Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Wei Excerpts(3 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Baroness Humphreys (LD)
My Lords, I will speak to the question that Clause 31 stand part of the Bill. I apologise to the Committee for not having taken part in Second Reading.
I also thank the Minister for her very clear statement at the start of this debate. I want to make a relatively short contribution to highlight one of the issues the Welsh Government wish to take forward in this Bill, and to acknowledge the constructive collaboration of the two Governments and their officers on this and other issues raised in the Bill. In particular, I want to make a few comments on children not in school registers. Liberal Democrats have long called for such a register, including in our recent manifesto. Here I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Storey, who initiated this work in his Private Member’s Bill on the subject.
We agree with the NSPCC and the Children’s Commissioner that the register can be an important tool in keeping children safe. We understand the legal responsibilities parents have to ensure that their children receive an education. As liberals we believe that parents have a right to choose home education where they feel this is the right choice for their child. However, we are very concerned that the whereabouts of hundreds of children in England and Wales are simply unknown.
Education is devolved to Wales, and the Welsh Government already operate a register on their children missing education database. However, the Welsh Education Secretary states in the legislative consent memorandum to this Bill that
“the children not in school provisions proposed in this Bill would enhance the”
children missing school
“policy (from a safeguarding perspective) with the CNIS register, school attendance order (SAO), strengthened suitability assessment and child protection clauses applying alongside the CME database arrangements”.
I am pleased that the Welsh Government have recognised that the provisions in this Bill as introduced would have resulted in local authorities in England having greater levels of contact with elective home-educated children than local authorities in Wales. If the provisions were not extended to Wales, as proposed by the tabled amendments, duties on families in Wales would be considered less stringent than those in England. I welcome the Welsh Government’s pragmatic approach, which should produce a seamless system between the two nations.
The action of the Welsh Government in taking this opportunity to enhance child protection measures is also commended by the Children’s Commissioner for Wales, who recognises the importance of addressing the gaps in provision to ensure that children not in school have all their rights fulfilled. It is to these rights that I would like briefly to turn. When we talk about a children not in school register, we tend to have discussions, as we have had today, about the rights and responsibilities of parents. But in her letter to the Senedd’s Education Committee chair supporting the LCM, the Children’s Commissioner for Wales highlighted the three tests her office has published in relation to children’s rights on home education. They are:
“First, that all children in Wales can be accounted for and that none are invisible. Second, that every child receives a suitable education and their other human rights, including health, care and safety. And third, that every child is seen and their views and experiences are listened to. This is essential for the first two tests to be met”.
These three tests help us to focus our attention away, slightly, from the needs and rights of parents, and to consider the needs and rights of children.
The Children’s Commissioner for Wales points out that the Welsh Government make no reference to children’s rights in their LCM and is surprised that no children’s rights impact assessment has been produced with the proposals. She said that such an impact assessment would help ensure that the Welsh Government fulfil their own duties to consider children’s rights, provide valuable transparency for key stakeholders, and assist in identifying and mitigating any unintended consequences.
I am sure that the Welsh Government will rise to the challenge and produce a children’s rights impact assessment to ensure the rights of the children of Wales, but can the Minister say whether the rights of children in England will be similarly addressed? It seems that the Bill, and Clause 31 in particular, goes a long way to ensuring that the rights of children are met in both England and Wales, but the Government need to make it clear that that is their intention.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I declare an interest as a parent of home-educated children. I take this opportunity to echo the earlier tributes to the many home-educating families who have worked so hard over such a long period to raise their children well, which, as another Peer mentioned, the data shows. I also thank the Minister for her offer to meet Peers, including the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I am around in August and, if officials can meet us to discuss our concerns, I would like to join some of those discussions.
I support Amendments 202C, 227, 227A and 286, which collectively interrogate what I believe is a sweeping new framework that Clauses 31 and 34 impose. These clauses lie at the heart of the Bill’s proposals to establish this compulsory register of children not in school, and to empower local authorities to demand detailed information from parents about how and why they are educating their children outside the mainstream system.
Let us be clear: I fully accept there are very few tragic cases where parents, intent on harming or neglecting their children, have cited home education as a smokescreen. However, in pretty much every instance, the abuse was already present when the child was still enrolled in school—or, indeed, in state-run care, as has just been mentioned. To take these horrors and use them to justify a regime that treats all parents who choose to home educate as presumptively suspect is not only disproportionate but profoundly unjust. It risks creating a system that soaks up scarce safeguarding resources chasing bureaucratic compliance by good families, while truly at-risk children continue to slip through the net precisely because professionals are mired in routine paperwork.
Clause 31 in particular gives local authorities extraordinary powers. It requires the registration of any child not attending school full-time, regardless of whether there is any reason to suspect unsuitable education or harm. The data that can be demanded under this clause is extensive, including personal details, philosophical convictions, protected characteristics, information on supplementary educational providers and more, which will be held indefinitely and cross-referenced with other local records. As I mentioned at Second Reading, I totally oppose this register on principle.
Here we can see exactly the concern raised by Reclaim Rights for Children and other expert bodies, including many academics, that the proposed children not in school register requires information far beyond what is necessary. Even the Department for Education itself has conceded that simply having a child’s name, date of birth, home address and the names and home addresses of each parent should be sufficient to support the existing duties of a local authority to try to identify those children not in school and ensure they are receiving efficient, suitable education. Yet the Bill goes on to say that there may be other data that it would be helpful to capture. That is not how lawful data processing works. Under well-established principles of minimisation, personal data processing must be limited strictly to what is necessary and not exceed the purpose for which it was collected. You do not gather more than you need simply because it might be helpful.
Clause 34 compounds these concerns. It not only record facts but makes local authorities active interrogators of family choices without clear statutory boundaries. There is no real limit on what might be demanded under the vague heading of sufficient information. This invites mission creep, allowing data collected ostensibly for educational oversight to be repurposed for broader monitoring. It risks empowering officers who may be ideologically suspicious of home education to harass families, treating any non-co-operation as evidence of neglect and flipping the burden of proof entirely.
That is why I strongly support Amendment 286 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, which probes how these sweeping new powers would intersect with children who have special education needs. Children with education, health and care plans or who receive Section 19 or Section 61 provision are already under a robust statutory framework. Pulling them into an additional generalist register not only duplicates bureaucracy, which does not sound very efficient to me, but risks destabilising finely balanced arrangements, often secured only after long struggle and hard evidence of need. The local authority already knows exactly what education these children are receiving; they do not need another compliance net.
Lord Wei (Con)
Perhaps I might build on that point. There seems to be a lot of conflation in this debate between home education and children who are missing education or invisible. It seems that all these measures are designed to try to find these invisible children. Is there not a risk, as I think the noble Lord is touching on, that we may bring in a system that does not actually find the missing children? The people who are very determined to abuse their children, or to hide them in very fundamentalist environments, are the very people who would not register their children even if we had a database. In which case, we would be going after all the people who are doing a good job in the noble Lord’s first few categories. Will the parents we actually want to get—the 39,000 or 300,000 or however many—really self-disclose? There is a real risk that we might not know this until we have imposed a huge amount of bureaucracy on all the parents who are doing a great job.
Lord Storey (LD)
I thank the noble Lord for his question. The answer is that, at the moment, we are not doing anything, which is why the children are going missing and why we do not know where they are. We therefore need to do something to ensure that those children have the opportunity of education and are safe.
Lord Wei (Con)
I am sorry to interrupt the Minister, but is it not the case that if a determined local authority objects to home-schooling, they could start a process of investigating a family under these powers and therefore, technically, the family would be under investigation and could be refused—and all parents could theoretically be prevented from doing so?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
No, and we will come to that in detail. The Section 47 provision, the child protection inquiries, would require evidence of significant harm to the child. It is not the case, as we have identified, that many parents who are home-educating would get anywhere near that sort of threshold. Nor would local authorities have any incentive to do that.
These provisions do not prohibit flexi-schooling arrangements. However, schools should agree to a flexi-schooling arrangement only in exceptional circumstances. We will update guidance to make this clear. In later groups we will be talking in more detail about the provisions around the consent process.
I turn to Amendment 286 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. This is a probing amendment which would remove an exemption on the parental duty to provide information for registers. To be clear, the proposed exemption relates to children whose education is provided under alternative provision arrangements when special educational provision other than in schools is in place or where arrangements have been made by the proprietor of the school that the child is attending. These children may be in scope of the children not in school registers, but the local authority will already hold this information, so there is no need for a duty to provide information that rests with the parents in those cases.
Amendment 233A, tabled by my noble friend Lord Hacking, aims to push on what mandatory information local authority registers should contain. The only information required to be held on registers is that which is easily available to parents or obtainable by local authorities, and that is important for ascertaining the suitability of education and the safety of the child—such as the child’s name, their date of birth, address and details of education provided by the parent and others. We will talk on later groups about the way in which that information should be provided and the ease with which I hope it can be provided.
I turn now to Amendment 279, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Nash, who made a strong case for the provisions in this legislation. His amendment aims to give local authorities the right to inspect the educational materials used by home educators and to view work that that child produces. Local authorities must consider a range of factors when assessing the suitability of a child’s education. One example of how they may conduct their inquiries into suitability is to request evidence of work samples. This position was confirmed in the Portsmouth judicial review case in 2021. If the local authority is not satisfied that the education is suitable based on the information received, it must usually serve a school attendance order, which requires the child to be enrolled at a school.
I turn to the Clause 31 stand part notice tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I hope the noble Lord was satisfied by my first speech on this group but, to summarise succinctly, we need an effective registration system so that local authorities can identify all children not in school and ensure that they are receiving suitable education and are safe. This is what Clause 31 will achieve.
The stand part notice tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, seeks to remove Clause 34 from the Bill. Clause 34 allows for statutory guidance to be provided to local authorities on how they should carry out their new duties in relation to the school attendance order process and children not in school registers. This guidance will provide local authorities with advice on how to exercise their new powers and responsibilities proportionately and consistently. For example, we would expect it to include further advice on how local authorities should request and conduct home visits.
As part of the implementation of the Bill, we will consult on the guidance to ensure that we hear from stakeholders that the measures will have an impact. It is necessary that the guidance is statutory to help ensure compliance with the advice within it. There will be considerable opportunity for further engagement on the details of that; the House will have the opportunity to consider it, because it will be subject to the affirmative resolution process.
The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, made points on why all children need to be included on registers. To reiterate, we agree that home education is not in itself a safeguarding risk, but it can mean that children slip under the radar of the services that are there to protect them. Our consent measures are a proportionate solution which, as I have said, focuses on the small but important group of children for whom there are concerns about actual or likely significant harm. We will further discuss these issues later. The registers are about helping local authorities to discharge their existing duties to ensure that children are receiving a safe and suitable education.
Finally, with respect to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, about the child rights impact and the relationship with Wales, there is, to be clear, a child rights impact assessment produced by the Government for this piece of legislation, but Wales wanted to produce its own. That is the reason for the situation that the noble Baroness outlined.
For the reasons that I have outlined, and given the extensive discussions we have had as a forerunner for the further discussions that we will have, I hope that noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments or stand part notices.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Wei Excerpts(3 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Lord Wei
“(c) a local authority is—(i) conducting enquiries under section 47 of the Children Act 1989 (duty to investigate) in respect of the child, or (ii) taking action under section 47(8) of that Act to safeguard or promote the child's welfare, in a case where the enquiries mentioned in sub-paragraph (i) have led the local authority to conclude that the child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm (within the meaning of section 31(9) and (10) of that Act).”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment limits consent requirements to safeguarding cases under section 47 of the Children Act 1989. It removes subsection (3) of 434A, recognising special school placement as supportive, not suspicious, and ensures local authorities must evidence actual harm risk, rather than requiring parents to justify withdrawal.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendments 203A and Amendment 215A, and to give moral support to Amendment 221. Before turning to these provisions, I wish to reflect briefly on the underlying scope and purpose of Clause 30.
