Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading & Lords Hansard - Part two
Monday 23rd May 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as the editor of The Good Schools Guide. I follow the noble Lord, Lord Davies, in saying that we are going to have an interesting time in all sorts of extra discussions on aspects of schooling: we are pretty good at being inventive as to how to fit them within the title of the Bill. I look forward to discussions on comparable outcomes, doubtless with the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, and admissions data, tutor regulation, and mental health with my noble friend Lord Altrincham. I note that the Government have recently endorsed Govox as a solution to mental health in schools. It is a very reassuring name—the voice of Gove. None the less, I think we should be careful in how we go around using apps which are unsupported by teacher training and our mental health services.

Employment skills, too, obviously need to be covered, as well as toilets for women, gender and exclusions. I think that there is a real case for revisiting the argument that, if you exclude a pupil, they stay in your performance tables—you cannot lose responsibility. It is up to you how well you place them, and you should take responsibility for that.

My main interests in this Bill are going to be on academies and home education. On academies, I very much follow the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman of Darlington, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth—two friends now, although doubtless they will soon be arguing about which of their towns the House of Lords should move to. But we agree that this is an astonishing end to the founding freedoms of academies: they have been reduced to something less than maintained schools, being looked after by a ministry that has never proved itself able to do that sort of thing. I shall, with my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking, be pushing back on this and asking, “What’s the vision, how is it supposed to work? Why should multi-academy trusts flourish in this environment? What is their role, why would it work, and what are the human dynamics of the system that the Government appear interested in creating?” I shall ask, too, how we can reconnect academy schools with parents. As others have noted, they have drifted away, and it is really very difficult for parents to have a relationship with or indeed an understanding of an academy school and the MAT that goes behind it.

On home education, I am very grateful to my noble friend for acknowledging the value and supporting the freedom, as she said. I hope that the Government do recognise that, in many cases, the resort to home education is due to a failure of the state—the school, the local authority or the other support services. It is because a parent cares about their child and is not prepared to let them be failed by the state. I am not unhappy with the register, but it should be universal; every child should be on it. At the moment, children in independent schools are not; as soon as a child gets into an independent school, they are off the data. We ought to be able to follow every child in the UK so that we can really understand where children go before and after home education and before and after exclusion, and really understand what our schooling system as a whole is doing. We might also look at having a universal register of providers. Why should we not know who is providing tutoring services, or indeed any other educational services? It need not come with obligations, but we should know who they are.

This Bill gives a lot of powers to local authorities. Some of them are wonderful: I will name Gloucestershire, Sandwell and Lancashire as three that really do well in looking after their home education communities. They step back, look at the big picture and innovate when it is needed; and they employ people who really know the law and understand how to use it and the wide extent of their existing powers, who want to help home educators, and who are open, responsive and collaborative in their approach. They create an environment of trust, where the community of home educators is open to working with the local authority, and they work with them to help resolve individual problems that occur with individual home educators. But this is not universal; other local authorities are repressive and oppositional, and this Bill, which should be constructed to drive local authorities towards best practice, instead enables bad practice.

There are far too many ways in which this Bill makes home educators vulnerable to bad local authorities—and there is, as yet, no money to support home educators. There is a promise, but nothing in the impact statement. We should ask that registration is not commenced until support is in place, and we should really look at the way in which penalties have been increased and have become very punitive in an area that should be about encouraging discussion, understanding and collaboration. It has made it far too easy for local authorities to resort to the stick. Time limits have become far too short—10 days to respond to a set of complicated questions is not reasonable if you are in the middle of it, living a life and educating children. No local authority will comply with a time limit like that.

The mandatory information to be provided should be basic; Otherwise, you will get into all sorts of safeguarding problems when local authorities start telling people who a child’s father is and where they live, and enabling people to find out what is going on in cases where abuse is taking place.

The Bill must make good behaviour by local authorities the default, rather than bad behaviour.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Norwood Green (Lab)]

My Lords, I regret missing Second Reading, which, according to some noble Lords we heard today, was the DfE version of “Apocalypse Now”. Even the noble Lord, Lord Baker —I am an admirer of UTCs—joined the doomsayers then, as he reminded us again today. I am an admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose advice is that

“to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.”

He is probably right about that.

I am an admirer of this House when it is at its best—for example, the debates on Ukraine or on the jubilee. However, as referred to by my noble friend—he is still my friend at the moment, but might not be at the end of this contribution—the debate on the then Health and Care Bill, which was an overcomplex and lengthy Bill, brought out the House of Lords at its worst. Every hobby-horse noble Lords could ride was ridden for hours, whether on modern slavery or organ transplants, but the real challenges facing the health service seemed a sideshow, in my opinion.

Before I contribute on this Bill, I want to give your Lordships a quotation. I am always indebted to my noble friend Lord Bragg, who continues to educate me in my quest for lifelong learning. A recent programme of his was about a philosopher of whom, I must admit, I had never heard—that is probably my ignorance—a man called John Amos Comenius. He was a

“philosopher, pedagogue and theologian who is considered the father of modern education”.

What he proposed was fascinating—and bear in mind that we are talking about the 17th century:

“Comenius introduced a number of educational concepts and innovations including pictorial textbooks written in native languages instead of Latin, teaching based in gradual development from simple to more comprehensive concepts, lifelong learning with a focus on logical thinking over dull memorization, equal opportunity for impoverished children, education for women, and universal and practical instruction.”


If that had been written today, we might think it a modern prescription for education, but he arrived at it in the 17th century and travelled around advising a number of countries, so Comenius has a lot to recommend him to us and others.

I turn to my noble friend Lady Chapman’s amendment. Perversely, if we remove “may” and insert “must”, the Bill will give the Government the power grab that noble Lords are concerned about. To me, “may” means exactly that. I ask noble Lords if you really believe that the DfE has the desire or capacity to intervene in every school in the UK. Come on—even if it wanted to, it could not. That is my view, and people are free to disagree. Is this a perfect Bill? Of course it is not; that is the purpose of our debating it today.

I will just say this to the Committee. I hope this will not be a debate that says, “Academies bad, maintained schools good”, or vice versa. Actually, we have not mentioned free schools, which have made a contribution. My view about schools is that variety is not only the spice of life but makes an enormous contribution to education. Indeed, as my noble friend Lord Knight reminded us, it was a Labour Government who, having seen the appalling record of maintained schools in London that were failing, introduced academies. They did a good job of changing that environment. Let us remember how important that is, because children get only that one chance. If these schools are failing, then that chance is denied them.

I was also interested when my noble friend said to trust in teachers. I do, but I will tell your Lordships who I put a bigger trust in, who I regard as the key component of any successful school: the head teacher. If you have not got the head teacher right, that school will not flourish. I will give as an example a good friend of mine, Liz Wolverson. She has recently retired, but she was the diocesan director of Church of England academy primary schools in London, in really challenging areas such as Newham, et cetera. They have rescued 10 failing schools. I asked her what her prescription was for dealing with failing schools. She said, “I go into the school, I look around, I talk to the head, to parents, to teachers and to pupils. Then I go back to the head and I say, ‘You’ve got six months to turn the school around, and if you don’t succeed, goodbye. That’s it’.” That is a tough prescription, but it is a necessary one if we care about that one main chance for our children. I believe we should.

I looked at the report from the committee referred to by my noble friend Lady Chapman, which talked about the terrible Henry VIII powers. I took that into account. It is right that the committee should draw that to our attention, but I also looked at what the Minister said to us in her reply to the debate at Second Reading, where these concerns were expressed. She said:

“My noble friends Lord Nash and Lord Lucas, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, also were concerned about the impact on the fundamental freedoms of academies. These reforms will maintain the central freedoms and autonomy of the academy programme. Our ‘strong trust’ definition and standards will set out clearly what we expect all academy trusts to deliver, but trusts remain free to design, innovate and implement operating models that they believe will deliver the best outcomes for their pupils.”—[Official Report, 23/5/22; col. 740.]


I saw that as a serious statement from the Minister. I hope she will confirm that today.

For me, that is an important pledge by the Government. I welcome the coverage, investigation and analysis of the Bill, of course I do. I am sure there are parts of this Bill that can be improved, like any Bill, but I ask the Committee to consider carefully what it is trying to do with Amendment 1. Time is not on our side. I do not accept the argument that we should throw it all out, take our summer break and then come back again. I have never seen anything that appears in front of this House that we are completely satisfied with. If there is such a thing as a perfect Bill, no doubt it exists in some other version of the universe that we have not yet encountered.

I rarely give advice, because it is freely given and freely ignored, but I participate in the Lords outreach service. It is a great institution. This Friday, I am going to speak to a Catholic academy in East Finchley. I am looking forward to this. I will get an opportunity to talk to the pupils. I like to say to them “If you were Minister for Education, tell me where you would put the money.” That always gets them going because I remind them that politics is about the language of priorities.

The other interesting thing about it is that it is a Catholic school. When I spoke to it and we got to the end of our discussion, I said, “By the way, what is your admissions policy?”, and I was told, “Anybody can come to our school. They do not have to attend a church service or anything else.” We will go on to debate faith schools, an area where I suspect there will be further disagreements. All I can say on that subject is that a large percentage of the public have faith in faith schools because they believe they deliver good education with good discipline, so they participate in them.

I hope I have not lost all my noble friends with this contribution. I seem to be the only person who has contributed so far who has given the Government the benefit of the doubt. I believe that what they are trying to do is in the interests of every Member of this House, which is to improve the quality of the education that we deliver to our children.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am puzzled about how the system proposed in the Bill produces good schools. I have spent the past 30 years involved with the Good Schools Guide. Schools die mostly because their governance goes wrong. Anything else you can put right, but the governors can take a school down irretrievably. To have a good governing body, you require motivation. You require people with real determination that the school will succeed, that it will get better. They have not got all the answers and they will look outside for them, they will listen and learn, talk to parents and work with outside experts to make things better.

In most cases, things turn out that way, but what we are producing here is a completely motiveless environment, and why is anyone going to want to run a MAT under those circumstances? What freedoms do they have left? What is left to them in terms of jurisdiction over the school? Why would anyone of any quality get involved with running a multi-academy trust? Would you really hang around just waiting to be beaten up by the Department for Education—or Ofsted, if it is allowed a part in multi-academy trusts? You have no ability to steer things, no ability to innovate, no ability to make things better or to show how good your pupils and your schemes can be. I remember this thing coming in. It was all about producing a system which would innovate and make itself better and which we could learn from; people would try new ideas. Things have not been perfect, but there have been a lot of good examples, and now we are going back to a system where none of this can happen. I am very puzzled.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, unusually for me—and, I think, for most Members—I came here simply to listen, not to speak. Most of us tend to be the other way around, I think. Really, it is not necessary to speak because, certainly from my perspective, my noble friend Lady Morris just said everything that needs to be said, and I shall follow her on this Bill wherever she decides to go. I thought she encapsulated the Bill when she said it is about building an entirely new school system—almost by accident, certainly not through deliberate, considered intent.

I have never been a fan of the academy system—I might as well put my cards on the table—and a key reason for this is that one of the many things I treasured as a local MP was the accountability of what we now call maintained schools. If parents whose children were at academies were not satisfied with what was happening at the academy there was very little that I could do or could advise them to do, whereas it was simple in the case of the ultimate democratic control which you had with what we now call maintained schools.

So far as it has any clear objectives—I agree with most of what has been said about that not being at all clear—the Bill seems to be trying to make it so that somehow or other we will now have accountability for every school in the country, and the accountability will consist of the Secretary of State for Education. That is accountability in name only; I would like to know the acronym for that. It is not accountability, for the reasons my noble friend gave. What would be the cost of the section within the Department for Education which had the responsibility for addressing complaints from any parent in any school in the country and making sure they got a speedy reply? It is a ridiculous concept.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

7: Clause 1, page 1, line 8, leave out “, and the curriculum followed”
Member’s explanatory statement
This and the other amendments tabled to this Clause, Clause 2 and Clause 3 in the name of Lord Lucas are intended to protect some of the freedoms currently enjoyed by academies.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, in moving this amendment I will speak also to the other amendments in this group. We have been speaking of large and fundamental questions, and I find myself entirely in agreement with those who are concerned at what the Government have been saying. I therefore wish to take my noble friend Lord Agnew’s advice and try to avoid getting too deep into the weeds that we should be in. If the Bill were—as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, wished it to be—a real exposition of what the plans were, we should be debating whether, as Amendment 7 says, academies should still enjoy freedom over the curriculum, or to what extent and how that should be expressed. That is what our role should be, not just handing that power over to the Government.

I think these amendments were drafted before I had begun to focus on the constitutional enormities being attempted in the Bill. So, yes, academies should have some freedom of curriculum; yes, they should have control over the school day; yes, they should have freedom when it comes to staff remuneration and admissions numbers. We should also be really careful about preserving existing contracts.

Another Bill before this House asks that the Government be allowed to tear up the contracts that landowners have with the providers of telecom masts. Security of contract—the belief that a contract entered into cannot just be rolled over—is a very important part of a successful constitution in a free country. To have two Bills in front of us which both try to act as though that were not the case is deeply concerning. Therefore, my noble friend Lord Baker, in his offhand remarks about Darlington, should realise that there is a DfE office in Darlington; this is probably part of the plan. We must get back to where we should be. All the concerns I have raised in this group are valid, but not particularly in the context we find ourselves in now. I hope we will move on to other big questions. I beg to move Amendment 7.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I want briefly to respond to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, about his amendments being detailed and therefore not echoing the feeling of the debate we have had so far. On the contrary, it absolutely gets to the heart of the problem. We heard from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, in the last group, about the detailed work he had to fulfil as Minister in his role of managing academies as a whole and failing and problematic academies specifically.

The amendments of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, go in the other direction and say that academies should be able to retain their personal freedoms. The difficulty is that the Bill does not give us any sense of the Government’s direction on academies. It is absolutely summed up by those two contradictions. It is important and this is the place in the Bill. I may not agree with all the amendments tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, but I am very grateful that he has laid them because it makes something very clear to me: the Government do not understand what they are trying to achieve.

