Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Storey and Lord Frost

Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 234 in particular, to which I have put my name, and, more generally, endorse the views that my noble friend Lord Lucas and the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, just set out.

I have just begun to engage with home education as a concept and as a community, and it is clear right from the start that the community is very well motivated and, indeed, deeply reflective about education in this country and how it works, and it has a lot of expertise into which government should be trying to tap and learn from rather than regiment and regulate. If it should turn out that the worst happens and my noble friend Lord Lucas is indeed forced to step back from advocating support for this sector, I am sure that I and other noble Lords will be very willing to pick this up and continue the discussion.

I thank the Minister and her team for all the communication that there has been over the summer, as there have been some very comprehensive communications and emails that have been very helpful and will be very useful today.

I want to make just one brief point today, which is relevant to Amendment 234 but also to all those in this group, which is the point about trust. Trust is the way home education works—trust and mutual understanding. In many ways, the Bill as drafted gives huge powers to the Government which appear to be based on a lack of trust and a determination to regulate. They are very detailed and prescriptive and will cause all sorts of practical difficulties, and are based on a misunderstanding about how much of home education actually works.

Now, it is true that some local authorities are not as positively motivated as others. It is certainly true that all are extremely overworked in this area. It is difficult to see what is gained by generating vast amounts of paper and reporting which go into a drawer and are not much looked at.

To conclude, if it is not too late, a rethink in this area would be helpful. There could be a pulling back of some of the prescriptiveness and a better understanding from government—centrally and locally. There could be more support for local authorities and a clearer direction from the Government to get the approach right. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I look back to eight years ago, I think, when I had a very simple Private Member’s Bill, which said that home educators should register. That was it. It was as though I had ignited a bonfire of education, because the online abuse and letters that poured in were just unbelievable.

Together with my noble friend Lord Addington, I, perhaps stupidly, decided to organise a round table to discuss home education with home educators, teacher associations and anybody else who was interested. That was a real learning curve for me. Since that beginning, I have got to know many home educators. In fact, one recently sent me a wonderful, illustrated book on home education. However, when we met at the round table there were pointed and jabbing fingers; it reminded me a bit of the local city council. Nevertheless, we became quite good friends and I understood home education quite well. Since that time, we have all been on a very important journey. We have to ask ourselves why we want to do this. It is for one reason only—for our children and young people. If every home-educated child went to school, the system would not be able to cope.

The points made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, are correct. It is all very well our agreeing legislation, but we must always have at the back of our minds whether it will work. It is important not only to know where our children are and that they are being educated, but that there is a correct relationship between the local authority and the home educator. There are some fantastic examples where local authorities work closely and successfully with home educators to the benefit of both. There are some learning curves where local authorities do not have that good relationship with home educators—where they think that giving the cane and waving the statute is more important than trying to do what is in the best interests of the child.

There are thousands of wonderful home educators, but there are also children who are not being educated but are languishing at home for all sorts of reasons. As I have said, there are children who are being home-educated in a religious setting. This is not about giving them a wide education; it is about them understanding their particular religious texts. To my mind, this is not beneficial for the child as a whole.



I am glad that we have almost got to the stage where we think we should register home-educated children—not least so that we know where they are and can, we hope, make sure that they are safeguarded. I am not sure that having an education portfolio is the same as registering; I am not sure that being a chess grand master entitles you to say, “I do not need to register”; and I am not even sure that teachers with formal educational qualifications should not have to register. That seems bizarre. We live in a society where one of the important words is “equality”—equality of opportunity, whoever and wherever you are.

I hope that, when we continue this journey on Report, we are not just mindful of home educators but—I speak as a local councillor mindful of the capacity issues for local education authorities—that we make sure that local authorities are able to cope with the legislation and that it works, not just for the family and the child but for the local education authority as well.