Clause 30 as drafted is striking in its breadth. It hands local authorities the power to demand consent before a child may be withdrawn from a maintained school. I pick up here on a point made previously by the Minister about whether all parents could be subject to this. My assertion is that they could if a local authority decided, on the withdrawal of the child from school, to put the parent under a Section 47 order. Apparently, this is incredibly easy to do. The law requires only reasonable cause to suspect significant harm. It is a deliberately low bar, meant to protect children, and I have had correspondence—we can discuss this again in August—that indicates that it has at times been misused, just through a referral, for example, from the school itself. Let us say that a teacher does not really understand home education, is concerned that withdrawal might cause harm and alerts the local authority. Instantly, it can start an investigation. As an officer, you run that by your manager, who is busy—partly, perhaps, because there are many more families to investigate now that that the database exists. Perhaps there was a missed medical appointment, which I am sure we have all experienced, and they were late and could not see the doctor in time, perhaps because there was traffic. Suddenly, that might give rise to an S47. Although in theory, under the clause, only a certain subset of parents may be affected, potentially, in practice, depending on the ideological bias of the officers involved—and we have seen in some authorities that there clearly are some outliers—all parents may be swept into such measures.
Clause 30 as drafted hands local authorities the power to demand consent before a child may be withdrawn, yet nowhere does it properly limit the grounds on which that consent may be withheld. This gives the state a sweeping veto over parents’ decisions to withdraw their children, even when such withdrawal arises from urgent, pressing circumstances such as sustained bullying or grooming—I believe that you can be subject to an S47 if you are being groomed in a school—unmet special educational needs or serious mental health concerns. In doing so, it risks turning what should be a family’s protective step—for example, taking your child out of that circumstance of grooming by bullies in school—into a procedural trap.
This is a significant expansion of state power into private family life. It runs counter the well-established principle, under both domestic common law and Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, that parents are presumed to act in their children’s best interests unless there is clear evidence to the contrary. By casting such a wide net without rigorous statutory safeguards, Clause 30 risks inviting inconsistency, arbitrary refusals and unnecessary confrontations that erode trust between families and local authorities. It is precisely this sort of overreach that sows the seed of future litigation and damages the co-operative spirit that effective safeguarding truly depends on.
Against that backdrop, Amendment 215 offers a much more balanced and constructive approach and, dare I say it, safeguard. It would require local authorities to offer parents a voluntary information session before they formally deregister a child to home educate. This session would do three modest but crucial things: provide an exploration of the parents’ legal rights and responsibilities, give details of what support services might be available, and lay out clearly what the process and consequences of withdrawal would entail.
This is not a barrier, a checkpoint or a covert mechanism for delay; it is simply an offer of information. It is a means to ensure that parents contemplating such a significant step—as we have heard, many more do so these days—do so with a full understanding of the legal and practical landscape, and it respects their right to choose while empowering them to make that choice wisely.
The decision to home-educate is rarely casual; many parents arrive at it after considerable distress. We have heard accounts from across England of children so overwhelmed by school that they stop speaking, suffer debilitating anxiety or face persistent exclusion. In such cases, parents often withdraw a child in a crisis, being understandably focused on immediate well-being rather than long-term procedural consequences. Those parents deserve our empathy, not our suspicion.
This amendment is rooted in sound constitutional principle. In R (Anufrijeva) v Secretary of State for the Home Department the law is clear. Procedural fairness is a cornerstone of our system requiring timely, clear information when rights are at stake. This is precisely what Amendment 215A would achieve, ensuring that parents understand their freedoms and obligations.
It is not an abstract problem. In evidence we have repeatedly heard of parents who did not fully appreciate the impact of deregistration. Some assumed that they could simply return their child to school at any time. Others did not realise the additional hurdles for exam access or the financial implications once local authority funding fell away. One parent who wrote in from the West Midlands said starkly, “We thought we’d just get on with it, but suddenly we were isolated. No support, no guidance and a local authority more interested in interrogating us than helping”. Another told us, “No one warned us about exam costs. If we’d known, we would have budgeted and planned differently”.
This amendment also helps to address the troubling postcode lottery that currently characterises local authority engagement. Some councils build relationships with home-educating families, others issue notices to satisfy and school attendance orders at extraordinary rates. In Portsmouth, for instance, in one recent year nearly three-quarters of all known home-educating families were issued a notice. That is not a safeguarding approach grounded in individual assessment; it is a blunt instrument that breeds fear and resentment.
Offering a voluntary information session helps to shift this climate. It replaces adversarial compliance checks with constructive engagement. It gives parents confidence that they understand their rights, that they are under no obligation to accept invasive home visits, and that they can approach home education in a spirit of informed partnership rather than fearful retreat. It is essential that this remains voluntary. To compel attendance would simply re-create the coercive environment that we seek to avoid. Some parents may never need further help; others may seek guidance. This gentle first step ensures that they start that journey from a place of respect and understanding.
Finally, I want us to remember the positive role that schools themselves can play. Head teachers are often the first to hear of a family’s intention to deregister. With this amendment in place, they would have somewhere helpful to direct parents to—not as a hurdle but as a supportive opportunity to become better informed.
In sum, this is precisely the kind of proportionate, relationship-based approach we should be championing, respecting parental authority, ensuring clarity of obligation, building trust and ultimately safeguarding children far more effectively than heavy-handed procedural entanglements could ever do. If in August we can perhaps implement more changes such as this, we may need fewer tribunals, although I agree they are a very important measure, and we may need fewer databases because parents and local authorities are working together in co-operation. I beg to move.
Lord Hacking (Lab)
My Lords, as I said at Second Reading and repeated earlier this afternoon, it is my contention on behalf of home-schooling parents that the provisions in this Bill are
“too long and too complicated”.—[Official Report, 1/5/25; col. 1414.]
To that end, I have given notice that I will oppose the Question that Clause 30 stand part of the Bill. I also put down Amendment 233A relating to Clause 31.
Perhaps we could look at the whole. I have argued against the long and complicated provisions in this Bill relating to home-schooling parents because they are frightfully oppressive on home-schooling parents and are in many ways unworkable because of the complicated language used in this Bill.
To look at it as a whole, the home-schooling provisions in the Bill are covered in Clauses 30 to 33. They cover 29 pages, from page 50 to page 79 of the Bill, and the clauses therein contain 17 very large new sections to be inserted after Sections 434 and 436 of the Education Act 1996. So the further complication is that not only do you need to have in your hands this Bill, or Act when it is passed, but you have to go back to the 1996 Act.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
The children who are subject to child protection inquiries and plans are among our most vulnerable and the children who attend special schools are likely to have the highest levels of need. It is necessary that local authority consent is sought in those scenarios to ensure that these children are safe and suitably educated.
Even then, Clause 30 does not mean that these eligible families will not be able to home-educate their children. We are simply requiring the local authority to take a closer look in those circumstances. It may, in any of those three categories, be wholly appropriate for those children to be educated at home, but it is also right, given the specific circumstances, that the local authority that has responsibility—or where those children live—looks at that case and gives consent for home education in those narrow categories of cases.
We want local authorities to know which children in their areas may be home-educated and to make an informed decision to determine what will be in the best interests of the child in those circumstances. Clause 30 is underpinned by a review process; I will return to that in a moment. Statutory guidance will also be published to help schools and local authorities to carry out their new duties consistently from authority to authority and in a proportionate way.
I turn to the specific amendments. Amendments 203A and 204, in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Wei and Lord Lucas, seek to remove the requirement for parents to obtain local authority consent to home-educate should their child attend a special school under arrangements of the local authority. The Government believe it is important to retain this requirement. We totally recognise that parents of children at special schools have their children’s best interests at heart, just like other parents. However, children in special schools often have very complex needs that would be difficult for their parents to provide for at home. The loss of the support the child receives in a special school may be a major upheaval in the child’s life. Clause 30 retains an additional check that there are no educational suitability issues resulting from the loss of this support and that home education would be in the child’s best interests. It is clear that this is a different nature of concern from that represented by Section 47 inquiries or a child protection plan.
Amendment 210, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, wants to specify a timeframe for the home education consent decision to be made. I wholly share the noble Lord’s desire for decisions to be undertaken as quickly as possible. We think that the current wording in the clause, “without undue delay”, ensures as prompt a turnaround as possible. If we had an arbitrary timeline for this process—28 days, for example—that would imply that every decision was as straightforward as any other. Timings are likely to be different, depending on the circumstances of the child. By necessity, because these are children who already have other needs and requirements, the process could be complex and will involve multi-agency collaboration and information-sharing to reach a decision.
Amendment 215A seeks to ensure that local authorities offer parents an information session on home education as part of the consent process. I agree it is important that the decision to home-educate is an informed one. But the duty to secure a suitable education rests with the parent, not the local authority. With this in mind, requiring local authorities to offer mandatory information sessions would not be appropriate. It is parents who should be taking responsibility for researching their educational choices. Parents should carefully consider their responsibilities and the financial implications of home-educating before requesting permission to withdraw their child from school. We will ensure that the department’s relevant guidance provides key information that a parent needs to consider when contemplating whether to home-educate. Local authorities and schools can signpost to this should they become aware of parental intentions to home-educate.
Amendment 219, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seeks to require local authorities to provide a statement of reasons to parents when refusing a request for consent. As the noble Baroness suspected, it is the case that local authorities are already obliged to provide their rationale for such a decision. We intend to make this clear in the relevant statutory guidance, which will need to be updated so that relevant professionals know what is required of them.
Finally, Amendment 221, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, looks to provide a tribunal appeals process as a review in the case of a local authority’s decision to refuse to grant permission to home-educate a child. We do not believe that this amendment is necessary because Clause 30 already provides for a review process. Parents who disagree with the local authority’s decision to grant or refuse permission to home-educate their child can refer the decision to the Secretary of State for review. They will carefully consider the full facts of the case. Having done so, the Secretary of State has the power to either uphold the local authority’s decision, to direct the local authority to grant consent or to refer the question back to the local authority for review.
Lord Wei (Con)
I am grateful to the Minister. I believe that this appeal process to the Secretary of State already exists. Clearly, it is a very difficult situation for the Secretary of State to be the tribunal for the parents, if the parents feel that the local authority or the Government have not been supportive of their desire to home-educate. I would be grateful if the Minister could let us know how many times, when a home-educated family has requested support from the Secretary of State to overturn a local authority decision, that has actually happened. According to the statistics I have, there has never been such an instance. I wonder whether, if this were to be tested in a court or by some other mechanism, this form of procedural appeal would not really muster the kind of belief that the Minister has. Might she reconsider looking into the various forms of appeal that we will propose in later groups of amendments, or indeed look again at the idea of a tribunal?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
This legislation introduces the consent process. People have not gone through this process, with the specific, narrow categories of children and families for whom it applies. Does the noble Lord want another go?
Lord Wei (Con)
I am referring to other instances, which home-educated families have referenced, where they have written to the Secretary of State for Education —under the current regime, not the future one—and where no action has ever been taken in their favour. Perhaps we can discuss this in August.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
Let us not talk about what will happen and when in terms of engagement with my officials. Just to be clear: as I said at the beginning of my remarks, that engagement will enable noble Lords to get an understanding of the way the Government intend to implement these provisions and to get some assurance around the processes that will be used. It will not be another opportunity for noble Lords who fundamentally oppose what the Government are doing—I am thinking of the noble Lord, who started his contribution by saying that he fundamentally opposes what we are trying to do here. I am not sure that the engagement will be particularly helpful for persuading, through officials, the Government to wholly change their approach to this. As I said, it is intended to look at the detail and to provide some assurance about how the processes will work.
I will reiterate the point I made previously. Clause 30 is introducing a consent mechanism and, specifically, a review process of that consent mechanism. Home-educating parents may well have written on other issues to the Secretary of State and been dissatisfied with the response that they received. However, that is different from the review process that is spelled out in legislation in Clause 30.
