Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Addington Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, on this I think it would be best if I listened to the Minister’s responses. I beg to move.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, we are doing things in a slightly unconventional way today, but I agree that it is probably in order. These amendments come down to the use of information. I would hope that education policy follows information and knowledge. I am talking here about the groups of home educators who are doing it not because they like the idea but because they feel they have to because needs are not being met.

Earlier the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, spoke to an amendment specifying that you should find out certain things. Effectively, it is a reaction to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Wei. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, has tabled rather subtler amendments about the use and storage of information. I hope the Government can give us at least an assurance that they will be collating information to make sure that those who are home-educating because they feel they have no choice have an answer going forward. This will be very important in the Government’s long-awaited—and, I hope, not just aspirational—changes to special educational needs. We are a large group. I would hope that they are collecting this information, making sure they do something positive with it, then telling us how they manage and distribute it afterwards. That is an equally valid point.

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[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, Amendment 288A is in my name. In a way, it is the counterpart to the amendment we debated this morning under which parents would have to provide information about providers. This is about the information that the providers need to provide. There are two points in it. I have used the same format as the earlier amendment to say

“a person or organisation is providing regular out-of-school education to a child not registered in school, for more than 10 hours in a week”

and used the words

“is not primarily social or recreational”

and

“takes place without any parent of the child being”

there. I will dwell for a moment on those two points: “regular” and “not primarily social or recreational”.

The point about “regular”, as we have touched on but not fully discussed, is that this should not apply to one-off or occasional items, some of which will come up at short notice and cannot therefore be included in the register because the parents did not know about them in time to give notice. It would be extremely useful to have this in the Bill and not just in guidance. As I argued earlier, we need some parameters around what will come out in regulation. The word “regular” is not a particularly difficult one for the Government to include and would clarify that this refers only to people who are providing regular activities—maybe a definition of regular would be needed.

The other point on which I want to dwell a little more is saying that these activities are “not primarily social or recreational”. The Minister will correct me, but I think that at some point she said that it was not expected that activities that are not educational should be included in the register. The trouble is that a lot of activities—such as rugby training or swimming lessons, where they are carried out by a school—are educational, or could be, and, for example, the Girl Guides is an educational charity. It would be easy enough to label these organisations and activities as educational, which is why I am trying to turn it the other way up and say that activities that should not be registered are those which are primarily social or recreational. That is a fairly simple judgment to make and it would allay quite a lot of fears, including, perhaps, the example I used this morning—although it may be regarded as more educational than social and recreational—of the Wildlife Trusts. It has already stood down its activities because of concerns about the data that it will have to provide on all the children that use its services as part of its home education programme, which has been going on for some time.

In looking at this, I ask the Minister to reflect a bit more on those two descriptions: “regular” and “not primarily social or recreational”, as opposed to the “not educational” aspect.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, this is probably not an interest that I have to declare under the rules of the House, but it is relevant. I am a trustee of the Atlas Foundation, which helps a couple of groups to do with rugby, and which regards itself as benefitting children through rugby. Rugby is a nice sport, with lots of structure and authority figures, and such groups reliably reach young people who are in danger of offending and so on. Will these groups be taken down by this?

This will not be the cuddly end of home education. It will concern people not in school because they do not like school and have rejected it, who might technically be regarded as home-educated. What is their status? Are they affected? Is this going to put an administrative burden on groups which are run by amateurs—by people who do their own tax returns, such as the secretaries of organisations? Will we put this burden on them? A little clarification and common sense might help. If some of your client base comes from this area, what is your status?

Placing another administrative burden on organisations which, if they are run on a charitable basis, do not want to spend their money on admin but rather on the help they provide, might put more pressure on them. I do not think it was the Government’s intention, but making sure this does not catch those organisations is very important.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, this is a large group of very detailed amendments which seek to clarify the responsibilities that the Bill will place on providers and how they are expected to fulfil those responsibilities in practice.

The amendments, which are mainly in the names of my noble friends Lord Lucas and Lord Wei, highlight the variety that exists in the range of approaches that are used to educate children at home. I know that the Minister’s earlier commitment that officials would work through these points with my noble friends and other noble Lords over the summer was very much appreciated by them, and I hope that any outstanding uncertainty can be clarified when the Minister makes her closing remarks.

Amendments 291 and 293, in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, are probing amendments and have, at least in part, been addressed by the Minister earlier today. The noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and I accept her point that the concept of weekends and holidays might not apply to some home-educated children, so I do not think there is any need for the Minister to cover that point again when she responds.

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[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much support what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. This is really the nub of things—how we can make support work.

I also support what the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has just said. It is absolutely clear that some local authorities take any opportunity to tip home-educating parents into getting their children back into school. We want to be encouraging parents, at all times, to approach local authorities to say that they need some help—that is a perfectly ordinary thing to do. If you as a solicitor are sued by someone else, the first thing you would do is find another solicitor. Even if you are an expert, you go and ask for help. It should be regarded as ordinary. No one should take on something such as home education without looking all the possible sources of advice, because there will always be someone who has insights that go beyond your knowledge. Protecting against the misuse of that approach is important to making sure that we have a strong relationship between local authorities and parents.

