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

Debate between Lord Storey and Lord Warner

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

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I strongly oppose the amendment. I do so because the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seems to be arguing that because we cannot have the perfect system, we should not take a few steps along the road towards such a system. There have been long-standing problems in the whole area of vulnerable children, which the Children’s Commissioner has identified, which would be helped a great deal if the Government could press on with a common identifier for children. The Minister has heard me banging on about this from time to time—I never miss an opportunity to bang on about it—but there is an issue of how the state joins up information about children who may be vulnerable in a number of ways.

Anyone who has been involved in public policy and seen the growth in the number of children claiming to be home educated would be worried whether there was abuse in that system. The sheer growth in numbers and its rapidity should make you anxious as a public policy person, whatever your politics, whoever the Government in power are. The noble Lord, Lord Soley, is trying to address that issue. He may not be solving all the problems of childkind, if I may put it that way, but he is trying in a practical way to tackle one element of the area of vulnerable children. We should not handcuff him in that effort by supporting the amendment.

[Lord Storey]

This is an opportunity to, and I hope the Government will, consider the points made. It is shocking that we have hundreds of thousands—well, not hundreds of thousands, but thousands—of children missing from our education system and no idea where they are. No society should allow that to happen. When teaching started, there were school rolls. A pupil’s name was put on the school roll, there was an annual census, the local education authority collected all the details and they were submitted to the then Department of Education.

During the Labour Administration, there was concern about missing children, so they brought in what was called the unique pupil number. The idea was that when each pupil started schooling, they would have a number which would follow them through the education system so you would know where they were, they would not go missing, they would not fall off the cliff. I was quite comfortable with that and thought what a good idea it was, but it did not work in practice. I recall from my final years as a headteacher a particular issue with a pupil and a family. The family took the pupil out of the school, went to see the local authority, did not get the school they wanted, so moved to a different authority. I wanted to find out what had happened to this pupil. There was information about his progress, special educational needs—a host of information that the receiving school should get. Nobody had a clue where he had gone. It was a legal requirement that a receiving school had to use that unique pupil number, but he just vanished and was never heard of again in the education system.

I did not realise that if a pupil went to an independent school, that number does not go with them either. There is a whole area here that we need to understand. I am not suggesting a Big Brother or Big Sister, but we need to ensure as a society that we know that our children are safe, not being put in vulnerable positions, and part of that safety is understanding the progress of their education and where they go.

Children and Social Work Bill [HL]

Debate between Lord Storey and Lord Warner

Wednesday 6th July 2016 Grand Committee

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, there are moments in Committee when we can listen to people with a lifetime of experience in law and the military, but we ignore at our peril someone with experience of adoption who speaks from the heart and makes such an emotional plea. Certainly our side thinks that this is an important issue.

It is not just an emotional issue, of course; it is also fulfils that awful phrase we use constantly—it would be value for money. This obviously makes sense. I had not appreciated how many low-income families adopt children. We should support them and thereby, we hope, increase the number of children who are adopted.

The last time I heard such an emotional plea was when my noble friend Lady Benjamin made a similar presentation and, I believe, stalked the Minister on a few occasions outside his office. Perhaps the noble Baroness, Lady King, could do the same, but I hope the Minister will take note of this issue.

[Lord Warner]

My Lords, I support this amendment. I will not offer flattery, as the Minister probably knows, but I take him back to the post-legislative scrutiny report of the Select Committee on Adoption Legislation. It is a shame that the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, is not in her place, but some of us met a lot of adoptive parents, some of whom were on quite low incomes. They made two points to us very strongly. One was the issue we have already discussed, about the levels of support for adoptive parents, but the second came from people who had been foster parents. They pointed out brutally—but in an amiable sort of way—that the financial disincentive in moving from being a foster parent to an adoptive parent was very high. This seemed to me and other members of that Select Committee pretty bizarre, given that the Government were at that point going hell for leather to promote adoption as the gold standard for permanence.

There is something not quite right here about what we might call the intragovernmental strategy—this applies not just in the Minister’s department—on how we align the financial incentives with the policy objectives. Therefore, the Minister should start to raise some of those issues not just within his own department but across Whitehall.