I turn to the points made by my noble friend Lady Morris. She is right. She asks questions that are the subject of amendments to be debated in later groups, but they are very reasonable. She asked about how much time a child would need to study with a provider for it to be reported, and how often and how quickly parents would need to update the details about that. Those are precisely the types of issues that would be subject to the further consultation around the regulations and guidance, including with home-educating parents and others, to ensure that we do that in a way that balances the burdens and requirements on parents, alongside ensuring that the local authority has the basic information that it needs to make the scheme work properly. In this area, there is considerable scope for consultation and engagement about how precisely that will work. I hope that answers my noble friend’s question and that the noble Lord, Lord Wei, will feel able to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Lucas (Con)
I am very grateful to the Minister for what she said. I entirely understand the limitations of discussions with officials, which is why I want to talk to her again about tribunals. Tribunals are an established part of mediating between the citizen and the state. In situations like this, or in many circumstances similar to those we are talking about—and this is by no means the only time we will discuss this; the next time will be when we are talking about best interests—when you have a hard-pressed local authority that may have a particular prejudice against home education and may be making life extremely difficult, as some of them do, you want an effective right of appeal. The system of appeal to the Secretary of State has existed in various forms in various bits of legislation for a long time. I am aware of one occasion when the Secretary of State agreed with the complainant. It does not work as an effective forum. It is not set up to be an effective forum. It does not allow for balanced and deep argument. The department is just not set up as a tribunal: it is not staffed as a tribunal, nor skilled as a tribunal. It is not the right place. I just say to my noble friend Lady Barran that I would very much appreciate her support for a tribunal amendment at Report, because that is what this appears likely to come to.
Lord Wei (Con)
We have heard in discussing this group of amendments a number of excellent suggestions for trying to take the edge off these complex—as the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, said—and, in my view, quite heavy-handed requirements on families. On the previous group, the Minister was very kind in offering discussions so that we can move forwards. Even though I have said that I oppose the register totally, that does not mean that I am shirking my responsibility as a legislator to help improve this legislation and to make it practical, based on the experience of someone from a home-educating family and having heard what was said by many Peers who have contributed to the debate. We are trying to make this practical and to make it work, so that people can get on with educating their children and local authorities can catch the perpetrators they want to catch.
There have been discussions about the tribunal, appeals and the fact that the department’s appeals process generally does not seem to behave in the way you would expect of a proper appeals process when parents complain directly. We have heard some quite sensible amendments in this group and the Minister has not indicated that she is willing to adopt any of the ideas in them. We will see later on. We appreciate the clarification that, when we meet officials, we will be told what the Bill is about and why it has been written in this way, but I hope we can also improve the Bill, which is the intent of us all. There have been suggestions on ways to improve its wording, in order to treat children in special schools and their parents with a bit more care and to have a statement of costs and benefits. These do not seem unreasonable.
I am afraid I am hearing a bit of a “state knows best” argument—that it should have 28 days to give a reason for its decision whereas parents should have only 15. That does not sound very fair to me and I am not sure it will sound fair to the British public, let alone to home-educating families. However, in the interests of time and given that we will discuss in further groups and potentially over the summer more of what we have talked about today, I will reflect on what has been said. I may return to this on Report but, for now, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
My Lords, I rise to speak to my Amendment 224, which I think is less contentious than the last issue that I raised in your Lordships’ House. The amendment is about deregistration from school when it is triggered by crises, or whatever. Taking your child to school is a voluntary arrangement at the point of enrolment, but parents get fined for unauthorised absence, even if they go into the sort of crisis that will eventually lead to them deregistering.
I do not know anything about education, despite being in education until I was 18, and then at university, but I have vested interest because three of my grandchildren were home-schooled. Two of them are now at Cambridge—one is doing history and the other politics—and the other one has made a comedy film about autism, which is a condition she has, and that is doing incredibly well. Those three children have been home-schooled and have reached a level that many children do not get to regardless, so I would argue that home-schooling can work extremely well. It is important to remember that, for some children, it is the answer. We want to avoid government overreach in these situations.
It seems obvious to me that, where a parent clearly no longer consents to the education arrangement with the school, it makes sense that they do not get fined. The fines do not get the children back to school, but they do add financial worries to the sense of stress. I understand why the Government reach for deterrence in order to give children the best education that they can, but sometimes school is not the right answer and I ask the Minister to consider whether financial penalties are useful in all these situations.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords I rise to speak to my Amendments 218, 223, 381, 403 and 418. Together, they seek to introduce fairness, balance and accountability into the Bill and to support families who are simply choosing a lawful, legitimate path of home education.
I will first focus on Amendment 218, which will require any local authority officer making decisions about elective home education to have at least two years’ personal experience of home educating their own children. This is not an ideological proposal but a practical one. I recall being asked once by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to help create a Teach First programme for social workers. I declined, not because I doubted the value of new graduates but because lived experience matters. Pattern recognition, nuance and trust are not easily taught, especially if you have only recently graduated. You cannot understand the reality of raising and educating a child outside school unless you have walked that path yourself.
To ask someone with no such experience to judge a family’s educational approach is like asking a man to speak with authority on childbirth or someone without children to dictate how others should raise theirs. According to Education Otherwise, home-educated children are twice as likely to be referred to children’s social services as their schooled peers, and yet no more likely to be placed on a child protection plan. This points to systematic overreferral, driven in part by ignorance and in part by a narrative that wrongly associates home education with safeguarding risk. This amendment offers one step towards correcting that imbalance.
Case law supports this. In R (T) v Chief Constable of Greater Manchester 2014, the Supreme Court held that administrative decisions that infringe individual rights must be informed by proper context and not rely on rigid or generic assumptions. Without understanding the diversity and nuance of home education, decisions risk being fundamentally flawed. If flawed decisions are made persistently, structurally and without oversight, judicial review becomes not just possible but likely. My concern is that the Bill, without this amendment and others like it, will open floodgates to such challenges, and perhaps rightly so.
This brings me to Amendment 223, which would establish an independent home education ombudsman—somewhat similar to the tribunal idea but very focused—to receive and investigate complaints against local authorities that overstep in the course of carrying out their duties under the Education Act. This is frankly overdue. At present, if a parent believes that they have been mistreated, there is no meaningful avenue of redress: no independent appeal, no clear complaints process and no statutory body to oversee how these immense powers are exercised. All they can do, as we have discussed, is write to the Minister, who to our knowledge has never, or rarely, upheld a complaint by a parent in this or a similar context.
I will give noble Lords some testimonies to bring this to life here. We have talked about the legal process here, but I want to bring home how human lives are affected by what we are proposing and what already takes place. One mother, a non-UK national, withdrew her child from the UK system before school age, having mistakenly registered with the local authority on school advice. Despite their lawful departure, the LA demanded boarding passes, proof of address and school details abroad. The child was never of school age in the UK. This was not protection; it was pursuit.
A military family has described how their local authority contacted the husband’s workplace repeatedly to discuss the children, even after it had ruled that the home education was of a satisfactory, suitable level. It then had to make an apology and had clear instruction to contact only the mother. The mother said this was a huge breach of privacy because of the nature of the agreement they had established. A home-educating doctor wrote:
“After de-registering my daughter with SEND, I was referred to social services again. My son and I were followed in public. I feared for our safety. My daughter began to regress. I had done nothing wrong—just removed her from a school that failed her”.
Lord Wei (Con)
To clarify, I was in no way saying that men could not work with women in childbirth. I was trying to make a point about speaking as authoritatively on the process of giving birth as a man as if you were a woman. In no way would I want the Minister to interpret me as saying that one could not be a male midwife or anything like that, but, as some of us know, when in certain circles I have talked about something feeling like childbirth, I have quite rightly been told off, because I have never given birth. There is something about that lived experience that I am pointing to. I am not making the point that people cannot work in certain professional settings in that sense.
We are crossing over from professional expertise into lived experience, saying that a parent can or cannot raise their child and parent-educate. Even if you were to use the professional argument, I am not sure that having that determined by someone who may not have that experience—when, right now, even the professional in this context is not trained in the philosophies and the different nuances of home education—is quite right in this context.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I certainly think it is right that we should attempt to ensure that people with lived experience are a key part of all areas of policy. That is why, for example, I talked earlier about the home educators’ forum that the department has brought together to help to inform our work here and the guidance. The point that the noble Lord was making went well beyond that. The suggestion that you could not make a professional social work or education decision in this area unless you had lived experience would make this area wholly different from any other area that professionals were making decisions about, and that is the stumbling block for this amendment.
We have a workforce of trained, dedicated practitioners who understand and champion the needs of the children they work with across schools and children’s social care. These amendments, in effect, would exclude around 99% of the population and, of course, would assume that one professional’s experience of home education is reflective of all parents. Working Together guidance is clear which practitioners should be involved in safeguarding decision-making and the importance of including children and families in that as well. We are confident that the Bill measures, and wider children’s social care reform that strengthens the protection of children, will mean that local authorities can draw on a range of expertise when making decisions—and so they should.
Amendment 220 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and Amendment 224 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, would allow a child not to attend school prior to receiving consent from the local authority. I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, who was not here for the earlier parts of the debate—for which I do not condemn her—that the points she made about the very successful home education experience of the children she was talking about who are close to her has very much been reflected in the comments that other noble Lords made earlier. We are clear that there are many children for whom home education has been a very fulfilling and successful process, and there is nothing in this legislation that removes, for example, the right of parents to make that decision to educate their children at home.
With these consent provisions, however—and in wanting to ensure that if a child is being educated at home, they are at least seen and understood to be being educated elsewhere than in school—we want to make sure that every child is seen. That is the expression that we were using earlier, and that is what we are aiming to do here. Also with respect to the consent provisions, we are concerned about those children for whom there might be particular reasons for a local authority to look carefully at the decision to grant consent by virtue of them being subject to a Section 47 inquiry, under a child protection plan or requiring the specific facilities of a special school.
For many children, a school is a protective environment and a means of offering essential support. I know that the noble Lord and the noble Baroness share our desire to reduce the risk of children falling through gaps and potentially going missing. It is therefore important that a child continues to attend school until a local authority has determined the consent request. Removing a child before this could subject them to unsuitable education or increase the risk of harm. I am sure that the noble Baroness could envisage a situation where, for legitimate reasons, a Section 47 inquiry is instituted where there are concerns about a child being at risk of very significant harm and—I am afraid that we have seen examples of this—a parent, thinking that this would be a way of avoiding it, decides at that point that they want to remove their child from school. In those circumstances, I do not think that any of us would want that child to be removed from what may well be the protective environment of a school before the decision had been made about consent.
For all children who are not subject to the consent process, which will be the vast majority of children whose parents want to home-educate them, all we are expecting is that the parent notifies the school that they want to remove their child from the roll and that the school has the opportunity to check, therefore, whether they fall within the criteria of a child for whom consent would be necessary or whether they are subject to a school attendance order. It would not be unreasonable to expect a child to carry on attending school while that relatively straightforward administrative check was made.
Amendment 222, also tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would require consent decisions to be revisited sooner than six months after the previous request when new evidence becomes available or the child has been disadvantaged by the decision. This six-month timeframe is proportionate and is provided to reduce multiple requests regarding the same child. There will be situations where it may be appropriate for the local authority to consider applications sooner—for example, if there has been a substantial change in the child’s circumstances. A local authority can do this under the clause as drafted, if it so wishes. I am sure that the noble Lord could also envisage a situation where a parent who was unhappy about the consent decision made by a local authority expected the decision to be revisited perhaps every week. That is the reason for setting this timeframe.
Amendment 223 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, is about establishing an independent ombudsman. I understand the theme that is developing here about independent review capacity. Notwithstanding that, the Government do not believe that it is necessary. I note that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, uses almost every opportunity to push his tribunal suggestion. I am interested in whether the proposition now is that we should have both a tribunal and an ombudsman in these cases. Of course it is right that there should be a process for referring local authority decisions that parents are not satisfied with; however, it should be uncomplicated. It is right that the final decision should rest with the Secretary of State, or Welsh Ministers, who will fully and objectively consider the merits of the case.
