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.