Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Frost Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I am delighted to have the chance to speak after the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and his eloquent and rather moving statement to the Committee about how he sees this. Echoing those important points, in the end this is about relationships, and about children and their needs and relationships. As the noble Lord said, with the Bill there is a real danger that this will be hugely disruptive for local authorities and parents, and in many ways could be a recipe for trouble to come if we get this wrong. But there are ways in which we can get this right and get proportionate reporting around the Bill. So there is a lot to get right here.

I will come back to various of those points later, but the simple point I wanted to make here was in relation to Amendment 238, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, which is about the requirement to know which parents are educating, how and for how long. We will come back to that point in various ways in later groups. There are two key points here. One is about safeguarding, where there is an issue with at least one of the parents, which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, has an amendment on, and there is one about the division of time between parents educating, which the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, has an amendment on.

This whole section needs to be rethought. What do we really need to know? We need to know which parents are taking responsibility, and where they are and how they can be contacted, but it seems that the rest of it is superfluous. I simply make those points in response to Amendment 238.

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 234 in particular, to which I have put my name, and, more generally, endorse the views that my noble friend Lord Lucas and the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, just set out.

I have just begun to engage with home education as a concept and as a community, and it is clear right from the start that the community is very well motivated and, indeed, deeply reflective about education in this country and how it works, and it has a lot of expertise into which government should be trying to tap and learn from rather than regiment and regulate. If it should turn out that the worst happens and my noble friend Lord Lucas is indeed forced to step back from advocating support for this sector, I am sure that I and other noble Lords will be very willing to pick this up and continue the discussion.

I thank the Minister and her team for all the communication that there has been over the summer, as there have been some very comprehensive communications and emails that have been very helpful and will be very useful today.

I want to make just one brief point today, which is relevant to Amendment 234 but also to all those in this group, which is the point about trust. Trust is the way home education works—trust and mutual understanding. In many ways, the Bill as drafted gives huge powers to the Government which appear to be based on a lack of trust and a determination to regulate. They are very detailed and prescriptive and will cause all sorts of practical difficulties, and are based on a misunderstanding about how much of home education actually works.

Now, it is true that some local authorities are not as positively motivated as others. It is certainly true that all are extremely overworked in this area. It is difficult to see what is gained by generating vast amounts of paper and reporting which go into a drawer and are not much looked at.

To conclude, if it is not too late, a rethink in this area would be helpful. There could be a pulling back of some of the prescriptiveness and a better understanding from government—centrally and locally. There could be more support for local authorities and a clearer direction from the Government to get the approach right. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I look back to eight years ago, I think, when I had a very simple Private Member’s Bill, which said that home educators should register. That was it. It was as though I had ignited a bonfire of education, because the online abuse and letters that poured in were just unbelievable.

Together with my noble friend Lord Addington, I, perhaps stupidly, decided to organise a round table to discuss home education with home educators, teacher associations and anybody else who was interested. That was a real learning curve for me. Since that beginning, I have got to know many home educators. In fact, one recently sent me a wonderful, illustrated book on home education. However, when we met at the round table there were pointed and jabbing fingers; it reminded me a bit of the local city council. Nevertheless, we became quite good friends and I understood home education quite well. Since that time, we have all been on a very important journey. We have to ask ourselves why we want to do this. It is for one reason only—for our children and young people. If every home-educated child went to school, the system would not be able to cope.

The points made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, are correct. It is all very well our agreeing legislation, but we must always have at the back of our minds whether it will work. It is important not only to know where our children are and that they are being educated, but that there is a correct relationship between the local authority and the home educator. There are some fantastic examples where local authorities work closely and successfully with home educators to the benefit of both. There are some learning curves where local authorities do not have that good relationship with home educators—where they think that giving the cane and waving the statute is more important than trying to do what is in the best interests of the child.

There are thousands of wonderful home educators, but there are also children who are not being educated but are languishing at home for all sorts of reasons. As I have said, there are children who are being home-educated in a religious setting. This is not about giving them a wide education; it is about them understanding their particular religious texts. To my mind, this is not beneficial for the child as a whole.



I am glad that we have almost got to the stage where we think we should register home-educated children—not least so that we know where they are and can, we hope, make sure that they are safeguarded. I am not sure that having an education portfolio is the same as registering; I am not sure that being a chess grand master entitles you to say, “I do not need to register”; and I am not even sure that teachers with formal educational qualifications should not have to register. That seems bizarre. We live in a society where one of the important words is “equality”—equality of opportunity, whoever and wherever you are.

I hope that, when we continue this journey on Report, we are not just mindful of home educators but—I speak as a local councillor mindful of the capacity issues for local education authorities—that we make sure that local authorities are able to cope with the legislation and that it works, not just for the family and the child but for the local education authority as well.