Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

There are two overriding reasons why it is essential to define local authority powers and responsibilities. Local authorities are, after all, the locally elected democratic body to which parents and the public will turn if there are difficulties, but secondly, they are the place where the co-ordination and integration of provision in schools can be undertaken. We will talk later about multi-academy trusts and whether they can be geographically widely spread across the country, with all the problems we can foresee if that is a developing trend. With these two amendments, I seek the Minister’s assurances that the role of local authorities will be properly embedded in the schools system.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I too have an amendment in this group, but first, in response to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, I very much share his vision of taking local authorities to the point where they are advocates for parents. If we look back to the old days, that role was missing; they were advocates for schools, not parents. I remember local authorities that would pull a bad teacher out of a school and deliberately put him in another one because they were there to look after the teachers, not the parents. The logic of the direction we are going in is to have local authorities as the parents’ advocate and therefore, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said, to have some power in this—to have the ability to really shift rocks where they are in the way of parents.

My Amendment 58A is, like this grouping, an odd collection of bits and pieces. We have largely dealt with proposed new subsection 1 in earlier debates, but I have a real problem with the way academies handle admissions data at the moment. What used to be a coherent local authority booklet on how you could get into one school or another has now been reduced to a collection of “For information, apply to school” notices. There is no coherence. It gets really difficult and time consuming for a parent to get to understand what schools they might have access to, and that is really destructive to the power of parental choice and the point of having lots of different schools and admissions systems in the first place.

You absolutely ought to empower parents to make the best choice for their child. That ought to be the centre of the admissions system; it is not. I have failed to shift the DfE on this on many occasions. It is ridiculous. All schools have to do is, on a reasonable timescale, provide the local authority with their admissions data in a standard format—it has to exist in that format anyway, because there is a common system of handling admissions—and then allow the local authority to publish it.

The Bill is an opportunity to bring some sense back into the admissions data system and to remember why it is there, the point of parents choosing schools and the good that we used to argue came from doing that, rather than allowing this continued pointless, profitless inertia in the DfE to get in the way of parents’ interests. I appeal to my noble friend to pick up on this issue again but to do so from the point of view of doing best by children and parents.

Academies also need to get better at providing standardised information to parents, so that it gets easy for parents to compare one school with another. Destinations of children, examination results and the level of literacy and numeracy in the school are elements which it ought to be possible for a parent to look at in detail, beyond the Government’s performance tables. It ought to be easy. You do not need to make it easy for the sharp-elbowed middle classes; they do it anyway. They have the time and do the work. We want to make it easy for every parent, and that requires not asking parents to do the work, because a lot of parents do not have the time to get to the point where they really understand what is going on. We have to provide things in a standard way, so it is really important that we get the data and that there is an up-to-date Ofsted report—and ideally one for the multi-academy trust, where there is one, too—because that sort of data is easily comparable and digestible by any parent who is really putting their mind to it, which should be the point of those reports.

In a system where we have a lot of academies rather than local authority schools, I think we need to come back to a system that really centres its thinking on parents, how they make the choices and how they negotiate their relationships with schools, and to reinvent the local authority as a strong friend of parents in that context.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the fact that we are discussing admissions policy. It is not the principal object of the comments that I want to make but it is certainly at the heart of the unfairness of the system that operates in many parts of the country. I was shocked at the number of different admissions systems referred to by my noble friend Lord Adonis. As soon as you depart—as, I am afraid, we did quite a while ago now—from a common admissions system for the whole of a local authority area, you depart from a situation whereby there could be no question of schools poaching pupils by varying the system. The only way to get fairness across the system, with schools working together co-operatively and the whole community being served, is through a common admissions system, not sundry random ones.

We have all heard comments—not just anecdotal ones—about the questions sometimes asked when selecting pupils for schools. I have even heard questions asked about whether there is a suitable room at home in which a pupil can conduct their homework—an outrageous kind of selection policy—or whether, at 11, it can be guaranteed that the pupil will stay on until the sixth form, and other selective admissions questions.

Anyway, that is not my main purpose. What I really want to say in connection with this group of amendments is, essentially, “hear, hear” to what my noble friend Lord Hunt said. I find it very depressing that, after so many years, we are still debating the merits of grammar schools. I much prefer to couch the debate not in relation to those merits but to the merits of saying to an 11 year-old—indeed to the majority of 11 year-olds in a particular area—“You have failed.” We hear lots about the alleged advantages of going to a grammar school, but I have not read many books—I would like to have references to them if they exist—on the wonders of failing the 11-plus and the advantages that come from it.

For most people, if not everyone, of my generation and probably a good few who are younger, there was no option; we all took the 11-plus. Over half a century ago in my case, in an average road in an average part of Britain such as I lived in, we all played football and cricket together and then, some of us had passed and some had failed. To this day, I do not know why; it was random. They were the same people who played football, who I went to the pub with when I was a bit older, and who I played with in a rock group—that was a long time ago—about the same time as the Beatles, although they were more successful.

Some of us had passed and some had failed. If anyone thinks, well, they should just get over it, I can tell the Committee that, 50 years on, many people who failed the 11-plus never really got over it. It was a life-changing circumstance, a life-changing occurrence at the age of 11, which I find indefensible. It has got better in many ways as educationalists of all parties have got rid of grammar schools in many areas but, in areas where it persists, it has, if anything, got worse.

At least when I took the 11-plus there was no intensive coaching of 10 and 11-year-olds to try to get us through, but the nightmare reported by parents in Kent is that this is now the prerequisite; that is what you have to do. I do not want to get too anecdotal about this but I even know of parents who, due to a promotion, wanted to move their family to Kent but were initially dissuaded from doing so—they did it eventually—because they did not want to put their seven, eight or nine year-olds, as they were at the time, through the trauma of having to take the 11-plus. Again, in a family near me with four children, the three eldest passed and the fourth failed; we can just imagine what it does to a family when that kind of thing happens.

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[Baroness Penn (Con)]

The Bill does not provide for that, and it is not government policy to open further grammar schools. It is about regularising their status within the legislation, and the provision makes sure that only a parental ballot can trigger an end to selection, whether that grammar school is a local authority-maintained grammar school or an academy grammar school. It will remove one of the main perceived barriers to them joining a MAT, while retaining the right of parents to choose whether they should continue to select by ability. I therefore hope that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, will feel able to withdraw his amendment and that other noble Lords will not move theirs when they are reached.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, might I just drop in before the noble Lord, Lord Knight? My noble friend is not right in saying that academies currently provide all the data required on admissions. I have written to the Minister and demonstrated many examples of where this information is not provided. Yes, you can go to the school and ask for it, and it may be somewhere on the school website, in an irregular place, but it is absolutely not given to local authorities in a way that makes it easy for the local authority to publish a booklet that gives parents complete information on the admissions structure in their demesnes. This hurts parents a lot. As editor of the Good Schools Guide, I know how much this disadvantages parents who do not have the time and experience to crack the code of 20 different schools and find out how to get the information and how it all knits together. It really gets in the way. If my noble friend would be willing to grant me a conversation with officials on that, I should be most grateful.

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[Baroness Barran (Con)]

We plan for the review to be launched in the coming weeks. I cannot give the noble Baroness an exact date, but I think I am allowed to say “shortly”. I have probably said more than I am allowed to.

I will go back, because this is important. The noble Baroness is right to raise the regulatory review; we see it as very important. As part of that, we will look at how we provide for the scrutiny of how these powers are exercised. Critically, we will do that in a way that wins the confidence of the sector.

I have reflected on my noble friends’ concerns, but I believe that, taken together, these clauses create a sound framework for robust but proportionate intervention as we move to a fully trust-led system.

Amendments 39A and 39B in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, envisage a new role for Ofsted in inspecting multi-academy trusts, and make the decision to issue a compliance direction and a notice to improve contingent on the outcome of such an inspection. Currently, the department relies on a range of evidence from a variety of sources to build up a joined-up picture of each multi-academy trust, to inform decisions about intervention. This includes evidence on finance and governance, as well as Ofsted’s school inspection judgments on educational performance.

Through the regulatory review, the department will consider the evolving role of inspection in a fully trust-led system. This will include consideration of how inspection of multi-academy trusts would be co-ordinated with our wider regulatory arrangements, as well as how it would interact with school-level inspection. I hope the noble Lord will agree that it is important that the review runs its course before we make any decisions in this area. He also asked a number of quite specific questions. If I may, I will write in response.

I commend Clauses 5 to 18 standing part of the Bill. I also ask the noble Lord, Lord Knight, to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Knight, is right about getting Ofsted into multi-academy trusts. It would make a great difference to how parents are able to interact with the eventual system. Parents need the level of information and reassurance that will come from an Ofsted report, and I hope it would be done in a way that, as others have suggested, is very much focused on the educational aspects, which is where Ofsted’s expertise lies.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I am grateful for those last comments, and that I do not have to speak for six minutes before I get my food while others discuss the national food strategy.

I am pleased to hear that, all being well, on Wednesday the Minister will be able to come and give us a little more information about the Government’s intentions, which is really important. It is also helpful that she was able to give us a vague timescale of “in the coming weeks” on the regulatory review. If on Wednesday she was able to give a little more detail on that timescale, I think the whole sector would be really grateful in terms of understanding the sequence of how things are likely to play out on all this.

The Minister talked about the blunt powers in agreements that she is looking to replace with a more nuanced and consistent response through the series of sequences, yet many of us are worried that the nature of the Bill, as written at the moment, will still be heavy-handed. If only all current Secretaries of State paid attention to their common-law responsibility to proportionality, I think we would all be a lot happier in this place.

The issues around paying and governance are issues to reflect on. All those many years ago, when I was Schools Minister responsible for academies, among other things, I commissioned some work around governance but it never really got anywhere. There may well be reasons why we want the ability to bring in people with a much more professional approach who therefore might be paid, but we need a really full debate around that. The people who give of their time voluntarily to be school governors, multi-academy trust trustees, ambassadors for local schools, et cetera, do so willingly, and we have to be really cautious about interfering with that by offering to pay even a few.

We look forward to hearing more on Wednesday. I do not think the Committee is persuaded about these clauses as they stand. I am sure the comments from my Front Bench about what will happen if we do not get a good response are being listened to by Ministers, but I am happy to withdraw my amendment.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab)]

My Lords, I regret missing Second Reading, which, according to some noble Lords we heard today, was the DfE version of “Apocalypse Now”. Even the noble Lord, Lord Baker —I am an admirer of UTCs—joined the doomsayers then, as he reminded us again today. I am an admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose advice is that

“to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.”

He is probably right about that.

I am an admirer of this House when it is at its best—for example, the debates on Ukraine or on the jubilee. However, as referred to by my noble friend—he is still my friend at the moment, but might not be at the end of this contribution—the debate on the then Health and Care Bill, which was an overcomplex and lengthy Bill, brought out the House of Lords at its worst. Every hobby-horse noble Lords could ride was ridden for hours, whether on modern slavery or organ transplants, but the real challenges facing the health service seemed a sideshow, in my opinion.

Before I contribute on this Bill, I want to give your Lordships a quotation. I am always indebted to my noble friend Lord Bragg, who continues to educate me in my quest for lifelong learning. A recent programme of his was about a philosopher of whom, I must admit, I had never heard—that is probably my ignorance—a man called John Amos Comenius. He was a

“philosopher, pedagogue and theologian who is considered the father of modern education”.

What he proposed was fascinating—and bear in mind that we are talking about the 17th century:

“Comenius introduced a number of educational concepts and innovations including pictorial textbooks written in native languages instead of Latin, teaching based in gradual development from simple to more comprehensive concepts, lifelong learning with a focus on logical thinking over dull memorization, equal opportunity for impoverished children, education for women, and universal and practical instruction.”


If that had been written today, we might think it a modern prescription for education, but he arrived at it in the 17th century and travelled around advising a number of countries, so Comenius has a lot to recommend him to us and others.

I turn to my noble friend Lady Chapman’s amendment. Perversely, if we remove “may” and insert “must”, the Bill will give the Government the power grab that noble Lords are concerned about. To me, “may” means exactly that. I ask noble Lords if you really believe that the DfE has the desire or capacity to intervene in every school in the UK. Come on—even if it wanted to, it could not. That is my view, and people are free to disagree. Is this a perfect Bill? Of course it is not; that is the purpose of our debating it today.

I will just say this to the Committee. I hope this will not be a debate that says, “Academies bad, maintained schools good”, or vice versa. Actually, we have not mentioned free schools, which have made a contribution. My view about schools is that variety is not only the spice of life but makes an enormous contribution to education. Indeed, as my noble friend Lord Knight reminded us, it was a Labour Government who, having seen the appalling record of maintained schools in London that were failing, introduced academies. They did a good job of changing that environment. Let us remember how important that is, because children get only that one chance. If these schools are failing, then that chance is denied them.

I was also interested when my noble friend said to trust in teachers. I do, but I will tell your Lordships who I put a bigger trust in, who I regard as the key component of any successful school: the head teacher. If you have not got the head teacher right, that school will not flourish. I will give as an example a good friend of mine, Liz Wolverson. She has recently retired, but she was the diocesan director of Church of England academy primary schools in London, in really challenging areas such as Newham, et cetera. They have rescued 10 failing schools. I asked her what her prescription was for dealing with failing schools. She said, “I go into the school, I look around, I talk to the head, to parents, to teachers and to pupils. Then I go back to the head and I say, ‘You’ve got six months to turn the school around, and if you don’t succeed, goodbye. That’s it’.” That is a tough prescription, but it is a necessary one if we care about that one main chance for our children. I believe we should.

I looked at the report from the committee referred to by my noble friend Lady Chapman, which talked about the terrible Henry VIII powers. I took that into account. It is right that the committee should draw that to our attention, but I also looked at what the Minister said to us in her reply to the debate at Second Reading, where these concerns were expressed. She said:

“My noble friends Lord Nash and Lord Lucas, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, also were concerned about the impact on the fundamental freedoms of academies. These reforms will maintain the central freedoms and autonomy of the academy programme. Our ‘strong trust’ definition and standards will set out clearly what we expect all academy trusts to deliver, but trusts remain free to design, innovate and implement operating models that they believe will deliver the best outcomes for their pupils.”—[Official Report, 23/5/22; col. 740.]


I saw that as a serious statement from the Minister. I hope she will confirm that today.

For me, that is an important pledge by the Government. I welcome the coverage, investigation and analysis of the Bill, of course I do. I am sure there are parts of this Bill that can be improved, like any Bill, but I ask the Committee to consider carefully what it is trying to do with Amendment 1. Time is not on our side. I do not accept the argument that we should throw it all out, take our summer break and then come back again. I have never seen anything that appears in front of this House that we are completely satisfied with. If there is such a thing as a perfect Bill, no doubt it exists in some other version of the universe that we have not yet encountered.

