly include poverty, mental health problems and the pandemic, which is thought to have led some parents to see daily school attendance as optional. In this context, the fundamental duties are those of parents to ensure that their children of compulsory school age are receiving suitable full-time education and those of schools to record and monitor attendance and to inform local authorities of failures to attend regularly.
In August last year, important revised statutory guidance on children missing education was issued. It states:
“Schools should monitor attendance closely and address poor or irregular attendance. It is important that pupils’ poor attendance is referred to the local authority”.
The guidance is also clear that the duties of schools and local authorities are to be viewed alongside the wider duties and local initiatives to promote the safeguarding of children.
In October last year, the Government announced increased investment in attendance mentoring. On 22 October, the Minister, in answer to a Question from the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, expressed her determination to bring absenteeism figures down. She also referred to the work already done by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran.
Between the guidance issued in August and what the Minister said in October, in September 2024 the Children’s Commissioner published a powerful and wide-ranging report entitled Children Missing Education: The Unrolled Story. This provided analysis of the procedures followed by local authorities to support children missing education and analysis of the characteristics and histories of children known or suspected to be missing education, who are among the most vulnerable in society and in need of support.
The report found that there are significant inconsistencies between local authorities in the use of the term “children missing education”, which can lead to children falling through the gaps; that few local authorities take proactive steps to prevent children from going missing from education; and that there is little one-to-one support available for children missing education to reintegrate into school. It referred to the lack of a shared national definition and to differing interpretations of children missing education. It called for resources for local authorities to trace and support children missing or at risk of missing their education.
The commissioner expressed her increasing worry about thousands of children being denied their right to education, having fallen off the radar of their local authorities. She said that in too many instances, no one knows where these children are or whether they are safe. She described a shocking lack of urgency in trying to trace these children. My amendment seeks to address, in terms of statutory duties, some of the main deficiencies and inconsistencies identified by the commissioner and to underpin in primary legislation what is or ought to be required by existing guidance and regulations.
Absenteeism requires a fast and sometimes robust response. Good practice should not be piecemeal. The amendment seeks to provide for such a response with consistent arrangements for local authorities to be promptly informed of persistent non-attendance or irregular attendance; a duty to take urgent steps to trace any child known or believed to be missing school without authorisation or satisfactory explanation; and a duty to provide appropriate support as soon as the child has been traced. I therefore hope the Minister might take the opportunity to indicate the Government’s response to the commissioner’s report and recommendations and indicate what is already being done to ensure compliance with the latest guidance.
The other trigger for this amendment is my experience of cases in the family court when the court is provided, sometimes as an afterthought, with the school attendance records of the child or children concerned in those proceedings. These can show how unexplained or unsatisfactorily explained absences can be a marker of significant neglect or mistreatment, which may have been unknown or not visible to other agencies. On occasions, with provision of those records, the court is left wondering why nothing or nothing more was done to follow up the absences much nearer the time. On other occasions, the court itself can be left to ask for unprovided information about school attendance. That explains the last sub-paragraph of the proposed amendment. All in all, I seek that the Government confirm that there will be a consistent approach, better communication and a better and faster response to absences.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I think this is a very important amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Meston. It reminds us that, in this part of the Bill, we dealing not just with parents who choose to educate their children at home but with some very substantial problems that state education has in not keeping hold of and looking after children who are nominally registered at school. I will come on to the question of unregistered alternative education, to which the state commits many children, in a later amendment. This is about looking after the children and I think that the noble Lord, Lord Meston, has put his finger very firmly on what we ought to be doing.
If there is a whole structure being built here to get better information on home-educated children, what is the point of it if we are not already using the information we have on children who are registered? Is there actually a responsive system that all this extra information is going to be fed into? Are we actually focusing on the children who need our help, or are we just making life more difficult for a lot of very responsible and successful parents? I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the Government’s approach to elective home education. I felt that there was a good deal in common in our approaches and I very much hope to be able to build on that as we look at these amendments.
I will very much endeavour not to take up the time of the House if I can avoid it. In that context, picking up on the Minister’s very kind offer of conversations with officials, might it not help if those conversations could take place between today and 1 September? That would mean that I would not have to take up time in Committee: we could short-circuit it before then. I am in the UK all August, but perhaps that might not amuse her officials.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I can clarify for the noble Lord that that is what I had in mind.
Lord Lucas (Con)
If I might address the general issues first, I remain unclear about many aspects of the Government’s policy. I was unaware of conversations with the implementation forum: if the noble Baroness is able to share who is on it, so that I can understand what been going on, that would be very helpful. My understanding is that, following the provisions of the Bill, all children will have the educational route that they are following clearly recorded, on one register or another, by the local authority; so, this is not something aimed at elective family education, it is aimed at looking after children. I would be very grateful if the Minister could confirm that, so that we will not be left with invisible groups of children somewhere in the system.
My own view of home education, though I have never tried it—I did threaten my daughter with it on several occasions, but I have never tried it—is that it is a fundamentally positive thing. One substantial group of home educators—about 60%, I would reckon—have found their child’s experience of state school to be sufficiently bad, or the child’s needs to be sufficiently non-standard, that they have taken on the challenge of educating them at home. In doing this, they are doing the nation a most substantial service and freeing the school concerned of a pupil who they have clearly had difficulty coming to terms with. They are contributing their own time and effort and they are costing the state much less than it costs to keep a child in school, particularly if that child has special educational needs, which many of these children do. To my mind, these parents deserve our wholehearted approbation and support, and I very much hope that the Minister agrees.
