Schools Bill [HL]

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

2nd reading & Lords Hansard - Part two
Monday 23rd May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, we have heard a lot today about the Bill being a missed opportunity, and certainly, as legislation often signals government priorities, it does seem a random mix of parts. But something this Bill definitely does not prioritise is freedom or choice in education. Instead, it promises hyper-centralisation, more regulation, more bureaucracy and more state control. For now, I want to concentrate on Part 3 and the new statutory “Children not in school” registration and changes to the school attendance legislation.

These proposals are not just technical or pragmatic. We must acknowledge that this means a significant increase in the amount of sensitive, personal, confidential data that is being collated and held about children and their families by the state. Counting Children, a non-partisan coalition, warned about intrusive monitoring, risk to privacy and a lack of safeguards. Whatever the worthy intentions, civil libertarians are right to raise the concern that any legislative normalising of the collecting and processing of non-anonymised data about law-abiding citizens should give us pause. The Government’s purpose, we are told, is to tackle an increasing number of pupils who are disengaging from schools and higher non-attendance. But does this need a legislative solution that includes surveillance along with punitive measures for non-compliance?

I remember when Michael Gove, back in 2008, argued against large state databases of children’s data in relation to ContactPoint. He argued:

“We need to invest in people. Strengthening relationships, not building another Big Brother system.”


I say “Hear, hear” to that. This approach was echoed by the Commons Education Committee chair Robert Halfon, who noted that a register is not going to bring back the 124,000 ghost children who have not returned to school post the pandemic. Instead, Mr Halfon has suggested using catch-up funding to recruit more truancy staff to specifically engage with parents of non-attending pupils.

I definitely prefer this human-centred, not data-centred, approach, but even this misses the mark and the elephant in the room. The Education Committee rightly notes that Covid school closures were nothing but a national disaster for children and young people. This is often understood in terms of educational development and attainment, but the real disaster was that when politicians rushed to lock down schools, they taught the young that school is not crucial. What did we expect the lesson would be for pupils and their parents when the Government folded under pressure from teaching unions, media commentators or opposition parties that loudly demanded, to quote Keir Starmer, post vaccine, that all schools must close immediately?

I warned this House then that this was a green light for future truancy and that it sent the message that face-to-face teaching was dispensable, second-order, non-essential. We abandoned children. We left them in limbo for months. We outsourced the job of educating to parents at home. The measures in this legislation, which is panicky, disproportionate and sometimes illiberal, will force-feed the message that schooling matters and that anyone who does not comply will be punished. That will not work to restore trust.

Inevitably, establishing a register of children not in school will also upset home-educating families, as we have heard today. According to Education Otherwise, those families are horrified by the implications of the Bill. Noble Lords have sort to reassure them, suggesting that they might be paranoid, but the new duty of local authorities to provide support to home educators sounds ominous when combined with talk of identifying suitable education at home and an expanded remit of Ofsted. Does this open the door to intrusive inspections of people’s homes that will undermine the legal rights of parents to educate their children at home as they see fit? Is this an attempt at interfering in the “how and what is taught”, in defiance of the legal right to educate at home, according to parents’ values and philosophies, as the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has already discussed, without state meddling?

Regardless of one’s personal views about home education, these are important principles to defend in a free society, and I worry that the Bill threatens that historically light touch that has worked perfectly well to date in relation to local authorities and home educators. Even more concerning is how EHE registration is helping to identify children who are not receiving safe education, implying a link between home education and the safety of children, yet the DfE’s assessment is that there is no correlation between home education and safeguarding risk. Is this proposed regulatory regime for a small percentage of pupils involved in home education necessary? Home educators find this approach insulting and ironic. Many would argue that they choose to educate their offspring at home because they are not safe at school.

Some opponents of home education suggest that because home-educated children are invisible or unseen by authorities, there is a particular safeguarding risk. This is perverse when we know that many children who are visible and seen daily at school are not guaranteed safety. Think of those contentious culture-war issues in the classroom. We have already heard from the noble Lord, Lord Altrincham, about the chaos that gender politics is causing in schools, when teachers are affirming the use of puberty blockers, breast binding and even mutilating double mastectomies as reasonable aspirations when discussing changing gender with year 7 and year 8 pupils.

There are also the safeguarding issues that we know about with regard to group intolerance or viewpoint diversity. We have all read the story of the 18 year-old who expressed doubts about accepting gender identity over biological sex. The noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, spelled it out for us. That young woman was driven out of school and when her teacher, who had whistleblown her story, inquired why she was no longer there, he was told that she was no longer in the system, and that was deemed a satisfactory outcome. It seems that some children not in school matter more than others, and so I worry that the focus of this Bill on the safeguarding of pupils out of school is misplaced. It is a lot more complicated than that, and is to be discussed.