I rarely give advice, because it is freely given and freely ignored, but I participate in the Lords outreach service. It is a great institution. This Friday, I am going to speak to a Catholic academy in East Finchley. I am looking forward to this. I will get an opportunity to talk to the pupils. I like to say to them “If you were Minister for Education, tell me where you would put the money.” That always gets them going because I remind them that politics is about the language of priorities.

The other interesting thing about it is that it is a Catholic school. When I spoke to it and we got to the end of our discussion, I said, “By the way, what is your admissions policy?”, and I was told, “Anybody can come to our school. They do not have to attend a church service or anything else.” We will go on to debate faith schools, an area where I suspect there will be further disagreements. All I can say on that subject is that a large percentage of the public have faith in faith schools because they believe they deliver good education with good discipline, so they participate in them.

I hope I have not lost all my noble friends with this contribution. I seem to be the only person who has contributed so far who has given the Government the benefit of the doubt. I believe that what they are trying to do is in the interests of every Member of this House, which is to improve the quality of the education that we deliver to our children.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am puzzled about how the system proposed in the Bill produces good schools. I have spent the past 30 years involved with the Good Schools Guide. Schools die mostly because their governance goes wrong. Anything else you can put right, but the governors can take a school down irretrievably. To have a good governing body, you require motivation. You require people with real determination that the school will succeed, that it will get better. They have not got all the answers and they will look outside for them, they will listen and learn, talk to parents and work with outside experts to make things better.

In most cases, things turn out that way, but what we are producing here is a completely motiveless environment, and why is anyone going to want to run a MAT under those circumstances? What freedoms do they have left? What is left to them in terms of jurisdiction over the school? Why would anyone of any quality get involved with running a multi-academy trust? Would you really hang around just waiting to be beaten up by the Department for Education—or Ofsted, if it is allowed a part in multi-academy trusts? You have no ability to steer things, no ability to innovate, no ability to make things better or to show how good your pupils and your schemes can be. I remember this thing coming in. It was all about producing a system which would innovate and make itself better and which we could learn from; people would try new ideas. Things have not been perfect, but there have been a lot of good examples, and now we are going back to a system where none of this can happen. I am very puzzled.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, unusually for me—and, I think, for most Members—I came here simply to listen, not to speak. Most of us tend to be the other way around, I think. Really, it is not necessary to speak because, certainly from my perspective, my noble friend Lady Morris just said everything that needs to be said, and I shall follow her on this Bill wherever she decides to go. I thought she encapsulated the Bill when she said it is about building an entirely new school system—almost by accident, certainly not through deliberate, considered intent.

I have never been a fan of the academy system—I might as well put my cards on the table—and a key reason for this is that one of the many things I treasured as a local MP was the accountability of what we now call maintained schools. If parents whose children were at academies were not satisfied with what was happening at the academy there was very little that I could do or could advise them to do, whereas it was simple in the case of the ultimate democratic control which you had with what we now call maintained schools.

So far as it has any clear objectives—I agree with most of what has been said about that not being at all clear—the Bill seems to be trying to make it so that somehow or other we will now have accountability for every school in the country, and the accountability will consist of the Secretary of State for Education. That is accountability in name only; I would like to know the acronym for that. It is not accountability, for the reasons my noble friend gave. What would be the cost of the section within the Department for Education which had the responsibility for addressing complaints from any parent in any school in the country and making sure they got a speedy reply? It is a ridiculous concept.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

7: Clause 1, page 1, line 8, leave out “, and the curriculum followed”
Member’s explanatory statement
This and the other amendments tabled to this Clause, Clause 2 and Clause 3 in the name of Lord Lucas are intended to protect some of the freedoms currently enjoyed by academies.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, in moving this amendment I will speak also to the other amendments in this group. We have been speaking of large and fundamental questions, and I find myself entirely in agreement with those who are concerned at what the Government have been saying. I therefore wish to take my noble friend Lord Agnew’s advice and try to avoid getting too deep into the weeds that we should be in. If the Bill were—as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, wished it to be—a real exposition of what the plans were, we should be debating whether, as Amendment 7 says, academies should still enjoy freedom over the curriculum, or to what extent and how that should be expressed. That is what our role should be, not just handing that power over to the Government.

I think these amendments were drafted before I had begun to focus on the constitutional enormities being attempted in the Bill. So, yes, academies should have some freedom of curriculum; yes, they should have control over the school day; yes, they should have freedom when it comes to staff remuneration and admissions numbers. We should also be really careful about preserving existing contracts.

Another Bill before this House asks that the Government be allowed to tear up the contracts that landowners have with the providers of telecom masts. Security of contract—the belief that a contract entered into cannot just be rolled over—is a very important part of a successful constitution in a free country. To have two Bills in front of us which both try to act as though that were not the case is deeply concerning. Therefore, my noble friend Lord Baker, in his offhand remarks about Darlington, should realise that there is a DfE office in Darlington; this is probably part of the plan. We must get back to where we should be. All the concerns I have raised in this group are valid, but not particularly in the context we find ourselves in now. I hope we will move on to other big questions. I beg to move Amendment 7.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I want briefly to respond to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, about his amendments being detailed and therefore not echoing the feeling of the debate we have had so far. On the contrary, it absolutely gets to the heart of the problem. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, in the last group, about the detailed work he had to fulfil as Minister in his role of managing academies as a whole and failing and problematic academies specifically.

The amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, go in the other direction and say that academies should be able to retain their personal freedoms. The difficulty is that the Bill does not give us any sense of the Government’s direction on academies. It is absolutely summed up by those two contradictions. It is important and this is the place in the Bill. I may not agree with all the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, but I am very grateful that he has laid them because it makes something very clear to me: the Government do not understand what they are trying to achieve.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

May I very briefly add to that? This is not just a matter for the Government; it is also a matter for the Chief Whip in the timetabling of Report. We had exactly this problem with the Health and Care Bill. We suddenly discovered a lot of detail on Report which should have been visible to us in Committee. As a result, Report took much longer, and the House sat until 1 am or 2 am on certain days. I hope the usual channels are looking at the detail of this because it will affect Report stage.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

We do, of course, have the ability to recommit a Bill to Committee if there are substantial changes to it.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support my noble friend Lord Lucas on protecting these freedoms and to try to cross the bridge between the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight. I managed those interventions with the powers that already exist. The freedoms that my noble friend Lord Lucas proposes go to the heart of what academisation is about. I will give noble Lords one tiny example. In Norwich we have two primary schools four miles apart. In one school they speak 25 different languages and the other is in an old-fashioned 1950s council estate—a totally different dynamic where a totally different approach to education is needed. Is that to be decided here in an ivory tower in Whitehall?

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[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, it is probably worth my reiterating my noble friend the Minister’s comments that we have heard and understood noble Lords’ concerns about the breadth of the power we are discussing and the fears about the centralisation of power over academies with the Secretary of State, and I know that we have heard other concerns about the nature of the power. It is worth reflecting on what the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said in terms of how we use this Committee stage. While we have heard those overall concerns, it is useful to have a discussion on specific elements within those clauses where noble Lords have issues that they wish to raise or questions that they wish to discuss so that we can make the best use of the time that we have in Committee.

I shall deal directly with the amendments tabled by my noble friend. We share his desire in these amendments to protect academy freedoms. The first set of regulations made under these powers are intended to consolidate and reflect existing requirements on academies. They will not represent a change of requirements on academies. This includes those areas referenced in my noble friend’s amendments: curriculum, length of school day, leadership and admissions. It is important to bear in mind that some requirements exist in these areas for academies, such as the requirement to teach a broad and balanced curriculum, including English, maths and science, and the requirements of the Academy Trust Handbook in relation to management and governance. The Secretary of State needs to be able to set standards in these areas. As my noble friend the Minister previously said, it is important that there is a clear set of minimum standards for academies to ensure that we get the basics right. At this point, it is also worth repeating that the Government have no desire to intervene in the day-to-day management of individual academies other than in cases of failure.

I turn specifically to Amendment 29, which seeks to protect the provisions within existing funding agreements. My noble friend Lord Nash touched on this, as did others. As we move to a fully trust-led school system, it will become increasingly unwieldy and difficult to regulate thousands of schools on the basis of individual funding agreements with no consistent set of minimum standards that apply equally to all academies. That is why, alongside a more proportionate compliance regime, we want to move away from a largely contract-based regulatory regime to a simpler and more transparent statutory framework—one fit for a system where every school is an academy.

I just touch on the debate and scrutiny that we might need in that circumstance. Some of the requirements are in a handbook that is amended by Academies Ministers; in bringing what is currently in a handbook into a form of regulation, with consultation with the sector in advance, there was the intention of having an increased level of parliamentary involvement and scrutiny in that process compared with the status quo, reflecting the fact that we are aiming to move towards a system where every school is part of a multi-academy trust. I hope that helps to reinforce the Government’s intention behind what we are seeking to do here. It also ensures, as I have said, that academy trusts are subject to a set of requirements over which Parliament has oversight and to which they can be held to account by parents. My noble friend’s amendment would enable funding agreement provisions and academy standards to co-exist and potentially conflict, if the former are not rendered void where there is a corresponding academy standard.

Finally, I turn to Amendment 34, which seeks to prevent primary legislation relating to the curriculum being amended by regulation unless it relates specifically to the curriculum in academies. Academy trusts are already subject to many of the same requirements as maintained schools, as set out in numerous pieces of primary legislation. As I have said, the intention here is to consolidate these requirements on academy trusts as much as possible into the academy standards regulations. This will be a gradual process; we want to work with academy trusts on the implementation of the academy standards at a pace which is right for them. As my noble friend reassured the Committee in her previous contribution, for each and every change of those regulations, there would be consultation in advance.

As we move towards a school system in which all schools are academies within strong trusts, we will want to ensure that the legal framework is fit for purpose, including by removing requirements that should prove excessively onerous or unnecessary. Clause 3 enables the Secretary of State to make these adjustments, subject to the affirmative procedure, and to be responsive to the changing needs of the school system.

I recognise that the autonomy to decide on key aspects of running a school, including the curriculum it chooses to teach, enables academy trusts to deliver the best outcomes for their pupils, and we have no intention to undermine those freedoms. This Government and I share my noble friend’s commitments to the principles of academy freedom, and, with this reassurance, I hope that he will therefore withdraw his amendment at this stage.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for her response. I think that it merely illustrates how far apart we are on the appropriateness of the structure of this Bill that we cannot have a serious discussion about what the curriculum freedoms should be. It is entirely undefined, and the Government say, “We’ll just make it up as we go along in the next few months, and that is what you are allowing us to do if you pass this Bill”. That is where the serious discussions lie; we ought to be having discussions about how the curriculum works. That is the level of responsibility we ought to be taking in this House, and this Bill seeks to take that away from us and place it with the Executive. I am delighted that we have had such unanimity around the Committee on what we think of that as a process.

So far as these individual amendments are concerned, yes, I applaud the diversity, innovation and freedom which the academy structure has had. It will be a problem to move that into a national system, but it will not be impossible. We ought to look at it, because this Bill gives the Government the power to introduce a totally prescriptive national curriculum. They could say what every school was going to do at every moment of every day, and we would have no more right to intervene on that—

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. He has really illustrated the puzzle I have: the handbook is clearly working at the moment—we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, that interventions can take place in the case of maverick trusts—so why on earth not let that continue, allow the consultation with the sector on the future governance and accountability arrangements, and then bring a Bill in a year’s time when we can actually go through it in detail and scrutinise it effectively? We could also have a statement at the front saying, “This Bill is about the academisation of all schools”. Why not be explicit and say this up front in the legislation, if that is what the Government want to do? Why does it have to be done in this sort of underhand way, and before they have properly worked out with the sector how it is best done? I just do not get it.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

No, my Lords, nor do I; I think it would work much better in that sort of way. The Government are good at making declaratory statements such as, “We’re going to do this: we’re going to abolish the sale of petrol engine cars in 2030”. We all know how effective that sort of statement can be. What is the difficulty if the Government were to say, “We are going for this sort of process; we’re going to have a period of consultation; it will end on this date; it’ll be in a Bill in Parliament in a year’s time, and that’s how it’s going to be worked out”? They would get exactly the same process as is envisaged by my noble friend Lady Penn—

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

I intervene briefly to say that an enormous amount of work could and should be done on the curriculum. The fact is that we are into the 21st century, and fantastic work is being done by educators all over the place about how we best educate our young people for the best possible outcomes. Yet, we have this odd divide between the schools that have to do the national curriculum and those that do not.

As my noble friend Lady Morris said, we should look at what the entitlements and requirements of an educated society are in order to rise to the challenges we obviously face as we move forward. Those should be things that are available to all young people. There might well be an argument for saying that those schools that are currently maintained schools but are required to do every last detail of the national curriculum might flourish more if they had some of those curriculum freedoms. So there is a big advantage to being able to talk in the round about our vision for what educated young people would be when they leave our education system. After all, there is common agreement now that young people will stay in school until they are 18 or 19. Gone are the days when they would leave at 16. There is such a lot to gain from having a much broader discussion about what an entitlement to a broad and balanced curriculum actually looks like, not just for the good of the individual but for the good of society at large.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

Yes, my Lords, and I imagine that we will have it as a part of the process of deciding how to turn maintained schools into academies. There is a really important debate to be had on where we should be resting, and I look forward to it. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 7 withdrawn.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading & Lords Hansard - Part two
Monday 23rd May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as the editor of The Good Schools Guide. I follow the noble Lord, Lord Davies, in saying that we are going to have an interesting time in all sorts of extra discussions on aspects of schooling: we are pretty good at being inventive as to how to fit them within the title of the Bill. I look forward to discussions on comparable outcomes, doubtless with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and admissions data, tutor regulation, and mental health with my noble friend Lord Altrincham. I note that the Government have recently endorsed Govox as a solution to mental health in schools. It is a very reassuring name—the voice of Gove. None the less, I think we should be careful in how we go around using apps which are unsupported by teacher training and our mental health services.

Employment skills, too, obviously need to be covered, as well as toilets for women, gender and exclusions. I think that there is a real case for revisiting the argument that, if you exclude a pupil, they stay in your performance tables—you cannot lose responsibility. It is up to you how well you place them, and you should take responsibility for that.

My main interests in this Bill are going to be on academies and home education. On academies, I very much follow the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman of Darlington, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth—two friends now, although doubtless they will soon be arguing about which of their towns the House of Lords should move to. But we agree that this is an astonishing end to the founding freedoms of academies: they have been reduced to something less than maintained schools, being looked after by a ministry that has never proved itself able to do that sort of thing. I shall, with my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking, be pushing back on this and asking, “What’s the vision, how is it supposed to work? Why should multi-academy trusts flourish in this environment? What is their role, why would it work, and what are the human dynamics of the system that the Government appear interested in creating?” I shall ask, too, how we can reconnect academy schools with parents. As others have noted, they have drifted away, and it is really very difficult for parents to have a relationship with or indeed an understanding of an academy school and the MAT that goes behind it.