Another group are those who wish to educate their children in a different way from what is on offer in our schools. Fundamental British values should guide us to respect and tolerate such difference, as we traditionally have. I agree with the Minister that we have a right to ask that these children emerge from their education fit for the world, prepared to make the best of themselves and safe. In our legislation, that is set out as suitable education and the surety of well-being, which can be summarised as “being seen”.
A case in point here is the Haredi community. Their children undergo elective home education—plus, for the boys, an intense religious education in yeshivas. Can the Minister confirm to me that the Government wholeheartedly support the right of this community, and other similar communities, to bring up their children in accordance with their beliefs? Will she further confirm that, subject to those children being seen and it being confirmed that their education is suitable, as for home-educated children in general, there will be no government demand for their religious education to be subject to inspection or controls, as long as it is clear to all that the religious education concerned stays within legal limits?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
No, and we will come to that in detail. The Section 47 provision, the child protection inquiries, would require evidence of significant harm to the child. It is not the case, as we have identified, that many parents who are home-educating would get anywhere near that sort of threshold. Nor would local authorities have any incentive to do that.
These provisions do not prohibit flexi-schooling arrangements. However, schools should agree to a flexi-schooling arrangement only in exceptional circumstances. We will update guidance to make this clear. In later groups we will be talking in more detail about the provisions around the consent process.
I turn to Amendment 286 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. This is a probing amendment which would remove an exemption on the parental duty to provide information for registers. To be clear, the proposed exemption relates to children whose education is provided under alternative provision arrangements when special educational provision other than in schools is in place or where arrangements have been made by the proprietor of the school that the child is attending. These children may be in scope of the children not in school registers, but the local authority will already hold this information, so there is no need for a duty to provide information that rests with the parents in those cases.
Amendment 233A, tabled by my noble friend Lord Hacking, aims to push on what mandatory information local authority registers should contain. The only information required to be held on registers is that which is easily available to parents or obtainable by local authorities, and that is important for ascertaining the suitability of education and the safety of the child—such as the child’s name, their date of birth, address and details of education provided by the parent and others. We will talk on later groups about the way in which that information should be provided and the ease with which I hope it can be provided.
I turn now to Amendment 279, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Nash, who made a strong case for the provisions in this legislation. His amendment aims to give local authorities the right to inspect the educational materials used by home educators and to view work that that child produces. Local authorities must consider a range of factors when assessing the suitability of a child’s education. One example of how they may conduct their inquiries into suitability is to request evidence of work samples. This position was confirmed in the Portsmouth judicial review case in 2021. If the local authority is not satisfied that the education is suitable based on the information received, it must usually serve a school attendance order, which requires the child to be enrolled at a school.
I turn to the Clause 31 stand part notice tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I hope the noble Lord was satisfied by my first speech on this group but, to summarise succinctly, we need an effective registration system so that local authorities can identify all children not in school and ensure that they are receiving suitable education and are safe. This is what Clause 31 will achieve.
The stand part notice tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, seeks to remove Clause 34 from the Bill. Clause 34 allows for statutory guidance to be provided to local authorities on how they should carry out their new duties in relation to the school attendance order process and children not in school registers. This guidance will provide local authorities with advice on how to exercise their new powers and responsibilities proportionately and consistently. For example, we would expect it to include further advice on how local authorities should request and conduct home visits.
As part of the implementation of the Bill, we will consult on the guidance to ensure that we hear from stakeholders that the measures will have an impact. It is necessary that the guidance is statutory to help ensure compliance with the advice within it. There will be considerable opportunity for further engagement on the details of that; the House will have the opportunity to consider it, because it will be subject to the affirmative resolution process.
The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, made points on why all children need to be included on registers. To reiterate, we agree that home education is not in itself a safeguarding risk, but it can mean that children slip under the radar of the services that are there to protect them. Our consent measures are a proportionate solution which, as I have said, focuses on the small but important group of children for whom there are concerns about actual or likely significant harm. We will further discuss these issues later. The registers are about helping local authorities to discharge their existing duties to ensure that children are receiving a safe and suitable education.
Finally, with respect to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, about the child rights impact and the relationship with Wales, there is, to be clear, a child rights impact assessment produced by the Government for this piece of legislation, but Wales wanted to produce its own. That is the reason for the situation that the noble Baroness outlined.
For the reasons that I have outlined, and given the extensive discussions we have had as a forerunner for the further discussions that we will have, I hope that noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments or stand part notices.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, if I might pick up the Minister on a couple of small issues, could she first confirm to the House that we will see a form of registration that will include every child? I thought that that was where we were going in Clause 4. She seemed to be talking about a register that includes only bits and pieces. In order for the local authority to know that it is not missing a child, can it use the provisions in Clause 4 and whatever comes out of that to connect to, as my noble friend said, what is going on in the benefits system and the NHS, in order to know that every child is in the system somewhere and to pick up cases where children are not being registered and seen?
Secondly, when it comes to flexi-schooling, is not the school absolutely in the best position to evaluate whether a child is receiving a proper education as a whole? A school has the power to discontinue flexi-schooling if that is not the case. Why do we want to insert a local authority official into a process when the school is in much the best place to take those decisions?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
If I have understood the noble Lord’s first point, it relates to whether the information-sharing provisions within this legislation will support the ability of local authorities to be able to track, so that they can ensure that children do not fall through the gaps. Of course that would be the case, but that in itself does not remove the requirement to ensure that, as he said, local authorities have information about where all children are receiving their education. The noble Lord is right that the intention of these clauses is that, obviously, if a child is receiving their education in school, it is clear and they are seen, but if they are not receiving their education in school for whatever reason, it is important that they are seen. The intention is that those are the children who should be included in the register of children not in school.