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

May I very briefly add to that? This is not just a matter for the Government; it is also a matter for the Chief Whip in the timetabling of Report. We had exactly this problem with the Health and Care Bill. We suddenly discovered a lot of detail on Report which should have been visible to us in Committee. As a result, Report took much longer, and the House sat until 1 am or 2 am on certain days. I hope the usual channels are looking at the detail of this because it will affect Report stage.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

We do, of course, have the ability to recommit a Bill to Committee if there are substantial changes to it.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support my noble friend Lord Lucas on protecting these freedoms and to try to cross the bridge between the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, and the noble Lord, Lord Knight. I managed those interventions with the powers that already exist. The freedoms that my noble friend Lord Lucas proposes go to the heart of what academisation is about. I will give noble Lords one tiny example. In Norwich we have two primary schools four miles apart. In one school they speak 25 different languages and the other is in an old-fashioned 1950s council estate—a totally different dynamic where a totally different approach to education is needed. Is that to be decided here in an ivory tower in Whitehall?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, it is probably worth my reiterating my noble friend the Minister’s comments that we have heard and understood noble Lords’ concerns about the breadth of the power we are discussing and the fears about the centralisation of power over academies with the Secretary of State, and I know that we have heard other concerns about the nature of the power. It is worth reflecting on what the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said in terms of how we use this Committee stage. While we have heard those overall concerns, it is useful to have a discussion on specific elements within those clauses where noble Lords have issues that they wish to raise or questions that they wish to discuss so that we can make the best use of the time that we have in Committee.

I shall deal directly with the amendments tabled by my noble friend. We share his desire in these amendments to protect academy freedoms. The first set of regulations made under these powers are intended to consolidate and reflect existing requirements on academies. They will not represent a change of requirements on academies. This includes those areas referenced in my noble friend’s amendments: curriculum, length of school day, leadership and admissions. It is important to bear in mind that some requirements exist in these areas for academies, such as the requirement to teach a broad and balanced curriculum, including English, maths and science, and the requirements of the Academy Trust Handbook in relation to management and governance. The Secretary of State needs to be able to set standards in these areas. As my noble friend the Minister previously said, it is important that there is a clear set of minimum standards for academies to ensure that we get the basics right. At this point, it is also worth repeating that the Government have no desire to intervene in the day-to-day management of individual academies other than in cases of failure.

I turn specifically to Amendment 29, which seeks to protect the provisions within existing funding agreements. My noble friend Lord Nash touched on this, as did others. As we move to a fully trust-led school system, it will become increasingly unwieldy and difficult to regulate thousands of schools on the basis of individual funding agreements with no consistent set of minimum standards that apply equally to all academies. That is why, alongside a more proportionate compliance regime, we want to move away from a largely contract-based regulatory regime to a simpler and more transparent statutory framework—one fit for a system where every school is an academy.

I just touch on the debate and scrutiny that we might need in that circumstance. Some of the requirements are in a handbook that is amended by Academies Ministers; in bringing what is currently in a handbook into a form of regulation, with consultation with the sector in advance, there was the intention of having an increased level of parliamentary involvement and scrutiny in that process compared with the status quo, reflecting the fact that we are aiming to move towards a system where every school is part of a multi-academy trust. I hope that helps to reinforce the Government’s intention behind what we are seeking to do here. It also ensures, as I have said, that academy trusts are subject to a set of requirements over which Parliament has oversight and to which they can be held to account by parents. My noble friend’s amendment would enable funding agreement provisions and academy standards to co-exist and potentially conflict, if the former are not rendered void where there is a corresponding academy standard.

Finally, I turn to Amendment 34, which seeks to prevent primary legislation relating to the curriculum being amended by regulation unless it relates specifically to the curriculum in academies. Academy trusts are already subject to many of the same requirements as maintained schools, as set out in numerous pieces of primary legislation. As I have said, the intention here is to consolidate these requirements on academy trusts as much as possible into the academy standards regulations. This will be a gradual process; we want to work with academy trusts on the implementation of the academy standards at a pace which is right for them. As my noble friend reassured the Committee in her previous contribution, for each and every change of those regulations, there would be consultation in advance.

As we move towards a school system in which all schools are academies within strong trusts, we will want to ensure that the legal framework is fit for purpose, including by removing requirements that should prove excessively onerous or unnecessary. Clause 3 enables the Secretary of State to make these adjustments, subject to the affirmative procedure, and to be responsive to the changing needs of the school system.

I recognise that the autonomy to decide on key aspects of running a school, including the curriculum it chooses to teach, enables academy trusts to deliver the best outcomes for their pupils, and we have no intention to undermine those freedoms. This Government and I share my noble friend’s commitments to the principles of academy freedom, and, with this reassurance, I hope that he will therefore withdraw his amendment at this stage.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend the Minister for her response. I think that it merely illustrates how far apart we are on the appropriateness of the structure of this Bill that we cannot have a serious discussion about what the curriculum freedoms should be. It is entirely undefined, and the Government say, “We’ll just make it up as we go along in the next few months, and that is what you are allowing us to do if you pass this Bill”. That is where the serious discussions lie; we ought to be having discussions about how the curriculum works. That is the level of responsibility we ought to be taking in this House, and this Bill seeks to take that away from us and place it with the Executive. I am delighted that we have had such unanimity around the Committee on what we think of that as a process.

So far as these individual amendments are concerned, yes, I applaud the diversity, innovation and freedom which the academy structure has had. It will be a problem to move that into a national system, but it will not be impossible. We ought to look at it, because this Bill gives the Government the power to introduce a totally prescriptive national curriculum. They could say what every school was going to do at every moment of every day, and we would have no more right to intervene on that—

[Lord Hunt of Kings Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. He has really illustrated the puzzle I have: the handbook is clearly working at the moment—we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, that interventions can take place in the case of maverick trusts—so why on earth not let that continue, allow the consultation with the sector on the future governance and accountability arrangements, and then bring a Bill in a year’s time when we can actually go through it in detail and scrutinise it effectively? We could also have a statement at the front saying, “This Bill is about the academisation of all schools”. Why not be explicit and say this up front in the legislation, if that is what the Government want to do? Why does it have to be done in this sort of underhand way, and before they have properly worked out with the sector how it is best done? I just do not get it.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

No, my Lords, nor do I; I think it would work much better in that sort of way. The Government are good at making declaratory statements such as, “We’re going to do this: we’re going to abolish the sale of petrol engine cars in 2030”. We all know how effective that sort of statement can be. What is the difficulty if the Government were to say, “We are going for this sort of process; we’re going to have a period of consultation; it will end on this date; it’ll be in a Bill in Parliament in a year’s time, and that’s how it’s going to be worked out”? They would get exactly the same process as is envisaged by my noble friend Lady Penn—

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

I intervene briefly to say that an enormous amount of work could and should be done on the curriculum. The fact is that we are into the 21st century, and fantastic work is being done by educators all over the place about how we best educate our young people for the best possible outcomes. Yet, we have this odd divide between the schools that have to do the national curriculum and those that do not.

As my noble friend Lady Morris said, we should look at what the entitlements and requirements of an educated society are in order to rise to the challenges we obviously face as we move forward. Those should be things that are available to all young people. There might well be an argument for saying that those schools that are currently maintained schools but are required to do every last detail of the national curriculum might flourish more if they had some of those curriculum freedoms. So there is a big advantage to being able to talk in the round about our vision for what educated young people would be when they leave our education system. After all, there is common agreement now that young people will stay in school until they are 18 or 19. Gone are the days when they would leave at 16. There is such a lot to gain from having a much broader discussion about what an entitlement to a broad and balanced curriculum actually looks like, not just for the good of the individual but for the good of society at large.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

Yes, my Lords, and I imagine that we will have it as a part of the process of deciding how to turn maintained schools into academies. There is a really important debate to be had on where we should be resting, and I look forward to it. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 7 withdrawn.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

There are two overriding reasons why it is essential to define local authority powers and responsibilities. Local authorities are, after all, the locally elected democratic body to which parents and the public will turn if there are difficulties, but secondly, they are the place where the co-ordination and integration of provision in schools can be undertaken. We will talk later about multi-academy trusts and whether they can be geographically widely spread across the country, with all the problems we can foresee if that is a developing trend. With these two amendments, I seek the Minister’s assurances that the role of local authorities will be properly embedded in the schools system.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I too have an amendment in this group, but first, in response to the noble Lord, Lord Knight, I very much share his vision of taking local authorities to the point where they are advocates for parents. If we look back to the old days, that role was missing; they were advocates for schools, not parents. I remember local authorities that would pull a bad teacher out of a school and deliberately put him in another one because they were there to look after the teachers, not the parents. The logic of the direction we are going in is to have local authorities as the parents’ advocate and therefore, as the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said, to have some power in this—to have the ability to really shift rocks where they are in the way of parents.

My Amendment 58A is, like this grouping, an odd collection of bits and pieces. We have largely dealt with proposed new subsection 1 in earlier debates, but I have a real problem with the way academies handle admissions data at the moment. What used to be a coherent local authority booklet on how you could get into one school or another has now been reduced to a collection of “For information, apply to school” notices. There is no coherence. It gets really difficult and time consuming for a parent to get to understand what schools they might have access to, and that is really destructive to the power of parental choice and the point of having lots of different schools and admissions systems in the first place.

You absolutely ought to empower parents to make the best choice for their child. That ought to be the centre of the admissions system; it is not. I have failed to shift the DfE on this on many occasions. It is ridiculous. All schools have to do is, on a reasonable timescale, provide the local authority with their admissions data in a standard format—it has to exist in that format anyway, because there is a common system of handling admissions—and then allow the local authority to publish it.

The Bill is an opportunity to bring some sense back into the admissions data system and to remember why it is there, the point of parents choosing schools and the good that we used to argue came from doing that, rather than allowing this continued pointless, profitless inertia in the DfE to get in the way of parents’ interests. I appeal to my noble friend to pick up on this issue again but to do so from the point of view of doing best by children and parents.

Academies also need to get better at providing standardised information to parents, so that it gets easy for parents to compare one school with another. Destinations of children, examination results and the level of literacy and numeracy in the school are elements which it ought to be possible for a parent to look at in detail, beyond the Government’s performance tables. It ought to be easy. You do not need to make it easy for the sharp-elbowed middle classes; they do it anyway. They have the time and do the work. We want to make it easy for every parent, and that requires not asking parents to do the work, because a lot of parents do not have the time to get to the point where they really understand what is going on. We have to provide things in a standard way, so it is really important that we get the data and that there is an up-to-date Ofsted report—and ideally one for the multi-academy trust, where there is one, too—because that sort of data is easily comparable and digestible by any parent who is really putting their mind to it, which should be the point of those reports.

In a system where we have a lot of academies rather than local authority schools, I think we need to come back to a system that really centres its thinking on parents, how they make the choices and how they negotiate their relationships with schools, and to reinvent the local authority as a strong friend of parents in that context.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome the fact that we are discussing admissions policy. It is not the principal object of the comments that I want to make but it is certainly at the heart of the unfairness of the system that operates in many parts of the country. I was shocked at the number of different admissions systems referred to by my noble friend Lord Adonis. As soon as you depart—as, I am afraid, we did quite a while ago now—from a common admissions system for the whole of a local authority area, you depart from a situation whereby there could be no question of schools poaching pupils by varying the system. The only way to get fairness across the system, with schools working together co-operatively and the whole community being served, is through a common admissions system, not sundry random ones.

We have all heard comments—not just anecdotal ones—about the questions sometimes asked when selecting pupils for schools. I have even heard questions asked about whether there is a suitable room at home in which a pupil can conduct their homework—an outrageous kind of selection policy—or whether, at 11, it can be guaranteed that the pupil will stay on until the sixth form, and other selective admissions questions.

Anyway, that is not my main purpose. What I really want to say in connection with this group of amendments is, essentially, “hear, hear” to what my noble friend Lord Hunt said. I find it very depressing that, after so many years, we are still debating the merits of grammar schools. I much prefer to couch the debate not in relation to those merits but to the merits of saying to an 11 year-old—indeed to the majority of 11 year-olds in a particular area—“You have failed.” We hear lots about the alleged advantages of going to a grammar school, but I have not read many books—I would like to have references to them if they exist—on the wonders of failing the 11-plus and the advantages that come from it.

For most people, if not everyone, of my generation and probably a good few who are younger, there was no option; we all took the 11-plus. Over half a century ago in my case, in an average road in an average part of Britain such as I lived in, we all played football and cricket together and then, some of us had passed and some had failed. To this day, I do not know why; it was random. They were the same people who played football, who I went to the pub with when I was a bit older, and who I played with in a rock group—that was a long time ago—about the same time as the Beatles, although they were more successful.

Some of us had passed and some had failed. If anyone thinks, well, they should just get over it, I can tell the Committee that, 50 years on, many people who failed the 11-plus never really got over it. It was a life-changing circumstance, a life-changing occurrence at the age of 11, which I find indefensible. It has got better in many ways as educationalists of all parties have got rid of grammar schools in many areas but, in areas where it persists, it has, if anything, got worse.