On home education, I am very grateful to my noble friend for acknowledging the value and supporting the freedom, as she said. I hope that the Government do recognise that, in many cases, the resort to home education is due to a failure of the state—the school, the local authority or the other support services. It is because a parent cares about their child and is not prepared to let them be failed by the state. I am not unhappy with the register, but it should be universal; every child should be on it. At the moment, children in independent schools are not; as soon as a child gets into an independent school, they are off the data. We ought to be able to follow every child in the UK so that we can really understand where children go before and after home education and before and after exclusion, and really understand what our schooling system as a whole is doing. We might also look at having a universal register of providers. Why should we not know who is providing tutoring services, or indeed any other educational services? It need not come with obligations, but we should know who they are.

This Bill gives a lot of powers to local authorities. Some of them are wonderful: I will name Gloucestershire, Sandwell and Lancashire as three that really do well in looking after their home education communities. They step back, look at the big picture and innovate when it is needed; and they employ people who really know the law and understand how to use it and the wide extent of their existing powers, who want to help home educators, and who are open, responsive and collaborative in their approach. They create an environment of trust, where the community of home educators is open to working with the local authority, and they work with them to help resolve individual problems that occur with individual home educators. But this is not universal; other local authorities are repressive and oppositional, and this Bill, which should be constructed to drive local authorities towards best practice, instead enables bad practice.

There are far too many ways in which this Bill makes home educators vulnerable to bad local authorities—and there is, as yet, no money to support home educators. There is a promise, but nothing in the impact statement. We should ask that registration is not commenced until support is in place, and we should really look at the way in which penalties have been increased and have become very punitive in an area that should be about encouraging discussion, understanding and collaboration. It has made it far too easy for local authorities to resort to the stick. Time limits have become far too short—10 days to respond to a set of complicated questions is not reasonable if you are in the middle of it, living a life and educating children. No local authority will comply with a time limit like that.

The mandatory information to be provided should be basic; Otherwise, you will get into all sorts of safeguarding problems when local authorities start telling people who a child’s father is and where they live, and enabling people to find out what is going on in cases where abuse is taking place.

The Bill must make good behaviour by local authorities the default, rather than bad behaviour.

Education (Careers Guidance in Schools) Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

3rd reading
Friday 25th March 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

That the Bill do now pass.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am honoured to have been chosen by my honourable friend Mark Jenkinson to take this Bill through. It is seemingly small but it will benefit a lot of people in a very important way. I must say that for 30 years in this House it has been my ambition to achieve that; Mr Jenkinson has achieved it in one short Bill. I therefore congratulate him and I am grateful to the Government for their support. I beg to move.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, we welcome the Bill and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, on continuing the good work of the honourable Member for Workington. I particularly welcome the fact that the Bill includes academies, which is an important aspect of increasing its chances of reaching the maximum number of children to begin their preparations for a career and the world of work. For so long we have been told that academies are often literally a law unto themselves, and the terms of their funding agreements mean that in many aspects of their provision they cannot be told what to do. The Bill demonstrates that in fact they can and that all that is required is a stroke of the Secretary of State’s pen. A precedent has thus been created.

I will not rehearse the powerful arguments advanced by my noble friend Lady Wilcox at Second Reading on the need for effective, regular, independent careers guidance. However, I feel that I have to draw something to the attention of the Minister—if her eyes roll as I start this, frankly, I would not be surprised, because it is about the consistency of government policy again. Yesterday I raised with her the fact that the Levelling Up White Paper talked up mayoral combined authorities at the same time as she was advancing a government position that effectively talked them down in terms of local skills improvement plans. We had the Chancellor talking up the need for an apprenticeship levy review just a month after the Government had voted down a Labour amendment in another place asking for just that. This Bill talks about year 7; it lowers the start of career guidance from year 8 to year 7. Yesterday the Minister said:

“We question the value of provider encounters in year 7, before those students can act on them”.—[Official Report, 24/3/22; col. 1139.]


That is what this Bill does. I may not be alone in being not just perplexed but slightly irritated at the Government’s apparent inability to present consistent policy. It is absolutely right that year 7 should be where it starts, but it was right yesterday in our discussions on the skills improvement Bill as well and I very much regret that that was not accepted.

Finally, the concession on the skills Bill that the Minister made this week in respect of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and his clause, shows that the Government have finally determined that they will make careers guidance more effective and meaningful and they are supporting it further in this Bill. That is why we welcome the Bill and look forward to it becoming law.

Education (Careers Guidance in Schools) Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 4th March 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. In doing so, I pay tribute to my honourable friend Mark Jenkinson, the MP for Workington, who had the sagacity to choose a Bill that the Government will support—not an easy thing, as various noble Lords have demonstrated—and which will make an important and solid improvement for all our children.

It is a very simple but effective Bill. Clause 1 amends the scope of Section 42A of the Education Act 1997, which puts a statutory duty on schools to secure independent careers guidance. The Bill extends careers provision to all pupils in state secondary education, bringing year 7 pupils into scope for the first time. It also extends the duty to all academy schools and alternative provision academies. Clause 2 revokes 2013 regulations that extended the careers guidance obligations to pupils aged 13 to 18. These are no longer needed as this Bill extends to all secondary-age pupils.

In practice, these clauses mean that all pupils in all types of state-funded secondary schools in England will be legally entitled to independent careers guidance throughout their secondary education. They show a determination to achieve guidance for every single child in every single state secondary school in every single local authority, without exception. The Bill will also establish consistency by applying the statutory careers duty to all types of state school, bringing approximately 2,700 academy schools and 130 alternative provision academies into scope.

By extending the lower age limit to year 7, the Bill also brings the careers duty into line with the Government’s careers framework for schools, the Gatsby benchmarks, which apply to years 7 to 13. This will enable the Government to meet a commitment they made in the Skills for Jobs White Paper and will reach over 600,000 year 7 pupils each year. It will also mean that we can give year 7 pupils early exposure to a range of local employers so that they gain experience of the workplace, ask questions and develop networks. They will begin to learn about the local labour market, which is important because skills needs around the country are very different.

Equally important—as my noble friend will no doubt expect me to say, given my performance on the skills Bill—is exposure to careers not available locally. That is important for both students and communities. As regards students, somewhere in Eastbourne, a town founded on hospitality, care and education, is a future nuclear engineer, and somewhere in Workington, a town founded on nuclear engineering, is a Michelin-starred chef. Those young people must not be denied the breadth of possibility which should be open to them. There are institutions in this country, such as Education and Employers and Founders4Schools, which exist to open those doors for pupils, and I really hope that my noble friend the Minister will be able to commit to continued support for bringing a breadth of opportunity to young people, wherever they grow up.

It is also really important for communities. I was part of a committee of this House that looked at seaside towns, and it was clear that these towns had become narrow in the range of opportunities they offered, and that the self-belief in their ability to change had declined. Opening the eyes of children is an important part of that. Getting children to have a breadth of career aspirations then makes them available to new industries coming in, and having a breadth of industry and activity in a town makes it much more resilient to shocks such as Covid or whatever else may come our way.

Early careers guidance can support important decisions that need to be made from the age of 14—whether it is choosing between GCSE subjects or making the decision to change schools to attend a university technical college. We must ensure that our young people are well informed in their opinions.

If the Bill is passed, I count on the Government to make it easier for schools to understand the changes to the law and what action they need to take, and to encourage or require Ofsted to focus clearly and consistently on how every school is meeting its statutory duty by providing independent careers guidance to every pupil throughout their secondary education. I very much hope that this additional requirement on schools will be matched when it comes to deciding what their funding will be next year.

If I may add a request of my own to this estimable Bill, it is that the Government stay the course and build on what has been achieved over the last 10 years, thinking particularly of the Careers & Enterprise Company and the careers hubs they have created. It is terribly easy for a Government to think that they might do better than that and to start again from the beginning. In this sort of area, that is a really difficult and dangerous thing to do. It takes ages to build up relationships with schools and with businesses—the network of understanding, prestige and respect that makes this sort of thing work well.

The Careers & Enterprise Company has done an excellent job, though it does need help at this time. Changes elsewhere, particularly with local enterprise partnerships, mean we have to look again at how careers support in schools interfaces with employers nationally and locally. I know that the Government are doing some things in the skills Bill, but they need to connect better with what they have already achieved in the Institute for Apprenticeships in terms of relationships with employers and what the levelling-up department will doubtless be doing. We need something integrated—something that employers will respect and to which they will commit really good people, so that the information and expertise coming into the Government accurately reflect what the people at the top of business want, not just a box-ticking exercise from big companies.

It is always difficult to do these things—I understand why the Government like to rein in these creatures that they do not properly control and to make sure they are working with government and not against it. But it is much better if we can work—and build—on the achievements of the past, rather than throw them out. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken, particularly my noble friend the Minister for that reply. I think that, if today were a baking day for my noble friend Lord Baker, he would have an oven full of hot cross buns. As ever, his was an impressive speech and one that we should all listen to. I very much look forward to the debates that we will have when this kill Bill returns to this House. It is really important that something we all agree should happen is framed in such a way that it does happen.

I support what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, said about how difficult it is for people to realise that something might be for them and then take the first step, and about the efficacy of having someone by their side to help. I really hope that we find the Government determined to move forward on careers hubs and career leaders’ education, including working with education employers; my noble friend the Minister mentioned the work done by Primary Futures and other equivalent organisations to produce people who can be by someone’s side when they are looking at taking that first step.

The noble Lord, Lord Shipley, focused on extending this to primary. It is important. Children coming into secondary school have a lot of their ideas formed by that stage; a narrowing has taken place. It does not take much. I have been on several Primary Future expeditions. At that age, children are so uncritical. They open up to new ideas so easily. They love sitting down next to a policeman or a nurse, or someone like that, who can talk to them about what they do in a way they have not had exposure to. It really works well as a formula.

As ever, my noble friend Lord Holmes waxed lyrical on disabled people. I must say, I have found it astonishingly difficult to employ disabled people. I have never found a structure, with charities or the Government, that makes it easier for me to communicate with and reach disabled people or understand how to do that better. I hope that we will see some progress on that; we need a structure that industry can relate to and which really supports disabled people. It is not beyond human wit.

Thinking about my noble friend Lady Altmann’s speech, I am reminded of Cisco’s pride that its champion apprentice was a woman who was previously a hairdresser. It had changed its advertising, so that the way it described its jobs appealed to people like that. It is not hard, if you are given help or you have the inspiration, to make changes, but it really helps if you have a structure to work with in doing that.

I am extremely grateful to all who have spoken. I wish the Bill a swift and untroubled passage through this House and very much look forward to its implementation.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.

School Admissions Code 2021

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 9th November 2021 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

That the Grand Committee takes note of the draft School Admissions Code 2021 and the School Information (England) (Amendment) Regulations 2021 (SI 2021/570).

Relevant document: 3rd Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am not so much concerned with these regulations, which seem to me to be a good thing, but I really want to encourage the Government to go further because the school admissions system needs some attention. If it were a set of teeth, it would not need a trip to the dentist, but it would certainly need the attentions of a hygienist. It has accumulated a lot of tartar, is not working well and needs improving.

Admissions regulations perform a set of very important functions in the education system. They are there to give everybody a chance of getting to a decent school and of knowing how to get there. Parents need to be able to tell what the chances of getting into an individual school are and what they have to do to establish their rights to do that. They also have a strong role as a driver for school improvement. Parental choice works well only if parents are actively choosing.

As things are, this does not work. If you look at an ordinary local authority publication on school admissions, you will find that most of the data is not there. So many schools are now their own admissions authorities that all the central source of information says is that information is available from the school. You cannot look at one document, in one place, and begin to have an idea of which schools you might actually get into.

You have to go round each individual school and ask it for the information—it is often not easy to find. You have to compare this year’s admissions policies with last year’s, to guess at how these are working. This is hard work for someone who is time-rich and capable and absolutely impossible for someone whose life is at all stressful or who does not have the necessary resources to do it. They are thrown back on going to the local school, because that is the only thing they can be sure of in the time they have. The whole business of school choice ceases to operate.

This is really just a matter of getting schools to do as they should and provide their local authority with the data on how their admissions structure works, so that the local authority can put it in its brochures. It is a matter of enforcement. Parents need this and it should not be hard to do. I really hope that the Department for Education will take that step.

The second set of problems comes from a lack of consistency between local authorities. Each local authority displays its information in its own way and with its own structure. There is no common format. If you live close to the border of a local authority, you are faced with learning two different ways of interpreting schools data and looking at what is going on. This also prevents anybody producing a coherent, consolidated app or website which could really inform a parent as to which schools they might have a chance of getting into and how to go about applying to them.

One company tried to gather this data once and it cost it £250,000. That was in the days when there were not a lot of individual schools that you had to “FoI” to get the data out of them. It is now completely impossible for anybody to gather this data and look at ways of making life easier for parents, which is why nobody does it. However, it would not be difficult or costly. All that has to be done is to require local authorities to make this data available in a standard format. They all have this data in an electronic form and converting data from one electronic format to another is not an expensive thing. All you have to do is produce a database that they can dump the stuff into and there it would be.

The immediate consequence of that is that there would be a scramble by commercial companies—I rather suspect that my own Good Schools Guide would be one of them—to pick up this data, make useful tools for parents with it and allow them free access to them. The department would not have to spend anything on using the data. This would happen because it is such an obviously wonderful thing for parents to have and quite a lot of organisations want parents to look at their websites.

Without doing anything that requires investment—and it does not require much effort—the Government could make huge improvements to the effectiveness of the school admissions information system and make it work much better for parents individually, in terms of finding the best school for their child and really knowing what schools are available, and for the operation of parental choice as a mechanism for improving what is going on in schools.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for her careful explanation of the regulations and her replies to our various comments. I will certainly take her up on the offer of writing to her with examples of information not being provided well. If she will allow me, I will also pick up again the argument about a machine-readable format. If somebody is telling my noble friend that this is difficult, what she is being told is not right.

This information is in a machine-readable format in local authority systems, so it is merely a question of flicking a switch and dropping this out into a common system. That should not take a local authority more than five minutes and, as there are only 100 of them, nationally this will take a few hours’ effort. It would do enormous good because parents need to know which schools their children might get into. If they have to research each school individually, they will never see the ones that are a little further away or a little more obscure that happen, for one reason or another, to be available to them because of their particular characteristics and admissions criteria.

You can get into some very good schools on some very odd criteria. If you are disadvantaged and not well-informed, and you have to research everything individually, you will never get there. This becomes a privilege for the middle classes. Making things available automatically means that all those who are setting out to help the disadvantaged suddenly have all the information at their fingertips; it is as easily available to them as it is to everybody else. If I may, I will put that to my noble friend.