I take the noble Lord’s point about flexi-schooling, but it is possible to envisage, as I suggested, models of flexi-schooling where children are receiving part of their schooling at a school where they are registered and on the roll but are not receiving all of their schooling there. Therefore, the explanation of why they should be included in the register of children not in school is in order to have sight of the other part of their schooling. The other point that I made was that that would not necessarily require parents to provide additional information, because it may well be that the information about where that education provision is happening is known by the school. There is a range of different flexi-schooling arrangements and it is important that, in line with the helpful principle that the noble Lord set out at the beginning, we are able to see children and to see the education that they are receiving.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I very much support what my noble friend Lady Jenkin has just said—it seems to be an excellent prescription for the right way forward.
We approached these technologies with such innocent optimism when they arrived. I absolutely remember what it was like at the beginning of smartphones. We were worried about how we would get them to everybody and how people could afford them. I remember an early example, with my noble friend Lady Shephard of Northwold, when I was briefly her Whip in the Lords and she was in charge of education. We were looking at this wonderful new system which would enable us to replace all maths masters with machines—I am delighted that it has not happened. Even Alpha School in Texas, which is part of the latest round of optimism that AI can do everything, is not looking at replacing maths masters either but merely at having AI to help them. We have to be careful about optimism when it comes to new things.
I think we have reached the point with smartphones when we know that they are damaging. We know this from all of the research that has been done and from personal experience—which in my case very much echoes what the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, described. Children’s lives at school should be full and social, but the spaces between classes are dominated by phones. All their social interactions are mediated through phones. Even when they are talking to each other, they are talking about what is on social media. The effect on boys, and on their relationships with and ability to relate to girls, is not good.
We have reached the point where we ought to start doing something. We cannot allow this level of harm to continue. I suggest that the Government do something along the lines of the West Dunbartonshire experiment. I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Knight, remembers the set-up in West Dunbartonshire where they tested various approaches to teaching children reading. It was supposed to be a five-year experiment but it collapsed after a year and a half, because part of the design of the study was that the schools running various different methods were talking to each other. After a year and a half, the schools that had not been assigned phonics said, “I’m not putting my child through this. The phonics works—we’re going to do that”. It produced a real sea change in the way schools approached teaching children reading, because teachers could absolutely see what the difference was. As my noble friend Lady Jenkin described, we would expect such differences.
Let us set something up and see how it works and what the differences are between schools that have various models—the current model, the intermediate model proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, and the total ban that I would favour—and see what happens. Let them talk to each other about how they are experiencing this process. Do not try to run it as a total blind trial with only the academics pronouncing at the end; let it be an interactive thing between the schools involved. We would very quickly find out what was working and get a good groundswell for the right solution, which may well be that of the noble Lord, Lord Knight—I do not know.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
Is that not what is happening at the moment? A vast number of schools are, in effect, banning smartphones—as many people would like—some have an intermediate approach, and then there are a few outliers that are not banning them. Is it not the case that the noble Lord is making a good argument not for proceeding with this right now but for going ahead with a proper study on the impact of those various regimes and then acting once we know what we are talking about?
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, there are indeed a number of these things going on, but no organised study with an organised direction is taking place. There is no communication between schools, with them saying to each other, “Yes, we could do it that way”. I am looking at a Government who, I suspect, have not been persuaded of the need to act now. Let us do a study now and get something set up, so that we can definitively get to the best answer. While academies are allowed to be different from other schools, a wide range of policies are being enforced. If we take advantage of that, understand what is going on and allow the schools to share that information as the process goes on, I think we will find ourselves with an answer quite quickly.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 154 effectively asks the question, “Why? What is the justification for such an examination?”. I look forward to listening to the Minister’s response to Amendment 155. I beg to move.
Baroness Benjamin (LD)
My Lords, Amendments 168, 228, 376 and 377 concern child performances and sporting activities. I declare my interest as per the register.
On Amendment 168, there is no system in place to safeguard and protect children’s earnings from financial abuse when they are engaged in performances, paid sport or modelling activities. Other countries, such as the US and numerous EU territories, have legislation in place to ensure that employers pay a percentage of the child’s earnings into a trust account where earnings are protected by the state until the child reaches the age of 18. We lag behind the times with this provision, and safeguarding and protection are long overdue.
Local authorities can add stipulations to licences—for example, that 80% must be paid into a child’s savings account or 50% used for the child’s benefit. However, these conditions differ throughout Great Britain and are sadly ineffective, as a parent can access and use the child’s money and not necessarily for the child’s benefit or in their interest. Local authorities themselves are concerned about how best to protect these earnings but, sadly, there is no system or law in place to support this.
My amendment would ensure that a small percentage of the child’s earnings is held in trust until the child reaches adulthood and is not accessible by a parent, guardian or the child themselves. If this amendment becomes law, trust accounts will protect the child’s earnings until they reach the age of 18. Income will be protected and any tax liabilities more easily calculated. As we enter a world of streaming platforms, social influencers and headline child stars, these earnings can be in the millions of pounds and we have a responsibility to ensure that all children, regardless of which local authority they reside in, have effective means to safeguard their future and their earnings.