Amendment 225, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would remove the definition of the “relevant local authority” that is responsible for making a home education consent decision. For children subject to a child protection inquiry or plan, the local authority where a child lives is responsible for making the consent decision. They will have the information needed to make informed decisions and should therefore determine consent. For children in special schools, who are not also subject to child protection processes, consent is needed from the local authority that maintains the plan, just as is the case under existing legislation. This new subsection provides legal clarity for parents, schools and local authorities.
Amendment 403, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, requests emergency court hearings for parents where a local authority seeks to remove, or removes, a child from their parents due to concerns arising from home education. To reiterate, the Children Act 1989 is clear that the threshold for care proceedings is significant harm. Home education as a singular factor would not reach the threshold for care proceedings. Child protection concerns about a home-educated child must be addressed through the same process as any other child facing harm. This includes parents’ rights to challenge decisions about the removal of a child into care.
Finally, Amendment 418, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, would require local authorities to refer individuals who file false or malicious allegations against home-educating parents, who then may be subject to civil penalties. There is a concern that this could deter valid concerns about home-educated children being reported, potentially leaving children at risk. Local authorities have robust processes in place to identify whether a child is suffering, or likely to suffer, harm and appropriately respond to malicious allegations, regardless of a child’s educational status.
I said earlier that it would not only be in the case of home-educated children that a local authority might have to make a decision about whether a complaint about a child’s parents was well founded or malicious. Home-educating parents have the same rights as other parents. Families can seek support from the local authority or police advice if intentional false reports are being made against them.
For the reasons I have outlined, I hope that noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments.
Lord Frost (Con)
My Lords, I have similar doubts and concerns about Amendment 211—or rather the problem it is designed to deal with—to my noble friend Lord Lucas. To elaborate, the principle that parents have the primary responsibility to provide education for children has been in statutes of various forms for the best part of 150 years and is currently in Section 7 of the 1996 Act. There is a qualification to that, for reasons of cost and efficiency, but no qualification for anything else. My noble friend Lord Lucas is right to say that this is the first time we have seen this very important principle qualified. The fact that it is done almost in passing and, as the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, said, in a bit of a muddle, makes one wonder how much thought has been given to this, and whether indeed the intention is to go back on this very long-standing principle or not. It does not seem to have been very clearly thought through.
At the moment, we have a provision that says that local authorities “must refuse consent” to the subset of children who are caught by these new provisions if they think that home education is not in the best interests of those children. That is most egregious for children in special educational schools but also for the Section 47 part of the definition, which, as we have been discussing, potentially has quite a low threshold.
My questions to the Minister are these. Is it intended with this provision to overturn that very long-standing principle? If it is not, can she explain why it is not and why this draft does not do that? Is it worth thinking a bit harder about the drafting of this section and, as the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, said, substituting some sort of objective positive test rather than this very broad and novel “best interests” test?
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 212 and the related amendment to Clause 30. Taken together, these amendments aim to restore vital balance and proportion to the question of whether a parent may withdraw their child from school. They would place evidence, not mere suspicion, at the heart of decisions to profoundly shape children’s lives, reaffirming that it is parents who are the primary guardians of their child’s welfare, unless proven otherwise.
As others have mentioned, Amendment 212 addresses the critical flaw in the Bill: trapping children in harmful environments by allowing local authorities to withhold consent for withdrawal without first producing clear, documented evidence of a standard sufficient to satisfy courts that such a withdrawal would cause greater harm. This is not some radical departure; it simply restates the core principle of the Children Act 1989 that the welfare of the child and the authority of the parents to act in their child’s best interest must be paramount.
From the groups that we have discussed so far, one of the concerns I have is that although we must recognise the sterling efforts of local authority officials, the department and the Minister, we must not always presume that in every case the state knows best. Mistakes are made, and from what I have heard so far I am worried that there is no real consciousness that there could be mistakes that would warrant either a tribunal or an ombudsman, and, in this case, no recognition that schools can potentially be a cause of harm as well—for example, if children are being groomed or exploited at school. Why is there this presumption that the parent must prove to the official that the alternative to school that they are about to provide will be safer, when in some cases they may be trying to get their child out of a harmful environment—for example, that particular school?
This is a real issue. Scandals we have had in the past. Horizon, and even Rotherham—if I dare to mention that in this place—were based on the assumption that the state clearly understands what is going on and is not making any mistakes, that nobody is overlooking anything, and that the state is wise and therefore everything it does is right and cannot be challenged, except when we find out years later that there have been mistakes and problems. The amendments that many of us are proposing are trying—certainly I am with this one and others—to address that assumption and create some safeguards.
The related, equally essential amendment to Clause 30 rightly distinguishes between the mere existence of a Section 47 investigation and its actual outcome. It seeks to ensure that local authorities may refuse consent only if their inquiries under Section 47 have led them to conclude that the child is suffering or likely to suffer significant harm.
I want to echo similar points made by others in this group that there is a real troubling shift towards the state deciding what is in the best interest of the child, based not on neglect or the criteria that we have relied on in the past for state intervention but on deciding what is in the best interest of the child educationally and holistically. How can this possibly be justified?
Even with Section 47, we are talking about suspicion as the threshold, so we may have this running debate which we may need to resolve when we sit down with officials. I have documented proof—real testimony—of officials who are suspicious, not recognising that there is harm being done in school to a child, of parents who want to home-educate. They say that the parents are going to harm the child, using cases such as the Sharif case and others to justify this intervention. This has caused officials to behave in ways that put them in a position of extreme power, without any protections or appeals.
The state should override parental rights only when there is evidence of significant harm, not because the state believes that it has a better view of what is in the best interest of the child over the parent. In re B (A Child) 2009, the Supreme Court was unequivocal. As Lord Kerr memorably put it, the state does not become the parent. It is justified in interfering only where a child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm. That is the litmus test.
For many families this is not theoretical; it is painfully real. I have been sent countless accounts, too often dismissed as anecdotal, of children enduring conditions in school that no safeguarding regime should tolerate. The 2021 Ofsted review on sexual harassment found that many girls routinely experience peer sexual abuse in school. The Women and Equalities Committee has documented similar risks. Children with autism, sensory processing difficulties and anxiety disorders frequently find the mainstream classroom overwhelming, not through any failing by parents but through systemic failure.
One mother recounted that her autistic child’s school-triggered anxiety caused seizures three to four times a week, which dropped to once every six months after she was withdrawn. Another spoke of her son vomiting every morning, paralysed by dread. Yet another mother described home education as not a lifestyle choice but “a safety net that saved my child’s life”. A 2023 study in the British Medical Journal found that adolescent mental health measurably improves during school holidays and worsens during school term time. This is not mere coincidence but evidence that for some children, school environments simply do not work.
Lord Wei (Con)
To build on that, if you had a local authority officer with not much experience of home education—given that that is apparently not available—who is shown suitable education arrangements by the parent planning to take their child into home education, then that first new sub-paragraph could allow them still to override those arrangements, which they have agreed are suitable, by saying that they think it would be best if the child attended a school. How do we deal with that precise situation which she has said could happen? Do we not need to work this out so that our wonderful local authority officials are not confused when reading this guidance and say, “Well, I can still override the parents because I think it is right that they stay in school, because that is in their best interests”?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
That is what I was saying. You could envisage circumstances in which there is a child on a child protection plan, notwithstanding that there might be suitable education, where the protective role of being in school would be in that child’s best interests and being away from the school might be against them, regardless of what the other education provision might be. Let us not forget that this would be a consideration only for children for whom there are child protection concerns or for children in special schools, where, to be fair, it would more likely be about the appropriateness of the education, but could be about the other support available for a child that would not be available in other circumstances, notwithstanding the question of education, because of their needs that required them to be put into the special school in the first place.
Lord Wei (Con)
I can fully appreciate that, given the scope here, if there was a safeguarding concern then one might want to pursue the route the Minister is talking about as the officer in question is trying to make that decision. However, the way that this is worded, even if the parents or family subject to Section 47 have found a way to provide suitable education, gives the officer the room to say, “I am concerned about the safety of the child”, when it is more that they do not like the education being provided.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I think I might speak for others in the Committee in saying that this level of detail could be better dealt with face to face with officials, which would allow us to do another group before the House rises.
Lord Wei
“(6A) A child is not required to be registered under this section if the parent provides evidence that any one of the following conditions is met—(a) a competent home educator with at least five years of personal or professional experience has provided a sworn affidavit affirming that, in their judgment, the parent will be capable of providing a suitable education consistent with their educational philosophy,(b) the parent has arranged and paid for the child to sit at least three externally assessed national qualifications, including but not limited to GCSEs, A-Levels, or accredited vocational awards, or(c) the child is enrolled with a national online school or flexible provision provider known to support home-educated or otherwise educated children to a suitable standard.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment and another in the name of Lord Wei exempt families from registration and data submission requirements where they can show credible evidence of suitable education through endorsement by an experienced educator, formal qualification entry, or enrolment in a recognised online provider.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 230, 254, 323 to 326 and 423, all of which stand in my name. The creation of a register, though flawed, is fundamentally intended to identify children and families who have yet to demonstrate they are providing a suitable education through home education or otherwise. It stands to reason, therefore, that those who have already demonstrated this suitability or who have mitigating circumstances preventing them doing so at this time, such as being in crisis, seeking asylum, holding diplomatic status or navigating a legitimate and complex personal or family situation, should not be treated identically to those where safeguarding concerns may genuinely arise.
There ought to be legitimate exemptions. These amendments start to aim to highlight such families, to give space to children who can show for themselves or through others that they are receiving a suitable education and that their parents are competent, committed and responsible, free from unnecessary state interference. These amendments deal with a wide range of contexts, but they all converge on a single point: not every child outside school is invisible, unsafe or neglected. Many are thriving, and the law must recognise that.
Amendment 230 is central to this group. It proposes that where credible evidence of suitable education already exists, families should not be compelled to register with the local authority. This could be demonstrated, according to the amendment, in three ways: first, through an affidavit from an experienced home educator, perhaps one who has seen their own children succeed in life and academically; secondly, through enrolment and payment for formal qualifications, such as GCSEs, for which I think the going rate is currently several hundred pounds; or, thirdly, through enrolment with an established online provider. It should be noted that the fastest-growing sector within education in the country is online virtual schooling. Indeed, the Government have their own Oak National Academy. These are not mere technicalities. They are serious, objective indicators that a child’s education is suitable. For those not taking home education seriously, they could be a suitable deterrent as well.
The state routinely accepts this kind of evidentiary substitution. The DVLA accepts a GP’s opinion for driving fitness. The Home Office accepts identity attestation from religious leaders. I think it is all digital now, but many of us have had our passport photos signed, and I think you still can get them signed, by a vicar or someone else of standing in the community. The courts accept third-party expert testimony in mental health cases. In GDPR, controllers are not required to collect identifying data if it is not needed. Why should education be the one domain where all such trust is withdrawn?
Case law supports this principle. In R v Secretary of State for Education ex parte Talmud Torah, the court affirmed that where parents choose an alternative but suitable method of education, the state must respect it. In Campbell and Cosans v UK, the European court held that education must respect parents’ philosophical convictions. A blanket requirement for registration, regardless of evidence or circumstance, may fall foul of that very principle. Not every religious school or environment is raising terrorists. Many of them are producing Nobel Prize winners, children who are totally blitzing every GCSE, children who are rounded and full of confidence.
A mother in rural England wrote: “I have taught three children from home, all of whom are now gainfully employed, emotionally stable and engaged in their communities. We have done this without needing state validation or supervision. If I now had to register and justify my choices retrospectively, it would feel like rewriting our family history through the lens of suspicion”.
This amendment makes clear that oversight should not be triggered where provision is already evidenced and functional. It reflects principles long recognised in other fields that where the state’s goals, be they safety, quality or accountability, are already being met, it need not intervene further.