At least when I took the 11-plus there was no intensive coaching of 10 and 11-year-olds to try to get us through, but the nightmare reported by parents in Kent is that this is now the prerequisite; that is what you have to do. I do not want to get too anecdotal about this but I even know of parents who, due to a promotion, wanted to move their family to Kent but were initially dissuaded from doing so—they did it eventually—because they did not want to put their seven, eight or nine year-olds, as they were at the time, through the trauma of having to take the 11-plus. Again, in a family near me with four children, the three eldest passed and the fourth failed; we can just imagine what it does to a family when that kind of thing happens.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

The Bill does not provide for that, and it is not government policy to open further grammar schools. It is about regularising their status within the legislation, and the provision makes sure that only a parental ballot can trigger an end to selection, whether that grammar school is a local authority-maintained grammar school or an academy grammar school. It will remove one of the main perceived barriers to them joining a MAT, while retaining the right of parents to choose whether they should continue to select by ability. I therefore hope that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, will feel able to withdraw his amendment and that other noble Lords will not move theirs when they are reached.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, might I just drop in before the noble Lord, Lord Knight? My noble friend is not right in saying that academies currently provide all the data required on admissions. I have written to the Minister and demonstrated many examples of where this information is not provided. Yes, you can go to the school and ask for it, and it may be somewhere on the school website, in an irregular place, but it is absolutely not given to local authorities in a way that makes it easy for the local authority to publish a booklet that gives parents complete information on the admissions structure in their demesnes. This hurts parents a lot. As editor of the Good Schools Guide, I know how much this disadvantages parents who do not have the time and experience to crack the code of 20 different schools and find out how to get the information and how it all knits together. It really gets in the way. If my noble friend would be willing to grant me a conversation with officials on that, I should be most grateful.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

We plan for the review to be launched in the coming weeks. I cannot give the noble Baroness an exact date, but I think I am allowed to say “shortly”. I have probably said more than I am allowed to.

I will go back, because this is important. The noble Baroness is right to raise the regulatory review; we see it as very important. As part of that, we will look at how we provide for the scrutiny of how these powers are exercised. Critically, we will do that in a way that wins the confidence of the sector.

I have reflected on my noble friends’ concerns, but I believe that, taken together, these clauses create a sound framework for robust but proportionate intervention as we move to a fully trust-led system.

Amendments 39A and 39B in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, envisage a new role for Ofsted in inspecting multi-academy trusts, and make the decision to issue a compliance direction and a notice to improve contingent on the outcome of such an inspection. Currently, the department relies on a range of evidence from a variety of sources to build up a joined-up picture of each multi-academy trust, to inform decisions about intervention. This includes evidence on finance and governance, as well as Ofsted’s school inspection judgments on educational performance.

Through the regulatory review, the department will consider the evolving role of inspection in a fully trust-led system. This will include consideration of how inspection of multi-academy trusts would be co-ordinated with our wider regulatory arrangements, as well as how it would interact with school-level inspection. I hope the noble Lord will agree that it is important that the review runs its course before we make any decisions in this area. He also asked a number of quite specific questions. If I may, I will write in response.

I commend Clauses 5 to 18 standing part of the Bill. I also ask the noble Lord, Lord Knight, to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Knight, is right about getting Ofsted into multi-academy trusts. It would make a great difference to how parents are able to interact with the eventual system. Parents need the level of information and reassurance that will come from an Ofsted report, and I hope it would be done in a way that, as others have suggested, is very much focused on the educational aspects, which is where Ofsted’s expertise lies.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I am grateful for those last comments, and that I do not have to speak for six minutes before I get my food while others discuss the national food strategy.

I am pleased to hear that, all being well, on Wednesday the Minister will be able to come and give us a little more information about the Government’s intentions, which is really important. It is also helpful that she was able to give us a vague timescale of “in the coming weeks” on the regulatory review. If on Wednesday she was able to give a little more detail on that timescale, I think the whole sector would be really grateful in terms of understanding the sequence of how things are likely to play out on all this.

The Minister talked about the blunt powers in agreements that she is looking to replace with a more nuanced and consistent response through the series of sequences, yet many of us are worried that the nature of the Bill, as written at the moment, will still be heavy-handed. If only all current Secretaries of State paid attention to their common-law responsibility to proportionality, I think we would all be a lot happier in this place.

The issues around paying and governance are issues to reflect on. All those many years ago, when I was Schools Minister responsible for academies, among other things, I commissioned some work around governance but it never really got anywhere. There may well be reasons why we want the ability to bring in people with a much more professional approach who therefore might be paid, but we need a really full debate around that. The people who give of their time voluntarily to be school governors, multi-academy trust trustees, ambassadors for local schools, et cetera, do so willingly, and we have to be really cautious about interfering with that by offering to pay even a few.

We look forward to hearing more on Wednesday. I do not think the Committee is persuaded about these clauses as they stand. I am sure the comments from my Front Bench about what will happen if we do not get a good response are being listened to by Ministers, but I am happy to withdraw my amendment.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Monday 13th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I am familiar with what is happening in education at the moment, and John Locke and JS Mill are nowhere near it. The point I was suggesting is that, if they were, they should be taught to everyone. Opting out is fine; on other amendments, we are going to go on to talk about parents opting out of different things—that is fine. I was worried about secular assemblies; that filled me with horror. Maybe children could go and listen to some classical music or something that would be more productive. That was my concern on that matter.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

I have a great deal of sympathy for what the noble Baroness has just said. The phrase that comes to my mind is, “Better the devil you know”—if I am allowed to refer to the Church of England in that way. We know that religion is an immensely powerful and deep force for people. The Church of England is very civilised and easy to get on with; it is part of our community and history. That is the right way, and the right environment, for that part of children’s education.

If you are sending your child to a school run by the Church of England or the Catholic Church, for goodness’ sake, you know what you are getting. Although I have come out the far side of religion some long time ago, I very happily sent a couple of my children to schools with a strong Church of England ethos, and it did not do them any harm any more than it did me harm to go to church twice a day for 15 years of my life. Religion is not a poisonous thing; it is an enriching thing. When I get to go to a decent wedding, I bellow the hymns with enthusiasm and deep memory. I am sure that a lot that I have experienced enriches my life. We should not look at this as something harmful; it is something that we are, by and large, all used to and live with, and is a positive force in our country and lives. We should celebrate it and not try to shy away from it.

[The Lord Bishop of Chichester]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, for her comments. There are two things. I am very aware of the important statement that the Queen made in her Diamond Jubilee about the vocation of the Church of England, which is not to promote itself but to promote faith, the practice of faith and respect for people of faith. The noble Baroness’s comments on religious literacy are very timely, particularly if we are taking seriously the education of our young people as they face not only a global issue in which religious literacy is of increasing importance but also, of course, as we prepare them for a pluralistic society here in England, in Britain, where, once again, religious literacy is increasingly important because of the range of places from which people come and the faiths that they bring with them. I greatly value the comments—thank you.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I take the noble Baroness’s point that NGOs and social enterprises may indeed have commercial interests. I still think that there is a difference between them using that to fund their work and a company that exists purely for making profit, but I take the point about commercial confidentiality. I will circle back to the question on computer gaming companies when I comment on some of the other amendments.

I entirely support Amendment 91 and the related Amendment 171I on careers programmes and work experience. We have already had an interesting debate, but a bit more needs to be drawn out. Some of the discussion was about raising aspiration and social mobility; the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, said that in introducing his amendment. We need to acknowledge that there is a huge amount of aspiration in our societies that people cannot fulfil because they lack opportunities. We need to acknowledge all those strangled aspirations.

I pick up the point from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that we need to think about this not just as a way of helping people to think about different careers—although I very much agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Garden of Frognal, that addressing gender stereotypes is really important—but as people going out into and spending some time in operations in society as a way to see how they might contribute in all sorts of ways, not just through whatever paid employment they might eventually take up. It is important that we see that.

On this whole language of aspiration and social mobility, I contend that we have to ensure we value everyone contributing to our society in all sorts of ways. I will pick up the point from the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, about Eton. Would we not have got somewhere when pupils at Eton aspired to be a school dinner person or a bus driver? Maybe there are pupils at Eton who do, but I doubt it somehow and I doubt they are encouraged to. Yet those are both vital jobs in our society that people can make a large contribution through.

I entirely support Amendment 168. Its importance has been powerfully covered by lots of people, in particular the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth. However, I question one word in it. It refers to British values as “values of British citizenship”. The values in the amendment—

“democracy … the rule of law … freedom … equal respect … freedom of thought, conscience and religion”—

are ones that the international community has collectively agreed should be the values of human rights and the rule of law and should be observed all around the world. I do not think this necessarily has to be referred to as “British” citizenship; they are the values of citizenship that we encourage in our own society and all around the world. Indeed, British jurists, British campaigners and British Governments have played a very powerful role in spreading those values around the world, such as through the European Court of Human Rights. They are not uniquely British values but values we want to encourage everywhere.

On that point, I have to challenge a comment made by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, who suggested that those who were born overseas and have chosen to become British citizens may have less awareness of these values than those who were born here. Of course, people who have chosen to move here—I declare my own interest as someone who chose to become a British citizen—have consciously chosen to sign up to those values. It is very important that we do not suggest that this is an issue for some people and not everyone in our society.

I had a lot more but I am aware of the time and we have not yet heard from the noble Baronesses on the Front Bench about mandatory curriculum subjects. I will just come back to the point about computer gaming. Some of the items that the noble Baronesses suggest as crucial are “financial literacy” and “life skills”. I looked to a report from the Centre for Social Justice, On the Money: A Roadmap for Lifelong Financial Learning, which points out that there is a huge problem with a lack of financial knowledge among young children being exposed in digital online marketplaces, particularly with gaming loot boxes. We need to be very careful about the involvement of companies such as that because there are very large financial interests there.

Finally—I am aware of the time and wanted to say a lot more—the one thing that I do not agree with, which I have to put on the record, is that all academies must follow the national curriculum. The Green Party does not believe that there should be a national curriculum. We think that there should be a set of learning entitlements whereby learners and teachers together develop a curriculum content to suit their needs and interests.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, just to pick up briefly on what—

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

My Lords, I am afraid the noble Lord was not here at the start of the debate on this group, so we should move to Front-Bench contributions.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

97A: Clause 48, page 40, line 34, after the second “is” insert “mainly or wholly resident”
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment is to enable the meaning of “is” in this context to be clarified.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 97A I shall speak also to the other amendments in my name in this group.

The substantive amendments in the group concern the completeness of the register. I personally see no justification whatever for the register targeting only people who are home educating. To my mind, the point of the register should be that we know what is happening to every child in this country. We should be able to track their progress through education, know what it has been, see the outcomes, understand what is going on and, through that process, improve our education system and make sure that every child benefits from our determination that they should have the opportunity of education.

Amendment 101B asks that we specifically identify those who are electively home educating so that we can know exactly which children come under that category—we do not want it cluttered up by people who have been off-rolled by schools into the care of parents who are clearly not up to home educating; this should be a definite decision—and understand how support for those parents and children in different local authorities, because it is very different between local authorities, results in the outcomes that it does. Then we can get a good picture of the benefits of, and concerns that we might reasonably have about, home education, rather than the darkness which is all that confronts us at present. Anyone who has been involved in home education will have a fistful of wonderful examples of parents who have made a great success of children who have been abandoned by the state, but is that the universal picture? None of us knows, but most of us suspect not. Home educators know that there are some parents who do not make a success of it.

We really need to know what is going on with all our children, so to my mind there is no justification for not putting on a register people who are not being electively home educated but who are not registered for full-time attendance at school. We should know who these children are, why they are not at school and what is being done to support them. The first thing the register should do is identify the home educators and, specifically, those who are not electively home educated and who therefore should be in the direct care of the local authority, and to pin a duty on the local authority as to why they are not in school and what is being done about it.

That is echoed in my suggestion that we should not grant local authorities an exemption for Section 19 children. To my mind, that is a disgraceful dustbin that is used by local authorities to deal with difficult children and put them out of mind. We should be focusing on them. We should know exactly who they are, where they are and what is being done about them. All that information should be easily accessible so that we can hold local authorities to account. It is really important that children who are difficult to educate should be educated well; they will only cause us much greater difficulties later on if we do not do so. We should not allow local authorities this escape hatch. We as a Government, and as people who hold the Government to account, should be able to see clearly what is going on with children who come under Section 19.

We should also have a very clear picture of what is happening in independent schools. If you try to track a child through education at the moment and they switch from state to independent, they go into a black hole: they are no longer in the national pupil database. They reappear when they take GCSEs or A-levels, but otherwise they are gone. Why? We should know what is happening; we should be able to judge the progress these children are making. We should be able to see how they are being educated and what pattern of education our children are going through. It is really important to have the data on which to base decisions about our education system.

We should have a universal pupil number that applies to every child, and we should know where every child with a UPN is; they should not be able to disappear off the system. That a child with a UPN does not appear on the register should be a cause for immediate concern; someone should be looking for them and finding out what is happening to them. At the moment, there are so many holes in the register we just cannot see. My plea in Amendments 101B, 122B, 130B and 132A, and 97E in the next group, is that the register should be complete and that this completeness should be used to make sure we know exactly what is happening by way of education to every child in the UK on at least an annual basis.

There are three small amendments in this group. On Amendment 97A, the phrase used in the Bill is that

“the child is in the authority’s area.”

Does that apply when they are on holiday? What is being “in the authority’s area”? How does this apply to Travellers’ children? What is the meaning of that phrase as it is at the moment—where is it established?

On Amendment 97B, the current wording rather sounds as if permission is needed to take a child out of school to home educate. I know that is not the case, but I just want to query the wording used in that clause.

Amendment 97C says that this is a big change as we are suddenly requiring a lot of people who have not had to register their children previously to register them now. We ought to provide them with information, support and plenty of time to get up to speed with what they need to do. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is contributing remotely.

--- Later in debate ---

With this, I ask my noble friend to withdraw his Amendment 97A. I ask other noble Lords not to move the amendments in their names.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for her answers to my amendment. By and large, she has answered extremely well, and I thank her for that.

I would like to press her a bit further on the business of identifying people who identify themselves as elective home education. There is a real importance in making that distinction, because elective home educators are taking responsibility for educating their children and the local authority has only a supervisory duty. If a child is not in education and is not being electively home educated, the local authority needs to take a very different kind of action. It is therefore very important that, in this register, we should differentiate between the two so that we can focus on what local authorities need to be doing. I am delighted to see my noble friend shaking her head on that.

I have been a user of the national pupil database for a very long time and, in the annual school census, I have never found information on independent schools. The pupils appear for the first time in the data when they take GCSEs—if they take GCSEs. I am puzzled by my noble friend’s response that the data is there. I will write to her, if I may, to see if we can solve that problem.