Amendment 228 deals with a child not appearing on the school register. The Bill as it stands fails to recognise the unique needs of children working within the entertainment industry, where many are educated in flexi-alternative provisions. The safeguarding elements of this pre-approval to be absent from school have already been scrutinised by the licensing authority and the education provisions are accounted for in the conditions of the licence period.
What is proposed in the Bill is the opposite of what should be a positive. This life-changing experience for a child is regarded as a negative absence, not only for the child but for the school. It will not record the beneficial reason for their absence—merely another day missed from school, which negatively affects both the child and the school’s record and could affect its Ofsted standing. This unique opportunity should be celebrated, not penalised.
When the child is granted a licence to perform within Great Britain, the Children and Young Persons Act 1963, combined with the Children (Performances and Activities) (England) Regulations 2014, make provision for the approval of education to be shared with local authorities. Requiring this information not only to be carefully considered and shared but then duplicated and, as often happens, amended at the last minute due to the requirements of the production, would divert valuable resources away from the safeguarding of young people and the most vulnerable children.
The Bill’s current requirement to include children within the register with pre-approved flexi-education from licensing authorities would divert attention from the very children the register is intending to capture. It will slow down the process of licensing children to perform. Local authorities will require information not available at the time of a licence application to add children to the register. The licensing process, in reality, is evolving and live; it is where industry collaborates with licensing authorities. It is imperative that the process works for all parties involved.
Amendment 376 concerns a body of persons approval, or BOPA, which is in the wrong place. It currently sits within Part 6 of the regulations, which targets only performance abroad rather than performance in the UK. My amendment highlights the need for a licensing authority that approves a performance abroad or exempts a performance within the UK to notify the local authority in which the child lives. This will ensure that the local authorities are fully aware of the children who are performing, to finally join up the dots and offer a working solution using the technological advances of 2025. This in turn will help safeguard a child from overperforming and not receiving the regulated overnight rest breaks, and give consideration for meaningful education.
At present, local authorities are aware of performances by children in their area only if they have granted the licence. Exemptions granted under a body of persons approval, or licences granted by a magistrate’s court for children to perform abroad, are not shared with the local authority where the child resides. However, under the Bill, they are expected to note on the register information that is not being shared. There is currently no legal requirement or process for a magistrate’s court to inform the child’s local authority that they are missing school under the child employment abroad order, so it will not be aware of the child’s involvement in a performance.
Amendment 376 requires licensing authorities that approve a licence, or authorise a performance under a body of persons approval, to notify the local authority in which the child resides. We have a duty to protect our children, regardless of where they perform, and the current system requires urgent consideration of we license children for paid and unpaid performances, to ensure that we have an effective, joined-up approach.
Finally, Amendment 377 calls for a review of the child performance regulations 2014. Since the regulations were revised in 2014, we have seen a substantial change to the entertainment industry, with streaming platforms, new film studios and diverse opportunities for children to be involved and perform. The industry is fast-paced and must adapt to new technologies. The very interpretation of the performance regulations across each local authority makes it hard to take a balanced approach when multiple children from different areas are involved in the same production. Children performing in the UK from other countries, which have their own regulations and union rules that must be followed alongside our laws, result in a mixture of regulations that do not always have the best interests of children at heart.
In 2014, the then Government agreed to revisit these regulations after 10 years, some of which I was instrumental in securing. It is important to acknowledge that, to move forward in the best way to support all children to partake in performance, there needs to be a period of reflection to stay current with an ever-evolving industry. Would the Government commit to review the child performance regulations to include the necessary improvements needed?
Our world has changed, and we have to adapt or face being left behind, otherwise children will miss out on potentially life-changing experiences and opportunities. We have an opportunity, by agreeing to my amendments, to make a positive change for children and young people in performing arts and sporting activities. I look forward to working with the Government to make these changes.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for those extensive replies. The delightful reminiscence from my noble friend Lady Fraser conjures up the thought of Report on the hereditary Peers Bill being conducted through the medium of expressive dance, featuring the Committee fly.
On the more prosaic question of these amendments, on Amendment 228 I hope that the Government will be determined that children should be recorded somewhere at all times. It would not be an acceptable part of the system if people could drop in and out of being registered at all. The point of the register is that we know where children are.
On Amendment 154, I got the impression that the Minister does not know any better than I do what this phrase is doing there or what it would be used for. I will write to her between now and Report to see whether we can explore what practical application it has, because I cannot see that, in the context of our modern attitude to disability, it should be the business of a local authority to say, “No, you’re in a wheelchair; you can’t do this”. For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Lucas
“Accommodation of looked after children: restrictionsAfter section 22J of the Children Act 1989 (inserted by section 10), insert—“22K Accommodation of looked after children: restrictionsLooked after children may not be accommodated in adult homes or hostels.””
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, a substantial number of teenage looked-after children are accommodated in adult homes and hostels. They should not be. I beg to move.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
The noble Lord was too quick for all of us. I want to speak on the same subject as he did, that of unregistered accommodation— I have been caught unawares and have the wrong notes in front of me.
I felt it was appropriate to make this point in Amendment 144, in my name, because it really is nothing short of a scandal that some of the most vulnerable children are regularly placed in illegal, unregistered children’s homes. These settings have the least amount of scrutiny, and as a result, children are at increased risk of harm.