I just want to share one testimony that I have been sent. One parent with qualified teacher status, who taught in state schools for over 12 years before home-educating, argued that the register was so vague that it risked turning families such as hers into scapegoats for failures that have nothing to do with home education. Another mother, a primary teacher of 15 years now teaching her own children, warned that repeated oversight by less experienced officials would be disproportionate and likely to be carried out by people who have no understanding of what is going on. I have one more: parents have been reported being referred to social services simply because their children were home-educated, despite data showing that home-educated children are less likely to end up on a child protection plan. One said that choosing to educate outside the system was in itself seen as neglect.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, very briefly, I find myself roughly in agreement with the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, on this one: a register should be there.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I want to clarify that, while I personally oppose the register totally, if there must be a register, I am proposing practical amendments. I believe the numbers shared earlier today were that the Government are going to have to get local authority officials to deal with more than 100,000 home-educating families. If they all have to be registered and a portion of them lead to various determinations and investigations, this will create a massive workload for already stretched local authority officers, who we know are struggling to catch the children we want to protect. My point in tabling these amendments is to create exemptions.
Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Blake of Leeds) (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Hacking for the clarification that he has just made, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, for a very clear explanation of why she is not supporting these amendments. As a former lead member for children’s services for the second-largest metropolitan authority in the country, I find it very difficult to recognise some of the comments that have been made tonight, and I emphasise the dedication and hard work of so many people whose primary, indeed sole objective is to make sure that all children in this country are safe from harm. It is so important to reference that as we go through.
I am not sure how many more times Ministers need to stress that there is total recognition of how many parents are out there working extremely hard to provide a suitable education when educating their children otherwise than at school. We have heard examples of the successes of so many of them, and we recognise that many of those children are thriving.
I emphasise that parents have no reason to fear the prospect of having to include key information on local authority children not in school registers. This information is vital to help local authorities discharge existing responsibilities and ensure that the education children receive is suitable and safe. As we have heard, without the registers, too many children and young people are at risk of falling through the gaps.
I will respond briefly to the amendments in this group, which are all tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei. They suggests exemptions for why a child’s information should not be included on a local authority’s children not in school register.
Amendment 254 seeks to ensure that, if a child does not fit the eligibility criteria, their parents would not be required to provide any information. This is unnecessary. If a child is not eligible to be registered, their parents would not be under the duty to provide information.
Amendments 230, 323, 324 and 326 seek to limit which children must be registered on a local authority children not in school register. A key objective of the registers is to aid local authorities in their existing duty to identify, as far as it is possible to do so, all children in their areas who are not registered pupils in school and are not receiving a suitable education. These amendments would prevent this.
Amendment 230 would exempt children if the parent is able to provide a sworn affidavit from an experienced home educator that the home education being provided is suitable, if the parent has arranged for the child to sit at least three national qualifications, or if the child is enrolled in certain educational provision. None of these proposed reasons for exemption would give a local authority enough assurance that the education being provided is suitable for an individual child.
Amendment 323 would exempt children who are temporarily residing in the UK with a permanent residence elsewhere. Where a child is living in the local authority’s area, even if only for a short time, the local authority has education and safeguarding duties towards the child.
I am particularly disappointed to see Amendments 324 and 326, where the noble Lord suggests exempting asylum-seeking families and families affected by war, natural disaster or economic collapse from registers. These are some of the very children who registers will most benefit. Where local authorities are aware of these children, they can offer support to ensure that their education continues undisrupted. The registers would simply not work if the exemptions that the noble Lord proposes were to apply.
Amendment 325 would enable children aged 14 or over to be exempt from being included on the register if they register as self-directed learners. Section 7 of the Education Act 1996 is clear: it is the responsibility of the parents to secure a suitable education for their child. Parents, not children, must remain accountable for this. As we have heard, most parents are fulfilling this duty, but registers will be a crucial tool in identifying where this is not the case so that these children can be supported into suitable education.
Finally in this group, Amendment 423 seeks to allow parents to discharge their duty to provide suitable education when their child is providing services, mentoring or trade-related activities. The Government’s guidance on home education for local authorities and parents sets out that a parent must provide their child with a full-time, efficient, suitable education. Parents therefore have the flexibility to educate their child in whatever manner they deem best for their child, provided it is suitable. This may be able to be achieved through school-type work or through practical education, such as the noble Lord mentioned, depending on the needs of the child. For the reasons I have outlined, namely that exemption of any eligible child for inclusion in the registers would mean that children who may be in receipt of unsuitable education fall through the gaps, I kindly ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Wei (Con)
I thank the Minister and my noble friend Lady Barran for their comments. Frankly, I am disappointed. I feel that many of the measures that I have proposed are designed to help our wonderful officials, who work in local authorities and are struggling under a huge workload, to focus their efforts with the register, which will create a lot of, let us say, false positives as well as genuine areas where intervention might be needed, and a huge amount of work. That is the focus of these amendments.
The point I wanted to raise about asylum seekers was that asylum seekers are obviously very vulnerable, but under the Bill, the moment when the details of the asylum seeker’s children are in the register, the clock starts ticking. They have two weeks to do it, they have to report X number of people’s email addresses and names, they might not even speak or write English, and yet the clock will start ticking. Of course, local authorities and we as a society need to support asylum seekers, but are we willing to put them through such an onerous process if they choose, for whatever reason, to home-educate? I am not sure that this has been really thought through.
It is not any part of my design to exclude asylum seekers from the support that local authorities can provide; it is just trying to be practical. While I recognise and really applaud the officials working on the front line—already under huge pressure and struggling to work out, within all the noise of all the many databases they have access to, where they should intervene—my concern is that without exemptions such as these, this is going to make their life much more difficult and may indeed lead to safeguarding scandals and problems because they have not been able to get around to the families and children who really do need help.
I am grateful for what has been said. I will reflect on it and may return to it at a later stage but, for now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Pupil Mental Health, Well-being and Development
Lord Wei Excerpts(1 year, 5 months ago)
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Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I extend my gratitude to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for initiating this vital debate, and declare my interests as a parent of home-educated and state-educated children and as a board member of an organisation committed to providing private education.
We are at a critical juncture, where the mental health challenges facing our youth have intensified—notably since the pandemic, as others have pointed out. Just this month, the Royal College of Psychiatrists said that there had been a 53% increase in the number of children in mental health crisis over the last four years. This situation is exacerbated by a schooling environment in which most GCSEs are now tested in exams only. This, coupled with limited resources, has severely hampered schools’ ability to support effectively those with neurodiversity and SEND, as well as other pupils struggling generally with mental health challenges.
It is heartening to see the Government’s introduction of mental health support teams and the provision of funding for training leads. This is a commendable step towards embedding mental health support within our educational framework. However, the reach of these initiatives needs expansion, given that eventually it will still only be available to half of all schools, and all schools are still limited in the degree that they can help children with particularly acute needs. It is essential that this support becomes a staple across all schools, ensuring that no child is left without the necessary mental health resources that they need at whatever intensity of need they have. I of course pay tribute to the many schools and teachers who do such a great job in spite of all this, helping where they can.
I will now focus my remarks on the school pathways for parents and children dealing with mental health episodes which, from those I have spoken to and interacted with, are too often confusing, complex and traumatic. This comes on top of the high levels of stress families feel because of the issues they have to deal with and, sometimes, the bullying that accompanies them. The pathways need clarification and simplification; they need to become more collaborative rather than confrontational, offering support rather than exacerbating stress and anxiety.
Too often, parents find that the imperative schools have to keep children in school and perform in and for exams, and to manage limited resources and attention to get the bulk of their pupils moving forwards, conflicts with the individualised and tailored attention and support needed by pupils facing mental health challenges. In a number of cases, parents decide to remove their children from a school environment which is not sufficiently supportive, which the child refuses to go to or in which they face bullying.
At this point, the parents face a number of hurdles: attempts can often be made to keep the child in school attendance, even if it might not be in the child’s best interests or aid their well-being, so that the school, trust and local authority can maintain their targets, sometimes with the threat of prosecution or fines. The family can often feel mistreated, like criminals.
I find that, in such scenarios, many families currently see home education as their only escape from such a system that does not adequately cater to their needs. It seems to them the only legal way to move forwards without harassment, short of moving house to another locality. This choice, often made in desperation, should prompt us to reflect on how we can make even more of our schools more neuro-inclusive and supportive environments, rather than ones that have to enforce rules that may not apply or be particularly helpful in such circumstances.
I am also saddened that, rather than dealing with the causes of such absences and the growth of home education as a result of this crisis, the Government and other stakeholders are considering implementing registers for out-of-school children. This would add further stress to families who have chosen to go down that route. It would be wiser to sort out the lack of support and empathy when families have to endure mental health and special needs challenges in schools, signpost multiple paths including, but not just, home education to provide temporary respite and formulate a plan, which may or may not involve the former school, and provide advice, support and training if home education is the chosen path, rather than to create a situation where those who have taken their children out of school are automatically assumed to be criminal or are suspected of neglect or any number of crimes. For many, their only desire is ultimately to see their child well, succeed and be restored.
In closing, I will pose a number of critical questions to the Minister. First, will there be an investigation into the reliance on home education as the only legitimate escape route for parents seeking to protect their children from a system that can sometimes feel to them adversarial, and work done to clarify the pathways out of an unsustainable school environment, so that they are more supportive and do not suspect the parents or child as a first resort?
Secondly, in light of the recent trends in school attendance and the unique challenges post Covid—they look like a result of Covid at the moment, given that attendance is now rising again—is there a plan for an emergency support package specifically targeted at the student cohorts most affected from 2020 onwards?
Thirdly, what support is planned for these children and families with mental health challenges and additional needs who are out of formal school contexts, given that they sometimes need help, either when they are being home-educated or are in an in-between situation, at home or in another non-school context? Will funding be released for families to access trained support from either local authorities or trusted charities without being pursued for absences in those situations?
Our commitment to the mental health and well-being of our pupils is a testament to our dedication to their future and the future of our society. Let us ensure that our actions reflect this commitment by fostering an environment where every child facing mental health challenges feels supported, understood and valued, whether formally in school or not.
Schools Bill [HL]
Lord Wei ExcerptsMonday 18th July 2022
(3 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 View all Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 35-II Manuscript amendments for Report (Supplementary to the Second Marshalled List) - (18 Jul 2022)
“(5A) Condition C is not met if the parents of the child have made alternative arrangements to satisfy the duty in section 7 (duty of parents to secure education of children of compulsory school age).”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to exempt home education from mandatory registration, where the standard of learning is such that parents are compliant with their duties.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, in moving Amendment 64B I shall also speak to other amendments in my name. I declare an interest, as I have before, that I am from a home-educating family, which I am proud of. I wish there were more noble Lords in this Chamber who had the privilege of being part of home education.
As was discussed earlier, the Bill really should not exist in its current form. It has been thoroughly gutted already, and there were good reasons for that. The reasons for gutting the earlier parts of the Bill are no different from the reasons for doing the same to the end of the Bill, which I am afraid is just as much of a mess.
We live in an age of change. There is more remote working and people want to take more control over their health, and they want to do the same for education. I fear that this Government, and Governments generally, are on the run. More and more parents are choosing to take control of their children’s education, which is their right in this country. We as parents have a duty to educate our children. When we want to, we hand over responsibility to the Government, academies, trusts and so on to fulfil that duty, but in this country it is parents who are legally obliged to provide education for their children, and that is only right. We are not some other countries where the opposite is the case.
In this time of change, where perhaps people are taking back control—though maybe not always in the ways that we might have imagined—that forms a threat, in health and to local authorities. I am afraid I have documentary evidence, which I shall share with the House today, about how that perceived threat has led to real injustices under the current regime, even before this Bill becomes law.
Without protections and, frankly, without a wholescale redesign of this law, on which I may push a vote several times today, we may end up with a circumstance in which the injustices that many families are already experiencing today will be heightened and worsened, and we will see many willingly go to prison to stand on this principle. Having spoken to the Minister and colleagues in the department, I do not think the Government truly understand why anyone would go to prison on principle in order not to have their children on the register. They do not understand why. Is that because they do not have any children who they home educate? I would love to see survey results on how many Ministers, people in the department and people in local authorities home educate their children. If they did then they would take a very different view of what they are trying to do today.