These regulations make some decent improvements to the way that looked-after children and similar children are treated. I very much hope that my noble friend will gather information over time as to how they are working. From what hints I have been able to gather, I suspect that the previous facilities were not as well used as they should have been and that many looked-after children were not helped to take advantage of the privileges they had to get into really good schools. We should know that the advantages being given to them are being well used, or else understand why they are not. That said, I am immensely grateful to my noble friend and I thank her for the attention she has given to this Motion.

Motion agreed.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Report stage
Thursday 21st October 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

47: Clause 17, page 20, line 22, at end insert—
“(e) the mental health and wellbeing of persons who undertake a higher education course with the institution is supported.”Member’s explanatory statement
To ensure that the Office for Students has a sufficiently powerful lever to enforce its policies on student support, mental health and suicide.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, the origins of this, for me, lie 10 years ago, when one of my work colleagues was rung by a friend of her son to say, “I think you need to come down to Cardiff.” That was the first she knew about her son being suicidal. Fortunately, it all ended well, but there are many other such stories that have ended badly.

The universal point in this is that the universities really have not looked after their students well enough. We get platitudes from them, every now and again, about what they will do, but they do not even follow the basic medical procedures of who to contact if they are really worried about someone. Nor do they, in their substance, take care of students in the way that we as parents might hope.

I tried, a few years ago, to see if universities would switch a bit in the American direction and pay close attention to what teachers said about students in their applications. The answer came back: “No, we cannot do that; we never get to know our students well enough in the three years they are with us to judge whether what a teacher said was right, so there is no way that we can build up a system of reputation and ability to judge teachers’ comments in the way that American universities do.” This is changing, and it is changing because of the Office for Students.

The Office for Students has produced an extremely good paper on what it expects universities to do on mental health. It is getting a real grip on access, saying that it is not only about how many disadvantaged people you let in but how you look after them while they are there. The fact that so many of them are dropping out is down to the universities. Universities must not blame what came before or do as the Government did last week and try to blame the examinations that students took before: these are your students; you have admitted them, so you look after them—we expect you to make a success of them. That is an enormously important change, and I really want the Office for Students to be in a position where it can enforce the ambitions that I just set out and make sure that universities come up to the mark.

Reading the underlying legislation, I was not at all sure that that was the case, which is why I put down these amendments. I am assured, in correspondence with my noble friend the Minister, that this is the case and the OfS has the powers it needs. I very much hope that that is what I will hear from the lips of my noble friend, when she comes to reply on this amendment.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, obviously the House is deeply sympathetic to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas.

I want to extend those points. The biggest cause of mental health stress for students over the past 18 months has of course been Covid. Over the past two years, a substantial part of their courses has not been physical; indeed, in many cases, they have had almost no contact at all with fellow students. Obviously, in a public health emergency, that situation was substantially unavoidable, although some universities dealt with the situation better than others. It is clear that there was a difficulty in students being able to meet in large groups and have physical contact. However, that is no longer the case.

I know—because they have been taken up with me personally, as I am sure is true of other noble Lords—that there are concerns about continuing restrictions on students meeting and face-to-face tuition. To me, such restrictions seem totally without justification now; if I may put it somewhat undiplomatically, they may be suited more to the convenience of university administrators and lecturers than to the well-being of their students. I know that the Government have been robust in their statements about the importance of returning to the full educational experience in universities, but this is clearly an ongoing issue. I think that the House would welcome a robust assurance from the Minister that universities should now be expected to return to offering the full educational experience; the Office for Students should also be making this clear to them.

On a related point, I find it extraordinary, given the serious diminution in teaching and learning that many students have experienced over the past two years, that universities have still charged them full fees. I was the guy who persuaded Tony Blair to introduce fees in the first place, so I have nothing against fees—we need properly funded universities and properly paid academics —but it is supposed to be something for something. The reason for paying the fees is to get the full educational experience. Indeed, part of the justification for the fees was that they would enhance the educational experience; we wanted universities to be able to staff up properly and offer proper facilities.

The other half of that contract applies too. Where students have not been able to gain the full experience and the quality of teaching and learning to which they are entitled in return for their fees of more than £9,000, the universities should have discounted those fees. I am surprised that the Government did not apply more pressure to them to do so; I assume the reason is that the Treasury was worried that, if the Government applied pressure on universities to discount fees, the universities would come and ask for the money. I have a feeling that what happened here was a kind of Faustian pact: the Government did not pressure universities because they did not want the consequential action of the universities asking them for money. But actually, it would be perfectly possible for universities, like almost every other enterprise in the country, to realign their outlays with their income and themselves take on the consequences of a reduction in fees. The idea that state funding is the only alternative to fee funding is wrong.

If I may say so—I have said this a lot over the past two years, but it still needs to be said—vice-chancellors are, for the most part, grossly overpaid. One of the less satisfactory outcomes of the fee reform, in particular the trebling of fees to £9,000, was vice-chancellors doubling their own incomes and creating a whole swathe of bureaucrats in universities. I went through the figures and was amazed at the swathes of bureaucrats in universities—all paid more than £100,000, and many of them paid more than £150,000—while none of the junior lecturers or PHD students gets any of this largesse. Apart from a few offers of short-term reductions in salaries, I have not noticed any university vice-chancellors taking this opportunity to apply proper scrutiny to the size and salaries of their senior management teams or, dare I say it, leading by example and cutting their own pay as part of a deal to cut student fees in response to the terrible experience that so many students have had to go through during the pandemic.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I shall be delighted to write.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful for my noble friend’s answer, which included just the words that I was after—that the Government are sure that the Office for Students has the powers that it needs to make progress in this area. I am very happy to leave it at that, given the record of the Office for Students to date.

I share with the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, the determination that disadvantaged students should not be disadvantaged further by the systems that we put in place. I think that is entirely possible. I hope that we will see from the OfS a system of better admissions, so that universities put some real effort into understanding how best to detect and attract those disadvantaged students who will do well at university; that this is a collaborative effort, a proper national research effort to solve this national problem; and that they will similarly collaborate on how best to look after those students once they reach university. They should expect them to need additional support because, after all, they are disadvantaged. In both those areas, I feel that the Office for Students is determined to see progress. I am confident that with that determination over the next few years we will see it.

I also hope to see some real diversity of thought as well as intake in our universities. I will know that we have achieved it when an Oxford college asks the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to be its next master.

Amendment 47 withdrawn.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I will not speak at any length about these two similar amendments, because I agree wholeheartedly with what all three speakers so far have said. Both represent an improvement on the current situation but, as we have heard, Amendment 35A from the noble Lord, Lord Baker, has stronger teeth and would provide for more frequent access—three times during each of the three specified phases, rather than just once. That is much more in line with the requirements of the Gatsby career benchmarks. It would require meetings with a representative range of educational and training providers, including UTCs, rather than just one provider, and it would not rely on any as yet unspecified statutory guidance. For all those reasons, it makes it much more likely that the requirement for pupils to receive these opportunities really takes place. I will certainly support the noble Lord if he puts his Amendment 35A to a vote.

The Minister’s helpful letter to us on Tuesday included a positive section on careers information and guidance, although I continue to regret the absence of a renewed careers strategy to provide an overall context and objectives for the various laudable actions that she set out. She mentions the support given by the Careers & Enterprise Company’s personal guidance fund for activities, including training for careers professionals, and the development of a pipeline of qualified careers professionals for the future. I wonder if she has made any assessment of the numbers of such professionals needing to be trained, what level of qualification they need to be trained to, and whether the funding and other incentives on offer are sufficient to meet those needs—in other words, a sort of workforce development plan for careers professionals. That is one reason why I think it would be helpful to have a strategy that sets out all the elements that are needed to deliver the kind of careers support that we need.

I end by echoing the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Storey: these amendments are important, and it is equally important that we make sure they are in some way enforced and the requirements are met.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, we had a fair old ding- dong last time we met on this Bill, with the Government proposing that we should destroy an entire suite of examinations in order to improve access to T-levels. Yet here they are refusing to make minor changes to the sight that children are given of T-levels—which have many other benefits—as an option.

I do not see how the Government are being consistent on this. If they want T-levels to be fully appreciated as an option by young people, they need them to be put in front of those young people, clearly and frequently. That is what my noble friend Lord Baker’s amendment would do, and the Government’s amendment would not. I am thoroughly with those noble Lords who have spoken in saying that my noble friend’s amendment is a better way forward than the Government are yet proposing.

I also encourage the Government to look at a couple of old chestnuts to do with performance tables. If you want head teachers to say to children that they will be better off in an FE college and encourage them to go to it, you ought to give them credit for the results that they achieve there. It ought to be something that appears in the performance tables, credited to the school that has made that decision; otherwise, the incentive is just to hang on to pupils for the money. If schools are risking a blip in the performance tables because the A-level results will be bad and it would have been much better if they had gone to a technical college, there will be a real incentive for schools to encourage children to take that option.

The other aspect is to provide much better data on where children end up after school. At the moment, the information provided on what happens to those who do not go to university is very thin, uninspiring and not the sort of thing that encourages a parent to say, “Oh, that looks interesting; why don’t we look at that?” The provision of data and information is really important in helping parents to help their children make decisions, and the Government are falling a long way short on that. They have the information; it is just a question of deciding that they will publish it or make it available to others who will publish it. I really encourage them to go down that road.

My noble friend the Minister said that she hoped children would be making fully informed choices. I totally agree with her. If we can bring universities up to that standard, I should be delighted as well.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

My Lords, I share the sentiments of my noble friend Lord Baker about the way that my noble friend the Minister has taken a grip of this Bill, and I thank her for that. I have to say, therefore, that it is with some trepidation, and with the benefit of my business and bureaucratic experience, that I rise to throw a bit of cold water on the detail of both amendments.

As noble Lords will know from earlier discussions, I am very keen to see vocational careers education, training and, above all, apprenticeships advocated in schools—and, in fact, by employers themselves. We clearly have a problem. However, I worry about the bureaucracy that will be created by this provision; it is a concern with either version. To comply with the provisions, a lot of detailed work would have to be done by teachers, who work so hard; by providers—including UTCs, which I agree should be involved—of post-16 education; and by employers, if they join providers in schools, which is something that I think can often work well. They will have to do a lot of form-filling and more recording, health and safety-style. Then, as has been said, there will be extra guidance, but we do not know exactly what will be in that; it could make it easier or it could make it worse.

I worry that this will deter exactly the people and institutions that you want to get into schools to encourage youngsters to think about their futures and choose the right educational option. Too many people, in my view, now go to university and not enough go into good vocational routes. I have experience in Germany and Switzerland and elsewhere. To pick up on something that the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said, in those countries, they often move at 14 or 16, which can be extremely helpful with the vocational route.

My worry is that the beneficiary of these micro-rules will be, yet again, the consultants who will have to help with process and compliance. I am obviously very sympathetic to the objective of these amendments, but I would like some reassurance from the Minister on how we make this system simple and efficient and how we enforce it sensibly—before we go through the Lobbies. As the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, was saying, there are costs and resource requirements in doing all these things in schools, and they have to come from somewhere else. So if we are going to make a change of this kind, we need to understand how it will be done and how it will be enforced, and that it will be done in a sensible and effective way, not adding needlessly to the weight of burden on our teachers.

Skills and Post-16 Education Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 12th October 2021 Lords Chamber

Can the Minister tell us, so that we can be sure that we are not completely wasting our time this afternoon, how many of these £3,000 incentive payments were made in respect of apprentices under the Chancellor’s Budget this year for new apprentices? That is the acid test that things are going in the right direction, because the great and depressing feature of this Bill is that, with the best will in the world—and all of us here have the best intentions—we are presiding over an increasingly failing state and state-led apprenticeship system which will further widen the gap between the opportunities that graduates have in our economy and those of non-graduates, and nothing that has been said so far during the Bill’s passage gives any confidence whatever that this situation is not going to worsen.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 11, which I have put my name to, and regret that the rules on Report do not allow the noble Lord, Lord Watson, to launch into his exposition of it before the end, unless he wants to rise now.

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord. I did intend to speak before the end of the debate.

I will speak to Amendment 11, which has cross-party support and has also been endorsed by the Local Government Association and the Association of Colleges. We support the Government’s ambition to give local employers a strong role in the skills system through local skills improvement plans, but we believe that it should be done as part of an integrated place-based approach to deliver sustained outcomes for local people and local businesses.

I cannot understand the Government’s determination to exclude major players in the localities where the employer representative bodies are based. There needs to be a much more clearly defined and significant role for local and mayoral combined authorities, as well as colleges and other training providers. There has to be an appreciation of differing labour markets, and the way they have developed and are likely to develop. Surely that is best understood at local and regional level. I suggest, as I did in Committee, that it is impossible to prescribe the skills needed for the whole of England from DfE headquarters, yet that is what the Bill’s measures effectively currently propose.

There has been a change since then because we now have a new Secretary of State, who, we are led to believe, has less centralising tendencies than his predecessor. Making the role of local authorities, MCAs, colleges and training providers clear and more effective would be a positive sign by the new Minister to that effect.

To achieve the best outcomes in every area, local authorities and providers should be named as a core and strategic partner in the LSIP process alongside employer representative bodies. To that end, Amendment 11 would provide for ERBs to develop LSIPs—sorry about all these contractions—in partnership with local authorities, mayoral combined authorities and further education providers to ensure that they reflect the needs of learners, employers and, as I said, the local community. Adults and young people have the right to expect access to quality education and training opportunities provided by a joined-up, place-based employment, skills and careers system. Integration at the local level will be vital to support the skills talent pipeline and to join up those skills and occupational pathways of progression.

Amendment 11 would also require local skills improvement plans to consider social and economic development strategies in the local area and long-term national needs that may not apply to local employers. Unless local authorities have a meaningful role in the development and approval of LSIPs there is a risk that these reforms could create further fragmentation within the skills system, which may result in further education providers being subject to different skills plans, disruption of progression pathways for learners and a lack of local democratic accountability, which I do not think we should lose sight of.

I can tell the Minister that local and combined authorities are ambitious to do more to join up local provision to create integrated skills and employment offers tailored to the needs of local economies and residents. This amendment would make use of local government’s expertise to deliver the best outcomes for every community.

Finally, Amendment 11 would require LSIPs to identify actions that relevant providers and other local bodies can take regarding any post-16 technical education or training that they provide. This is drafted to avoid being too prescriptive but would allow LSIPs to work closely with other agencies, including Jobcentre Plus and careers advisory services. As Amendment 12 from the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, says, bodies providing careers information, advice and guidance, and independent training are also crucial to the development and success of a local skills improvement plan.

I want to mention the LSIP trailblazers. Less than 24 hours ago, the Minister circulated to noble Lords a 20-page draft guide for employers on LSIP trailblazers. This was promised by her predecessor in Committee 12 weeks ago, so I have to ask why we received it quite literally at the 11th hour, which was not helpful. I do not claim to have gone through it in depth, partly because I was still trying to digest the 69 pages of additional policy notes I found on the DfE website last week that had not been drawn to our attention—yes, I do sometimes have trouble sleeping. There are ways in which communication of some of these papers could be improved, not least in their timing.