I am grateful for what my noble friend has said about Section 19. At the moment, some children under Section 19 get five hours of education a week. My understanding is that those children would have to be on the register because that would not qualify as full-time. If I am wrong about that, I would be grateful if my noble friend could let me know, because I am comforted that, where a child is not being provided with full-time education, it must get noticed, and that there are no circumstances under which five hours of education counts as full-time for the purposes of the conversation that we have just had.

I am attracted by the idea from the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, of a unique children’s number—a crossover between the medical and teaching professions—and getting some integration there. It really helps to know where and how children are, particularly when it comes to supporting children well. Knowing that the information is available to professionals when appropriate and required in an integrated way seems sensible. But then I am very much a data person so perhaps I am pushing further there than the noble Lord, Lord Knight, would do.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

In the interests of time, I will be brief. My noble friend may be aware that the recent Health and Social Care Act commits the department to report to Parliament in the summer of 2023 on the feasibility of using a consistent child identifier. I will of course include more information on that in my letter to your Lordships.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for that. Perhaps we will get to the stage when there is a single identifier for a school. At least three different numbers are used by the Department for Education, as far as I know. It would be nice to have consistency. There is a fourth number, too—universities—so it all gets extremely confusing when one is trying to understand which school the data is talking about. I am all in favour of identifiable numbers. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Soley, for saying that he sees this proposal as a supportive measure. That is good and is, I hope, absolutely the basis on which we are all going forward on this.

When we come to later groups, my focus will be on: how do we make this a Bill whereby it is advantageous to be a supportive local authority and harder to be one that is not supportive? At the moment, I have big worries about the Bill making things easy for an abusive local authority, without giving any incentives to supportive local authorities. There are some wonderfully supportive local authorities. I come back to what the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said. There are local authorities that are just hymned by the home educators in their patch, who say what a wonderful experience they have had and how supported they feel, how good the relationship is and how good the authority is at picking up cases where home education is not working because everyone feels like telling the local authority about it and because they know that the parent will be treated well and the child will be looked after.

I therefore approach the rest of the discussion on this part of the Bill with optimism—but possibly after supper. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 97A withdrawn.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Monday 20th June 2022 Lords Chamber

“the child is receiving a suitable education”.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have a few amendments in this group. Amendment 97E is an echo of Amendment 101B and may well have already been answered. Amendments 98A, 101A and 104A seek to offer a defence of reasonableness for withholding. An obvious example of that would be where a parent has escaped an abusive relationship and does not want the details of her spouse and other such information to be on, in effect, a public register, or one which the local authority can use widely down its existing channels. There have already been examples of local authorities leaking such data. It is reasonable, where you have a proven history of suffering abuse, to withhold the information of a spouse, and it ought to be a defence.

I also join the right reverend Prelate in my concern for the data-related clauses. Amendments 110A and 126B address that in rather more general terms than he did. This seems to be highly personal data, very loosely regulated, and I am concerned that that is neither appropriate nor actually needed.

I urge the Committee to take a close look at proposed new Sections 436C(1)(c), 436C(1)(d) and 436C(2), all of which seem to display the characteristics of some of the earlier clauses in the Bill that we have expressed concern about. Where there is already a mechanism for assessing whether a child is being offered a suitable education, what on earth would Section 436C(1)(c) be required for?

Paragraph (d) allows the Secretary of State to invent anything. This really gets at undermining the relationship between the Government and home educators; just at a flick of the pen, some whole new suite of information can be required of them, greatly altering the relationship between them and the system, and introducing that level of uncertainty. Unless the Government have clear plans for what they want to do, and a clear understanding of why it is needed, this seems very damaging for their plans and quite unnecessary.

Subsection (2) is devastating. It allows the local authority to invent anything. Given the powers of compulsion in this Bill, the short timescales and the way in which that could cascade into school attendance orders, this is really unreasonable. If we want to give powers to local authorities, we should specify exactly. We should not allow them to mess up the relationship on a whim. There are some lovely local authorities—I will give some quotes later—and some home educators are really happy in their relationships with them. However, I have read extensive correspondence from and about some of them that is, frankly, abusive.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of St Albans is right that parents should have the right to choose the educator for their children, whether they choose a voluntary aided school, a maintained school or an academy, or to home educate. I would be extremely concerned if they chose an unregistered school which in many cases would fail an Ofsted inspection every day it was inspected because of some of the practices that go on, but we do not know that because we do not have that information.

We probably all agree, including in respect of the amendments that I have put down, that we need to take a chill on this and think it through carefully, because I can see that there are issues here. We need to know what the real information is that we want, and why we want it in the first place. But let us not kid ourselves that it is just about this. For example, parents give all sorts of data when they apply for a school—far more detail than some of the requests that are in this Bill. Voluntary aided schools, for example, will ask the faith of the family. Why do they ask that? In a Catholic-run school, for example, they will have a percentage of children who are non-Roman Catholic who can take up places, and that is why they want that information. I make no comment on whether that is right or wrong.

Believe it or not—and I am not particularly keen on this—individual schools, even primary schools, have informal application forms that parents fill out. I remember only a few years ago that one of the questions on the informal application form was what the occupation of the parent was. There is a whole gamut of information out there and we need to rein some of that in.

My final point is that we must ensure that when we have had this pause and perhaps reflected on what we really want, this data is not retained at the end of a child’s schooling. The notion that the data is retained by schools or local authorities is not very helpful. That would be my concern.

I turn to my Amendment 103. I have never really understood this issue, in the sense that when I was first a head teacher—I was head teacher of two schools—you had to collect a unique pupil number. Why? So that when a child moved to another school, perhaps if they moved house, their parents moved jobs or they just did not like the school they were at, you could know that they were in a secure situation. This was brought in by the Blair Government. I never understood why we did not know how many children were in schools when we had this unique pupil number.

This came home to me when I had a pupil who, for all sorts of reasons, left the school I was at. The local authority contacted me and asked, “What happened to pupil X?”. I said, “Well, his parents told me that he’s gone to this school, and I have contacted the school and given it the unique pupil number”. The school never received the pupil, and nobody knows what happened to the unique pupil number. We have to think through what we really mean by that and how it will work.

If we want to have a proper system, it has to involve us being able to follow the pupil’s education—not in any way spying, but making sure that the pupil is, first, getting educated and, secondly, being safeguarded.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 22nd June 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

112A: Clause 48, page 42, line 2, at end insert—
“(4) Regulations must, in relation to a register under section 436B, make provision about the right of appeal to an independent body against any interpretation or discretion applied by a local authority in compiling the register or in taking action based on information contained in or requested for the register.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is intended to ensure that parents have the ability to argue effectively with a local authority who refuses to accept good reasons for not complying with their requests.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 112A, I shall speak to my other amendments in this group. The focus of the group is the relationship between local authorities and home educators, which is well illustrated—we shall come to it later—by the text of Amendment 128A, which reads:

“Local authorities must … recognise that the first responsibility for educating a child lies with its parents … be supportive of those who elect to educate their children at home … recognise that home education is of itself not a safeguarding issue, and … acknowledge that in many instance the decision to home educate reflects failures by other institutions of the state.”


I would add that they also must recognise that home education can be very different from school education. You inherently have much more flexibility in the structure. You do not need to follow all the systems and rules which make a school practical. You may choose to do things very differently.

There are local authorities where relationships are very good. One email sent to me, from someone under Gloucestershire County Council, said that the EHE team are a “genuine delight” and that, “Talking to our caseworker just feels like boasting about how well our daughter is doing and being reassured about any concerns I have by a person with a great deal of knowledge and experience of elective home education.” I have also talked to home educators in Coventry who described the team there as “very well liked, at ease with the children and respectful of parents” and said that 85% of home educators ask for a visit because it is an open conversation and a totally supportive experience. As a result, Coventry has a higher than average rate of school attendance orders, because the team in Coventry knows what is going on and home educators, when they know of a problem elsewhere, pass it on to the team because they know that things will be fairly dealt with by the team.

There are other local authorities—I will not name them in public, but if anyone would like to see the documentation I have on them I would be happy, if I have permission, to share it—where the team appears not to have any relevant experience either of home education or of teaching. There is a totally oppositional attitude to home educators and no understanding that the structures of schools do not necessarily apply to home education. There have been extraordinary exchanges between people who do not appear to have sufficient qualifications to be a teaching assistant and a home educator who has been a teacher for 20 years, asking the most ridiculous questions. Under those circumstances, it does not surprise me that the relationship between the local authority and the home education community breaks down; a lot of difficulties arise because of that.

I do not stick to any particular formula in my amendments in this group, but their overall objective is to suggest to my noble friend that there are ways in which the Bill can incentivise local authorities to act well, so that it is easy to be a good local authority. Being a bad local authority is a path that is not conducive to the efficient exercising of its functions, and therefore it gradually becomes one which is not followed.

I note the breadth of powers given to local authorities in the Bill, in particular the ability to make any demand of a home educator under a totally open new subsection that allows them to ask whatever they want and, if the parent does not provide it, to dump them into school attendance order proceedings without any appeal. That is a system in which it would be tremendously easy to be a bad local authority. Local authorities will have total power over home educators, with no one controlling how those powers are used. There will be no incentive for local authorities to improve. I do not think that is a reflection of the long relationships and discussions that the Department for Education has had with home educators. It was immensely surprising to the home education community that the Bill should be written in this way. I very much hope that we will be able to persuade the Government to make some changes.

Amendment 112A and other amendments suggest that there should be a right of appeal—a space in which a home-educating parent can argue in front of an independent tribunal with a local authority. As we are giving local authorities such huge powers, in fairness, there surely must be some form of appeal—some outside oversight over whether they are being reasonable.

Amendment 130A asks that data held by the local authority should be made routinely available to home educators. If we want a good, open, conversational relationship between good home educators and their local authority, sharing information plays a very important part.

We should have available to us, as legislators—indeed, as the Government—data on the penalties imposed by local authorities. That is a very good indicator of the state of relationships between the home education community and local authorities. We need early indicators in the system so that we can see when things are going right or, maybe, not so right.

Amendment 136ZA brings in the phrase “light touch”. This is one much used in conversation between the Department for Education and home educators. I should really like to know what the department means by it. It startles me to think that some local authorities whose work I have looked at could be defined as light touch, but perhaps it can. I need to understand where the department stands on this. I should like an arrangement where the people in local authorities charged with looking after home education had some relevant qualifications and experience.

If you have in a team someone who knows what home education looks like and someone with strong teaching experience, that seems to be the combination, looking nationwide, that works really well in local authorities. The main thing is that the people in the local authority should have enough experience and qualification to feel confident in the judgments they are making. If not, they have to rely on getting out the baseball bat and beating home educators around the head, because they do not understand the arguments being made. Getting qualifications and a level of performance into local authorities is an important aim.

On Amendments 137B and 137C, I say that being able to tip parents into punitive action after just one fault does not seem the right way: there should be a pattern of behaviour that then requires the whips and scorpions to be got out. Amendment 137B states:

“Except in circumstances of deliberate rule breaking, the school attendance order process must be preceded by a process of communication where the education being provided can be adjusted and services under section 436G offered.”


In other words, this should be a supportive dialogue between the local authority and the home educator. Where the home educator is failing, there are conversations about how things could be made better; where the local authority can help with that process, it does; and only if that process breaks down do we get into the punitive provisions. That is the nature of the relationship between home educators and local authorities in a lot of areas. That would be a better template for the legislation: to take the pattern of behaviour which is current in local authorities where there is a very good relationship between home educators and the local authority, rather than the pattern of behaviour exemplified by the more punitive local authorities.

Amendment 137C is another right of appeal. Amendment 138ZA looks at dealing with a child who is in mid-assessment. If a school recommends a child for assessment for special needs, and then the parent withdraws that child because there is clearly a problem in school and they think home education will be better, that process of assessment ought to be completed before the local authority can tip the parent into a punitive process. The process of assessment is entirely in the hands of the local authority; it can make it fast if it wants to. I know a lot of them have long backlogs on this, but that is up to them—they can prioritise a child if they are worried about them—but they should not be able to tip parents into a school attendance order process where they have failed to provide the assessment that the school has said is necessary.

Similarly, if it is clear to a medical practitioner that a mental health assessment is needed—this would be common in the case of people suffering from school refusal or trauma as a result of events at school, when a proper assessment needs to be made—it seems entirely appropriate that the local authority should wait until that process is complete, and until there is not an independent medical professional standing in the way saying, “No, don’t do this now. We don’t know what the right thing to do for this child is.”

Amendment 138A looks at things in a more general sense. It says that this is a really disruptive process for the family and the child. Local authorities really need a proper justification for what they do and need to ascertain where the child stands in this process.

Amendment 143B asks that a refusal of the revocation of a school attendance order must be reasonable. That may be implicit in the law as it stands, but I would be grateful if my noble friend could confirm it.

Amendment 143F argues that if a parent re-offends, the circumstances should be reinvestigated as they may have changed and things may be different. Just having the ability to reimpose an endless series of penalties does not seem in accordance with the general practice of English law.

Amendment 143I gives the Government an opportunity to justify why stronger penalties are needed. We seem to be entering a level of penalties that I find excessive in the context of not sending your child to school, but I would be interested to listen to what my noble friend said.

Although it is not in this group, Amendment 143IA asks that Ofsted should have oversight of the local authorities’ performance on elective home education, which would be a very constructive way of making sure that local authorities were aware that if they fell down seriously, in looking after home educators, somebody would be on their tail. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Faulkner of Worcester) (Lab)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is participating remotely, and I invite her to speak now.