I start by apologising to my colleagues on the Benches who have had to come here in such heat—although, thank God, we are well air-conditioned in this Chamber—to potentially vote on my amendments and those of other Peers. I am truly sorry that my amendment was put in early on the Marshalled List so that they have had to take that kind of heat. However, I ask the House to imagine that they had to face that heat every day for four or five years with no end in sight.
As I start to present my amendments, I shall read the House a few excerpts from a testimony that has been shared with me which has broken my heart. It is under the current regime—the current legal means by which local authorities can monitor and vet home education. I will not share the name of the lady concerned but I want the House to hear her story because there are many similar ones that I and other Peers have been sent. Again, this is happening under the current regime and existing laws.
This lady, a teacher of 20 years’ standing, decided to home educate after a parents evening where her six year-old daughter’s teacher announced that she “would not set the world on fire”. This is a teacher saying that a child will not do anything good in their life, basically. She decided, quite rationally, as is her right, to home educate and the child thrives. In fact, in Kent, where the family started to do this, the local authority visited them, with consent, saw the learning that was going on and valued it so much that it highlighted all the information and resources that were available to support this family. Soon after, the local authority said that it would be a waste of its time and resources to continue to visit this family. Clearly, education was a priority. They were always available and they did not need to have the level of monitoring that they initially had. They were happy for several years.
London, where my children are home educated, is an amazing environment for home education with all kinds of groups. However, this family then moved to Bromley. I am sorry that I have to mention this local authority by name, but it is one of many, according to the letters that I and other Peers have received, that have behaved atrociously under the current regime, which we are about to tighten, by the way. We already have many injustices and many families facing difficulties—I will describe the kind of things that happened to them—but we are about to give the authorities a great deal more power and not even to track down and deal with the bad actors that my other amendments try to start to deal with.
I will fast forward, because of time. This local authority visited the family, asked for lots of information and samples of work, which were kept on record over a long period. The authority’s job was to identify children missing from education. This eventually became unnecessary intrusion. After four years, the family still had no answers; they were still under investigation. Their immediate request for information held about them—remember GDPR, which we will discuss later—was not heard. The family decided not to provide any more information, because the situation was getting ridiculous after four years of constant hounding. It got to the point where the children were scared of the postman coming.
The family requested information. They wrote to Ofsted and they wrote to the department. This is all relevant to my amendments, so forgive me for taking a little more time. Bromley was given a great report for the way it treated this family. Eventually, the family was given a school attendance order, after requesting information being held about them under GDPR rules, with the Information Commissioner’s Office saying that Bromley had to comply. None of the ICO’s requests was followed through. The information that was held about the family was not provided and a school attendance order was slapped on them. The home education was of a very high standard—there was no reason to do that.
We have found out since then that this is a common occurrence. School attendance orders are used to silence families who kick up a fuss, because you cannot complain to the Local Government Ombudsman. I would love to hear from the Minister whether she disagrees and whether she has audited this kind of behaviour, but I hear that it is very common. Most families do not know that it has happened to them; they cannot appeal and they are silenced because they now have a school attendance order. We are about to make this process stronger in the Bill, forcing people to send their children to school where, ultimately, if they do not comply or provide information, prison is what awaits. The Secretary of State has not replied. We have heard before that there is provision for appeal, but both routes are closed for these families. Again, I have other amendments to create better ways to hear their voices.
The point of my first amendment today is that we need to provide protection. One of the ways that we can provide protection is simply to exempt home educating parents who are delivering a high standard of education, in line with current law, from this register. It is, in my mind, ludicrous that those who are doing a good job are put on a register in an open-ended way. At any time, their home education can be interrupted. Those who complain can be forced to send their children to school, so they do not complain or appeal. There is no recourse and no time limit and there is no easy way to overturn this.
Lord Grocott (Lab)
I gently remind the noble Lord of the Companion, which says that speakers
“are expected to keep within 15 minutes”.
That is not a formal limit but an advisory one. It says that
“on occasion, a speech of outstanding importance, or a ministerial speech winding up an exceptionally long debate, may exceed”
the limit, but the noble Lord has now been going on for 17 minutes.
Lord Wei (Con)
Thank you, I will wrap up.
I have two final amendments in this group. Amendment 86A in my name relates to a refusal to provide info not being sufficient reason to impose a school attendance order on a family. In this instance, the fact that the teacher or home educator did not provide information was seen as evidence that they were not educating their children properly. If you do not provide education and choose on principle not to provide that information, that should not mean that you are not educating your children well or that a school attendance order is put on them. This amendment is to prevent such occurrences happening again.
Finally, I support Amendment 118C on a code of conduct, but others will speak to that. I will give way and let them do that now.
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Geddes) (Con)
I assume that the noble Lord would like to move his amendment?
The Deputy Speaker (Lord Geddes) (Con)
My Lords, as I previously advised, I now invite the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, to speak.
Oh, I have been advised that the noble Baroness does not wish to speak.
Lord Soley (Lab)
I was going to get a glass of water, but that is going to be difficult. I thought for a moment that maybe the noble Lord, Lord Wei, was not going to move the amendment. I would have advised him not to. I am sure that he is well intended—I do not doubt that—but he has missed many of the debates on this over the years. I ask him to understand that, when I put the Bill forward on home education, that was five years ago. I never heard from the noble Lord then or had any involvement with him. He did not seem to be interested in it, but I consulted very widely. I consulted by all sorts of measures: I had meetings in the House; I had Zoom meetings up and down the country; I had emails and all those things. I was dealing very much with a small group of people who objected to the register. Most of them came on board; a small minority have not, but the majority support the Bill and the register. They do so because they know it is beneficial.
I think one of the things the noble Lord, Lord Wei, has missed quite seriously is that the provision is designed to be supportive. It is not a punishment, but he does not seem to understand that. In other words, for the first time a home-educating parent will be able to say to the local authority, “I want help to do this bit of home education, which I cannot deliver myself.” It might be in advanced science, music or art; it might be any of those things, and the local authority has to do it. It is supportive, not punitive, and the noble Lord’s whole speech was on the idea that it is punitive.
I say to him, as I have said in previous debates, some home educators are very good at it, but that does not mean that they do not need help at times. Just because you are able to teach certain things does not make you a good teacher without that support and backup which might be, as I say, in advanced sciences or whatever. The noble Lord’s amendment would deny them that and actually make it worse for them.
My line on this—I give credit to the Government, who have adopted most of my Bill here—has been about doing it well, and they have. I had some doubts about the appeal system. I wrote to the Minister about this and she gave me certain assurances in her reply about how that system will work. I made other suggestions too, but I think the Minister is saying that the appeal mechanism is there for both the parents and the authority. We should remember that this is a two-way street. The noble Lord, Lord Wei, says that he has had complaints from people about the way that a local authority has behaved. I say to him: listen to those people, mainly children who are now grown up and had complaints about the way that home education was done to them or, importantly, where it was done partly as a cover for something else. You do not have to think just about abuse here: it is about a child working in a shop and then being told “Well, you’re learning mathematics”; it is about trafficking, too.
Listening to the noble Lord, I think he has no concept of this. His speech was all about the terrible state and the wonderful home-educating parent. Most parents who home-educate in the way that he described do it well. They really have nothing to fear from this because what they will get is support from the local authority, if they ask for it. At the same time, they will have to demonstrate that the child is being properly educated. Is that really wrong?
Lord Wei (Con)
Just to clarify a few of my remarks, I want to credit the noble Lord, Lord Soley, the Minister and the Government for doing research. That is important and I hope that the research and consultations that will take place, moving forwards, will bring out more of the data and evidence that we sorely need. I feel that the most recent consultation, which was very short, did not get enough of the opinions of home educators. Many of those who oppose the register are painted as a minority, but that is not necessarily the case. A lot of people—
Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)
Will the noble Lord give way? My understanding is that it is not normal to have a backwards and forwards between Back-Benchers. I am getting nods from the Front Bench, which is a very rare occurrence from either Front Bench. I am going to speak to my amendment—oh, sorry.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have participated in discussing these amendments and thank the Minister, who I pay tribute to, as many others have done, for her long-suffering forbearance with all our discussions on various aspects of the Bill.
I accept that the Government are taking, and are planning to take, account of some of the concerns that have been raised today. My main issue, and the reason I have shifted from my earlier position on the Bill, is that my concerns have been raised by existing bad practice that we are seeing in the interaction between local authorities, the department and home-educating families. If that were not the case, and there were many more local authorities—which I applaud as well—doing a great job, I would not be standing before your Lordships today. However, sadly, if the current situation is that sufficient protection is not in place for home-educating families, what confidence do we have, until we actually see the detail later on, that these abuses by local authorities will not happen later?
My Amendment 72A, which would provide a warrant, is designed to allow us to pursue bad actors. We also have through the Children Act ways to pursue people who neglect their children, so we can protect the children. However, the problem is that we do not always use properly those rules and laws—or the data that we can collect, in a co-ordinated way, together, to pursue those bad actors. I genuinely still believe that this register will cause bad actors to go under the radar.
Therefore, I would like to test the opinion of the House. I am not saying that we should not have a register but it should be there for parents who do not believe that they are providing the level of education that the law requires them to provide. Those who are uncertain can seek advice and support from the local authority, but those who just want to get on with the job should be given the right not to be interfered with in doing so.
Lord Soley (Lab)
The noble Lord would give a right not to go on the register to those who he would say are educating their children okay. How on earth are you going to define that without giving the state even more powers? It is contradictory.
Lord Wei (Con)
The law already places a requirement on parents to educate their children to the standards that the law requires; therefore, I would just refer to the law. It is not for me or for us here to specify in detail in the Bill what that looks like, and the moment we do so, we will have overstepped the mark.
I am more satisfied by the Minister’s response on Amendment 85A, that greater care is being taken on the use of the information in this register, and I look forward to hearing about that.
Finally, on Amendment 86A, again, existing practice evidences to me that local authorities are not necessarily respecting parents’ rights not to be interpreted as not providing a good education by not providing information. That misunderstanding is dangerous, and I have not heard anything yet that satisfies me that the plans that will be put forward will solve that problem. If you refuse to provide information, you should not have a school attendance order put on to you. That may create problems, but it should be a principle. We have that in law: when you are arrested, you have the right to remain silent. Why, then, if you do not provide information in this instance, are you forced to send your child to school on the pretext that you are not providing a good education? There are many ways in which local authorities can get information. Forcing parents to do so by saying, “If you don’t do so, your child will be forced to go to school” is the wrong way to go about this. Therefore, I wish to test the opinion of the House.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, it might be appropriate if I speak first to Amendment 76, which stands in my name and that of my noble friend. As the noble Lord, Lord Knight, just mentioned—and I thank him for his support—and as I think we have heard from around the Chamber, if you are dealing with a very rare condition, a teacher or the school cannot be expected to know everything about it.
What we expect teachers to deal with now has expanded. Special educational needs have been spoken about already, and we have a better understanding of them: it is not some fad or anything that is made up about various conditions. I refer the House to my declared interest in dyslexia; that is just one. All these conditions will be present in the classroom, and we now expect schools to deal with them. Expecting them to deal with every medical condition that might affect the way children should be taught is beyond the pale. Commonly occurring ones? Yes. The rest of them? No. There should be a duty on the school and the education authority to communicate and to take it on board when something else arises. That is quite straightforward.
