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

Lord Bird Excerpts

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

[Lord Adonis]

My noble friend and I could debate academies over a good deal of time, and indeed we have done over the years. I do not believe there is any inconsistency between strong and autonomously-led schools and social responsibility. That has always been at the heart of the reforms that I and others have promoted over the past 20 years. Schools should be free to succeed, not free to fail their children. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, made a number of very good points about the important role that Ofsted should play in this process. When it inspects schools, Ofsted should pay much more attention to what is happening to children who are basically off the register and being treated very badly.

[Lord Bird (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise for not speaking at Second Reading—please forgive me. I have to declare an interest, and here I address my remarks to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. I was a child who was excluded from school, which meant that I had an incredibly impoverished education. When I brought up my own children, I started by putting them through the system where they failed and fell because they had inherited many of the problems I had. Poverty and crime and all these things can be passed on to many generations. They do not just fall off the map because you change your postal code.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis: my problem is that we fail 37% of our children in schools. When the noble Lord was the Schools Minister, he was a part of that failure in the same way as Justine Greening was, who reminded me that the failure rate is not 30% but 37%. Let us not do what I think is being done today, which is to bring together two considerations. The first is this. I have home schooled my children. If you meet them, you will find that they are the most socialised people I know. My grandchildren have also been home schooled, and I can swear on the lives of them all that their dignity, their citizenship and their quality of life have been increased incredibly by the beautiful opportunity we have to give parents and children a choice.

I am in love with that system, but I am aware that we cannot leave it to become a free for all. I have spoken to the noble Lord, Lord Soley, about this. However, I would ask the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, please not to bring two things together here. Social exclusion from school is a killer. I must have been one of the first pupils whose headmaster said, “You don’t have to come to school, Tony Bird. We will tick you off”. He did not call it home education; he sent me out shoplifting. It was a good Catholic school just down the road in Sloane Square—a lovely and beautiful school. They do not do that now.

The point I am trying to make is that we should not conflate these issues. The Bill drafted by the noble Lord, Lord Soley, is interesting because what it means is this: let us make sure that there are no perversities. However, school exclusion is a separate argument. I will be 100% with the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, as an example of a person who was violated by an education system created after the Second World War. They set up an underclass through the secondary modern school system, where all we were was being lined up to do jobs that had disappeared in the 1930s. That is one of the problems.

My problem is that I do not agree with the pedagogy in the school system today. It is preparing our children for 1972 while we have the fourth industrial revolution coming down the road. We should be preparing them for that, but I will leave that issue for another debate.

[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.

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[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.

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

I am grateful for that last-minute intervention. Anybody who believed that home education could not produce some pretty emotional responses should have listened to this opening debate or been involved with me in the many meetings and discussions that I have had, including one via Skype for Business, with people all over the country. I think that I have been able to allay some of the fears that people have.

Before I turn briefly to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, let me put all this in context. This Bill is about creating a register. We need to know what is happening and to be able to help. It is a helpful Bill; it is a Bill which we can build on. I commend the Government and the noble Lords, Lord Lucas and Lord Addington, to whom I talked yesterday, who are working with me to try to get it right. More needs to be done on it, but we need the Bill because we have no idea where some children are. I have said for many years that some people who home educate do it extremely well and the results are very good. One of my frustrations is that there is virtually no research in this area, and we need some—I have asked some universities to think about that.

A second and bigger group are people who need help in home educating. Precisely as my noble friend Lord Adonis said, children who have been pushed out of school sometimes need help because their parents might want to home educate but cannot, or there may be others who do it but find it a struggle or have difficulty accessing the resources they need—access to laboratories, for example, or access to exams and to having them paid for.

Then there is a small group who have always worried me deeply: those who are taken out of school to be home schooled when in fact it is about radicalisation, trafficking and abuse. Anybody who ignores that is ignoring something very serious.

I agree with the amendment and with the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that we need to look at this. Following my conversation with him yesterday, I think that I need to look at another area where I may be able to help him, because I know that he has a particular concern which will perhaps come up on a later amendment. I also want to thank the Government for having embarked as a result of this Bill on a wide-ranging consultation which enables us to take into account many aspects of the amendments that have been put to the House. I also thank my own Front Bench and my noble friend Lord Watson, who has been incredibly helpful to someone who does not know that much about education in the round but knows a lot about the problems of children caught in impossible situations, not least in trafficking, abuse and radicalisation. The House has to take that very seriously.

I have no problem with the amendment but, if we spend as much time on all the other amendments as we have on this, this Bill will fail. I do not want to discourage people from speaking, but I say to noble Lords that it would be helpful if we could focus on the amendment and keep it brief because, otherwise, there will be no Bill and the Government, whom I commend for working closely with me on this, will be not be able to get through the consultation process that we need to build a Bill that is more fit for purpose than my present one—I believe myself, of course, that it is almost perfect, but I will accept significant changes. I think that we can do that, and it will be to the benefit of home educators who are doing it well and, above all, to children who are at the moment getting a pretty raw deal.

