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.

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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.

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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.