Children living in registered children’s homes benefit from the safeguards that regulation brings. Ofsted inspects registered homes at least once a year, and an independent person must visit these homes every month. They check the running of the home and assess whether children are being kept safe—as absolutely anybody would have a right to expect. But children living in unregistered children’s homes do not have these safety nets. There is also no process for assessing the quality of their care or the suitability of the adults providing that care. As my noble friend the Minister said in summing up on the last group of amendments, unregistered means no inspections. Surely this is a situation that cannot be allowed to continue.
Children aged 16 to 17 in residential care are treated very differently from their slightly younger peers. In 2021, the previous Government introduced provisions through secondary legislation to prohibit unregulated accommodation for children in care aged 15 or under, but not for those aged 16 or 17. Two years later, the previous Government introduced what they deemed appropriate standards for supported accommodation for children in care and care leavers. These statutory instruments legitimised, and therefore to some extent encouraged, the increasingly shameful practice of placing children in unregulated, unsafe hostels, bed and breakfasts, shared homes, and even, in some cases, caravan parks. All those settings leave them without the support they need and leave them vulnerable to habitual criminals, drug gangs and sexual exploitation—an issue which we have heard all too much about in the last two days.
The changes that followed in 2023 to supported accommodation for 16 and 17 year-olds included no requirement to provide these children in care with any care at all. It is important to remember that, legally, they are still children, up to the age of 18. How many parents would be unconcerned at their own 16 or 17 year-olds leaving home, never mind moving to such totally unsuitable accommodation?
It is appropriate to ask why there should even exist such places as unregistered children’s homes. Unregistered means unregulated, and in such homes there is no requirement for qualified staff or managers to be trained, or even present in the accommodation, and, crucially, no requirement for independent monthly monitoring of the accommodation, as happens with registered homes.
The latest available statistics, from March 2024, show that up to 50% of 16 and 17 year-olds who are in care in England—upwards of 800,000—were living in what might we describe as “care-less”, often bleak accommodation. I was one of many noble Lords who argued against this lack of care for 16 and 17 year-olds when the changes that I referred to were introduced in 2021. Tellingly, one of the recommendations of the MacAlister report was bringing to an end the use of unregistered homes. It has not happened. Perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, who was the Minister responsible at the time, can say why she regarded such accommodation for 16 and 17 year-olds as appropriate.
Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
The noble Lord may say that.
In my personal experience, there is no reason why local areas cannot put these arrangements in place. There have been circumstances with agencies in the past—I am sure this does not happen now—where police have gone into a situation of domestic violence, for example, and not even known that there were children hiding under the beds upstairs. That is the shocking result of a lack of joining up—of agencies not speaking to each other. Provisions in the Bill will go a long way to making sure that this becomes normal—a culture shift. It is normal to tell a school if one of its young people has a change of circumstances that could affect them in many different ways. I am delighted that Government Ministers are coming together, and we will await the outcome with interest.
Amendment 170 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, concerns the publication of a national capacity plan for children’s homes intended to highlight the issue of distance placements. I highlight the Government’s commitment to supporting local authorities to meet their sufficiency duty through a range of reforms that will boost system capacity and better meet the needs of children in their areas. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, and others added to the discussions on this amendment. While the amendment would require the Secretary of State to publish an annual national capacity plan, it would also take significant local authority resource to collect, collate and submit additional information on an annual basis to inform the plan, all at a time when their resources for children’s services are rightly focused on implementing reforms to actively improve services. A range of complex contributing factors across the children’s social care system can lead to the use of distance placements, which the Government are addressing through reforms in the Bill and investment in fostering kinship care and local authority children’s homes. Paramount in these decisions is the issue of risk to the safety of the young person. Sadly, in some cases, distance is a necessary factor when considering placements.
Finally, Amendment 134B tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson, seeks to introduce a duty on the Secretary of State to carry out a review on the distinction in the planning regime between children’s homes and domestic dwelling-houses, and to consider whether it should be removed. I would like to reassure the noble Baroness that the Department for Education and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government continue to work together in this important area. In the last two years it has been clarified via a joint Written Ministerial Statement that planning should not restrict the timely delivery of children’s homes, and we have changed the National Planning Policy Framework to make it explicit that planning authorities must plan to meet the needs of looked-after children.
As we said in Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, we will continue to make progress on further changes that support the delivery of children’s homes where they are needed. This includes data collection and an analysis to translate the data and work out how it needs to be used, which is often overlooked, I am sad to say. In my experience of dealing with an application for a small home in the ward I used to represent, we went out for intensive consultation with the residents living around the home. I am very pleased to say that, in the end, after some scepticism and reservation, when we went through it carefully and they met the people running the home and understood how many children would be there, it went through and was an enormous success. They came and asked how they could help to support the children in the home through their local connections. So there are reasons to be optimistic, but there is a great deal to do, which is why, as I have said before, we have this Bill before us. I thank everyone for their comments but, for the reasons I have outlined in these remarks, I hope the noble Lords will not press the amendments in their names.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Blake of Leeds, for that comprehensive reply. I think the most important amendment in this group was Amendment 144. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, we should not be looking at placing children in unregulated accommodation. We are taking powers in this Bill to deal with unregulated schools—quite rightly, and I hope a great deal better than we have in the past.
The idea that we are putting children into unregulated homes, or, as one of my amendments will address later, unregulated alternative provision, is really not acceptable. In Clause 30, we are giving power to the same local authorities that are making these placements to override parental judgment as to the best interests of their child. We really need to get our thinking straight in this area. Unregulated accommodation is not acceptable, particularly when we are talking about people charging at the level they are. We ought to be doing something clear about that in the Bill. I am glad that the Government say that they aim to end this practice, and that it should be done away with, but we need a stronger commitment than that.