Colleges and employer representative bodies in the recently announced successful LSIP trailblazers and strategic development fund pilots will be considering how best they can work in partnership and how they can work with other key partners. There is considerable scope for the sector to lead the way in building new linkages between colleges, universities, schools and other providers; strengthening relationships with mayoral combined authorities and local government; and embedding the voice of students, staff and the wider community in all of this, in so doing demonstrating and strengthening the new environment that they want to operate in. The Government should do everything that they can to facilitate that. It would be to everybody’s benefit.

I am very sympathetic to Amendments 10 and 66 in the name of my noble friend Lady Whitaker, who is yet to speak to them, which aim to ensure that the DfE has a plan for closing the attainment gap and that employer representative bodies have regard to it. The latest annual report from the Education Policy Institute found that the gap between what poorer pupils and their richer peers achieve at school had stopped closing even before the disruption of the pandemic. Disadvantaged pupils in England are now 18 months of learning behind their peers by the time they finish their GCSEs—a huge gap, but the same as five years ago. Disparities at primary school age are also widening for the first time since 2007.

However, a plan will not be worth the paper it is written on unless it includes substantive proposals backed by funding. Noble Lords will be well aware that the Government’s education recovery plan has been roundly criticised as insufficient, including by Tory Members of Parliament and the Government’s own, now departed, Education Recovery Commissioner, Sir Kevan Collins, who said that it did not come close to what was needed. I do not expect the Minister to answer me on that point now, but it is an issue that had an impact on Oral Questions earlier today and which must be taken forward and dealt with if the full effects of the pandemic are to be dealt with. I like to think that we might see a much-needed policy change shortly in the spending review, although, like other noble Lords, I obviously will not hold my breath.

Finally, the development of local skills improvement plans must be inclusive by demonstrating an awareness of and commitment to equality and diversity. It is crucial that those with learning and other disabilities can benefit from the measures in the Bill and that support for schemes that help, especially supported internships, are on the face of the Bill. It requires a focus on making all the so-called three ships—traineeships, supported internships and apprenticeships—more accessible and widely available, opening up pathways into long-term employment for people with a learning disability. Apprenticeships need to be made more flexible; this should be included as part of reforms to the post-16 education offer. Additionally, we want to see more of a commitment to people with education, health and care plans, as well as those who have disabilities but do not qualify for such care plans. Leaving these groups out will only further entrench the current barriers that people with learning disabilities face in finding sustainable paid employment.

There is much for the Minister to respond to in this group of amendments. I do not expect her to respond to all of it in detail but it would helpful if she could follow up on some of my points by letter after the debate. However, let me be clear: we want both employer representative bodies and local skills improvement plans to be successful but we believe that, as it stands, the Bill will limit what can be achieved. There are so many people and organisations with much to offer. They should be encouraged to play their part fully in developing skills for the future.

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After seven years of conditional funding, there is ample need for a review to see how the current policies are fitting, or not fitting, students for work. For many years this significant proportion—the missing third—has been most damagingly neglected. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I will pick up where I left off on Amendment 11 and also speak to my Amendment 20. I welcome my noble friend to the Front Bench. There was a period when she was my Whip; she probably thought that she had finally escaped having to deal with me, but now she is back, front and centre of my interests.

I apologise that my first action will be to vote with the noble Lord, Lord Watson, if he pushes his amendment. Like him, I absolutely support the objectives of the Bill, but I will vote with him because I am really unhappy and unclear about it in its current state. I want us to be able to continue this conversation as the Bill winds its way through the Commons. As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, the key element of this discussion—the local skills improvement plan trailblazers document—arrived today, at least for me, and I have not managed to look at it properly. There is a lot there that needs attention.

I thoroughly support the idea of local employer involvement in skills provision. For a long time, local employers have complained to me that their local colleges and other providers are not doing the courses they need: the engineering kit that the FE college has is 20 years out of date, and graduates have to be completely retrained if they enter engineering; the building courses do not align with the methods used at the moment; nothing is available for the local foundry; and so on. The need for local employers to be involved in local skills provision is very clear to me.

However, to get successful employer engagement you need both status and longevity. You are asking employers to get senior, good and effective members of staff to spend time on collaborative bodies and arriving at results. They need to do that over a period of years to build up relationships and understanding with each other, among the employer community as much as with education providers. That takes time and an attitude to these bodies that is not, “Oh, we’ve had this for five years—let’s throw it out of the window and start again”. Starting again takes you back to zero.

If I have understood the document right, the trailblazers will exist only for a year or two. Why will any sensible employer spend time trying to make something right when it will be torn up after two or three years? There will be a few, but there will not be the comprehensive effort that would be made if the Government gave themselves a bit more time and, when they know what they want to do, set out to provide employers with something that has a hope of lasting 10 or 20 years.

We have a new ministry for levelling up, which gives it an opportunity to make a decision about what is happening to local enterprise partnerships. These are a source of relationships, understanding and established ways of doing things which might well be drawn on to make a success of local skills improvement plans, but they appear to be ignored entirely. Why? Let us have some coherence in this across government. This is already at least the second way in which the Department for Education is proposing to consult employers; it already has a reasonably well-established network in IfATE, but it does not appear to be tying that in at all to what is happening with local skills improvement plans. There are also networks based in BEIS and in the Department for Work and Pensions. There needs to be more thought and coherence before we set out on this, so that we can really make a success of the idea.

If I read this document right, there is a budget of £4 million for the seven trailblazers, so that is about half a million quid each. In our local area, this is the whole of Sussex, and because of the way Sussex has evolved, the Sussex Chamber of Commerce knows very little about what happens down at the town level. There is almost no relationship between the Sussex chamber and Eastbourne; Eastbourne is dealt with by the Eastbourne Chamber of Commerce. There is also very little relationship between the Sussex Chamber of Commerce and that huge employer of people in Sussex: London. So you are asking this body to build from nothing a knowledge of the skills needs of a very large area—four or five million people’s worth, if you embrace the south of London—on a budget of half a million quid. It is a comfort to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, that there is no possible way they will have money to pay consultants; they will be really pushed to do this on a few local people. It does not seem to be a recipe for success.

To pick a quote from the document, these partnerships are supposed to look at

“opportunities created by emerging technologies, cleaner growth and new global markets.”

How can you do that based in Sussex, for goodness’ sake? You are not exactly at the middle of any of these industries. Where is the source of knowledge and information to enable them to do that? That sort of thing requires national co-ordination and there is no sign in this plan of how that national understanding will develop.

As the noble Lord, Lord Bird, said, you need an organisation which is looking ahead; ideally, 10 years ahead—though it is getting pretty speculative—but certainly five years. If you talk, as I do, to the jobs board providers, they will say, by and large, that employers look at what they want today and, if you push them hard, they will look a year or so ahead. Local employers do not have that understanding of where their whole industry is going; they have to deal with the problems of today. You need to build in something which is looking further ahead, and there is no reason to try to do that locally. Also, there is a lot of commonality between local problems: the problems we face in Sussex will be replicated in East Anglia, the north-east and elsewhere, one way or another. We do not want to have to create individual, from-the-ground-up solutions to each of these problems; we want to have a mechanism for sharing the problems and approaches and putting the best solutions forward, rather than just creating new things locally. Again, I do not see a sign of that in the Bill.

The system of careers advice for children at school set up by this Government in the Careers and Enterprise Company, of which I have a high opinion, is based on their relationship with local enterprise partnerships. What is proposed under this new system to enable them to continue the rollout of local career hubs? Again, I do not see anything. Where in this structure do we encounter the interests of students? Somewhere in Eastbourne is the engineer that the noble Lord, Lord Ravensdale, wants. Under the LSIP, as described here, the only training available for us will be for hoteliers—that is the main business in Eastbourne. There is no engineering contractor, let alone a nuclear industry. There is not much IT at the moment; there is no obvious source of green growth jobs within our patch. Where is this understanding to come from? Why should our children be restricted in their opportunities to what happens to be available in Sussex? An awful lot of people who live in Sussex work in London. How is the source of demand and need to be factored into the local skills improvement plan in Sussex?

I hope that when the Bill comes back to us from the Commons we will end up with a nationally coherent, long-living system of involving local employers and other sources of information in producing a structure of training that works for local people and local industries. What the noble Lord, Lord Watson, suggests is the right way to do it. As for Boris—if I am allowed that shorthand for my right honourable friend the Prime Minister—he was talking about that last time I read one of his speeches regarding raising the leaders of counties to the same status as local mayors and giving them the same sort of powers and ambit. We will see how that direction works out but at least the understanding is there. A lot of support is available at county level, including a lot of knowledge, skills and people in the workforce, which would really support an enterprise like a local skills improvement partnership. If the two aspects are embedded together, they are likely to work together and benefit from each other. In terms of sending a message to our colleagues in the Commons, the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, does that pretty well.

[The Lord Bishop of Oxford]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 13, 16 and 19, tabled by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, who is unable to be present because of his other engagements. Along with others, I welcome the Minister to her new role and join others in offering appreciation to her predecessor, the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge. I should also say, as a member of your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Environment and Climate Change, how much I welcome government Amendment 6, and I add my support to Amendment 64.

The context of my remarks is a general welcome for the Bill and recognition of its role in helping to meet the Government’s ambition on FE and skills. However, there is almost no specific reference to SEND provision in the Bill, despite the significant role that FE plays in provision for students with additional needs or disabilities. Noble Lords will know that around 202,000 students have special educational needs in further education, of whom 90% attend general FE colleges and make up almost one in six of all enrolments. Within those, almost a quarter of students are aged 16 to 18. In contrast to the school sector, there is a small number of specialist institutions. That situation makes a profound difference to the scale and range of support needed in general FE and sixth-form colleges.

During Second Reading, the Minister gave assurances that the overall legislative framework, notably the Equality Act and the Special Educational Needs and Disability Act, provided sufficiently rigorous safeguards for ensuring that the needs of SEN students were met. It was also most helpful to see the updated policy note and to hear the further assurances from the noble Baronesses, Lady Chisholm and Lady Barran, at their meeting with my right reverend friend the Bishop of Durham last week. The Government’s high aspirations for students with learning needs and disabilities is clear, and we warmly welcome that ambition.

However, the evidence from the Special Educational Consortium and Natspec, which are key voices promoting the rights of disabled children and young people, those with special educational needs and specialist further education, is that far more explicit duties should be incorporated into the Bill to ensure that high ambitions and good intentions are subsequently consistently turned into effective action.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

27: Clause 7, page 7, line 32, at end insert—
“(c) must specify a range of qualifications with a teaching and learning requirement equivalent to one GCSE (at level 2) and one A level (at level 3) which allow students to combine academic and vocational education.”

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, there are a number of other amendments in this group. I very much hope that we will pursue one or more of them to a Division if we do not get some very clear reassurances from my noble friend, because it is my conviction that BTECs should continue to be widely available for some good long time yet at least, and that the Government’s suggestion that we should quickly move to a system of A-levels and T-levels only is profoundly mistaken. I have a number of reasons for this.

First, BTECs are respected. When it comes to educational qualifications, respect is hard to gain. BTECs are respected by universities, employers and parents, and not just parents of disadvantaged children. My daughter took a BTEC, her friend took three, and my cousin took three. They are something, as editor of the Good Schools Guide, that I would happily advise a child to take. They are a well-respected qualification and to dispose of them in haste and short order is profoundly un-Conservative. I very much hope that my new colleagues in the department will share that view.

I am very grateful to the department for sharing its reasoning with us. Broadly, as I understand it—my noble friend will doubtless correct me if I am wrong—it is that, looking at the people who take BTECs and comparing them with similar people who take A-levels, the people who take BTECs have a higher drop-out rate at university, and those who stay at university go on to learn less than equivalent pupils who take A-levels. That analysis is deeply statistically unsound. I will explain why.

A definitive and careful choice is made by a pupil and the people advising them as to whether they should go down the A-level or BTEC route. It is not a question of random allocation. Unless you really analyse what is going on in that process of differentiation, you absolutely cannot legitimately statistically compare the subsequent path of the two groups. You can remark on and look at them, but to compare them and say that one is therefore better than the other is not something you can do because you do not have the data to understand what that process of differentiation was. They are two different groups. They are swallows and crows—both birds, but to compare them is just to describe. It is not something you can draw conclusions from.

Nor is that the only point at which these two streams have different processes applied to them. When it comes to applying to university, they receive advice as to which course they should take at which university. The quality of that advice might well differ markedly for people taking BTECs as opposed to people taking A-levels. It certainly differs markedly between institutions. When, a few years ago, I was working with HESA statistics it was quite remarkable how drop-outs focused on the products of particular institutions rather than particular types of students or courses they were going for. So there is a second point at which this stream is different, which destroys the ability to compare.

Then there is what happens at universities. Universities are supposed, under their access policies, to support students from disadvantaged backgrounds. It is quite clear that they have not been doing this properly. I am delighted that the OfS is picking them up on this, but universities have not been looking at how they make the best of a student and give them the best possible outcome. They have been providing them with a relatively standard product and seeing how they get on with it.

Students who take BTECs are likely to have a different set of requirements in terms of teaching and support from students who take A-levels, so the differentiation may be entirely down to the practices of universities in not supporting BTEC students properly. That means that you cannot tell what is going on. The department is using this data to evince the reasons for its proposals on BTECs, but the data applies to the old pattern BTECs only—those that existed before the 2016 reforms. The new BTECs were specifically designed to deal with the worries people had about how BTEC students were doing at university. All the changes made to BTECs in the first teaching in 2016 were directed at helping students do better at university, but there is as yet no data available on how those students do at university. There were big changes—it is a different qualification in many ways—but the Government are treating it as if they can apply the data from the old qualification.

There is then another set of data which the Government do not seem to have applied themselves to: the data that comes before the surge in popularity of BTECs. The data for disadvantaged students in 2013-15 shows that almost all of them took A-levels and there was a huge rate of dropout, because these were not suitable for them. Go on a few years and there was a much lower school dropout rate because BTECs were holding these students in school. That does not seem to have been taken into the Government’s calculations. The department talks of getting these students back to doing A-levels, but we used to do that, and it had terrible results. Why does it want to do that again?

I am somewhat in despair at the quality of the DfE’s analysis of why it wants to do away with BTECs quickly. However, its analysis does suggest a test; it suggests that we should look at how new qualifications do when they have run their course and students have got to the point of being in employment. We can then judge how well they are doing. If we look at 2019-21 as the sample cohort for the new BTECs, we should have a reasonable idea of that by 2027. We should have a reasonable idea of how well T-levels are doing by 2029 or 2030.