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[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I apologise. I referred to my noble friend’s amendment right at the beginning of my remarks and reflected that we will consider what options there are to make sure that there is a system that feels fair to parents and in which parents have trust and confidence. With that, I ask my noble friend Lord Lucas to withdraw his Amendment 112A and hope that other noble Lords will not move theirs.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for those replies. I shall read them in Hansard and return to her if I have any points of detail to make. I very much agree with my noble friend Lord Wei that we need an appeal system that feels fair and builds trust. There are different ways of doing it. It clearly should not be by internal local authority appeals, the Local Government Ombudsmen have not proved helpful in elective home education cases to date and the Secretary of State system is a bit on the impenetrable side, so I very much hope this is an area where we will make improvements.

My noble friend’s remarks put a lot of weight on the forthcoming guidance. If at any stage a draft of that can be shared, I would be most grateful to have a look at it. It would shortcut a lot of debate if we had a clear feeling of where the Government are heading.

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[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I was not trying to hurry my noble friend; I was just saying this is clearly quite important.

Picking up on other points made in the debate, I am absolutely delighted that the noble Lord, Lord Soley, and I are so much in agreement on this. We approach it from different angles, but we both agree on the need for the system to be supportive and for children who are not being properly educated to be rescued with speed. The question is: how do we do this fairly and leave home education as a supported system?

My general experience of this—and I hope that talking to Gloucestershire will mean that my noble friend shares it—is that where there is a supportive system, money is much better directed. Money goes to supporting the education of children, rather than being used to try to control their parents, and there is a much better flow of information about what is happening. Providing facilities for parents, including maths and English catch-up and even swimming lessons, means we get to see these children and get the information without having to be punitive about it. There is a flow of information because we are working with the home education community. The numbers that remain outside the easy orbit gets small, and they can be focused on. Building something that is supportive and works with home education is a double benefit—using the money well and allowing us to catch up with children who are being failed swiftly. I very much hope that that is the direction the Bill will take.

I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 112A withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

114A: Clause 48, page 42, line 26, leave out from “1(a),” to “days” in line 27 and insert “the period of 30 school”
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment, along with other amendments to Clause 48, page 42, and Clause 49, page 47, in the name of Lord Lucas, are intended to simplify the immediate duty to one of registration, leaving it to the local authority to then inform the parents of the other requirements, and to increase the timescale to accommodate for additional responsibilities on parents. “School days” are used to exempt parents from having to disrupt holidays to provide the required information.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 114A is the first appearance of an amendment that deals with longer time limits. Such amendments seem to be scattered through a number of groups. I will try not to repeat myself, or indeed focus on them at this moment because there are many more of them in later groups.

The principle I am working to is that the time limits being set should work for a reasonably together, reasonably collaborative parent. We have to allow for the fact that children go on holidays and that out of term time, it may be hard to get hold of them. We should look at longer limits than are set out in the Bill, and at the concept of “school days”—the parental equivalent of working days—as the form these limits should take.

I am interested to know where my noble friend finds herself on this and all the other amendments on time limits. I am aiming to help the Government produce a system that works fairly. If we have a system that trips parents easily into school attendance orders, then we need to allow parents time to react first. I particularly think that we need to give parents time to get it wrong first. I know how often I managed to get things wrong. Reading through my amendments in putting together these groups, I can see that my drafting has not exactly been perfect. We ought to have human time limits. They should not be overlong, but they ought to allow for the real lives of the home educators involved. After all, local authorities are not known as the fastest people in the world when it comes to responding to inquiries. There ought to be some equality of allowance.

In this group, Amendment 122C questions whether, in this section of the Bill, the Government intend to catch hired home tutors—people picking up an individual from a tutor supplier and saying, “We’d love you to come in a couple of days a week to support us in home education”. Would they be caught by Amendment 122C? Where is the boundary between organised provision of education and a parent asking an individual to come in and help?

Amendment 126A asks that we look at the benefit of registering tutors, in much the same style as we have done with parking operators. The Government are expanding the number of tutors and their use in the schooling system, but we do not have a system that in any way is protective of the public. There is no useful form of registration for tutors. To my mind, this is a subject to which the Government should be bending a thought. The best I can hope for from my noble friend is, “Yes, we’re thinking of looking at it”, but I do think that they should be.

I have read through Amendment 128A before. This does need to be said somewhere, and I suspect it is in the guidance my noble friend has been talking about. The basis on which local authorities are supposed to be interacting with home education need to be made clear to them.

All the other amendments in this group—apart from Amendment 140B, which is just an example of an appeal—consider ways in which the support the Government mention in the Bill but do not, as far as I can see in the impact assessment, provide any money for, might be provided. They look at things that good local authorities already do. Amendment 173 suggests that this support should be in place before we pitch into activating the registration system.

The point was made when considering the last group that home educators are actually saving the state a lot of money. My noble friend said we should not start giving money to home educators, and that this was a decision they had made. Yes, but we should give money to local authorities so that their support for home educators is properly funded. In previous iterations, I have suggested that half the money the Government save should go to local authorities—with no undue ring-fencing—the intention being that it is a fund to provide for their support of home educators, to be used in a way that works best locally. That is not in the impact assessment at the moment, and I very much hope that the Government will have a figure in front of us before the Bill leaves this House. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)]

I remind the Committee that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is taking part remotely. I call the noble Baroness.

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[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I do not know the answer to the noble Baroness’s specific question, but I will get an answer and respond to her.

In closing, I ask my noble friend Lord Lucas to withdraw Amendment 114A and other noble Lords not to move the amendments in their names.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, yet again, I am very grateful to my noble friend for her replies. I assume that the Government have all the powers they need to create this guidance that we are all placing so much reliance on. I hope my noble friend will tell me if that is not the case, but I assume that it is. I look forward to reading her replies in more detail in Hansard and picking up any issues I have with them in correspondence. For now, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 114A withdrawn.

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[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I shall move Amendment 120 and speak to Amendments 122, 123 and 134 in my name. I can be brief because we have effectively discussed all this already. The first three amendments all refer to wishing to lengthen the relevant period from 15 to 28 days in a number of different situations but, of course, I would be very happy to accept the amendment that suggests 30 days. I really will not go into detail on each of them, although Amendment 134 does ring the changes, as here, for some reason, it is 14 days. One wonders why, when we have had 15 all along, suddenly here only 14 days are given to challenge a monetary penalty. Could the Minister explain how these periods are arrived at? It would be helpful if we knew how the Government decided that some should be 14 and some 15. Anyway, my amendment does not waver. We still consider 28 days a reasonable time for such representations. I will not repeat previous arguments but will just say that that is a much more reasonable period in which to challenge and work out an appropriate response. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have a couple of amendments in this group. My noble friend covered the government arguments on this subject clearly under the previous group. I expect to come back at her in one form or another when I have the time to analyse the detailed timescale she is looking at—in other words, the whole distance between a worried local authority saying that a child is not being looked after properly and being able to enforce, and how that all works together. But I shall not move my amendments at this time.

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a technical question and compassion for parents who are often struggling to deal with vulnerable children must be factored in. These amendments are intended to simplify the immediate duty to one of registration, leaving it to the local authority then to inform the parents of the other requirements and increase the timescale to accommodate additional responsibilities on parents. School days are used to exempt parents from having to disrupt holidays to provide the required information. These all seem sensible alternatives to what is currently proposed by the Government. I conclude by asking the Minister what analysis lies behind the Government’s choice of a 15-day period in these proposals.

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[Baroness Penn (Con)]

I can absolutely take that point away and see whether it is possible. If that is not the mechanism by which we can provide further detail and assurance, I will look at what else we can do to explore, and reassure on, that issue further.

As my noble friend the Minister said, under UK GDPR, parents have the right to object to any processing where UK legislation requires such processing, which would include the sharing of information to prescribed persons. The organisation responsible for that processing would then need to review the request and decide whether the processing is in the best interest of the child or family, and either uphold the request in the specific circumstances or proceed with the processing. The parent also has a formal route of complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office, which has a range of powers in this area. It is essential, however, for local authorities to be able to share information, if needed, to support multi-agency safeguarding and education efforts, with the appropriate safeguards in place.

On the question of statutory guidance, which the noble Baroness asked about also, this will help ensure the consistency of interpretation and implementation of duties across local authorities. As we said, we will ensure that it is created in close collaboration with local authorities and home educators, and includes advice on how local authorities can best promote positive engagement, as we have heard the concerns from parents where that has not been the case. We have also heard examples of best practice, and that is what we will seek to draw on in drafting the guidance.

There was a concern about financial penalties for tutors or childminders and home education groups. The duty on providers to share information on request will be important in helping to identify those children who are not—but should be—on registers, and those regulations will be used to set a threshold at which an education provider comes into the scope of the duty in Section 436E, ensuring the duty is only placed on providers that provide a substantial proportion of an eligible child’s education. There is also the power to make regulations to create specific exemptions to this duty, and we have indicated our intention to use that power to exclude informal groups of home-educating parents from the scope of this measure.

I thank the noble Baroness once again for the opportunity to reiterate some of those points, and I think we have heard the areas that the Government will take away and look at to ensure that we continue to have a message for support for home educators, but not lose sight of the importance of what we are trying to achieve with these registers.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, that was a good answer, but I feel my noble friend has not addressed the reasonable fears of some home educators about the way this Bill is drafted at present. For instance, in new Section 436C(1)(c),

“such details of the means by which the child is being educated as may be prescribed”

is a completely open phrase. This is an area which is used by some local authorities to pressure parents. They pursue parents for timetables, the details of subjects of studied and other things which do not necessarily form part of home education. Home education is not subject bound. Schools have to do it that way; if the Times has its way, schools may not have to do it that way, but they do so at the moment. Home education may follow timetables, or it may be something much looser. The age at which a child begins to read can be quite late in home education, or it can be very early. These things vary enormously from the practice which is necessary in school. That new Section 436C(1)(c) is in this Bill, and opens and then flows through to the school attendance order provisions, is a source of considerable worry, and I think reasonably so.

Clause 48 agreed.

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[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, I have two amendments in this group: Amendment 137D and 143IB. Amendment 137D replicates Amendment 171V that I had in an earlier group, for children who are home educated or out of school long-term for other reasons.

Amendment 137D sets out that a local authority must take account of the advice of a doctor, social worker or youth offending officer when considering school attendance orders. This comes back to the issue that I have talked about often in these groups, where some parents have their children out of school not because they want to but because their child is not safe in school, whether that is for medical, psychological or other reasons. For the reasons I said earlier, and I will not go through them again, many parents say that the officer at their local authority refused to acknowledge the reasons why the pupil was out of school. This amendment ensures that the advice of the relevant independent expert must be taken into account when considering orders and school nomination notice for a school attendance order.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have some amendments in this group: Amendments 136A and 137A are timing amendments, and we have covered that subject already.

Amendments 140A, 143A, 143C, 143D, 143E and 143H are of a technical nature. I think the quickest thing would be for me to listen to the Minister’s reply, because I think I have made my intentions clear in the amendments.

Amendment 143IA goes back to an earlier discussion on the relationship between local authorities and home educators. It suggests that having Ofsted report on the quality of the home education provision in a local authority, and on the quality of the work that it does on school attendance, would be a useful way of redressing the balance between home educators and a local authority, and that it would direct the attention of the local authority to the need to perform well in this area, and would have similar benefits in the case of attendance.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I have in Amendment 143G a very simple provision that, on acquittal for breaching a school attendance order, that particular school attendance order dies—no ifs, no buts. Surely, natural justice mandates that the court’s decision is respected for that specific attendance order.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

146A: Clause 56, page 59, line 4, at end insert “or a family”
Member's explanatory statement
This amendment is intended to stop large families being classed as a school.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, large families are not a school unless they are very large families and fish. I beg to move.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I want to speak to Amendments 147 and 152.

I applaud the Government for including in this Bill Clause 56, which seeks to ensure that schools currently avoiding registration and inspection are included in Ofsted’s remit in the future. This is a far more important issue than we may have considered it. This country has been standing by while an unknown number of extremist, fundamentalist, isolationist schools are teaching children to reject the values of the country in which they are growing up. What will some of those children do when they grow up? Will they join a terrorist organisation? We simply do not know.

Ofsted has written to me to give us the benefit of some of its information, which is worth quoting. It says that at least 6,000 children are being educated in 900 unregistered schools, or, as it puts it, likely many more. It is very concerning that Ofsted has issued more than 100 warning notices to those it believes are running illegal schools, and 40 % of those settings have not changed to comply with registration as a result. These are people who do not respect the law, so we have to be very tough with them.

It is worrying that children are not learning the most fundamental subjects, including maths and English. Not only is the narrow religious curriculum in many unregistered schools unacceptable but these schools may have unsanitary and unsafe conditions. Ofsted says that it found settings with severe health and safety hazards, and other problems. No one is able to check on these things so long as schools evade registration.

I want to thank Rob Cann of Humanists UK for his very detailed briefing and the precise wording of these amendments.

In Clause 56, the Government are seeking to extend registration to independent education institutions—that is fantastic—but only to those which provide all, or the majority, of the child’s education. Herein lies a significant loophole. The proprietors of some such settings know that if they are inspected, they will have to choose between changing to something very different and closing down. They are therefore very wily and will do all they can to continue to evade regulation and inspection. They will use every loophole they can find to wriggle out of their safeguarding duties. Amendment 146B would limit registration to establishments that provide 18 hours of teaching for 39 weeks of the year. That would be something, but I believe these schools would adjust their regime and continue to avoid registration.

Without doubt, as soon as the Bill receives Royal Assent, these proprietors—who all know one another; there are little groups of them—will get together and split their provision into separate morning and afternoon settings, or some other configuration such as one teacher taking kids in the morning, another in the afternoon. Neither will then be subject to registration under Clause 56 as it stands, and I would be grateful if the Minister would comment on this loophole and whether the Government are content to see these extremist schools escape the important purpose of this Bill.

I recognise that Clause 56(2) allows further tightening definitions to be done through regulations. Here, I am going to say something from experience. Nine years ago, I allowed, if you like, the Government to have a little adjustment to my proposal for an amendment on the face of a Bill on the basis that they would introduce regulations and deal with the problem. I thought, “Well, that sounds okay”. Was I naive? Nine years later, nothing has happened, so I am not impressed with the idea that this can be dealt with through regulations. I fear that it simply would not be done. That is a bit cynical, but it really is my experience.