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[Baroness Morgan of Huyton]

Personally, my Lords, I think we need to be a bit careful with this. Given the conversation on Amendment 1, when we were talking about one of the problems being large numbers of pupils who are now excluded from schools in a way that most of us feel very uneasy about, I would hate us to end up producing something in this Bill that said it was okay because there was a fund that did a little bit to help children who are being home educated. I accept that it is important to have the legal right to home educate but, again, the more that we keep this simple and have the wider conversation about support in the discussion that the Minister has offered on exclusions, the more helpful that would be.

[Lord Bird]

I think it is really interesting that we are talking about the legitimacy of home education. The way I see it is that schools and individual parents who are choosing that route should be going in the same direction. It is about the child, and that is really wonderful. My own children, who, like me, have problems around dyslexia, have used a wonderful system on the computer called Easyread. I would like that to be available to all our children, especially those who have dyslexia. Unfortunately, the chap has to pay for it. I would love it if our schools could get together on this because it is a brilliant method. It took my son from a very low reading age to a very high one in the space of a year.

[Lord Soley]

To sum this up, if I may, I very much welcome those remarks. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, again makes an important point about the involvement of the people doing this job with local authorities so that we can break down some of the barriers of distrust and build up confidence-building methods. There are implications about support and what that would involve in terms of finance and other resources, which is why I did not put the word in there, but the rest of the words stand. The key point here, which I think the Minister accepts, is that we need to consult rather widely on this.

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[Lord Warner]

Can I just explain my position on this? I speak as someone who spent six years as a director of social services safeguarding children, and I came to an eternal truth at the end of that. The more that children are outside any kind of supervision, the more vulnerable they are to abuse. It is actually a truth that has been validated in many hundreds if not thousands of cases. We know nothing about the children who are in home education, but the fact is that those numbers have grown very rapidly over the last few years. I am not making any kind of allegation that children who are home schooled are being abused, but in those circumstances, we need to get a better fix on this subject —not just for educational reasons but, I would suggest, for safeguarding reasons as well. That is not the purpose of the Bill, but it is an assistance in the safeguarding area as well. That is why it ought to be a very clear statutory requirement to register home education, which the Bill as drafted provides for.

[Lord Bird]

Maybe this is not the place to broaden the discussion about home education, but it is so interesting. The late Tony Benn put his children through a wonderful school called Holland Park comprehensive, and the moment they left school they were then ferried to extra maths, extra history and extra this and that, and were taken to their grandfather’s at the weekend to read all his books. There is a concept that we are all involved in the home education of our children, if we follow Tony Benn—and we have a duty. I am a bit worried that we are narrowing down home education to just this period, and I would like it to be broadened out. As far as I am concerned, when you are a parent, you are an educator, and you should be given the chance to create as many opportunities as possible.

The noble Lord talked about what happens when children are let outside of control, but the problem is that sometimes when they are in control they are abused—they are not developed properly. One reason why people like me back home education is that it gives you the chance to bring out of your children things that would never come out, even in the best school in the country.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, to pick up on what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said, a local authority that has a decent history of being collaborative with home education knows a great deal about people who home educate because it interacts with them, provides facilities and services to them and talks to them—not to everybody, but the core of home education will be known. The local authorities that have trouble are generally those which have adopted bullying attitudes to home education and then get widely mistrusted.

The solution to this problem lies mainly in institutionalising an attitude of support and providing the funding to enable that support to be good and consistent. Under those circumstances, if you are really offering something—not just the possibility of being criticised and attacked and having people trying to remove your right to home educate—then registration serves a purpose. It serves a much better purpose, however, if it is part of a consistent attempt by government to keep in touch with everybody, particularly, as the noble Lord, Lord Warner, says, those who are least cared about and least supervised, of whom the home educators are at the best behaved end.

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[Lord Bird]

I add to the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that there are many ways to skin a rabbit or a fish, or whatever. It is about how we use education, and I welcome the idea that we do not tie it all down. We have a load of educational experts in the country: teachers. Other people are educational philosophers and developers. In Brazil, for instance, you can go to a school where they do not teach you anything at the age of seven except how to make a bike. In the course of the first term, the children come together to make a bike, in the process learning teamwork and other things. Whether you are dyslexic or not is entirely secondary, and it brings everybody together. I therefore believe it would be very wrong to tie home education down to a system chosen by practitioners. Practitioners have to get on with practising their art, which is teaching, and the philosophers, educationalists and psychologists have to look at where we will take our education in 10 or 20 years’ time. That is not the job of a practitioner.

[Lord Storey]

My Lords, briefly, on safeguarding, many home educators bring in people from outside to teach in particular subject areas, and it is absolutely important that we make sure that all the adults are checked by the Disclosure and Barring Service, which is what my amendment seeks to do.