Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Lords Chamber

If you look at the statistics, last year the number of children in England who were home-educated was about 111,000. The 15,000 children who are caring for 50 hours or more, more than 13%, are a significant proportion of home-educated children. I think that we have a moral duty to recognise the enormous help that those children are providing through no wish of their own to the care system. However, the enormous burden that is placed on them needs to be recognised, and I hope that the solution that the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Young, has found—with, I understand, the active support and engagement of the Government—will happen, because these children deserve all the help that we can give them.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I was going to rise very briefly to speak to Amendments 243, 249 and 260 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to which I added my name, but the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, has put it far better than I possibly could. I was going to talk about concerns about the home-schooling fraternity, but my noble friend Lord Crisp has put it far better than I could. I have also been persuaded by my noble friend Lord Russell and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, that Amendment 251 is extremely powerful. I am greatly looking forward to the Minister’s reply to these powerful arguments.

[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.