My Amendment 147 has been carefully thought through. By applying registration only to establishments providing at least a quarter of a child’s education, it would not catch common after-school classes in music, sport or, indeed, religion. I very much hope the Minister will feel able to accept it.

Amendment 152 would close off another loophole for unregistered schools. Many of them operate in private dwellings; indeed, 85% of illegal education settings in Hackney, the borough with the greatest prevalence of illegal schools, are private dwellings. If the proprietor puts down a mattress in a school, on inspection, the school may be classified as a dwelling and a warrant would be required under the law as it stands. Without a warrant, the inspection would be invalidated, so, as Clause 63 stands, a warrant will be required for almost every investigation to prevent that. This will generate unacceptable pressure on the courts, the courts will then put a whole lot of pressure on the inspectors to prove that they really need the warrant, and the whole system could be snarled up. It is reasonable to suppose that determined proprietors will disguise their settings as dwellings to try to protect themselves from Ofsted’s new powers. As I said, they will do just about anything.

Clause 63 introduces a requirement that inspectors can enter a private dwelling only if a warrant has been issued, and a request for a warrant is permissible only if consent has been refused. This leaves in limbo the situation of an inspection in what could be deemed a private dwelling where consent has been given. I am sure this is not the intention, but the wording leaves open the situation of those inspections where consent is given but there is a problem; it leaves an issue.

Registration and inspection of schools must, of course, be dealt with sensitively and authorities cannot be given free access to private dwellings without a warrant if consent is not given. Nevertheless, if the first intimation for Ofsted that a school is in a so-called private dwelling is when it attempts to enter the building, it will need to go away, fill in the forms and ultimately get a warrant, which could take a week or more. This will allow lots of time for the proprietors to conceal, dispose of or fabricate false evidence about whether a school was in operation within the dwelling. Surprise is essential in such situations.

Some proprietors will be less cunning than others and perhaps have less need to be, if a proprietor provides access immediately to an inspector arriving at the address. Amendment 152 clarifies that a warrant will be required only where consent has not been given for entry and where the setting visibly appears to be a dwelling. That sounds a bit pedantic, but it is important, on the basis that these people may just put a mattress down somewhere and claim it is a private dwelling. What is a private dwelling? All sorts of things can be done by them.

I hope the Minister will therefore ask officials to give serious consideration to the following two points. First, the current drafting of Clause 63 is poor and risks making matters worse for Ofsted inspectors. The element of surprise is so important, yet Clause 63 seems to reduce the scope for that surprise. Secondly, the clause does not clarify what a private dwelling is. Will the Minister ensure that, if possible, a definition of a private dwelling for the purposes of the Bill is given in it?

I failed at the beginning of my speech to thank the Minister very much indeed for the discussion we had, and I remember that one of her points was: how on earth do you define a private dwelling—it is probably impossible? I hope that efforts will be made to define a private dwelling to avoid what I call the mattress problem.

Again, I emphasise that the Government seek to achieve a very important objective in these clauses. I hope these comments are helpful; they are certainly intended to be.

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[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for the answer she gave on my amendment. I had a lot of sympathy for Amendment 149, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey. If we are to require home educators to provide a suitable education, we should make the same requirement of local authorities. What is important is that all children get a suitable education, and we should not accept backsliding by the state on that.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, would expect, as editor of the Good Schools Guide and a product of Eton, I do not have any sympathy for her amendment. It just seems self-defeating. If you take away the charitable exemption so that independent schools start paying rates, they will do that much less charitable work. That charitable benefit goes straight through to charitable work; the sufferers will be the people currently benefiting from the charity. It will all come back to the state because, although the local authorities may get some additional money from business rates, the state will find itself educating a lot more pupils who are currently being educated elsewhere, not at its expense. The same applies to VAT, but in spades. It appears merely to be an unsatisfactory solution to a long-running niggle. This Government’s approach to try to get the two sectors working together, integrated and benefiting each other, so that they become part of a unified system in rather the way that the health service works with private providers, seems a much better idea. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 146A withdrawn.

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Personally, I would like mandatory reporting in all registered activities that children take part in, which is what happens in most countries that have mandatory reporting, but I was told it was unfortunately outside the scope of this Bill. Frankly, achieving it for schools would be helpful as a good start. I look forward to IICSA’s final report and their comments about whether countries in the UK should adopt mandatory reporting. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, it seems delightful that the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, who, with the rest of us, objected to the Henry VIII powers in the earlier parts of the Bill, should be asking for Henry VIII to return to deal with the Abbot of Ampleforth, who is the seat of the schools problems when it comes to safeguarding.

This is the bit of the Bill that I would very much like to listen to the Government’s rationale behind. I also hope that they will consider the other amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton—if not now, at least in terms of thinking through what happens when IICSA finally reports. As we have seen in this House with the Valuing Everyone training, when everyone knows what they must do if they see something wrong, wrong happens much less often.

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 171Z on mandatory reporting. This is an area I am very interested in, having started my career in a sports setting, not least because I have a Private Member’s Bill in the queuing system that seeks to address the issue. Having the chance to debate this as part of the Schools Bill was an opportunity not to be missed, and perhaps is the first step in addressing this serious issue.

I thank Tom Perry from Mandate Now for his support on this issue over the years and for his advice on what is required in various settings. If the Government were minded to accept this amendment, it would send out a strong message that they are listening and have an interest in protecting children and young people. I and many others having been debating this for a long time and, over the years, we have been given many reasons why this is not possible to bring in: the cost; that it puts people in a difficult situation when having to report; and that there are other mechanisms which can be used. None of these seems a particularly adequate reason. I have also been told that, if mandatory reporting comes in, the number of cases will rise—well, of course, they will. However, we know from other jurisdictions that those cases stabilise over time.

The fact that this legislation exists in 86% of Europe may not be enough to convince some that it is necessary, but this is also about increasing knowledge and understanding. Schools are a place that have reasonable contact with young people. I am very interested in hearing the Minister’s response. I do not want to pre-empt it, but I suspect that it might include her saying that it will be difficult to do this in a school setting without doing it in a wider setting. If that is the case, I look forward to support of my Private Member’s Bill when we get the chance to debate it.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, our Amendment 44 would remove the exemption that teachers in academies have from needing to have qualified status, but it gives a grace period until September 2024 to give schools and teachers time to adjust, which we feel is a sensible way forward. It redresses the opt-out from 2012, when David Cameron removed the need for academies to have QTS. Since that time, there has been a decade where children and young people have been taught in academies by unqualified staff. We assert that, in recognition of the preparation teachers must undergo, the term “teacher” should be reserved solely for use by those with QTS and that a person in training should have a separate designation. This amendment would ensure that all pupils in every school were taught by a qualified teacher.

The quality of the teacher is the most important factor in academic and non-academic attainment. Those of us in your Lordships’ House who have had the privilege of working in the profession would surely agree. Teachers need pedagogical content—knowledge—as well as a strong understanding of the material being taught. They must also understand the ways students think about the content, be able to evaluate the thinking behind students’ own methods and identify students’ common misconceptions. All these areas are covered in training teachers towards QTS: it is not just about having the knowledge and content of the subject itself; teachers must have knowledge and understanding of how children learn in order to convey that knowledge. There is quality of instruction, classroom climate, classroom management, teacher beliefs and professional behaviours, all of which impact on the quality of education experienced by our pupils.

The Government need to match the ambition of Labour’s national excellence programme. We have plans and visions for education: we will recruit thousands of new teachers to address vacancies and skills gaps across the profession; we will reform Ofsted to focus on supporting struggling schools; and we will ensure that the best, fully qualified teachers are in our schools by providing teachers and headteachers with continuing professional development and leadership skills training. This amendment would begin to address these current failings in the system.

Our Amendment 45 would mean that all multi-academy trusts were subject to Ofsted inspection. We want there to be more accountability for the decisions taken at MAT level, including the necessary interventions when there are failures within the trust. We recognise that Ofsted “summary evaluations” of MATs were introduced in 2018, but these are done only with trust consent. They offer no gradings, do not cover every trust and do not target those causing concern. Recent updates to the guidance on those inspections should help to broaden their remit and increase their volume. However, Ofsted itself has highlighted the need to go further, noting the “peculiarity” of not inspecting MATs on their governance, efficiency and use of resources.

The Labour Party proposes in this amendment that MAT inspections should include a proper assessment of leadership, governance and safeguarding arrangements. We also support the amendments moved by my noble friend Lord Hunt, which address the issue of “proper consultation”. Parents and staff need to be consulted at the beginning of any process. Additionally, we offer our support to Amendment 10 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, which would require a proprietor of two or more academies to establish a local governing body for each academy in its care, with a role for local authorities, parents and carers.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am attracted by the noble Baronesses’ Amendment 45. From a parent’s point of view, I think it is key that information should be available on what a multi-academy trust is about: what is its style, what are its beliefs, what atmosphere is it seeking to generate in a school? Within the structures of a multi-academy trust, particularly one that is strongly centrally controlled, this makes a great deal of difference to a school. In judging whether your child will flourish in and be supported by a school and will have their particular character and ambitions celebrated by a school, knowing how the multi-academy trust looks at things—not just the head teacher it has in place at that particular moment—is a really important part of the judgment. To have some narrative on that from Ofsted strikes me as being the best practical way of getting that information out to parents.

I am also attracted by the amendment proposed by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington. I have not seen, in my experience of running the Good Schools Guide, schools groups that successfully embrace schools of a really different character. Schools groups are human organisations; they need to have a philosophy of life, a way of doing things, and to have within them schools of radically different philosophy poses great challenges. I cannot recall an example of that being done successfully. Usually, one philosophy or the other comes to dominate, and that produces, in those schools that really do not belong with that philosophy, a lack of tone and performance which reduces their value to the children attending them. This is a really difficult thing to do well, and therefore I support the safeguards proposed by the noble Duke, the Duke of Wellington.

The Government have the whip hand in the end. They are providing the money and can push something through against opposition. If it is ridiculous, they will not find themselves in an Ampleforth situation, because they are the paymasters. However, I think the decision to push a specialist school into a generalist trust is one that ought always to be taken with a great deal of care, and that is what I think the noble Duke’s amendment would produce.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 2
Tuesday 12th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, I support Amendments 114 and 115. I recognise that the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, has made some very helpful points about the danger of pathologising and the need for collaboration between education and health, although she put it rather more as an either/or while I would want to see it more as a both/and.

I particularly thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman of Darlington and Lady Wilcox of Newport, for proposed new paragraph (c) in Amendment 115. The noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, and I could give the Committee a very good example of the work in local schools by the Darlington Area Churches Youth Ministry, which is outstanding when it comes to young people’s mental health and mental well-being. It is a voluntary charity that works in collaboration with schools. I am delighted that that was included.

While I acknowledge some of the concerns of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, I think these amendments are well thought through and would be of value.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I encourage the Government to look in the directions that Amendment 63 is looking in. Generally, having a school counsellor is very positive: it adds a lot to the spirit, education and good running of a school because it deals with those people who, left to themselves, would generate a lot of unhappiness in the structure.

To my mind, a school counsellor is generally enough, someone that you know you can go and talk to, but that counsellor has to be supported in two ways. First, they have to be supported by the whole culture and structure of the school. Everyone has to know that they are able to speak to them. There has to be an open structure of communication through to the counsellor so that information flows in, and everyone is aware that that person is there to help.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

In reply to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham, obviously we are talking about secondary schools. That should be in the amendment, and I am very pleased to have the opportunity to clear that up. We were not intending to suggest that there should be a minimum of 10 days’ work experience for primary school pupils, although they might have an awful lot of fun going out into the workplace.

On the issues highlighted by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, in Amendment 112, I enjoy the way she draws our attention to these things, but this time, I do not know whether she has the wrong end of the stick, I am being deliberately obtuse, or this is just a very boringly written amendment—if there is a zippier way of doing it, that would be fine—but this is all about awakening imagination.

My dad was a nurse, and I remember being at school, and saying this to my classmates when I was asked, and people laughing. I am sure that that does not happen anymore—this was the early 1980s—but too many people are still limiting their own possibilities because of a lack of awareness. There is plenty of evidence that career-based learning, as we are calling it here, or career-related learning, is not the same as careers advice, being asked to make decisions or eliminating options at a very early age. This is about awakening young children to all the amazing possibilities that exist, and whether that be in the arts or science or whatever, it is about broadening opportunities, not narrowing them.

On Amendment 113 we were challenged about work experience and the minimum of 10 days. To be clear, that does not have to be 10 days in one block. There are lots of innovative schemes now where people are going out for half a day a week, or where they start work experience younger in their school life and build up relationships with employers as appropriate. There are lots of ways of doing this now. What we find is that young people who are maybe more advantaged—whose parents have connections and whose schools have really good partnerships—get great experience. It benefits them when they are making important decisions about what to study and the choices that they make in the future. It also benefits them through exposure to ways of behaving in different workplaces. We find that less-advantaged young people do not, as often, get the benefit of that experience. Unless we make it a requirement or an entitlement, my fear is that this inequality will persist. This is something that can help; it is a contribution towards social justice and reducing inequality. We are totally committed to the provision of careers-related learning, however that might be done. It must not be dull—and I take the warnings of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, to heart here.

I highlight the second part of Amendment 113, which talks about looked-after children—I thought I might get asked about that actually, and I want to explain why it is there. I have felt for some time that local authorities are missing a trick in their corporate parenting role. Every young person I know who has parents who have got their own business is able to take advantage of work experience in that business, and other young people might make use of their parents’ contacts to secure opportunities. Looked-after children, whose corporate parent is the local authority, are too often unable to take advantage of opportunities to experience work in a council or other local public body. I think we can build on the good work that some local authorities are doing to fulfil that parenting responsibility, which most other parents try their best to do. There is a lot more that could be done. Some good work is happening, and it would be good if the Minister could commit to looking into that, and figure out whether that is something that the Government might want to encourage, so that we can see more of our looked-after children benefit from it.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, that is a really good suggestion, and I sense that the House is at one on what we are doing here.