Indeed, many of the amendments in this group are about establishing that supportive relationship between such bodies and home educators. I hope that we hear some supportive words from the Government on that, and on Amendment 84, in the name of my noble friend Lord Storey, which makes provision for some sort of co-ordination of support for those who are home educating, and a relationship. I am hopeful that the Minister will have something positive to say in this area. We need to support those who are, let us face it, at the most basic level, saving the public purse some money. If they are doing it properly, let us help them.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 118 and in support of Amendment 74. As I said before, I have real concerns. I accept the intentions of the Government as stated by my noble friend, and I hope that this summer will provide an opportunity to come up with independent appeals processes which are not operated just by local authorities or the Government. The current regime, where something like that is already in place, is clearly insufficient. Families are being left in the lurch—often, as I said, for a very long time.
I shall not speak for long. I have already spoken about my amendment in the previous debate, so others can refer to Hansard on that, but the principle is that we would have a voluntary, independent person who would serve as an adviser to local authorities where they want to investigate what is going on in home education, but also provide a mediation resource for families so that they do not have to resort to expensive and lengthy processes such as judicial reviews. I was speaking to some judges over lunch last week who said that there is a massive waiting list in the courts. Why should we add to that through the Bill? Instead, we should provide an independent means by which issues can be resolved, such as the one I described here in London and elsewhere.
That is why I tabled Amendment 118, but I support the idea captured in Amendment 74 that there should be recognition that home education itself is not a crime or anything negative; in fact, it is positive for society. I think the noble Lord, Lord Soley, would agree on that point, so let us make sure that those hard-working, hard-pressed officials who are trying to work with home educators truly understand that in law.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, I support the thrust of these amendments. They follow on from my noble friend Lady Brinton’s amendment on the fact that specialist guidance and help will be needed. The education sector is going into an area where it does not expect to have the expertise readily at hand. It may have to go and find it, and the parents are often the people who have done the finding. I hope that, when the Minister comes to answer, the Government will give us a little insight into how they expect to handle this process. We are talking about often very seldom-occurring incidents, which means that we cannot expect there to be group memory. These are incidents occurring not only infrequently but over long periods of time; certain combinations of events come through. Stress tends to trigger mental health incidents. If a child happens to have been failing at school, they and their parents will have more stress. It does not take a genius to take it to the next step. I hope the Minister will give us an idea of the Government’s thinking and how they are proposing to address these very real concerns.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 119, and am generally supportive of a lot of the other amendments relating to mental health. Amendment 119 is conceived as a means to cut through what I believe will be quite a lot of court cases and judicial reviews. As we have discussed on this grouping, there will be instances in which local authorities make a judgment about home education, whether in the case of mental health or involving families with a particular faith or philosophy around education. My concern is that, even if the Government in their own impact report feel that they have satisfied all human rights obligations—bear in mind that concerns are raised in that report that Articles 8 and 9 will be intruded or infringed upon to some degree—how can we be so sure that the local official in the local authority has the expertise to make a judgment? In some cases, given the context or circumstances, they may go beyond what is right in terms of human rights. This may lead in turn to many judicial reviews. I believe that in the home education community there are already attempts to start raising the funds for such action. That will be costly for all concerned. It may delay for many years the implementation of what the Government are trying to do here, so I ask the Minister to look at this whole area.
A lot hinges on the composition of this consultation committee, review committee or implementation committee. In the interests of transparency, I would love to know the criteria for inviting those to join such a group and to have reassurance as to whether they will be preselected to be favourable towards the Government’s current views or will be genuinely independent members with genuine expertise in some of the really sensitive matters that will be dealt with as the Government seek to implement this.
I can tell from the House’s view that, from my point of view, this part of this campaign must come to an end. I will not seek to divide the House any further today, but I know that there will be many discussions in my party over the summer, whoever the two candidates for the Conservative Party leadership are. With all due respect, I believe this is not a Conservative Bill. Our party is about many things but really it is about letting people get on with their lives, and many aspects of the Bill currently do not make me feel that it is following that principle. I think many home educators will write to their MPs and come along to various hustings around the country to make that view known to those candidates. We should probably ask them what they think of this Bill so that we can get an early view as to what will happen to it in the autumn.
I would be pleased to know more from my noble friend the Minister how the guidance provided will be consulted on, including with those of us who have spoken in this debate. Clearly, a lot hinges and rides on that.
I will stop there, but I think my noble friend the Minister and the Government have heard strongly the views of many in this Chamber, including those such as me who do not believe the Bill is a great idea. It is now up to them to see if they can get it through the Commons and into statute and, in so doing, make sure they look after the welfare—as I believe they claim to do—of home educators up and down this country.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I will not speak to the Tory leadership election.
We support the approach suggested in many of the amendments in this group. To pluck one out of the air at random, Amendment 81 tabled by my noble friends Lord Hunt and Lord Knight, suggesting a code of practice—which is really just another way of sharing best practice—is a positive suggestion. We recognise completely that poor attendance can be a symptom of a much deeper problem and that schools often take a holistic approach already. The amendment suggests that families and organisations with experience of overcoming barriers to attendance be included in the Government’s thinking. It is a very good idea and seems to be the right approach. Even if we do not divide the House on this today, it is a good suggestion for the Government to consider this code of practice further.
Schools Bill [HL]
Lord Wei ExcerptsTuesday 12th July 2022
(3 years ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 View all Schools Bill [HL] 2022-23 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 35-I(b) Amendments for Report (Supplementary to the Marshalled List) - (12 Jul 2022)
Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)
My Lords, I support what my noble friend Lord Cormack said about this Bill. We are in the most extraordinary situation where, in the course of the day, we are going to gut the Bill by removing the first 18 clauses and removing its real intention. The rest are really issues that can be brought up in another Bill.
We are going to be asked to pass this Bill to Third Reading but this House has never been asked in the past to pass a Bill the guts of which have taken out. We have no idea what is going to be placed into the Bill later in the House of Commons. This has simply not happened in our history and it is not the right way to behave.
I believe therefore that we should consider not giving this Bill a Third Reading when it comes to it, because it is a gutless Bill. I am not critical at all of the Minister; in fact, I have the highest praise for her because she did not resign and is now the best Minister in the whole department. She knows about it. The other cronies appointed by the Prime Minister have no idea about what happens in education; he just wanted to give them extra pay for five months and the possibility of a consolation retirement. This is how cronies work and they will have no influence on this Bill whatever. The new Government will have to decide how this Bill should continue, or whether it should continue and in what form.
The issues that they will have to decide are very serious. We are told that the regulation of schools is the bit that is going to come back to us, and that concerns us very seriously indeed. If the Government are going to change the rules on regulating schools, there must be a consultation period; it cannot just be foisted on us at the end of a parliamentary Session.
I invite the major parties of this House, the Liberals and the Labour Party, to consider whether it would be sensible to give this Bill a Third Reading. I do not think it would be. It should be left to the new Government to decide, and it is highly unlikely that the Chancellor of the Exchequer will return to being the Education Secretary; we will have a new Education Secretary on 5 September. That person, with a new team of Ministers—I hope he gets rid of them all, apart from my noble friend—will have to consider very carefully the steps forward in the regulation of schools and MATs. I hope that the idea of not giving this a Third Reading now takes aflame in this House and that we agree not to do it.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I support both propositions of delay, particularly not giving the Bill a Third Reading. Not only are there legislative problems with the Bill now not being a Bill in any substance, as originally intended; many measures in it give a future Education Minister the power to provide guidance and put in place statutory instruments—but we do not even know who that Education Minister is going to be.
To be implemented, the Bill will be passed from this House to the other side over next year and the year after, but we have no idea who will be leading on this, how long they will have been in the job or how good their guidance will be. Will it simply be left to the civil servants—for whom I have great respect, but obviously government must lead? We need people in post who know what they are doing and who, ideally, know about education. Over the passage of this Bill, that, sadly, has not always been the case, even with the present team, as much as I respect them. How can we have any confidence that it will be the case with the very fresh team coming in in the autumn?
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, I rise briefly to support the noble Lord, Lord Baker, in particular. The Minister listened carefully and that is why she agreed to remove the first 18 clauses of the Bill. That puts the House in a difficult position in allowing the Bill to go to the other place in its gutted, skeletal form. The suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Baker, not to give the Bill a Third Reading gives us some time before next week, when we will be asked that question, to consider whether he is right.
I suggest that we proceed to Report now and have the debates for which noble Lords have been preparing. But we should take some time, within the usual channels and among ourselves, to decide whether the noble Lord, Lord Baker, is right and whether the Bill should have a Third Reading.
Schools Bill [HL]
Lord Wei ExcerptsWednesday 22nd June 2022
(3 years, 1 month ago)
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Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, this is an important group of amendments, very well introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas; like the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, I do not propose to spend much time going over the points that he has made. I read the somewhat testy exchanges—when everyone was a bit tired, I think—at the end of the day on Monday, so it is nice to be having a debate about how we can better support parents rather than causing them any anxiety, if that is the concern.
In that context, having some means of appeal is really important. That might be through the ombudsman that the noble Lord, Lord Wei, is proposing in Amendment 171X or by some other means. I have been sat here wondering whether the Office of the Schools Adjudicator might be another possibility of a pre-existing office that could perform the function of refereeing and providing some kind of safeguard against the possibility that some rogue local authorities might overuse some of the powers being talked about; that is a worry, given the variety among local authorities that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, talked about.
Amendment 130 from the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, about exams, which I put my name to, is important. It is really important that parents have a positive reason to register and are not just doing it because the law tells them to and that if they do not then they will be subject to penalty. This would be one of those positive reasons that we could offer. I am not sure whether the local authority having to find the funds itself is the answer because, as we know, local authorities struggle to find the funds to do much these days. If the Minister were to agree with this, perhaps she could reflect on the national funding formula or some other means whereby the money could find its way to elective home educators so that their children can have a link with a school and an examination centre. That all seems very positive in the wider scheme of things.
I share the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, about the scale of change regarding the penalties being proposed for parents who fail to abide by this. There is a further amendment on school attendance orders and there having to be some kind of judgment about what is suitable education from someone who at least knows something about education; that is also an important safeguard that we could put in to protect parents.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 171X on the proposal for an ombudsman to provide protection for home educators. I support many other amendments in the group. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Lucas for putting this focus on the need to provide protection from overzealous local authorities.
I also need to apologise for not speaking at Second Reading due to a variety of home and personal health matters. I also need to declare an interest, in that I am part of a family that home educates. I cannot disclose all the details, which are private, but I have two sons whom primarily my wife home educates. She is incredibly well qualified for that work. They are teenagers and their education is going incredibly well. I fear I might be the only Peer in that situation, but if there are any others we might be able to form a little club.
I want primarily to speak from this perspective, as somebody from a home education family, on the Bill and the relevant clauses. First, as many others have done, I honour the many parents and caregivers, including my wife, who work tirelessly to raise their children, often at no cost to the state, for their outstanding outcomes and work in a variety of different contexts and for a variety of different reasons. If noble Lords want to find out more about how amazing home education can be, an exhibition has just been announced in Parliament in the Upper Waiting Hall, commencing the week of 4 July, which I highly recommend noble Lords pop in and see.
I need to start by saying that I cannot support the Bill. I believe much of it was designed after consultation merely to make the lives of officials in the department and at large in local authorities easier. Not enough is in it to help parents and families, or indeed society. It feels like it was a bit of a one-sided consultation.
We shall see how colleagues in the other place view the Bill. Arguably, the way it is currently drafted in many parts is an affront to freedom and makes a mockery of our claims to be about rolling back the state and enabling ordinary citizens to take back control. If it transpires, as has been reported in the press, that the Bill was launched without proper political vetting and that it will be radically altered by the other place when the politicians have time to look at it, then we all have to ask why our time is being wasted with what appears to be an incredibly lazy piece of legislation, designed to make officials’ lives easier, not those of citizens.
Frankly, I would rather that this part of the Bill, on registration of children who are not at school, which includes many in home education, did not exist, especially in its current form. It has not been thought through; more consultation is needed. Registration is a hammer to crack a nut, the nut being bad actors—I commend the noble Lord, Lord Soley, on raising this very real issue; it is not one that we want to sweep under the carpet—such as those in informal schools who, frankly, would raise children to oppose the existence of this country, or commit future generations to violence against citizens of this country, or inflict neglect and abuse. Many of these situations have been talked about.