I was glad to hear the support for boarding schools. I had a miserable time at my boarding school. I would rather have been on the barge of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, frankly, such was the quality of accommodation. But I have seen the hugely transformational effect it can have when it works well, so it is very much a matter of choosing the right child for the right school.
I hope my noble friend Lady Sanderson of Welton will pursue her campaign when it comes to the Planning Bill, because we need to be sharper than we are. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Russell, will pursue Amendment 165, which is so clearly achievable. If we are moving towards a consistent identifier for children, this is just the sort of thing that ought to be being done.
My noble friend Lady Cash was told that it would be a burden on local authorities to collect the data. I hope that the Department for Education will wander down the road to their friends at the science department and look at what they are doing with AI, because that sort of function of data collection is so much quicker, cheaper and easier if you design the right systems. It ought not to be a matter of cost; it ought to be a matter of course.
Lastly, I felt that that was a rather disappointing response to my amendment. I cannot see that it is ever going to be right to place a 17 year-old in an adult hostel. Children take a long time to grow up. A 17 year-old is not in a position to be with troubled 25 year-olds as their principal companions. I will look again at the Minister’s reply, but for now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Lucas Excerpts(3 months, 3 weeks ago)
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Lord Lucas
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to enable debate on the implications of adding “and others” before section 23ZZA of the Children Act 1989.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I will also speak to my other amendments in this group.
Amendment 77 just asks the question: what is the effect of “and others” at the end of Clause 6(2)? Is it just to enable the insertion of Clause 6(3) or does it have wider implications that I have not noticed?
Amendment 78 is to encourage good and improving practice by making sure that what is being done is published so that it can be assessed and criticised by the local electorate, and there can be a stimulus for doing better. Amendment 81 enables the Secretary of State to enlarge on that by specifying the way in which local authorities should report on the educational achievements of children in need of or in kinship care—again, with the objective of making sure that the information is out there against which the local authority will wish to report improvements. I beg to move.
The Earl of Dundee (Con)
My Lords, I support strongly this group of amendments.
Does the Minister agree that local authorities would very much welcome the positive effects of these constructive amendments? Thereby, local authority education success stories would become more visible and, as my noble friend Lord Lucas has already implied, that visibility in itself would clearly assist further improvement.
As indicated in Amendments 78, 79 and 80, this would apply to the educational achievements of children in need or in kinship care, as it also should to all previously looked-after children who were adopted.
As correctly advocated in Amendment 80, career and employment opportunities ought to be included as part of educational achievement.
Taking into account the increasing benefits from virtual education, I am sure that the Minister will concur as well that, in these and other respects, and as recommended in Amendment 83, the Secretary of State should equally now review the current and future role and remit of virtual education, so that it can become properly funded.
Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
With all this work, I believe it is important that we focus on the job in hand through the route of accountability and the local authorities, and do not give virtual school heads yet another onerous task to do. I believe that enough safeguards are in place and enough ways that the outcomes can be reviewed, so I do not believe that this is necessary at this time.
I was going to say that I ask noble Lords not to press their amendments, based on the fact that this is work in progress. We all know the significance of this area and the contribution that so many people make to it. We are opening up an exciting new chapter to make sure that the work that happens is accountable and transparent, and that more people are aware of what needs to be done and how these young people can be helped going forward.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for what I thought was a really satisfactory set of responses to these amendments, and I thank her for that. Will she commit, when the evaluation and the statutory guidance are published, to giving a heads-up to those noble Lords who have expressed an interest in this area during this debate?
Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
I have a feeling that I would not have any other option, given the comments I have received to date.
Lord Lucas (Con)
I shall be very grateful for that. I hope the Minister will also have a quiet word in the ear of her colleagues responsible for the Employment Rights Bill, referring to the speech of my noble friend Lady Stedman-Scott in particular. When an employer wants to take on someone who has a history in care, they know that this may be a difficult experience for them. As it is at the moment, the Employment Rights Bill makes that much more dangerous and difficult. It is a matter of casting the rules right, but the Government have not got there yet. This is really important in making sure that children from a care background can find their way into employment, that an employer can take on someone they know is going to be difficult and have time to bring them through, and that the regulations are set right to make that happen.
I encourage the Government to encourage local authorities to use boarding schools where this is appropriate. As my noble friend Lord Agnew said, this is something that can save money and make for a better outcome for the right children. I ask that, where this is done, we track performance. We ought to build up, not just as one experiment but as a routine, a history of how these children have done with that experience, so that we can all learn who it works for and how it works best, and the schools concerned can learn from each other how to do better. There is a real wish in the independent sector to be part of this, and I very much hope it will be included.
I thank the Minister and I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I have Amendment 94 in this group. It is very much the same as my amendments in the last group. If we can get local authorities to say clearly what they are doing and what they have achieved in a year, then they will wish to do better next year.
Lord Storey (LD)
I just want to say a few words, especially in support of the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Watson. I remember that 14 years ago this issue was discussed during consideration of the Children and Families Bill. We all sort of huffed and puffed and said, yes, this is really important, but nothing came of it. I just wish we had seized that opportunity then. As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, rightly said, we do not want to make this a missed opportunity. Some young people are ready to leave, but many are not. If you look at the figures for young people who are not in care and not fostered—I think the noble Lord, Lord Watson, mentioned 24 year-olds—sometimes we see people in their 30s still living at their parents’ home. What happens in those families should be reflected right throughout our society. Sometimes young people are not emotionally ready. We heard of “pack the bag and go”, but I can tell of the opposite: foster parents, at their own cost and in their own time, being prepared to keep on their foster children for several years afterwards. That is amazing.