I did my work experience down a coal mine—I think that broadened my experience a good deal, as a boy from Eton. One of my work shadows from Yorkshire was, until recently, a government Minister, so respect to him for getting there and also for not being there.

Work experience is a real mind-opener for people. When, under the guidance of the noble Lord, Lord Bassam, we did the report on seaside towns, one of the things we noticed all the way round the country was not a poverty of ambition in young people in seaside towns but a poverty of belief. All they saw was what was around them, and they did not believe that anything else was possible. To give them work experience outside that, and to bring in at primary level people who represent careers that are not obviously open to them, would be wonderful.

It is wonderful to do work experience with primary school children; they are so open. They are interested, chatty and fascinated. There is none of the, “Oh, whatever” that you get at secondary schools. Children’s minds are so open at primary school. I am delighted that we are moving in this direction, and I encourage my noble friend to carry this forward to whoever is in charge of things in a month’s time.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Garden, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox, for Amendments 64, 112 and 113, which raise the important topic of careers education in both primary and secondary schools.

I turn first to Amendments 64 and 112 regarding careers education in primary schools. The Government believe that careers education is essential to ensure that young people can make informed choices about their future learning and careers. To reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, she will be aware that the Government have long stressed the need for a broad and balanced curriculum, so I hope that some of the breadth she described is recognised in the curriculum, as set out today.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, for his warm welcome of the new grant funding that is now open for applications to deliver a programme of careers provision in disadvantaged primary schools. Having attempted to win round the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, I now know that I am going to lose her, because the programme will focus on three of the eight Gatsby benchmarks. I think one is exactly what the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, was talking about, in linking curriculum learning to careers. But here is where I think it might go downhill: we are facilitating meaningful age-appropriate employer encounters—I feel the ground giving way beneath my feet—and providing opportunities to experience a variety of workplaces. It will be a chance to encourage children to raise their hope and belief, as my noble friend Lord Lucas described, and, we hope, help them overcome any lack of confidence that might hold them back. The programme will target support for schools in the 55 education investment areas announced in the levelling-up White Paper, where educational outcomes are currently weakest.

In addition, Amendment 112 requires every secondary school to provide professional, in-person careers advice. From September this year we will commence the Education (Careers Guidance in Schools) Act 2022, which extends the duty to provide independent careers guidance to all pupils in all types of state-funded secondary schools throughout their secondary education.

It is also the case that our statutory guidance makes clear that schools should deliver their careers programmes in line with the Gatsby benchmarks. Benchmark 8 is focused on the delivery of personal guidance and makes it clear that every pupil should have opportunities for guidance interviews with a careers adviser. In addition, we are funding the Careers & Enterprise Company with £29 million during 2022-23 to help support schools and colleges to drive continuous improvement in the delivery of careers services for young people and to support it to deliver the Gatsby benchmarks.

Turning to Amendment 113, again I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Chapman and Lady Wilcox. Our careers statutory guidance for secondary schools has a clear framework, based on meeting the expectations in the Gatsby benchmarks. It requires that schools offer work placement, work experience and other employer-based activities as part of their career strategy, and it makes clear that secondary schools should also offer every young person at least seven encounters with employers during their secondary education. Through the Careers & Enterprise Company, more than 300 cornerstone employers are working with career hubs to bring businesses together with local schools and colleges. In addition, the enterprise adviser network of about 3,750 business professionals is working with schools and colleges to help ensure young people are offered quality interactions with employers throughout their secondary education.

For looked-after children specifically, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Chapman, referred, each school and local authority’s virtual school head has an important role to play in raising the aspirations of this group of young people, supporting them to think about their careers and prepare for adulthood. As the noble Baroness knows, each looked-after child should have a personal education plan, and local authorities have clear guidance that this should set out how a child’s aspirations and self-confidence are being nurtured, especially considering long-term goals, such as work experience and career plans. I should be delighted to discuss that further with the noble Baroness; I very much share her aspiration, and I hope we can work together to support and create the best opportunities for looked-after children, in particular. With that, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Shipley, to withdraw his amendment.

Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 18th July 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I am going to be very quick. I would like to speak to my Amendment 86B and later amendments which are essentially saying the same thing: that this Bill is dreadful and ought to be taken away and thought over completely.

Amendment 86B is to delete Clause 49 entirely because it is such a far-reaching clause that it will create a bureaucratic nightmare for thousands of families. At the same time, it will fail to achieve the Government’s stated policy aims. I am also completely puzzled about how overstretched local authorities will be able to implement these new powers and duties. Having been a local councillor, I know how hard they work and how overstretched they are already—even before the recent government cuts.

Overall, I am convinced that Clause 49 will turn out as a total legislative failure and will leave a trail of destruction that will probably be ignored because home-schooling families are a minority in this country. I wish the Government would see sense on this and support the deletion of this clause, as they have with significant other parts of the Bill which they acknowledge were also unworkable. Within that, I would like to include my deletion of other parts of the Bill in Amendments 93A, 95A and 95B.

Finally, on my Amendment 118C, the government amendments are a step in the right direction, but a long way from the necessary protection that families need from these new powers. A code of practice would address the data protection concerns that many parents have. I urge the Minister to think about that.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have several amendments in this group. If I were to say one thing to my noble friend the Minister, it is that I really hope the department will use the time it has while dealing with Part 1 to advance its thinking on the guidance and other aspects of the Bill so that, by the time it gets considered by the Commons, its thinking is rather more detailed and matured than what we have had the chance to look at. That would be a real help.

My noble friend Lord Wei raised some issues of true Conservative principle, which I hope home educators will find the opportunity to discuss with the candidates during August. Home education is a matter of freedom. Although the noble Lord, Lord Soley, and my noble friend both say that the Bill is supportive of home education, in many details it is not.

As my noble friend Lord Wei said, many letters are reaching us describing situations in which local authorities have been, frankly, abusive to home educators without any obvious good reason. I have pursued some of these matters with local authorities. I will not name the one I have talked to, but it is clear that they allow the difficulty that they have with some families to spill over into the way that they deal with those who are, on the face of it, doing a pretty good job—for instance, harassing a child who had a stroke aged six and saying that the child, rather than being cared for specially within their family, must be cast into school, not accepting independent reports about this child and saying that they must have more, different evidence. That is not in any way conducting their relationships in a supportive way. There have been cases where they have made really unpleasant remarks about home educators privately, and then, by mistake, copied others into emails. This shows that among a good number of local authorities there is a very unsatisfactory attitude to home education.

I am very keen that the Bill contain safeguards which put home educators, particularly good ones, in a position where they can reasonably hope to argue their case. We will come to some more details of that later. My noble friend Lord Wei espouses some true Conservative values of freedom and family which the Bill does not recognise sufficiently. One could also argue for efficiency, in that the best local authorities seem to do a very good job and, with the same money, go beyond what is achieved elsewhere by building up a pattern of trust which enables them not to spend time harassing people who are doing a good job.

The Bill as it is at the moment is not efficient, nor does it pay sufficient attention to all those occasions when the state is failing children. We have an amendment later, which I applaud, which says that children who have been excluded should not be placed in unregistered institutions. Oh, my golly—that is the state doing that. Why are we fussed about what good private educators are doing when there are things like that being done by the state?

There is a flavour in some of the remarks I have read from local authorities of a difficulty with difference which we should surely not allow. Local authorities have to deal with a lot of very different people, including Gypsies and others who choose to live a lifestyle which is not at all in accordance with the normal. Fear or dislike of difference should not be something one finds in a local authority. I entirely understand where the noble Lord, Lord Wei, is coming from, but my wish in the Bill is to find ways of improving it in its detail rather than attacking the principle of the register.

Amendment 65 looks at the

“means by which the child is being educated”.

That is widely seen—I think correctly—as permitting the Government to inquire deeply into the exact way in which a child is being educated. That is one of the ways the worst local authorities have adopted to oppress home educators. They ask for more and more detail. They ask for things that home educators are not doing, like having a timetable. There is a whole structure of education which is necessary in school but does not apply to home education. Home education can be centred on the child and be very different. The question is: is it effective and sufficient? Is it doing what it should do to bring out the qualities of the child? The structure of what is being provided should not be open to question and attack if the outcome is sufficient.

Amendments 65 and 66A suggest alternative ways of dealing with that, and in Amendment 66 we will come to another, when the right reverend Prelate speaks to it. With Amendment 66A, we are looking at a limit to who is providing the education. The Government want to know what outside people are providing the education that a child is receiving. That seems to me to be a reasonable bit of information to ask for, and is well short of the worrying implications of the wording as it is.

In Amendment 85, I come back to a subject I raised in Committee. One of the justifications for the register is so that we know what is happening to children. I find that quite persuasive, but if we are going to do that, we ought to know what is happening to all children in this country; we should not leave bits unexamined. At the moment, your standard independent school does not return data to the Department for Education on the children in its charge. I do not think it takes legislation to change that; it just takes the Government to decide that they want that, and to ask for it—they have the power. But if the justification for a register on home educators is that the Government ought to know what is happening to children, that same thought ought to apply to independent education too.

[The Lord Bishop of Carlisle]

My Lords, I speak on behalf of my right reverend friend the Bishop of St. Albans, who has two amendments in his name, Amendments 66 and 94. His name is also listed on Amendments 65 and 66A, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas.

Amendments 65, 66 and 66A continue to take issue with the proposals for details of the means by which a child is being educated to be included on the register. Amendment 66 would replace this with a determination of suitability, and provide for visits by the local authority for determining that suitability to be recorded. However, further to communication with the Department for Education and the Minister, we understand that their interpretation of the word “means” does not relate to the educational content or methods of home educating but simply to the providers of the education, since separate rules for registration will pertain to out-of-school education. We have been informed that this framework will be set out in the future statutory guidance. This is a much more positive interpretation than had previously been supposed, but if this is the interpretation I am not sure why it could not have been contained within the primary legislation rather than prescribed at a later date. Amendment 66A, from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would naturally resolve that problem.

We are most grateful for the Minister’s communications with the Bishops’ Bench to clarify this matter. However, the terminology remains unhelpfully ambiguous. I hope that the Minister can alleviate the concerns of home-schoolers and state on the record that this simply means inquiring into who is providing the education and not the substance of the education or the methods of teaching.

I turn now to Amendment 94, which would insert a new clause after Clause 50 and seeks to provide protection for the institution of home schooling against any undue or unfair interference. The proposed new clause would ensure that any contact between the local authorities and home-schoolers respects protected characteristics, as well as Article 2 of Protocol No. 1 to the European Convention on Human Rights, as in the Human Rights Act, in making sure that

“the State shall respect the right of parents to ensure such education and teaching in conformity with their own religious and philosophical convictions.”

The point is that the way in which this Bill is framed could be seen to cast a cloud of suspicion on all home educators. The noble Lords, Lord Lucas and Lord Wei, have already raised that point. Some parents are also worried that this register is the thin end of an invasive wedge that could lead to undue state prescription with regard to home schooling.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

74: Clause 49, page 45, line 24, at end insert—
“(A1) Local authorities must—(a) recognise that the first responsibility for educating a child lies with its parents,(b) be supportive of those who elect to educate their children at home,(c) recognise that home education is of itself not a safeguarding issue, and(d) acknowledge that in many instance the decision to home educate reflects failures by other institutions of the state.”

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 74 I will speak also to Amendments 75 and 78. It is important in the context of the relationship between local authorities and home educators that there is a very clear statement of that relationship. I have set out a couple of versions of that in Amendments 74 and 75. I would be content if this was to find its way to the top of the guidance, which is a document that both local authorities and home educators will need to be able to refer to and get clear guidance from. Amendment 74 contains a statement of the fundamentals of the relationship which seem important to me.

On Amendment 78, I will defer to the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, when she speaks to Amendment 77. I am thoroughly in support of what she is proposing. That home-educated children should be enabled to take exams has been a long-running problem and ought to be one of the things that we and local authorities are doing to support them.

I am also very much in favour of the amendments in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath and Lord Storey, and look forward to hearing from them. If we happen to have the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, on the line, which I hope we do, I think her direction of asking local authorities to take account of expert advice is important. I know of several occasions when local authorities have said, “It doesn’t count. It doesn’t matter. We’re interested only in what we hear directly from the parent. Expert advice is not something we listen to.” I do not think that is the right attitude; the attitude described by the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, is right. I beg to move.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, Amendment 77 is in my name, and I am delighted to have the support of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. This is a very modest amendment so I hope the Minister can agree it without too much difficulty—one always lives in hope in this place.

Home educators save the country thousands of pounds because they are not using state-funded education systems, but they often have difficulty finding a test centre for their children when they want to take public examinations, and when they do find one they have to pay exam fees, which can amount to hundreds of pounds, for the privilege of doing so. Of course, many home educators are not wealthy and struggle to find the money for the fees, but surely home-educated children are as entitled as other children to have public recognition of their learning in the form of examinations. This amendment would guarantee that home-educated pupils had a place at which to sit their national exams and financial assistance to ensure that no child is denied recognition of achievement because their parents cannot afford the fees.

As I say, it is a very modest amendment and I hope the Minister will look on it favourably.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Penn (Con)]

That is very much appreciated. I also pass on to my noble friend the Minister the thanks of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, for engaging with home educators. I emphasise that we see that as a very important part of the process for the Bill.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am glad to hear that the Government continue to give thought to the question of an independent appeal. The current system, where the first appeal goes to the local authority, is obviously right; you want to resolve as much as you can without going outside. But, beyond that, the idea that the Secretary of State provides a satisfactory route of appeal really does not stand up. First, there are far too many relationships between the Department for Education and local authorities to allow independence. Secondly, I believe I am right—although the Minister may contradict me if she wishes—that, in the entire history of this right of appeal, the Secretary of State has not granted any, but he has come down in favour of the local authority on every single occasion. That may or may not be true—as I say, I hope the Box will be able to confirm it when we return to this issue in two groups’ time—but that there should be an independent appeal is important.