That gives us a timescale for when we will have legitimate data to compare how T-levels and BTECs have done, if the Government are doing proper research—I do not know that they are—on how decisions are taken as to which qualification is provided, how pupils with the qualifications are supported at university and on careers advice given to different groups of students. All of that is necessary to take a justified decision about which set of qualifications should be provided.

I hope I am right in quoting the Government as saying that T-levels are the best option for 16 to 19 year-olds. How can they possibly know that? These qualifications have only just been created—they are newborn. The emperor’s second wife always wants to kill the older children. It is a natural thing, but we really should not allow that. We ought to insist on a proper period of comparison to find out how they work out. I think the answer will turn out to be that we need not two qualifications but three: A, B and T. We want parity of esteem. If the system has just A-levels and T-levels, we will lose parity of esteem.

I would never, as editor of the Good Schools Guide, advise a child to do a T-level unless they were so clearly committed—at age 16—to the narrow scope of that T-level that they could legitimately take such a decision. There are not many 16 year-olds who are so clear and focused that they can reasonably take that decision. It is really hard to commit yourself to a single, narrow line which leads you away from the generality of university and towards a specific career. There are children for whom this will work, but there are fewer of them than the Government think, and there are an awful lot who need to be kept more general.

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[Baroness Barran (Con)]

Perhaps the noble Lord will allow me to proceed.

Amendment 30 from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, seeks to confirm that the decision to withdraw approval from a technical qualification may be subject to judicial review. I assure your Lordships that the institute is a public authority and its decisions can be reviewed by the courts in the same way as the decisions of any other public authority.

Amendment 32 from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, would require the institute to publish in advance the criteria which must be met before withdrawing approval of a technical education qualification. It is absolutely right that the institute should publish information so that awarding bodies know in advance the matters the institute will take into account. The Bill already provides for this in new Section A2D6(4).

As I said, approval will be withdrawn when a qualification no longer meets the criteria against which it was approved; for example, where it fails to keep pace with the relevant occupational standard, which will evolve with industrial advances. Specifying criteria that must be met for withdrawal—in addition to criteria that must continue to be met for a qualification to retain approval—would result in duplication and will remove the flexibility the institute requires to meet employer needs.

A number of questions were asked regarding the impact of T-levels on social mobility. Again, if I may, I will set out our position in more detail. However, I would like to be clear that the Government are absolutely committed to levelling up. Social mobility is clearly an integral part of this and education, skills and careers are vital to making a success of those efforts. We believe that T-levels represent a much-needed step change in the quality of the technical offer. As we have heard, they have the endorsement of employers, and alongside T-levels we have introduced the T-level transition programme to support students who are not yet ready to start a T-level at 16 but who have the potential to progress to one. We have also introduced flexibility for SEND learners across all elements of the T-level programme.

In conclusion, our reforms to post-16 qualifications aim to ensure that we will have a system where the choices are clear and learners can be assured that every option is of high quality, whether it supports progression to higher education or to skilled employment. Extending the role of the institute will make certain that the majority of technical qualifications available in England are based on employer-led occupational standards and deliver the skills outcomes that employers need. Given this, I hope that my noble friend Lord Lucas will feel comfortable in withdrawing his amendment, and that other noble Lords will not feel it necessary to move theirs.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that comprehensive reply. I will start by agreeing with her final words. Let us have qualifications that are clear, where every option is high quality, with employer-led standards and the skills outcomes that employers need. However, whatever language my noble friend dresses this up in, she is saying that the Government intend to abolish BTECs well in advance of having any information to show that T-levels deliver what we all hope they will deliver. Given in particular the effects that my noble friend Lord Baker has outlined on the children we ought to be having most care for—so ought the Government—I very much hope that one of my noble friends, or more of my noble friends than the noble Lord opposite, will choose to move their amendments. As far as my amendment is concerned, I prefer that in the name of my noble friend Lord Baker, so I hope he will consider moving it. However, I will certainly vote for some of the amendments in this group if they are moved to a Division. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 27 withdrawn.

Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee: 1st sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 27th April 2018 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

1: Clause 1, page 1, line 5, at end insert—
“436AA Duty of local authorities to collect and share information where the proprietor of a school has received written notification from parents that a pupil is receiving elective home education.(1) A local authority must make a return to the Department for Education in such form and at such intervals as may be specified on children removed from roll at each school in its area where the proprietor has received written notification from parents that one or more pupils are receiving elective home education.(2) A return made under subsection (1) must include information as to whether the children concerned have Education and Health Care Plans.(3) A local authority must record and keep up to date the names and addresses of all such children and of their parents.(4) When so requested by the Department for Education or on their behalf, a local authority must write to some or all of such parents as are specified in subsection (3) in such form as the Department may specify.”

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, there has been considerable noise in the press and elsewhere about off-rolling: the idea that schools are pushing the parents of troublesome pupils into home education. Looking at the statistics for Northamptonshire, which I happen to have, there does appear to be some evidence of a move in that direction. During the 2016-17 academic year, 1,182 pupils in Northamptonshire were known to be home educated, and by the end of the year it was 784, which is double the rate of two years previously. The pattern of home education in that county is a level of about 60 pupils per national curriculum year—that is, from the beginning, so those are presumably the dedicated home educators. Then, from year 4 to year 10, the rate of home education picks up rapidly. By the time you get to year 10, 180 pupils are being home educated. A chunk of those—about an eighth—had exclusion problems before being home educated and about one-third are children who have had some contact with social services. The analysis by school shows that some schools are notably excluding very few pupils relative to others and sending a lot to home education. There seems to be evidence that some schools are making it a practice to tip children into home education.

That is not, in itself, a wrong thing. In the circumstances of an individual child, family and school, home education may be the best alternative. Some children who have been suffering in school will flourish in home education. You just do not know, without going into the details, whether this is malpractice or good practice. In too many places in this country, the alternative to home education is exclusion, and the pathway from exclusion is into desolation. We ought to provide, but do not, a strong system of alternative education for children who are persistently excluded.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

My Lords, does the noble Lord think that a better solution might be if schools did not exclude pupils in the first place?

[Lord Lucas]

I am sorry, but I did not hear the noble Lord.

[Lord Adonis]

Does the noble Lord think that, rather than parents being obliged to home educate their children because of the danger of exclusion, a better solution would be to be much more restrictive about exclusions in the first place and not to allow them except in extremis? In that way, we would not have this huge extension of home education that is taking place at the moment, which is a covert form of excluding pupils from school.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, that is quite possible, but schools and parents can deal only with the circumstances in which they find themselves. It is the parents’ duty, in particular, to make the best of what they can. I agree that we ought to emphasise much more looking after those children who find school hard to deal with and bringing them through to success. There is a lot to do in that area and, as the noble Lord and I know from our long careers in this place, it has proved difficult to successive Governments. But that does not mean that we should not try. I believe that we are having another go at it and I commend the Government for that. In the local circumstances of an individual school, it may be best to encourage home education.

Home education is something that we should be prepared to support. It seems to me very strange that the Government’s attitude to children who have had such difficulty with the state schools they have access to that their parents have been forced to take them home is to immediately cut off funding and support. That seems a weird way of treating those who are finding life hardest in school. Throughout today, I shall be urging the Government to look at this from the point of view of supporting home education. Why, when a child moves into home education, does the money just disappear? Why does it not move to the local authority, or at least a decent proportion of it, so that the local authority can continue to support the education of that child, particularly in circumstances where it is clear that this is a matter not of some middle-class choice but of the best interest of the child?

The amendment is pretty technical. It is aimed at making sure there is a flow of information to Ofsted that will enable it, when it inspects a school, to understand what the school is doing, and whether the moves to home education have been well advised or whether they are a covert form of exclusion. Ofsted tells me that it currently cannot get at the data. When it visits a school, it knows that children have moved into home education, but it has no way of finding out why that has happened. There is no record, information or contact with the parents involved. It just has to accept the school’s explanation. I would like to see circumstances where Ofsted has access to proper information so it can properly evaluate what a school is doing.

I particularly commend to the House the practice of the Magnus Church of England Academy in Newark. Its attitude to pupils who get into trouble is that it retains ownership of them. Even if they end up in the local PRU, Magnus keeps them on roll. It accepts the responsibility for the rest of their education. It accepts that they have gone to the PRU because that is the best choice for the child and that the results they achieve through that method will belong to the school. We should impose that attitude on all schools. I do not think that we should allow schools, whether by way of exclusion or off-rolling, to throw children away, to absolve themselves of responsibility for them. Children should stay on schools’ registers for the purposes of performance tables until the next point of measurement —key stage 2, 4 or 5—so that the decision the school takes about where a child goes, if they leave the school, is one for which the school will be held accountable. That would be the right way to move in this direction to produce data and evidence so that we can watch how these decisions are taken. That seems vital.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Agnew of Oulton) (Con)]

My Lords, on 24 November at Second Reading I made it clear that we understood the concerns that have led the noble Lord, Lord Soley, to bring this Bill forward. That remains the position. We are interested in it and welcome the debate it has engendered in this House and elsewhere, but the position remains that the Government are not formally supporting it. I made a commitment to consult on drafts of revised departmental guidance, and that consultation started on 10 April. In answer to the noble Lord, Lord Watson, the guidance looks at specific issues such as the role of safeguarding by local authorities and whether that extends to this area.

We know that there are concerns about the efficacy of the current framework and the lack of hard information about numbers to address the actual needs of children being educated at home. Indeed, at Second Reading noble Lords spoke about the need for more evidence. We know that involved in this is the potential of increasing exclusions or, as the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, referred to it, “off-rolling”. I would welcome a meeting with him and other noble Peers on that subject, but we should not get it too tangled up in the simpler issue of the Soley Private Member’s Bill. This is why we published a call for evidence on 10 April. This seeks information and comment about a wide range of issues within the broad headings of registration, monitoring and support for home education.

I take this opportunity to reassure my noble friend Lord Lucas and the noble Lord, Lord Bird, that we support home education that is done well. We want to find ways to support families that are achieving this. I am very conscious of the amount of work needed to educate a child properly at home. It is entirely consistent with our aim of ensuring that every child has a good education within a diverse system that allows for maximum parental choice. We should aim to help good home education, but also to ensure that poor home education is dealt with quickly. To address the queries of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, about the Government’s position, the consultation is open until 2 July and we hope for responses from a wide spectrum of families, local authorities and others. This will give us a much firmer basis for considering whether any changes are needed. In the meantime, I shall listen to today’s proceedings with interest and note the points raised. It is of course open to the noble Lord, Lord Soley, not to progress his Bill further until the Government’s consultation has concluded.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very encouraged by that reply from my noble friend, particularly his last sentence. I very much hope that the Government are thinking of taking advantage of the Bill to take forward the results of the consultation when they are available. In that context, I think the noble Lord, Lord Soley, need not worry about the Bill failing if we run out of time today. Today is about talking to the Government, even though they do not answer much: it is about getting them to listen to us, as an input to the consultation and to inform their intentions for the future of the Bill more generally. I very much hope that if we run out of time today we may find space on a subsequent Friday to complete its passage before the Government have to let us know their opinions, which will presumably, with luck, be in September or October. Without government support, the Bill will fail; with government support there will not be any problems, so I hope that although we will not waste time today, we will none the less make sure that the Government have heard our opinion on things.

On the interesting suggestion by the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, I think Skillforce would find very good relationships, certainly in some areas, between local authorities and home educators, which would give wide access to the home educating community. It is not true in every area, but there are some where you will get pretty complete coverage from what is there already.

I am delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, is a Member of this House. Every time I listen to him, he adds to my understanding of the world. I am just an observer of home education; I honour him as someone who has done it. I do not think I would ever have the strength of character and energy to finish that. I am entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, in tackling this problem in the round and very happy to line up behind him in any meeting or effort. These children are our children; they are part of our community and we absolutely ought to treat them that way. It hurts us all that we do not. I am going to pursue the noble Viscount, Lord Falkland, on the matter of his daughter. I have a project running in Eastbourne which would benefit from her advice.

There is much to be done here but, generally, I am delighted by the reaction to this amendment. I hope the Government will see it as an example of how the Bill might be used to address the wider problems. It trespasses into the whole area of safeguarding, trafficking, abuse and radicalisation, which concern us all so much. That is not the same as home education but the two get mixed up. There are educational concerns but enforcing educational orthodoxy ought not to be seen as a way of tackling safeguarding concerns. They are separate. Both need to be addressed but we need to think of them separately, particularly in the context of home education. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 1 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

5: Clause 1, page 1, line 9, after “receiving” insert “full time”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the function of the amendments in this group is, I hope, to demonstrate to the Government that they can use the Bill to clear up some of the uncertainties that have bedevilled the administration of home education regulation for local authorities. You get so many different interpretations and understandings of what particular terms mean because they are not defined in legislation and not well-defined in practice. If we are to get consistent and good practice across the nation, people need to understand what we are talking about. What is home education and how do we define “full-time”? These things matter and I hope that, as a result of the Government’s consultation, we can move towards a system where everybody is clear what we are talking about.

Local authorities tend to be understaffed and the staff in this area are often inexperienced or subsidiary to quite fierce people in the enforcement and safeguarding divisions. It can be difficult for them to maintain things that, when they are brought back to government, are absolutely clear. My noble friend Lord Agnew has made it clear in his consultation, which has been a great help. But clarity is to be aimed for and I have tabled these amendments just to show that the clerks would allow them, and that the Bill would accommodate them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Warner]

I hesitate to stop progress and I apologise for not speaking at Second Reading because I was otherwise detained then. As the Minister knows, for some time my concern has been—I think this was a concern of previous Ministers in the department—the overlap between home education used inappropriately, unregistered schools and unregulated madrassas. I am normally an enthusiast for definitions in legislation because they introduce clarity. On this, I am a bit less certain. I am not clear—I would very much welcome the views of the noble Lords, Lord Lucas and Lord Soley, here—about whether this set of amendments, excluding Amendment 28, would make it easier for someone who had a child who was flitting between home education, an unregistered school and a madrassa to use this definition to carry on doing that, because they did not meet the requirement of the length for “home education”. I wonder whether there would be an escape route for people doing that if we accepted this precise definition, but I would very much welcome the views of the noble Lords on that issue.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, these definitions are by way of illustration only, and I entirely accept the questions that the noble Lord, Lord Warner, asked.

The group of amendments that includes Amendment 12 takes another look at this. I am very much in favour of the Government taking advantage of the Bill to make clear their power to stick their nose into any and all educational situations and arrangements that might give them safeguarding or radicalisation concerns. There should not be any hesitation by local authorities in getting to know what is going on somewhere where they do not know what is going on. I would very much like the final version of the Bill to deal with that, but I will come on to that more under Amendment 12. I utterly support what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said.