My Amendment 311 would require local authorities to explicitly take account of the needs of the child and the educational preference of the parents. That is a very important part of the attitude; the local authority should understand the parents and work with them, not try to impose its own formula.

I will also speak to a number of amendments in this group tabled by my noble friend Lord Wei. Amendments 390, 401, 402, 407, 419 and 422 address the financial asymmetry borne by home-educating families. Every child educated at home saves the state around £7,500 a year. However, the entire burden of curriculum costs, exam fees, tutoring and lost parental income falls on the families themselves. Amendment 390 would introduce tax relief for education expenses, while Amendment 401 would grant rebates when families home-educate due to a lack of suitable school places.

Amendment 402 would adjust council tax to reflect that home-educating households are not drawing on local school budgets. Amendments 407 and 419 explore models for direct funding, whether through per-pupil allocations for individual families or co-operatives, which would bring a measure of parity to a system that otherwise risks confining high-quality home education to the affluent.

Amendment 422 recognises another imbalance: where the state compels parents to spend hours compiling reports or attending overnight meetings while simultaneously providing the labour of teaching, they should not do so entirely unpaid. Compensating that time, at least to the level of the minimum wage, is not only fair but respects the immense commitment that parents undertake on society’s behalf.

Amendment 396 presses the Government to fund independent research into home education practice. It is striking how much policy in this area proceeds on assumption and anecdote rather than robust data. What does successful autonomous learning look like across different family contexts? How do educational outcomes compare when we look beyond narrow test metrics to include well-being, creativity and lifelong resilience?

Speaking with my own voice now, that is something that I would very much support. As the Minister said, it is difficult to get a grip on how education is doing just from incomplete exam statistics. Doing some proper research would not only benefit the Government and their policies but enable the home education community to become a self-improving community and to do better by their own children, which is a huge motivation for them.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I am afraid that my noble friend Lady Garden was beaten by the rapid progress that has been made by recent standards, so I shall just draw the House’s attention to her amendment, which says that if someone does not have English as a first language, they should receive some help in understanding the requirements, and that that should be appropriate to them when they are dealing with this field. It is not a big thing, but it is important to get it and the Government’s response on the record.

Looking down this very eclectic list of amendments, I come to one from the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, about sports education, and I wonder if there is some way of linking in there. One of our challenges is how much we should help people with sporting education. Physical fitness is an important part of that; it is a great way of asserting degrees of confidence in certain groups of people, and we could put the arts down here as well. Are the Government looking at ways in which certain aspects that cannot be provided in a small setting might be done by the education establishment? Is any thought going into this? We have sport on the list, and we could easily put something like the performing arts down too.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, three main themes run through this group of amendments. The first relates to the practical support offered to home-educating parents who request it. Amendments 309 and 310 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, have merit in that they seek clarity about what support can be expected from a local authority, although in practice I imagine that the term “appropriate support” might be hard to guarantee.

As we have just heard, other amendments focus on very specific elements of support, such as Amendment 309A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, which would offer support in a language that parents understand, or Amendment 313 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, regarding the provision of the same support for electively home-educated children as is available to children in schools. It would be very helpful for the Government to set out what the basic support offer from local authorities will look like and how it will be funded. I hope very much that the Minister will cover this when she responds.

The second principle that emerges from this group is about the relationship between electively home-educating families and the local authority, which I know my noble friends Lord Lucas and Lord Wei have been particularly concerned about. This is set out most comprehensively in Amendment 314 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. It is helpful to see the spirit of engagement that electively home-educating families would like to have with local authorities. I am not quite sure—perhaps the Minister has an answer—how you legislate for relationships. Having clarity about the Government’s expectations in this area, alongside what the basic support offer will be, could create a degree of transparency, which is a good platform from which to build good relationships.

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[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

On those points, I hope I can reassure the noble Lord that the law is already clear. We have discussed during the course of the debate that parents have the right to educate their children using the methods, approaches and content they think best, provided that the education being received is suitable and safe. The point, though, is that local authorities must be able to assess that education to establish whether or not it is. The Bill does not give local authorities any additional powers to regulate the content of home education.

On the point about the nature of education, we believe that a child must be provided with a suitable education from the age of five. Of course, the point about home education is that it would be up to parents, assuming that that education is suitable, to determine what sort of education was being provided to a child of five.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I am sorry to intervene, as we are in the closing straight. Can the Government confirm that they accept that flexibility of approach is something that will happen? If we look laterally—says the dyslexic—at special educational needs, that is often what is required there. Some of the problems come from the fact that there is a structure that one is supposed to be doing, but not everybody learns like that. Can the Government confirm that this is something which should be worked across the education system?