My noble friend Lord Wei’s proposal for an ombudsman is one that should be considered, although there are others. One way or another, there should be a point where someone truly independent casts their eye over what the home educator is doing and how the local authority has handled it and says either, “Yes, come on: get into line,” or “No, I can see here that the local authority has pushed things too far and ought to take a step or two back.” That would make a big contribution to keeping the relationship straight between home educators and local authorities.

I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Storey—I apologise if it was not—who said earlier that this bit of the Bill meant that local authorities had to give support. I can see nothing that makes it compulsory. I hope we will get the Government to give this a budget so there is an indication that support ought to be given, but at the moment I do not believe there is anything compulsory about it.

My noble friend Lady Penn said local authorities could consult a doctor when they consider it appropriate. I think the right balance is that the home educators ought to be able to able to evince that evidence when they consider it appropriate too, and the local authority ought then to pay attention to it. From cases that I have seen, I rather doubt that that is the arrangement at the moment. However, as my noble friend asked, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 74 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

I have spent most of my life in and around the health service, and we know that current mental health services for young people are, frankly, grossly inadequate. The long waits and the scandal of in-patient care hundreds of miles from home are indications of the issue that we face. I know the Government have put money in and are anxious to see improvements, but the fact is that on the ground helping young people to get access to mental health services can be very challenging. All I am asking is that in the guidance, and in the code that I am suggesting, there is a clear indication to local authorities that in those circumstances they have to be sympathetic to the needs of a child and their parents if they are receiving health treatment and there are issues about attendance. I beg to move.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 82 in this group, asking that local authorities give reasons when they choose to deviate from guidance. I hope this will be dealt with in guidance rather than in the Bill, but it is important that both local authorities and home educators come to regard the guidance as something to which they can resort for support. Therefore, when local authorities need to go outside the guidance, as they may, that should be clearly explained.

I very much support the amendments that the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, has proposed, in particular Amendment 81. It is important that there is a strong set of guidance around attendance. This is a change of structure for local authorities. They are taking on much more of a responsibility that was formerly shared with schools. We will need them to reach deeper into the reasons for non-attendance and to deploy other strengths that local authorities have to deal with those reasons, going well beyond the usual educational provision. To have a set of guidance that enables them to do that well and to have ways of sharing good experience will be really helpful. In the next group we come to the punitive side of this. We really ought to be strong in making sure that as few families as possible get tipped into that, and guidance seems to be a clear part of that.

I have one question on government Amendment 99, which applies to regulations passed

“before the end of the session of Parliament in which the Schools Act 2022 is passed.”

I wonder whether it should refer just to the first passing of the guidance. Given the extended timescale on this Bill and the consultations we hope to have, it may run beyond that. The Government are really saying that they do not want this to last for ever. It should cover the first issuing of regulations, whenever that may happen to occur, and we should not have to rush things just because we have this in the Bill. If it is passed next year, will it still be the Schools Act 2022 or will it be the Schools Act 2023?

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I support the thrust of these amendments. They follow on from my noble friend Lady Brinton’s amendment on the fact that specialist guidance and help will be needed. The education sector is going into an area where it does not expect to have the expertise readily at hand. It may have to go and find it, and the parents are often the people who have done the finding. I hope that, when the Minister comes to answer, the Government will give us a little insight into how they expect to handle this process. We are talking about often very seldom-occurring incidents, which means that we cannot expect there to be group memory. These are incidents occurring not only infrequently but over long periods of time; certain combinations of events come through. Stress tends to trigger mental health incidents. If a child happens to have been failing at school, they and their parents will have more stress. It does not take a genius to take it to the next step. I hope the Minister will give us an idea of the Government’s thinking and how they are proposing to address these very real concerns.

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Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

87: Clause 50, page 48, line 39, leave out from beginning to end of line 1 on page 49 and insert “has repeatedly and without good reason failed to provide the information or substantially all of the information despite clear evidence that they have received the requests.”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment is to reserve penalties under this Clause for substantial misbehaviour.

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[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, in moving this amendment I will also speak to my other amendments in this group. This group is looking at the stage of the process at which penalties start to come in. I feel that the wording of the Bill is at the moment far too hair-trigger. The words that Amendment 87 seeks to replace mean that a local authority must tip a home-educating parent, or a parent, into the school attendance order process if they have failed to provide any scintilla of information. That could be anything; it could just be that they have spelt something wrong or have not got the date right, or whatever, and does not seem appropriate.

I am not sure that the Government will find my wording appropriate either, but we ought to look to soften this to make it clear that for these hard-pressed parents, an ordinary error of forgetfulness or a failure which does not find its roots in opposition or deliberate obfuscation should not be punished immediately. It should be something the local authority should seek to engage with.

I came across one example where the local authority had been corresponding with a good home-educating parent and had decided that it really wanted to see examples of the child’s work. It is one of those arguable questions you come across as to whether the experts’ report that had been provided should have been sufficient. It did not then e-mail the parent to say, “If you continue in this, we will tip you into school attendance orders”. It wrote by snail mail, to an address which was wrong, and made no other reference to it until six months later when the school attendance order appeared. There needs to be a much more active relationship and there should not be things in the Bill which make a lazy relationship between the local authority and parents acceptable. The local authority ought to be working with the parent to get things right.

Amendment 88 seeks to restore the current timescale of 15 days, rather than the 10 days in the Bill. This is the crucial step; it is the point when things get serious. Parents ought to be given a reasonable length of time and 15 days is what is accepted. The Government have argued us out of all sorts of other extensions of timescales, but this one is crucial.

Amendments 90 and 92 come back to the subject of a tribunal, which we have covered. It is really important that the Government do something. I am with the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton, on Amendment 95 in wanting to reduce the maximum prison sentence to three months.

In Amendment 97, I am urging the Government to provide proper funding to local authorities as they take on these additional duties on school attendance. Particularly post Covid, this is clearly a complicated problem with its roots in all sorts of aspects of society. Local authorities ought to be properly supported to get it right and become really effective at helping children to get into school.

I also look forward to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, speaking to Amendment 100. He has put his finger on a really serious thing there.

My Amendment 110 suggests that Ofsted should be able to inspect local authorities on their performance with elective home education and absence. I do not want all these things we have suggested to come into force—it would just be ridiculous to have everything—but we need some structure for oversight of local authorities, so that they feel motivated to improve. Ofsted might be one of the options, so I hope that the Government will keep that under consideration.

I look forward to what other people will have to say on this group and beg to move my Amendment 87.

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[Baroness Barran (Con)]

That was in relation to illegal settings, and we hope that is straightforward. Alternative provision education is delivered in other settings—as the noble Lord has rightly drawn attention to—which do not receive state funding, are not required to register as an independent school, and do not meet, currently, the requirements for registration. The noble Lord is aware, I think, that in the special educational needs and disabilities and alternative provision Green Paper, we made a commitment to strengthening protections for children and young people in unregistered alternative provision settings, so that every placement is safe, offers good-quality education and has clear oversight. If I understand correctly, that is exactly what the noble Lord also aspires to.

I am pleased to report that on 11 July the department issued a call for evidence on the use of unregistered alternative provision settings. Again, I place on record my thanks to the noble Lord for his insistence and persistence on this very important issue, which is important, as he pointed out, for children whose parents may not have the confidence to challenge the system. The information collected will help us find the right solution that addresses these concerns effectively and proportionately.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Mendelsohn, for his Amendments 97A, 118J and 118K, and for the very constructive way that we have been able to work together. I hope we can continue to work together to address the points that he has raised. We have worked with Ofsted to develop the package of measures to investigate illegal schools, to ensure that we can take effective action against unlawful behaviour. Since Ofsted started investigating unregistered schools in 2016, we have gained a much better understanding of how to tackle this sector. There have been six successful prosecutions. The number of cases investigated reflects an increase in efforts to investigate. The actual number of unregistered schools, as the noble Lord knows, is unknown, sadly, but the measures in this Bill have been developed—working together with Ofsted—to address the key issues in the sector, which the noble Lord has rightly drawn attention to.

We believe that Amendment 97A is not necessary as we can already prosecute companies and charities which are operating schools unlawfully. We already inform the Charity Commission when charities are prosecuted. Education and childcare behaviour orders will allow courts to prevent individuals from continuing to operate from buildings that have been used for illegal schools. When we were developing the measures, we also looked at whether it would be appropriate to create measures which would allow action against landlords, in the way that the noble Lord’s amendment has set out. This is a very complex area, and we concluded that education and childcare behaviour orders, which could prevent those convicted of an offence from continuing to operate from a given site, were the more appropriate mechanism.

Amendment 118J replicates powers that Ofsted already has. Genuine part-time settings are not under a statutory obligation to register, so would not be caught by the proposed amendment. There is ongoing engagement between the department, Ofsted and other stakeholders on the effectiveness of measures to tackle unregistered schools. The effectiveness of the legislation will be kept under review. The need for accountability suggested by Amendment 118K is, we believe, best secured through the annual report that Ofsted presents to Parliament.

Finally, I turn to Amendment 110, in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas. We believe that this amendment is unnecessary as existing provisions—specifically in Section 136 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 and in Clause 65 of the Bill—already ensure that new local authority education functions under the Bill will be within scope of Ofsted’s inspection powers. I therefore ask my noble friend Lord Lucas to withdraw Amendment 87 and hope that other noble Lords will not move theirs.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for that extensive explanation and her many good answers. I am delighted, too, that she is being so supportive of the campaign of the noble Lord, Lord Storey.

With regard to her last answer in relation to Amendment 110, I look forward to sharing with her the correspondence I have had with the chief inspector, who takes a different view, but this can be remedied later in the passage of the Bill if the chief inspector is right. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 87 withdrawn.

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[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, I am speaking to the two amendments we have in this group: Amendments 118G and 118H. I thank my noble friend Lady Lawrence for making some extremely salient points which I will refer to subsequently.

To the noble Lord, Lord Storey, I would like to explain that Amendment 118G will require every academy to follow the national curriculum. We have the list of things we would like to talk about because of the inherent contradictions we have found in this Bill. We have been trying to work around them and are attempting to fill the gaps as best we can. As the Government were clearly intent on a sweeping approach, we felt it was imperative that those issues be included in the national curriculum.

Amendment 118H would compel the Secretary of State to

“work with the devolved administrations”,

as noted by my noble friend Lady Lawrence, to launch and publish a review into teaching about diversity in the curriculum and

“to ensure that teaching of British history includes but is not limited to … Black British history … colonialism, and … Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.”

The English education system could learn a great deal from Wales in this matter. Our new curriculum will be launched this September. The new mandatory elements of the curriculum, in particular the teaching of the experiences and contributions of people from minority backgrounds, will broaden the education of every child in Wales so it better reflects the experiences of the whole population of Wales. Educating young people about the experiences and contributions of minority ethnic peoples in Wales, past and present, will promote lasting change aimed at tackling broader inequalities within society. I urge the Minister to support this aspect of our range of amendment suggestions.

In conclusion, we also support Amendment 101 proposed by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, and other noble Lords. The values of British citizenship should include important elements, not least democracy and the rule of law—an important lesson learned by some Members of the other place in recent weeks.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, for explaining her amendment to us. I am liberal rather than post-modern; I believe in the objective being one united society where we are all equal, rather than in the fractured values which her amendment proposes. It is really important that what we teach in schools covers all our experiences and all the threads that make up the UK. The English ought to learn a great deal more about the Welsh and Scots, for a start.

One of the fundamental problems, illustrated in the dispute with OCR over its poetry curriculum, is that we have allowed our examination system to become far too narrow. Yes, a thread of the undisputed greats in literature ought to run through things, as well as the thread of our history that used to consist of learning the names and dates of kings but is actually rather more interesting. Within them are the stories of us all—and that really ought to be us all.

To manage that within a school curriculum, you need a lot more freedom than we allow people at the moment, not less. We should not have a national curriculum that says, “These are the five things that you must teach”, but one with the ability to stretch broadly, bring things in and illustrate them and, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, enrich people’s local experience with things that mean something to them. I support the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, in his endeavours.

My noble friend Lord Sandhurst will know that I am very much with him on his amendments, and I am delighted to find myself with the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, in what he is asking for. The noble Lord says that he is surprised to discover that the Lords is cool. For those of us who come from the west, we walk in every day past a notice that says, “Peers entrance”. Indeed they do. The problems he outlines remind me a lot of what goes on with sexual abuse in schools. The answer is to face it, look at it and really be interested in, not afraid of, what is going on. We should be confident that we do not want it to be that way. We should not expect quick solutions so that we can forget about it, but know that this will take us a good long while to sort out and that it has some deep roots. I would really like to see the Government take some steps in the sort of direction the noble Lord proposes.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, for Amendment 101. As he knows, we support the principles at the heart of this amendment and agree that teaching staff and leadership in schools need to understand the important role that fundamental British values play in our society and beyond.

I think he is making two points: one about curriculum content and one about the quality of the delivery of that curriculum. The Government believe our current arrangements provide a sound basis for this. As your Lordships know, schools have a duty, as part of providing a broad and balanced curriculum, to promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development. Those principles are embedded in the Independent School Standards, teacher standards and Ofsted inspections.

As to the comments on the environment, our ambitious sustainability and climate change strategy publicly addresses the importance of teaching about the environment. This includes teaching topics related to climate change, covered within the citizenship, science and geography national curriculum.

We have prioritised helping schools to remain focused on recovery from the pandemic. This is why we undertook in the schools White Paper not to make any curriculum changes during this Parliament. The noble and right reverend Lord referred to the comments of the Chief Inspector of Schools about what she and her colleagues had seen in schools on the teaching of these subjects. We expect schools to take those comments very seriously and respond to them.