Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Storey and Lord Lucas

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have a few amendments in this group. Amendment 97E is an echo of Amendment 101B and may well have already been answered. Amendments 98A, 101A and 104A seek to offer a defence of reasonableness for withholding. An obvious example of that would be where a parent has escaped an abusive relationship and does not want the details of her spouse and other such information to be on, in effect, a public register, or one which the local authority can use widely down its existing channels. There have already been examples of local authorities leaking such data. It is reasonable, where you have a proven history of suffering abuse, to withhold the information of a spouse, and it ought to be a defence.

I also join the right reverend Prelate in my concern for the data-related clauses. Amendments 110A and 126B address that in rather more general terms than he did. This seems to be highly personal data, very loosely regulated, and I am concerned that that is neither appropriate nor actually needed.

I urge the Committee to take a close look at proposed new Sections 436C(1)(c), 436C(1)(d) and 436C(2), all of which seem to display the characteristics of some of the earlier clauses in the Bill that we have expressed concern about. Where there is already a mechanism for assessing whether a child is being offered a suitable education, what on earth would Section 436C(1)(c) be required for?

Paragraph (d) allows the Secretary of State to invent anything. This really gets at undermining the relationship between the Government and home educators; just at a flick of the pen, some whole new suite of information can be required of them, greatly altering the relationship between them and the system, and introducing that level of uncertainty. Unless the Government have clear plans for what they want to do, and a clear understanding of why it is needed, this seems very damaging for their plans and quite unnecessary.

Subsection (2) is devastating. It allows the local authority to invent anything. Given the powers of compulsion in this Bill, the short timescales and the way in which that could cascade into school attendance orders, this is really unreasonable. If we want to give powers to local authorities, we should specify exactly. We should not allow them to mess up the relationship on a whim. There are some lovely local authorities—I will give some quotes later—and some home educators are really happy in their relationships with them. However, I have read extensive correspondence from and about some of them that is, frankly, abusive.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans is right that parents should have the right to choose the educator for their children, whether they choose a voluntary aided school, a maintained school or an academy, or to home educate. I would be extremely concerned if they chose an unregistered school which in many cases would fail an Ofsted inspection every day it was inspected because of some of the practices that go on, but we do not know that because we do not have that information.

We probably all agree, including in respect of the amendments that I have put down, that we need to take a chill on this and think it through carefully, because I can see that there are issues here. We need to know what the real information is that we want, and why we want it in the first place. But let us not kid ourselves that it is just about this. For example, parents give all sorts of data when they apply for a school—far more detail than some of the requests that are in this Bill. Voluntary aided schools, for example, will ask the faith of the family. Why do they ask that? In a Catholic-run school, for example, they will have a percentage of children who are non-Roman Catholic who can take up places, and that is why they want that information. I make no comment on whether that is right or wrong.

Believe it or not—and I am not particularly keen on this—individual schools, even primary schools, have informal application forms that parents fill out. I remember only a few years ago that one of the questions on the informal application form was what the occupation of the parent was. There is a whole gamut of information out there and we need to rein some of that in.

My final point is that we must ensure that when we have had this pause and perhaps reflected on what we really want, this data is not retained at the end of a child’s schooling. The notion that the data is retained by schools or local authorities is not very helpful. That would be my concern.

I turn to my Amendment 103. I have never really understood this issue, in the sense that when I was first a head teacher—I was head teacher of two schools—you had to collect a unique pupil number. Why? So that when a child moved to another school, perhaps if they moved house, their parents moved jobs or they just did not like the school they were at, you could know that they were in a secure situation. This was brought in by the Blair Government. I never understood why we did not know how many children were in schools when we had this unique pupil number.

This came home to me when I had a pupil who, for all sorts of reasons, left the school I was at. The local authority contacted me and asked, “What happened to pupil X?”. I said, “Well, his parents told me that he’s gone to this school, and I have contacted the school and given it the unique pupil number”. The school never received the pupil, and nobody knows what happened to the unique pupil number. We have to think through what we really mean by that and how it will work.

If we want to have a proper system, it has to involve us being able to follow the pupil’s education—not in any way spying, but making sure that the pupil is, first, getting educated and, secondly, being safeguarded.