Largely, I feel that this has been designed to fix an IT problem. As much was confirmed to me by a government representative, who I will not mention, who I discussed this with. I said that the Government could get this data anyway: we have birth certificates, local authorities ask who is in households and we have pupil registration in formal schools. We could triangulate that data—I come from an IT background; that is the kind of thing we can do with IT—to find out who was not in school. But of course, that is too difficult for the Government to do right now; IT is a very difficult area. So, to make us do all the work for local authorities and government, a registration programme is to be brought in when we could have fixed it with good IT and good use of the powers that already exist to safeguard children who are suspected of being abused or neglected. This is on top of a risk that the data, once collected, could be used intentionally or unintentionally to harm, or get hacked, which has happened.
I will not say much more on this point because I want to get to my amendment, but I suggest that registration could be voluntary to begin with but highly incentivised, perhaps using the Oak National Academy, the online school set up by the Government, as a resource and a referrer, which could provide amazing data if parents consented to it being provided and analysed.
What incentives might there be for signing up voluntarily to such a scheme? We talked about the cost of exams and paying for them. It costs £150 to £200 per GCSE; I am feeling the pain of that right now. Many families have to fork out a huge amount of money for those exams.
Another incentive might be the provision of forecast grades in the event of situations such as Covid. This was brought home for many home-educating families, whose children basically had to resit because no resource was available; children in school could get forecast grades from their teachers. The Oak National Academy might be a place that could provide such forecasts, based on its data.
Baroness Whitaker (Lab)
My Lords, I may have omitted to declare an interest as chair of the Department for Education stakeholders’ group and other similar interests listed in the register. If so, my apologies.
I have added my name to Amendment 143I in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I should make it clear that it is the increase in fines and custody that I have difficulty with. It might be better to do away with fines altogether.
I am heartened by the statement in the department’s factsheet that
“The government does not intend to criminalise parents”
in respect of school attendance orders. But Clause 50 does not achieve this aim.
When I was a magistrate, I recall cases of parents who, with the best will in the world, simply could not control their children. They were rarely parents who could manage the fines prescribed. As for the custodial option, the Farmer review emphasised how
“disruptive and costly short sentences are to family life”
and ties. What does the imprisonment of a parent do for a child’s attitude to school?
There are deep reasons for school refusal that should be investigated, as I also recall from my time as a teacher. Different means to ensure the essential participation in education that children must have must be developed, and indeed in some schools are adopted, but in this time of a cost of living crisis, at least we should not increase the penalties, which can be justified in very few cases.
In conclusion, I take issue with the “hammers and nuts” of the noble Lord, Lord Wei. The nut of not being in school is a very large nut indeed. Of course there are parents who educate their children well and who are going to have no trouble with a register, although I quite understand that there needs to be some clarity, but children who are badly educated or not educated account for a much larger number. It may be that noble Lords do not come into contact with these children very often. In other debates in this Committee, we have spoken about where these children are and why they are not educated. It would take a lot of time to go through this, but it is a much larger number than the number of children who are well educated. We really must do something about this. That is why the register is a good idea.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, I will clarify my position. A number of noble Lords have mentioned—and perhaps implied—that what I was trying to say was that we do not go after these bad actors and do not pursue those using home education as an excuse to provide a poor, non-existent or abusive context for learning or non-learning. That is not what I am saying. I am actually in favour of strengthening the use of other means for the identification and pursuing of families, parents or caregivers who are not home educating and are instead using it as a cover for their practices. Personally, I think we should be as hard as we can on that and strengthen our response as much as possible, whether through data, local authorities or other action.
Right now, some people are using home education as an excuse to say, “Stay away; don’t look here; go away”. However, if the ombudsman, or any other mechanism, were to agree with the local authority that there are good grounds to pursue families such as these and ask for any kind of information it wants—and if, on the evidence, if it looks as though home education is not happening—then, yes, let us go after those many families who are thought not really to be home educating. In addition, let us support those families who are struggling. I did not want to be misunderstood on that front.
However, my main concern is about where there are miscarriages of justice and we get into matters of educational philosophy. I ask noble Lords to consider Finland, where education is not really monitored until the very end. Nevertheless, Finland has pretty much the best education in the world because it does not spend 30% of time in education—as we do—monitoring, testing and checking the learning; the Finns just let the learning happen and train the teachers. I believe teachers there are given the equivalent of bankers’ salaries to make them some of the best education and learning facilitators—if you like—in the world. I would therefore just caution against this monitoring and the need to know what people are doing—I do not think we need to do this. If we have suspicions that what is going on is bad, we need to pursue this and use every power we can to sort that out. However, I am not sure that it is the right approach to ask about everyone in the country who is doing home education—whether good or bad—just because they might be doing something wrong. The ombudsman would make sense of this; it would also make sense not to put families under such an investigatory lens for too long. I have friends who have waited two years for national insurance numbers for their teenagers. Imagine a home-educating family having to wait two years, just to be told that they are not abusing the system but are instead teaching well.
Lord Wei (Con)
I am sorry to interrupt again, but the point about Finland is important, because many of us in education policy—I helped to set up Teach First—have studied this material and I do not believe Finland is as exceptional as people make it out to be. I brought Professor Hattie over 10 years ago, who is a researcher who studied 15,000 randomised control studies on education—the noble Lord, Lord Knight, knows what I am talking about. He looked at 30 million children across thousands of studies and found three things that affected their education the most by a standard deviation. They were simple: how well does the teacher, or the parent in home education, know the child? How difficult is the work? If it is too hard or too easy, it makes a big difference. And when they mark their work or give feedback, how good is that feedback? Those three things can work in any system or country, whether private or public. All the things we argue about in politics—private/public, the size of the class and teacher pay—were shown to make a limited difference in the randomised studies. Incidentally, televisions and screens were very bad, and keeping kids back a year took things back by a standard deviation.
We could debate Finland for a long time, but I would argue that home education has many of the hallmarks that the Finnish enjoy. They are: an incredibly great relationship between the well-paid teacher and the child; and the time, because they are not being monitored all the time, to set work at an appropriate level; and to give great feedback.
Lord Storey (LD)
I thank the noble Lord for that and would, at some point, like to talk to him about Finland. One of the other things we forget is that, just as a teacher in the classroom—I still miss teaching and miss my time in the classroom, because I got a great deal from that—home educators get a great deal from being with their children, learning with them and teaching them. We forget the importance that can have for the family home and for parents, whether they are a family or a single parent.
I end by going back to the point I was making: it is really important that we get this right. This is an opportunity to reset the dial, so that we achieve what we are all trying to get.
Baroness Barran (Con)
So, as the noble Lord knows extremely well, is the spectrum of educational needs. I know that one is not allowed to have props in the Chamber, but I commend to the noble Lord the flowchart at the back of the policy notes on this part of the Bill. It sets out the process, including where a child has special educational needs. I think it is easier to follow than me trying to explain at the Dispatch Box.
Turning to Amendment 130A from my noble friend Lord Lucas, individuals already have the right to ask local authorities for copies of their personal information and inquire how they are using it by submitting a subject access request. A parent can demand that inaccurate information is corrected, and if the local authority fails to do so, the parent can complain to the Information Commissioner, who has significant enforcement powers.
Turning to Amendment 134A, I repeat that it is not possible for fines or penalty notices to be given to parents for failing to provide information for the registers and the Bill does not provide for that, but if parents fail to demonstrate that their child is receiving a suitable education, it is right that the local authority begin the process of issuing a school attendance order. If the parent is unable to evidence that the education they are providing is suitable, the process will lead to an order being issued. If the parent then breaches the order, they may be fined by the magistrates’ court. On collecting and publishing data on this, the Bill already provides flexibility to require this through regulations.
I now turn to Amendments 136ZA, 136B, 136C, 137B, 138ZA, 138A, 139 and 140, from my noble friend Lord Lucas, the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, and the noble Lord, Lord Shipley. My department’s guidance for local authorities highlights that the authority should initially attempt to resolve doubts through informal inquiries.
The noble Lord raised the point of expediency, and I am grateful, because I absolutely understand why, and why it sounds anything other than what one might expect. The current test for issuing a school attendance order is that the child is not receiving a suitable education, in the opinion of the local authority and, as the noble Lord said, that it would be expedient for the child to attend school. That is the test contained in the existing Section 437 of the Education Act 1996, and new Section 436J mirrors that test, so this will keep the test for issuing a school attendance order the same in both England and Wales. I again point the noble Lord to my favourite flowchart, from which he will see that, prior to issuing a school attendance order, there needs to be a preliminary notice, which is covered at new Section 436I(3)(c), where it says that one of the conditions for issuing a preliminary notice is:
“the child is not receiving suitable education, either by regular attendance at school or otherwise”.
I absolutely understand his question, but I hope I have reassured him and the House that, while it may appear to be one thing, it is covered absolutely properly in the legislation dating from the 1996 Act. The current law, supported by guidance, requires that local authorities take all relevant factors into account when considering whether it is expedient for a child to attend school, and that includes where the child has expressed an opinion about attending school—the voice of the child was something that a number of your Lordships raised.
Local authorities should have the in-house expertise to make these decisions, but if they do not, they can and should consult a suitably qualified external expert. We will make this clear in our guidance. It is crucial that the time a child is in receipt of unsuitable education is minimised, and therefore it is right that local authorities move to initiate formal school attendance order procedures as soon as possible where home education appears unsuitable. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, rightly mentioned the work of many charities; we may be thinking about the same ones. If he goes back to the schools White Paper, he will see that our approach on attendance is: support first, support second, support third, with enforcement very much down the line. We are working with a number of charities which are leaders in this field.
Amendment 143B from my noble friend Lord Lucas is unnecessary, because if local authorities were to refuse to revoke a school attendance order on an unreasonable basis, that refusal would in itself be unlawful.
My noble friend’s Amendment 143F would mean that if a parent was found guilty of breaching a school attendance order and continued to breach it, the local authority could take no further action to enforce it: it would have to restart the process and make a new order. That would obviously be a waste of public resources, but, more significantly, would add to an already lengthy timeframe in which a child may be in receipt of an unsuitable education. I should be very happy to follow up with my noble friend on the specific example he gave, where that home education may have changed, to check that we have that very reasonable point covered.
Finally, I speak to Amendment 143I, also tabled by my noble friend and the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker. A breach of a school attendance order is currently punishable by a fine of up to £1,000, compared to a maximum fine of £2,500, or up to three months’ imprisonment, for the offence of knowingly failing to cause a child to attend the school at which they are registered. This means that there is currently an incentive for some parents to remove their child from school under the guise of home education rather than incur the greater penalty associated with non-attendance. By aligning the penalties, we can increase the deterrent and help ensure that as many children as possible are in receipt of a suitable education.
The noble Baronesses, Lady Whitaker and Lady Brinton, asked about the change in custodial sentence. Wider criminal justice legislation, which has not yet come into force, will raise sentences in magistrates’ courts from three months to 51 weeks. New Section 436Q is simply in line with that wider change, and until it comes into force, the maximum sentence under new Section 436Q will remain at three months, as set out in subsection (9). The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, also raised the issue of publication of individual data, and I am happy to repeat that we are taking that away to consider it.
I hope that I have answered the bulk of the points raised in this group and I ask my noble friend to withdraw his Amendment 112A—
Lord Wei (Con)
I think that my amendment might have been missed out. I would be grateful if my noble friend the Minister had any thoughts on Amendment 171X and the idea of an ombudsman with the expertise to adjudicate and mediate to prevent any expensive court cases that might otherwise occur.
Baroness Barran (Con)
I apologise. I referred to my noble friend’s amendment right at the beginning of my remarks and reflected that we will consider what options there are to make sure that there is a system that feels fair to parents and in which parents have trust and confidence. With that, I ask my noble friend Lord Lucas to withdraw his Amendment 112A and hope that other noble Lords will not move theirs.