Amendment 5 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for putting his name to this amendment. This is the only other amendment I have put down, which shows how perfect my Bill was in the first instance. Mind you, what I have been writing at home is another matter. This amendment relates to an important issue. It goes to the heart of what I have been saying for some time, which is that we do not offer enough support to people who are home educating, whether they are doing it very well, not so well or, in some cases, very badly. This amendment places a duty upon the local authority,

“to provide advice and information to a parent of a child receiving elective home education if that parent requests such advice or information in relation to their obligations under this section”.

I was tempted to put in the word “support” as well. I have used “advice and information” largely because in a Private Member’s Bill there would be all sorts of problems about financing that and where the money came from, and there is a problem of local authority resources generally. However, I emphasise that this is a direction in which we have to move. If we are serious about helping people who are home educating and the children in that group, we need to put some money, resources and thought into it. At the moment, that is not there. Imagine, for example, a parent who is doing a remarkably good job home educating generally, but who suddenly spots that the child is quite good at, for example, chemistry but has very little access to a chemistry lab. If advice and information was available, it could enable that parent to be directed to an area where they might be able to get it. In the long run, I would like to make that option much more possible. There are many other examples—music, mathematics or whatever—where children have a particular skill that the parent cannot meet in home education.

That is my reason for this amendment, but there is another reason, which is very important. When I launched this Bill, inevitably I got attacked from all sides, as one does, but particularly from home educators who thought I was intent on destroying the family. They referred to me as Mao Tse-Tung in drag. I am not Mao Tse-Tung in drag and I am not about destroying the family, although sometimes I feel like destroying various families, but we will not go into that in any great detail. That is my background as an MP in certain areas, I guess. There is real concern among some parents who are doing this that there is a constant attempt to take away the right to home educate. It has never been my view that we should do that. I have always made it clear that I regard it as a right. It is a complex area where you have to balance the rights of the parent with the rights of the child, which is an area which causes parents concern.

By putting this wording into the Bill, it says to parents who are anxious about this that they have a legal right to home educate. It recognises in a legislative form that there is a right to home educate. I do that because of the concern of some people who are determined to believe at almost any cost that there is a killer on the loose about to devastate every family in the land. I am not. It is working quite well. If people want to see some of the discussion on this, the interviews I did around the country last week on Skype for Business are now on the Lords of the Blog site. They are all there, and many parents were worried about this.

So I ask the House to accept this amendment for two reasons. First, it requires advice and information to be given by local authorities to parents who request it and opens the door to longer-term support. I hope that in the consultation period and the discussions with the Government we will build up a proper support system for parents who are home educating. Secondly, it puts in legislative form the right to home educate. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I support this amendment. I understand the limitations of a Private Member’s Bill. The noble Lord has done extremely well to stretch it as far as he can to get here. I say to the Minister that we really must look at proper support. To return to what I said on the first amendment, looking at the data from Northamptonshire, by the end of schooling three-quarters of children being home educated have got there not through the initial choice of their parents but because they have failed out of school. Our reaction to children for whom schooling has proved impossible to maintain for whatever reason—depriving them of all funding—is, frankly, perverse and wrong. We really ought to look at saying that these parents have taken on the burden, but they need help and we can provide it. It is probably a great deal cheaper.

From talking to home educators, I think we could probably manage special needs provision on about one-quarter of the budget that it takes to provide it through the state because the parents are doing so much of what needs to be done, but they need outside help. Even if it is fairly straightforward—just behavioural issues, not some abstruse special educational need—parents need help. They may not be good enough at teaching mathematics. They may know that. They might really like to drop their child into maths classes or literacy classes or give them a chance to play games with other children, not just with home-educated children, or get them access to the swimming pool, the library or the other things that happen occasionally in good local authorities. They should be there and be supportive.

I urge the Government to consider the idea that a budget should be given to local authorities to provide educational assistance to home-educated children. The Government are saving so much by these children coming out of school: £5,000 per year per child. The Government should not pocket the whole of that. There is no reason to. The Government should recognise that they have a continuing duty actively to support these children.

Having that fund and local authorities having that duty would produce a supportive attitude and a real reason for parents to engage with the local authority. It means that, rather than being hidden from sight, the vast majority of these children will be seen because they will be engaging in an activity sponsored by the local authority. They will be seen by independent professionals in doing that. There will be very good visibility and the whole problem of how we know that these children are being properly educated becomes easy to solve. It is solved as a side effect of educating them. That surely must be the best way to approach this.

Supportive means actively supporting their education, not just directing what it should be. There is a wide range of good practice out there that we could borrow from and, with good funding, produce something that results in a very large proportion of home-educating parents actively wishing to register. Most of them are not state phobic. Most of them just think the state has done a very bad job for them, and they do not trust some of the individuals involved. If we get to a position where the state is providing a range of helpful services, and there is a decent budget behind that, we would solve most of the problems covered in the Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

7: Clause 1, page 1, leave out lines 11 and 12

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the purpose of this amendment is to enable some discussion on the subject of registration. I am entirely comfortable with the idea that local authorities, with all their responsibilities, should know where the children that they are responsible for are—where they can reach them and how they can begin to establish that they are, within the duties of the local authority, well looked after.

If we are going to do that, we really ought to have a system that is comprehensive. We do not really have a grip on children who are registered with an independent school. They are not part of the national pupil census. Why not? What is happening in the whole of alternative education? What is happening with children who are just told to stay home, who are held at home waiting for the school of their choice, who are moving between this country and another one that they have a connection with, or are in some other way adrift from the ordinary ways of a local authority keeping tabs on children? If we think it is important that there is a register—various noble Lords have made the case that it is, and I agree with them—then it should be a register of children. Some of that is done already because we know that they are at schools within the local authority or connected with it so that the local authority can get data about them, but it ought to be a comprehensive exercise.

We should not just pick on home education—or, rather, those parents who choose to declare themselves as home educators—because the people who will register are probably not the ones who are causing us trouble. The ones who might cause us trouble are the ones who are not registered, or the ones that schools have chosen to abandon and their parents are really not capable of picking up. I do not think registration just for home education answers the case. I hope the Minister, in all that he is thinking through, when he comes to registration will look at the wider question of how local authorities are supposed to have proper information on which children they are supposed to be paying attention to.

There are data sources that we should be making good use of. Most children, one way or another, will be registered with medical authorities. Many of them will have other contacts with the state through child allowances and so on. There ought to be an integration of that information so that the local authority has a picture of who is there. There has to be a sensible way of dealing with parents moving from one place to another without making it immensely difficult, uncertain and bureaucratic. I do not think there is any sign that that has yet been thought through.

We have a good pupil census that operates in schools, which might well provide the basis for a complete child census. It might give us a very interesting picture on children who go missing. I have not seen anything that I know to be an accurate number, but there appears to be quite a high number of such children and we ought to be paying attention to them. They are children who are really at risk, in capitals, but we do not seem to have good enough systems for picking up on that and being able to investigate where they last were and what has happened.

We want to produce a system that is good value for money. I come back to what I said on the last amendment: all this works much better if we give parents a real incentive to sign up, and all justice says that that is what we should be doing anyway. We as a country should be part of educating these children. It is not like sending your child away to prep school, nor is it just choosing a school outside the state system; this is choosing to educate them yourself and taking on that burden. The state has every right and duty to offer assistance in that, and I hope that will be a consequence of the review that my noble friend is undertaking. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Addington]

Very briefly, just to comment on the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, it would be interesting to get some feedback either now or later on why other mediums of passing on information are used. I work in a world where I am not comfortable with information coming in paper form—or, indeed, with any written text—but I have found coping strategies to deal with it. However, a film does not have the stigma of something scary. You can open it up and it is a very good way forward; it can contain quite a lot of information. No matter what else we do, I suggest that somebody takes that idea and keeps it in mind. You should use this medium more often, because it is a great way of getting across the essence of what you are doing. I hope that other people will use it more, and the Government will do it and find ways to explain that it is available. The most disastrous situation is that you get a series of texts telling you where on the web you can find the film explaining the text. It happens.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I am very attracted by the amendment proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker. It is a very good approach. I urge on my noble friend the Minister, if they are going down this road, that they should make at least the core of it a national film—because why do we want widely different practice towards home educators and attitudes towards home education across the country? I do not think that we do. It is a common problem and there will always be a local gloss on it—particular local facilities and local people and services that need to be drawn attention to. But the basic message that the noble Baroness outlines ought to be something we deliver consistently and across the country, and it should link through to the obligation to provide advice, which the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, addressed. That is obviously important. We are dealing with particular sets of circumstances—we are dealing with parents who are not expert in the system. Absolutely, they need showing the way through.

Something we might well combine with this educational, supportive attitude to people who are entering into home education is keeping their place open at the school they are thinking of leaving. That can be a really difficult thing. It seals them into home education and seals them off from ways back into the state system if, by coming off-roll in the school and entering into home education, they lose their right to get back into that school. I really do not think it should be such a cliff edge; we should provide a continuing right of the parent to get back. After all, in most cases, the school will still receive funding for the balance of the year for their place, and it absolutely should not be closed off to them. We need time to allow parents to make an informed decision. Many will already have satisfied themselves that they want to do it, but others this is happening to rather willy-nilly, and they ought to have available to them advice, support and time for proper consideration.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for touching on the subject of flexi-schooling in his amendment. That is a very interesting way forward. I was encouraged by what the Government said in their consultation, in that it seemed to open up the idea that they might support it. There are some necessary changes to be made, and it ought to be easy for a school to indicate in their returns that a child is being flexi-schooled. At the moment, there is no code that they can use for that purpose; in one way or another, they have to tell an untruth—either they have to say that a child is full time or that the child is absent with leave, whatever else the case might be. There ought to be a way. It signals, as the earlier amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Solely, signalled, the acceptability of flexi-schooling if the Government make provision for it in their coding systems. We shall come on to my views on that in a later amendment.

The noble Lord, Lord Warner, says that we absolutely need registration. I think that we need registration if it is going to achieve something. In all the collection of children whom we do not know about, the children who are being home educated are probably the least vulnerable. By singling them out we are saying, “In some way we think you are the worst—in some way we think you require special attention. In some way, we do not trust you above all others. You are much worse than those who have just been left to wander the streets”.

[Lord Warner]

Can I just explain my position on this? I speak as someone who spent six years as a director of social services safeguarding children, and I came to an eternal truth at the end of that. The more that children are outside any kind of supervision, the more vulnerable they are to abuse. It is actually a truth that has been validated in many hundreds if not thousands of cases. We know nothing about the children who are in home education, but the fact is that those numbers have grown very rapidly over the last few years. I am not making any kind of allegation that children who are home schooled are being abused, but in those circumstances, we need to get a better fix on this subject —not just for educational reasons but, I would suggest, for safeguarding reasons as well. That is not the purpose of the Bill, but it is an assistance in the safeguarding area as well. That is why it ought to be a very clear statutory requirement to register home education, which the Bill as drafted provides for.

[Lord Bird]

Maybe this is not the place to broaden the discussion about home education, but it is so interesting. The late Tony Benn put his children through a wonderful school called Holland Park comprehensive, and the moment they left school they were then ferried to extra maths, extra history and extra this and that, and were taken to their grandfather’s at the weekend to read all his books. There is a concept that we are all involved in the home education of our children, if we follow Tony Benn—and we have a duty. I am a bit worried that we are narrowing down home education to just this period, and I would like it to be broadened out. As far as I am concerned, when you are a parent, you are an educator, and you should be given the chance to create as many opportunities as possible.

The noble Lord talked about what happens when children are let outside of control, but the problem is that sometimes when they are in control they are abused—they are not developed properly. One reason why people like me back home education is that it gives you the chance to bring out of your children things that would never come out, even in the best school in the country.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, to pick up on what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said, a local authority that has a decent history of being collaborative with home education knows a great deal about people who home educate because it interacts with them, provides facilities and services to them and talks to them—not to everybody, but the core of home education will be known. The local authorities that have trouble are generally those which have adopted bullying attitudes to home education and then get widely mistrusted.

The solution to this problem lies mainly in institutionalising an attitude of support and providing the funding to enable that support to be good and consistent. Under those circumstances, if you are really offering something—not just the possibility of being criticised and attacked and having people trying to remove your right to home educate—then registration serves a purpose. It serves a much better purpose, however, if it is part of a consistent attempt by government to keep in touch with everybody, particularly, as the noble Lord, Lord Warner, says, those who are least cared about and least supervised, of whom the home educators are at the best behaved end.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

9: Clause 1, page 1, line 14, at end insert—
“( ) An assessment under subsection (3) shall not require or imply a requirement for any particular curriculum, method of teaching or order of educational development.”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, assessment is a serious problem if it is overemphasised in this context. Of the population of children who are home educated, those who have been taken out of school are, almost by definition, divergent. If they were ordinary mainstream children behaving in a mainstream way, there would probably have never arisen any impetus to get them out of school. They come out of school because some problem has arisen; it usually means that there is something—it can be any of a whole range of things—about the child that puts them at the fringes of the national distribution. Those who have come out into home education or are in it for philosophical reasons develop divergence, because they are no longer constrained by the needs of a curriculum that is designed to make schooling possible.

There are all sorts of things about the way we choose to school children that are dictated by the need to have schools that can run with a curriculum that broadly keeps pace with itself across different schools and with a way of doing things that enables a school to understand where it is supposed to be and for us to judge whether it is doing well. There are all sorts of restrictions that do not need to apply to a home-educated child. You will often find children who are streets ahead in some particular area of interests—at age nine or 10 they are doing an Open University course in astrophysics, or whatever it might be. You will also find children who have entirely neglected some aspect of their education until they find a need for it and then they catch up. It becomes a very divergent, varied pattern of achievement.

There is not any sensible way to assess this in a light-touch way by some sort of standard assessment. Assessments are designed to evaluate what is happening in school, where there are a lot of children and statistics are in your favour; the oddities even out and you get some sort of pattern emerging that tells you how the school is doing as a whole. Even then, there are problems, as we have with Progress 8 at the moment, where the system means that the outliers have far too much influence on the average. If you draw Progress 8 out as a bell graph, however, you can see where the weight of a school is and can make a reasonable judgment on the quality of education being provided there. You cannot do that when looking at an individual child, not simply and not just by putting them through a SATs test. You need far more information. If a parent gets to a point where they are arguing with a local authority about a school attendance order and getting the independent advice needed to establish where their child is and what they have achieved, that could cost a couple of thousand quid. This is an immense resource to apply just to check where a child is. It is entirely pointless and destructive to emphasise assessment carried out by those sorts of means.