I turn to the amendment from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester. Having each local authority publish what its national care offer should be seems such an obvious thing to do. I just hope that the Government will seize this opportunity and do that.
Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
I apologise: I knew that I had missed the noble Baroness’s question. Yes, of course I will write on that important point.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, the Minister will have noticed the difference between the answer she gave on the last group and the answer she gave on my amendment in this one. Channelling the reporting through guidance to the virtual school head is doing something that would be immediate, current and present and would affect the day-to-day way in which a local authority and its team conduct their business; something that may or may not appear in the depths of an Ofsted report every three years is not at all as effective. I encourage the Minister, between now and Report, to consider whether it would not be much better for the continual improvement of the Staying Close services if they were reported on annually and personally by the team responsible for delivering them, so that it becomes much more visible and a much more current thing for them to keep improving, rather than something that they hope will get lost in whatever else Ofsted is saying about the local authority as a whole.
Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate on this group, particularly the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the noble Lord, Lord Russell, both of whom spoke forcefully in support of the amendments—which may not be surprising, since they added their names to them, for which I also thank them. I say in passing to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on the point she raised about 16 and 17 year-olds living in unregistered accommodation, that there will be an opportunity to debate that in group 8 today, if we get that far.
I also thank my noble friend the Minister for her reply, although, of course, it is disappointing. I noticed a nuanced difference in her response—if she will forgive me, it could probably be described in three words, “We’re staying put”, which is effectively what she said—whereas her opposite number in the other place said that the Government were not in favour of extending Staying Put because they wanted to concentrate on young people in residential care, who, she said, had the most complex needs. My noble friend today said that the Government want to concentrate on filling the gaps in current provision. Neither is unimportant, but I think that, where there are gaps in current provision, yes, they can be filled, but that does not mean that there are no gaps in the provision beyond the age of 21 for young people Staying Put.
My noble friend said that, when people in foster care reach the age of 21 and leave for whatever reason, they will have Staying Close to fall back on in certain situations, and of course that is right. But, overall, we are dealing with a relatively small number of people who want to stay on in foster care beyond the age of 21. We are not talking about thousands and thousands, so the cost in additional resources required to do that is relatively modest. I have to come back to the point that I started off with, which is that there was a very positive statement yesterday in the spending review, which may offer the opportunity to deal with this as well, although of course there will be many competing demands.
As I said, it is disappointing. I request the opportunity of discussing this issue a little further with my ministerial colleagues before Report, but I again thank everyone who has contributed to this debate. At this stage, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, on Amendment 100, from the noble Lord, Lord Young, I will offer a bit of Big Issue news. We did a survey in the early part of this century in which we surveyed 150 to 200 Big Issue vendors. Some 80% of them had been through the care system; most of them had been in care for a period of at least 10 years. I wrote an article about this which upset a lot of people, because I said that, in order to produce a Big Issue vendor, you had to spend over £1 million. To me, that is one of most frightening things: how expensive it is to keep people poor.
It costs £70,000 to keep somebody in foster care, but it costs almost £200,000 to keep somebody in care. We need to look at this problem. In spite of all the moral outrage, we need to look at this as a bit of fiscal bad news. We have to start shifting our resources towards moving children into foster care as much as possible. I am going to talk about this later, but I wanted to give noble Lords the news that Big Issue vendors are very, very expensive.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, Amendment 98 in this group asks the same question I asked in the two previous groups: can we get local authorities to publicise what they are doing each year, to give them a benchmark to improve on each year?
Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, this group ranges quite widely but there is a common theme: the things that are going wrong which ideally should not be. The question is, how do you get a handle on all of this?
There is a certain symmetry with the amendment of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, asking for a review into the disparities that care leavers are facing, which is fairly all-embracing. I suspect that quite a lot of that information is already available thanks to the MacAlister review. The right reverend Prelate’s amendment suggests that it could take up to two years—I would hope and expect it to be done a great deal quicker.
Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)
I thank the noble Baroness for picking me up on that commitment. This is quite a detailed ask, but it is absolutely realistic that this is a new departure going forward and there will need to be consultation and everyone coming together to make sure that the statutory guidance is deliverable and works. However, I am happy to write to the noble Baroness with more specific detail on that area as we move forward.
Amendment 130, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, seeks to extend the provision of Staying Put to age 25. We have discussed this at great length and I am no clearer as to why this is in this group of amendments rather than one of the others. So, without repeating the arguments, I will just say that the rationale is that we cannot commit off the top of our heads to effecting fostering arrangements without recognising that there will be a knock-on impact of change on the whole area of the foster care market, as it were. Any changes in this area are sensitive and have to be taken in the round.
However, the most important thing that we have to address is that too many young people who have come through the route into independent living from residential care, for example—who often, as I said earlier, have the most complex needs—will be a priority area in terms of addressing the support that they do not have because they have not entered the foster care route. So, we are keeping an eye on all of this through the introduction of statutory Staying Close duties, making sure that all former relevant children under the age of 25, including those who are still in a Staying Put arrangement, as well as those who have left it, will be provided with Staying Close support where their welfare requires it.
Amendment 153, in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford, would require public bodies, when carrying out equality assessments, to consider the needs of people who are or have been in local authority care. We know that looked-after children and care leavers face stigma and discrimination and we are determined to tackle this. There has been effective and passionate campaigning, with many local authorities taking positive action as a result.
