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

Viscount Falkland Excerpts

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

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, before I turn to the amendment, I want to say that of course no one wants to see pupils being excluded, but I have to tell noble Lords that all the meetings in the world with the Minister will not change things unless we are prepared to put in the resources to support special educational needs and to deal with all the other things that cause children to get into trouble in our schools. Teachers have a right to teach and pupils have a right to learn. A disruptive pupil can often destroy a classroom and a school. We want to change that system, and I agree that we should not have exclusions, but it is about resources.

I support the amendment. It is absolutely bizarre that, as a society, we do not have a clue how many children go missing from the education system or how many are being home educated. We have responsibilities towards children. There are very good home educators. I have been looking at the guidance for parents on home education. It is a charter to do exactly what you want.

What is the legal position of parents? You can decide from an early age that there are no requirements. What is full-time education? There is no legal definition; you are not required to do this and you are not required to do that. If your son or daughter is enrolled in a school and you decide to take them on holiday in term time, guess what. You end up in court. But there are no legal requirements on parents teaching their children at home to do anything. On the curriculum, we had a long, anxious and worrying debate about British values. If you are home educating, you do not have to teach those values at all. The guidance to home educators, which we proudly say is the full guidance on what has to be done, is a charter to do absolutely nothing.

What should we be doing as a minimum? First, it is right that we should ensure that local authorities have to record those pupils who are being educated at home. Parents should have to register that fact. But there are other issues linked to that, one of which is resources. When there is a problem, we often blame local authorities, but when there is a difficulty, we often ask local authorities to do something about it. If we are going to ask local authorities to do this work, there have to be the resources for them. You cannot just say, “Right, we’ll pile this pressure on local authorities”. Local authorities that do this work will need additional resources.

Again, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, was right when he said in passing, “You know what, every pupil is worth a sum of money”. When that pupil is taken out of school and home educated, that money is lost to the education system; it goes back to the Treasury. Would it not be nice if that sum of money were used in some way, perhaps to support young people and excluded children or to give some resource to local authorities to ensure that this area is monitored properly? I support the amendment.

[Viscount Falkland (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak in your Lordships’ debate with some trepidation because education is not my subject and never has been.

First, I follow my noble friend Lord Bird in apologising for not having spoken at Second Reading. I followed that debate quite closely and I think the best words I can use to cover my feelings about it are those of the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, in debate on the withdrawal Bill: noble Lords must “get real” if they think that home education is the way to deal with excluded children. I say that because my third daughter—a video editor by profession—went to her local authority in a fairly poor part of north London one day and said, “I really want to do something. Seeing the number of excluded children in this authority, I’d like to offer my services because, having been a freelance video editor, usually working on film sets, I may be able to help these children in some way”. She has done so; over a number of years, I can safely say that she has been of some help. If they are willing and she has spotted them as being possibly suitable for this kind of experience, she has met children who have been excluded for violent behaviour, come from very poor backgrounds and have not co-operated at school at all, for whom exclusion is an option—although I deplore it. Like the noble Lord, Lord Adonis—if I understood him correctly —I think exclusion is an absolute disgrace. My daughter thought she could see something that came within her field in the children she had spotted. She said she would encourage them to come up with an idea, either fictional or from their experience, and give them the opportunity to learn how to create a story and put it in visual terms—in others words, they were going to film it together and produce four to five-minute films. She has been doing this for three years and shown a number of examples of her work with these children, including in your Lordships’ House.

I would say, as would noble Lords who have seen some of it, that her work tells one something about excluded children: they generally come from very poor backgrounds and bad homes, so it cannot be said automatically that if school does not suit a child, they should be educated at home. The kind of homes that the children taught by my daughter come from would not be interested. That is why those children are what they are and have imaginations that have turned negative —which she tries to turn positive and creative again—so it would not work. Now a raft of pupils has passed through her hands and some of the films have been quite brilliant. Those children, who would hardly speak to anybody and found it difficult not to resort to violent behaviour, have found being encouraged to use their imaginations and being taught to turn that into a film an enormous success. I say that without exaggeration and without exception. First of all, the children generally get praise for what they do. When you begin to use your imagination as a child, it shuts out all kinds of resentments that you might have following a poor home background and a lack of success at school.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Warner (CB)]

The noble Lord is making a very interesting discourse but can he explain how it has any connection to the Bill of the noble Lord, Lord Soley?

[Viscount Falkland]

Absolutely. The connection, which may upset people, is that I think the Bill is total nonsense in the way it is being followed through. I do not think that the teachers of this nation, most of whom are very dedicated people, are meeting the requirements—which they could do if they “get real”, to use the phrase of the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, again. My daughter, through what she does, has put around 100 young people into a new frame of mind, having lost all their instincts for violent reaction and such things. That is the way forward.

[Baroness Morgan of Huyton (Lab)]

My Lords, those of us who were present at Second Reading were clear about the importance of keeping things simple in the Bill. When there has not been an education Bill for a long time, there is always a tendency for all sorts of things to be raised. Those of us who have taken part in this debate over months, if not years, are clear that there is a precise need to start to move forward on this issue, which we will do by moving forward on registration. There is a time and place for wider conversations and today is not it.

[Viscount Falkland]

I take the noble Baroness’s hint. I shall wind up my discourse by saying this. If we are to see in children of the background that I have described a change in their behaviour, their mood and, one hopes, their enjoyment of life, the best way to bring it about is to get people such as my daughter who are volunteers to do the work in the home, because the parents will not be any good at doing it. As is often the case in this country, the voluntary sector needs to be involved. I have much more faith in the voluntary sector than in the teaching profession and education generally. On that rather contentious note, I will now allow the House, with apologies, to continue in its normal vein.

[Lord Bird]

Please can we stop bringing things into the debate, as the noble Baroness said? Why do we need to deface the brilliant dedication of our teachers? This is not an anti-teacher movement. I am sorry that I missed the Second Reading. I could probably have said some brilliant things then, so I will try to do so now. Please, let us concentrate on the very sensible Bill introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Soley, which is about making sure that we do not send our children into a hinterland of non-education.