Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I should just say “ditto” to that, should I not? What the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, said is hugely important, as is the response from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the words of my noble friend Lady Spielman. It is unclear how this set of amendments is going to work. It unclear whether they are proportionate. We would like to get a good understanding. We can see that there is a purpose and that they are important, but we have concerns about how the demands of this Bill fit with reality and are going to work in particular circumstances. I will not go into the detail of the amendments that I have in that space—I will wait for the Minister’s reply—but I will pick up on some of the points made by my noble friend Lord Wei on his amendments. Amendment 245 provides that, if a private tutor teaches online and never sees the child in their home, there should be no need for that tutor to supply a private address. There are other aspects. It appears that a company has to provide details of all the people it employs. What happens with online companies where you are not interfacing with anyone at any obvious location but are just interfacing with the software? It is really hard to read what you are supposed to produce and why it is reasonable to produce it.

Amendment 248 highlights the absurdity of trying to quantify every minute. Many parents rightly say that their children learn continuously through conversation, trips and hobbies, without rigid slots. Precise time-logging is trying to force home education into a classroom straitjacket.

Amendment 260 and, in particular, Amendment 261, which my noble friend Lord Frost has supported, seek to address what is breathtakingly open-ended stuff. What is required here and why? What is the underlying purpose being served? We have to be careful about going in for open-ended data collection. Those of us who have been here for a while will remember what happened after we passed RIPA, and the way in which local authorities started using it to find out parents who might be cheating when it came to saying what their address was in school applications. Anything that is collected under such a register does not just sit quietly in a database; it becomes available throughout government and will be swept up into the profiling systems used by the police and the security authorities.

We know from history and from the work of those such as Professor Eileen Munro that these systems tend to record deficits, not strengths, and to build up negative pictures of people. This results in children from black and other ethnic minorities being racially profiled as being bad. People worry about them and so something appears in the database, and then they are seen as a problem. That information will appear everywhere that the authorities look them up. We need to be really careful about how we allow information to be collected.

I do not see any practical provision that would allow anyone to know what is on the register or to correct what is on it. There must be some process for making it accurate when the local authority has added stuff of its own volition—it does not have to tell anyone that it has done so, and the information might be completely daft and inaccurate. There is no provision for how information should be assessed and removed. We need to look carefully at this. Dr Stephen Crossley’s work on the troubled families programme illustrates that this leads to intrusive interventions justified by mass data trawling and families being

“bullied to no good effect”,

with little evidence of positive outcomes.

In this area, we should legislate with humility about what the state can know and manage and about what is useful and practical. We should be careful about turning supportive families into defensive ones, educational flourishing into compliance anxiety, or safeguarding into a byword for intrusive bureaucracy.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, this group is about gathering information, and I am struck by certain things. Are we collecting the right type of information? Are we ignoring other information?

I was particularly struck by the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, which seeks to include on the register why the child is being home-educated. That would be a useful addition, though I am fully aware that others are saying that we might get a sea of information that ignores the key reason. As somebody who comes at home-education from a special educational needs background, I am familiar with lots of people who have removed their children from school because the school simply did not have the capacity to teach them accurately; teachers are trained to teach those who more closely conform to the norm and these children’s learning patterns do not correlate with that.

The same will be true about the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, when she said that blocks of time sitting down and studying is what education is. This is the type of education that has failed that group. For instance, many schools say, “We are going to give them extra help”. If you do not give them the right help, for this group, because the learning patterns are different, it still will not work. There are lots of little things in here that I would like the Minister to start to clear up. Too much information and the wrong sort will not help.

Even then, there are certain other bits that probably should be there. Are we going to review this periodically? Are we trying to get a feel of it? If we do not do so, there is a danger that we overload. But the register should be there because every child—it comes back to this—is entitled to an education. As was movingly put and supported by my noble friend Lady Tyler, who is a carer, that child is entitled to some support. Carers are entitled to function as an adult in the outside world after they have finished their caring duties—indeed, if they ever finish them. If we do not get away from that, I should like to know a little more on how we are going to use this information. It is a difficult subject, and I do not envy the Minister when she comes to answer on this group, but it is one we are entitled to extract the information from.

There are lots of situations here where we need to get an approach more than we need to get the detail—something that says whether it will be flexible enough. Is it going to understand the types of situations involved? We have heard they are variable, and anybody who has looked at this knew they were variable. So I look forward to the Minister’s reply and do not envy her her task.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I have listened to Members talk on all these amendments, and it raised some thoughts in my mind, which I just want to mention before dealing with the amendments. One of the things that we will perhaps appreciate even more as a result of having a register is that, never mind home education, there are currently 100,000 children missing. They are not in home education or schools but are missing. I hope that when we have established—if we establish—a register for home-educated children, we will know the exact number of missing children and have a similar opportunity to work out how we do something about it. It is one of the highest levels in western Europe. That is my first thought.

My second thought is that we constantly hear from schools about the workload that teachers have to have, and maybe some of the discussions about what we are requiring of home educators in terms of the information from them would be music to teachers’ ears as well. In my days as a probationary teacher in my first school, I remember that the head did not require me to keep any records at all. He trusted me as a teacher. There was a single school syllabus and you just got on with it. After five years, I moved on to my second school. It was a huge culture shock because the head teacher demanded that we all had our record books and that we wrote down in great detail a paragraph for every subject from maths, literacy and numeracy right through to technology on what we were doing in that week. Perhaps this discussion also relates to issues for schools as well. Each of these amendments has important things to say. I thought that the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, was absolutely right to ask, what in these amendments adds value and what adds little value?

Sometimes it is not in plain sight. For example, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, dismissed Amendment 244 as more bureaucracy. I am surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, did not get up. His later Amendment 333ZA is about safeguarding. I do not think that many parents know that, currently, under UK law, an individual barred from working with children due to safeguarding risks or serious offences—including imprisonment—can legally offer one-to-one tuition to children when hired directly by the provider. So the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, which seeks to avoid having to provide details of staff at, for example, online schools, is a mistake. We should know the details of individuals who are not parents and who come into schools to do tutoring. That is hugely important.