Amendment 183A, tabled by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, seeks to enable care leavers to claim the higher over-25 rate of universal credit. Although he is not in his place, his amendment is an opportunity to revisit this: I was at the Dispatch Box at Second Reading of his PMB on this subject. Just to emphasise what we have already said, the Government recognise the considerable challenges that care leavers face and remain committed to supporting them. However, we do not believe that this amendment is necessary.
The Government have recently announced the first sustained increase to the universal credit standard allowance, and, while under-25s receive a slightly lower rate, additional elements are available, including for housing costs, to help them to live independently, and towards their living costs. They may also be eligible for universal credit elements, including for children, childcare costs and disability. Under-35s who are single and renting in the private rented sector and claim either housing benefit or universal credit can receive help towards their rental costs via the shared accommodation rate of the local housing allowance. Single care leavers under 25 may qualify for the one-bedroom local housing allowance. Discretionary housing payments administered by local authorities can be paid to those entitled to housing benefit or the housing element of universal credit.
The Government have extended the household support fund by a further year, from 1 April 2025 until 31 March 2026. I would emphasise the work that the DWP is doing in this area: its objective to help care leavers into long-term employment is the key to supporting their independent living. This is why we are focusing on providing access to the right skills and opportunities for sustained employment and career progression. Therefore, with all of those considerations, I kindly ask noble Lords not to press their amendments.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, that was a really disappointing response to Amendment 98. We started with a response to Amendment 78 which was excellent, a continuing annual dialogue by someone who was really involved in what is going on. When we get to this amendment, I am not offered a review at all, it is just the menu: no content of what has been done, how it has been done and what the excitements and disappointments of the year have been. I very much hope that the noble Baroness, when she reviews this day and looks in general, will say, “Actually, my first answer was the better one”, and that that sort of relationship between a local authority and its duties and the public produces a much better response than just a local authority setting out what its offer is and making no comment whatever on how its performance has been, and offering no interaction to the public in general as to how that is going on. I will talk to my noble friend on the Front Bench about coming back to this on Report. It was a more general look at how local authorities should relate to their public about what has happened this year and what they hope to do next year.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her comprehensive response. She used a word that I also thought of: it has been a very rich debate; it has been very wide ranging, with real passion, expertise and knowledge of the subject matter.
We all agree there is a strong moral imperative that we do all we possibly can to support care leavers as they make their transition into independent lives. I welcome and recognise the number of measures in the Bill that do that, but the whole tenor of this debate is that there is scope for strengthening. So many specific planks have been identified: health, housing, financial education, family relationships, et cetera. There is much to reflect on.
I was encouraged to hear that there is such a top-level, cross-government board looking at this, including Cabinet Ministers. That is really positive. Could this debate be drawn to its attention, so that it can see what we have said and the suggestions we have made? On the offer that should be available to all care leavers, it was helpful to have the distinction between some sort of national offer that is, essentially, the minimum standard that should be available everywhere and the local offer, where it is actually delivered. That will vary, but there is a set of standards below which it really should not fall. That is something we could think about further.
Rather than getting back into other issues or any disappointment about responses, I have a suggestion: would it be possible for interested Lords who have spoken in this debate to have a meeting with the Minister before Report, so that we could look together at where it is realistic to do the strengthening, which came across very strongly in this debate? On that basis, I withdraw my amendment.
Higher Education Regulatory Approach
Lord Lucas Excerpts(8 months, 2 weeks ago)
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Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
It was exactly the position that the noble Baroness has taken that brought us to this conclusion. Freedom of speech and academic freedom are at the heart of what is good and important about our universities, but perhaps there had not been the focus on them that was necessary, particularly at a time of some quite contested ideas and difficult challenges. That was important, but it was too important, frankly, to be left to legislation that, while important in many areas, on occasion looked as if it was more about creating a headline than solving a problem. The burdensome elements of the legislation, particularly around the tort and the requirement to, essentially, lawyer up earlier on, and the impact that may well have had on universities’ decisions and the concerns of vulnerable and minority groups as a result, meant that it was right to pause the commencement of the legislation and find a more pragmatic, balanced and less burdensome way of delivering a nevertheless important objective.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I very much welcome what the Minister says. I look forward to the legislation when it comes, and to it being effective. Would she take a look at extending the provisions on non-disclosure agreements to free speech issues? Knowing what has happened, what has gone wrong and how it has been solved is a really important part of improving practice, and having that supressed by NDAs does not work. Will she also look at how Clause 16 of the Employment Rights Bill will affect free speech at universities? Will she look at the effect of both of those issues on schools?
Maintained Schools: Term Dates
Lord Lucas Excerpts(9 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My noble friend is absolutely right: how well you do throughout the whole of the rest of your education is often determined very early on in your school life. That is why, last week, the Prime Minister set out our target to ensure that 75% of children are school ready by the age of five. That is an increase on the current figure; noble Lords may be quite shocked to hear that fewer children than that are ready to start learning at the age of five. Whether through government-funded provision or government-supported voluntary sector provision such as that outlined by my noble friend, we must focus on making sure that children and their families are ready for them to start school and gain the absolute most that they can out of their time there.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, what is the Government’s opinion of Devon County Council’s proposal to charge schools £21,000 for each pupil whom they permanently exclude?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
That has not been drawn to my attention, but I am certainly willing to look into it and perhaps come back to the noble Lord.