The assessment to aim for is of professionals having contact with the child—a good school teacher or someone with a decent level of experience who can say, “Yes, I can see how this child is getting on; I can see that they are well educated and that their attitudes are right. I don’t have any problem”. Much the most effective way of organising assessment is to promote contact between professionals and the home-educated children, and to do that by offering all sorts of support so that home-educating parents will find a need for at least some of it. That way, you do not incur much additional cost on assessment; you are providing money for education. To run this sort of assessment process in a way that is fair to the children and the parents would cost a vast amount of money and all it would be spent on is assessment. To run an assessment system that costs much less risks, because you are dealing with children who are way off centre, a vast amount of unfairness for children and parents. It really does not work as a standard assessment system, and I do not think that we should pretend that it does. Good local authorities employ professional people and trust their judgment; that is what we should be looking at. Local authorities that perform less well hire inexperienced people who do not feel confident in their own judgment and therefore run standard forms of assessment. They have no business drawing conclusions from it, but do anyway and then harry the parents as a result. We have to be really careful about what we are asking for by way of assessment.

There is a quite a good exposition of this in the draft guidance that the Government have produced. They do not require any detailed form of assessment. We need to move to a position, however, where we are quite clearly, and in words that local authorities can trust, supporting their professional judgment. Yes, they will get it wrong sometimes—everybody does, including all professionals. But that is fundamentally the best and most sensible thing we can do, and we should make that level of support the default in everything we do.

In assessment we should provide the means to deal with children who have been traumatised by school or who are otherwise emotionally damaged. One should not just take it as read; if it is said that a child will be scarred by meeting a stranger from the local authority, that is not satisfactory evidence on its own. However, we ought to recognise that there are such children, and there ought to be an easy mechanism for a parent to establish that theirs is one such. Frankly, it ought to be part of the support given to them by the National Health Service; if a child has got itself into that sort of position, there ought to be professionals who can back up that judgment. It certainly should not be a local authority’s unfettered right to send some relatively untrained person—certainly untrained in mental health—barging into a delicate situation. However, we need to provide for such situations in what we do.

We ought to take into account in assessment specific respect for parents’ wishes, not as an absolute but as a matter of ordinary courtesy. There are different ways of doing these things, and we ought to adapt to the parents’ way of doing things if we can. The attitude ought to be that it is a collaborative effort, not an imposed effort. We should recognise that assessment is a reflection of the duties imposed on parents by the founding Act and that we ought to tie things into that explicitly and directly. We ought to make sure that where parents are subject to assessment by other agencies, particularly with regard to things like special needs, that assessment can serve both purposes, and should make sure that it is not duplicated.

We also need to understand that in making an assessment, the local authority may need access to information which is sensitive in the family context. There may be absent parents who still have rights of care and access, who should not be able to see things that fall outside their rights and responsibilities. They should not automatically have rights to see all the data that is accumulated as a result of an assessment. This needs to be handled within context.

I feel that we need to look at assessment carefully and that we should not, as the Bill does at the moment, say that you should have “supervised instruction” in numeracy and literacy. Things do not work that way in home education, and they do not have to. What matters is the outcome and not the process, and that we should base our assessments on professional judgment, obtained in the best possible circumstances, and reserving methods of compulsion and intrusion for instances where the local authority has got to the point where it has real concerns. I beg to move.

[Lord Addington]

My Lords, I have a degree of sympathy with this set of amendments. As the noble Lord suggested, some of the problems I see with Clause 2 might be addressed here in some way.

The noble Lord spoke about different types or facets of assessment getting in the way of each other, and that happens. Somebody who has failed at school because of a special educational need often acquires psychological problems—the two of them fit into each other. There is usually not just one thing—it is a package or a spiral, although whether it goes up depends on what is happening. Therefore they have to be taken into account together.

It is essential that we do not get overly prescriptive about people with different learning patterns or needs. If you are to deal with people whose learning patterns and possibilities are different, they will need a different approach, and unless that is taken on board, you will guarantee a degree of failure. The unfortunate thing about schools at the moment is that they are slightly overregulated, which means that you make the possibility —indeed, the probability—of failure higher in certain cases. I therefore hope that the Government and the noble Lord, Lord Soley, are careful to take this on board. If you get prescriptive, you will get it wrong, because you are guaranteeing that your prescription does not fit.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I strongly support Amendments 16A and 19A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey. We cannot ignore the risks associated with this, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, which is why Amendment 16A is important. It is also important that, if there is evidence that a child is going to an unregistered school, someone should be notified of that so that action can be taken.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, to pick up on the amendments proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, it seems sensible that a local authority should be able to know whether a parent who is home educating would pass the DBS test. However, we have to recognise that we let these people be parents. There is no bar on somebody who has committed one of these crimes having children and bringing them up. So far as I know, local authorities have no special responsibility to supervise their activities at home as parents or to otherwise inspect them. Would the noble Lord feel comfortable if we were to impose, as a matter of course, a requirement that everyone who has a conviction that might bar them from working with children should be inspected before they are allowed to have children?

At what point does being comfortable with them bringing up their own children make one uncomfortable with them educating their own children? Why does that give the noble Lord cause for concern? If these children are seen as a matter of course in the way that they would be at school because the local authority provides a proper level of support and is therefore content that the education is proceeding happily—

[Lord Storey]

Does the noble Lord not accept that anybody working closely or intimately with children, whether in a school setting, a semi-school setting, a youth club, the Scouts or the Brownies, should be safeguard-checked?

[Lord Lucas]

I am entirely comfortable with that and I have been through the process myself in the context of working with children. However, we do not require this of parents. As the noble Lord, Lord Bird, pointed out, parents do a lot of educating outside school hours anyway. I do not see—

[Lord Warner]

Perhaps I may clarify that. Amendment 16A refers to “other adults”; it does not say “the parent”. I gently suggest to the noble Lord that if you leave your child unsupervised with a childminder for a number of hours in the day, the sensible thing is to check whether the childminder has been safeguard-checked. I suggest to the noble Lord that the noble Lord, Lord Storey, is simply saying that, if in home education you find another adult who does some teaching, probably in an unsupervised way either in the home or elsewhere, they should be safeguard-checked. That seems a sensible arrangement that many thousands of parents go through all the time when their children are looked after by somebody else.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I appreciate that we are near a borderline and that this is a matter for discussion, but a lot of the people whom a home educator leaves their children with are other home educators, as it is a way of sharing the burden. On many occasions I have sent my child off to spend a play day or night in the company of a friend’s child without having the parents checked to see whether they have any relevant convictions. One should be conscious that this is an area where we are quite comfortable to rely on personal judgment. It tends to be when you are putting your child in the company of strangers that you want to know that they have been properly checked, particularly those who are part of an institution where they might expect to deal with children on a regular basis. I am very comfortable with that system but I do not think we should start letting that intrude into personal decisions about with which of one’s friends one should let one’s child spend time overnight in their house or spend time with their children being educated by the parent.

A border seems to be being drawn here on the basis that in some way home educators are worse or more risky than the rest of us. Not only is there no evidence for that but it is entirely unjustified to say it. I keep feeling that people say it because they are different: “They are not people like us and therefore we’re suspicious”. I hope that in many aspects that is something that we can educate ourselves out of—we should not allow ourselves to slip in that direction. Therefore, I feel that the noble Lord’s amendment goes too far, although I understand what he says about it. However, I do not think that it fits with the general pattern of home education.

We will come to the subject of unregistered schools in a later group, and that seems a substantial problem to address. Effectively there are institutions run by strangers that purport to provide education. Children are dropped off and collected later and, because the institutions are not registered or formally classified as schools or other institutions, there may be no DBS or any other checks on them. That is a problem that the Department for Education needs to deal with. We know that there are a lot of such places and that they need attention, but we do not seem to have given ourselves the tools to deal with them.

However, I do not think we should trespass on the privately run institutions, where parents are permitted to drop their children off with friends and acquaintances to receive a bit of education. We all do that at the weekend but we do not for a moment consider that formal checks have to be made. We should recognise the difference between the need to check in the public realm and there being no need to check in the private realm. We should draw a rational and natural division between the two and not let the checks of the public realm bleed into the private. I do not think that that would work. We should trust parents to educate children in the same way as we trust them to bring them up outside school hours and we should be comfortable with the processes around that.

Coming back to the main amendment, I am comforted by what the Minister effectively says in the draft guidance that he has published about how a local authority should establish whether a parent is providing a proper education for their children. I again urge him to accept that this will all work much better if he can find a way of providing a proper level of support. Then, in almost all cases, that assessment can be carried out in the natural way—in the same way as it is carried out by a teacher, observing a child over a period of time and forming a professional judgment.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal]

My Lords, the noble Lord has made some very valid points but I am concerned by the length at which he is speaking. The Committee would much appreciate being able to finish Committee stage today. If he could possibly curtail his remarks, the Committee would very much appreciate that.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I do not think that with the point that we have got to there is any great danger of running over the time. I am taking a bit of time on this group because it is the last important and substantive group. There is only one other point that I wish to make at length and that is on flexi-schooling, but I will not speak about that at great length and I do not think that it is contentious. However, I believe that the whole business of assessment is a point of great concern for home educators. Many of them undertake education in their own way. Helping them with that—giving them support, direction and information so that they do it better—seems to be an entirely good idea. However, trying to corral them into a system of education which has largely evolved to make schools work but which is not followed in many schools of which we approve, as well as a lot of schools abroad, seems to be entirely inappropriate. Therefore, if we are to have something that works, and if we are to support and accept home education, we have to be very careful what we say on assessment. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 9 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

12: Clause 1, page 1, line 19, at end insert “and the setting or settings where the child receives all or part of their education”

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, the amendments in this group are an attempt to show the Government that this is a Bill they can use to get a grip on settings in which education is provided. We seem to have a considerable range of problems, particularly with regard to radicalisation and the failure to educate people fully and in citizenship in some of the settings that our young people are allowed to attend. It seems that we do not have the power or the ability to deal with that effectively. This group of amendments is very much directed at showing the Government that this is a Bill they can use to achieve that. I will leave it at that. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

My Lords, if Amendment 12 is agreed to, there will be consequential arrangements in respect of Amendment 13.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I think we are a long way short of having time problems—we have 45 minutes for the last group.

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, these are complicated amendments that need to be considered in the process that we have been talking about. However, there is a bit of a time problem, and if you talk to the people who are involved in the Bill that is coming up next, they will tell you that there is definitely a time problem. I understand what the noble Lord is saying in these amendments but, again, they are too complex for a Private Member’s Bill. I know where the noble Lord is coming from: it is about having the discussion and asking the Government to consider and consult on it. I am confident they will do so, as we all need to do. This is a complex, important area, but not one for a Private Member’s Bill.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, if there was a time pressure, my noble friend Lord Cormack would be in his place. If the Whips are concerned about time pressure, perhaps someone might scurry out and get him, otherwise we will have to adjourn before the next debate.

I agree that this group is more directed at showing the Minister what is possible than for discussion today. It is a subject that goes wider than that of the Bill and I am happy to beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 12 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Addington]

Perhaps I may respond to that. Although I am severely tempted, I shall not call a Division now. If we put in “an appropriate education” we will cover these points. It will be a building block. If we put it in as an absolute—“must”, “shall”, “will”, whatever you want—we will be dancing on the head of a pin. It depends on the context in which you take it. We know that because we have all done it. I have had 30 years of playing with those words. If we do that and keep in the age-related provision—even if we put caveats after it—we will still have the initial provision, which means you will have to have discussions on it.

The Minister is studiously looking at a piece of paper but perhaps I may ask him whether we have a legal definition of ability and—I am looking for the Bill; it is nice to know that long sight comes to rival dyslexia in my life—aptitude. He says that they are important but I do not think aptitude can come in if you have not had a proper assessment in the first place. You cannot assess aptitude if you do not have the right range of environment to find out what it is.

There are all sorts of problems here. If you have another form of words you do not need those three provisions in the clause because the number of people affected by it—20% of the population have special educational needs but you can probably double that for this group to 40%, or maybe only 30%—is enough to colour this legislation’s effectiveness unless there is something in there to say that you are not going to place this stress on them. Dyslexics are the biggest although not the only group—they are not the only pattern but they are the most commonly occurring pattern—and, unless we deal with this issue, the legislation will fail a large group of its clientele. We cannot have that. Other forms of words can go in such as an “appropriate education”.

If there is an appeal, the group that will have the most problems dealing with it will probably be the dyslexics and—guess what?—it runs in families. We will be creating more problems than we need. Just change that and make sure that it is done. I hope the Minister will give us guidance that the Government will not look unfavourably on this. If we do not change this it will create more problems than we need to have. Perhaps the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Soley, will have something more positive to say on that comment.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, perhaps I may speak briefly to my amendments in this group. I share the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and hope that the noble Lord, Lord Soley, and my noble friend the Minister will agree to suspend the Bill between Committee and Report until we have the results of the consultation. We will then be able to see in context what this Bill says because this clause in particular will work much better when we have a more expansive sight of the full-blown draft guidance to go with it. As it is, I have real concerns and I would definitely join the noble Lord, Lord Addington, on Report. To allow legislation like this to go forward beyond Report would be a great mistake because we need to know much more.

In particular, in Amendment 24 I seek to leave out the words “supervised instruction”. It is just not appropriate for many of these children. It is not the way it is done or the way they learn. They may well be learning entirely by themselves, but what matters is that they are learning. Numeracy, literacy and writing are absolutely core and we should not let children come out of home education illiterate, but we ought not to be prescribing the process; we ought to be prescribing the outcome.

In framing the guidance we must have regard to the whole range of support. The fact that support is available makes much clearer guidance possible because we are not trying to push parents back into taking up patently unsatisfactory school provision; rather, we would be giving them a clear and supportive alternative. Under those circumstances, it is reasonable to make demands of them, but it very much depends on that.

Lastly, I want to draw attention to flexi-schooling, which is one of the possible answers to this issue. I had a helpful conversation with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Ely. The Church of England is willing to be extremely supportive of this proposal. It has a lot of small rural schools and many of them would really like to become involved in the provision of flexi-schooling, which would suit them well. They are small enough to be flexible and they can provide an environment with space and freedom which will suit many children who feel oppressed by a more restricted city school environment. Also, not many of those schools, in particular the good ones, have the time and space available to do things slightly differently for home-educated children. It also fits well with the provision that these rural schools are already making for Travellers and others for whom a non-traditional education pattern works well.

I would really encourage my noble friend the Minister to talk seriously with the Church of England to see what can be done to establish a pattern for the support of flexi-schooling. Indeed, I do not think that much is needed other than the comfort of knowing that it is a form of education of which the Government approve. Frankly, if a child is receiving flexi-schooling for a couple of days a week, all the worries about whether that child is visible would disappear along with knowing about the quality of their education because they would be closely and properly observed by educational professionals. It is a very good solution to many of the problems that this Bill sets out to tackle. It will not apply in every case, but it is a facility that we should encourage.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, it may be helpful if I offer to have a meeting with the noble Lords, Lord Addington and Lord Soley, and indeed with my noble friend Lord Lucas to discuss Amendment 23 in particular. I consider this to be part of our broader call for evidence and feedback on the draft guidance that we have issued.