Home School Education Registration and Support Bill [HL]

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Friday 15th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for giving us the opportunity of looking at this Bill. I am a long-term supporter of home education, though I confess I have never had the courage to try it myself. I declare an interest as the proprietor of the Good Schools Guide, which covers home education and the best online schools. In that context, I may well stray over the four-minute ideal, but I think this is an important area to deal with since, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, says, we are likely to see this in the upcoming government Bill.

Home education is a very varied world; there is a great deal of good practice, some problematic areas and very little data. Therefore, a review, in this Bill or otherwise, is really timely. We should approach home education with both humility and respect. With respect because the parents who are taking this on are taking on a huge responsibility and a great deal of work, relying almost entirely on their own resources, and many parents I know have done so with huge success for their children. With humility because, despite the state’s resources and all the improvements that have been in the last 30 years in state education, we still have failing schools. Special educational needs, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, is still a mess and alternative provision is not what it should be.

We are far from perfect and we should understand imperfection in others. However, we should approach home education with confidence in our culture. Children have a right to education and a right to be part of society. Just because someone is a follower of the Taliban, it does not give them—in this country—the right to treat their children in the way the Taliban do. Based on that confidence, we should have confidence in accommodating difference—as indeed we do. I have been around some truly astonishing—in terms of what they are teaching the children—Catholic and Church of England schools. But, fine—we can live with that, as long as they are not closing their children off from a full education and from the world.

In dealing with religious authorities, we should negotiate with confidence and strength. We should approach the whole thing with support. Home education is a huge challenge, even if it is something you have chosen. And, as the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, it very often is not—it is because of some failing in the state system, and parents being determined that their child should not suffer from it.

I very much feel that the best way of interacting with home education is by making home-educated children visible, and by offering them support. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, says, there are many excellent examples of local authorities which will provide support in mathematics, which is always difficult for someone who does not have that skill to teach. Sport offers other ways of getting together and making the children visible, making it easier to see which children are thriving.

Yes, some local education authorities do this really well, and the result is that the money local authorities spend is mostly spent doing good, and the families that are not thriving in home education become immediately visible, because they are not participating. The money and the focus of helping children can just be on the children who really need it.

Other authorities, however, in my experience, are positively demonic and it really is up to the DfE to hold the ring. We must have clear requirements and a clear understanding of what both parents and local authorities are meant to do. It must be clearly expressed, so that there are no arguments over the language. We must have had the opportunity of extensive discussions about it. We must make it easy for people from the local authority to act with confidence, to know that their judgments—that, yes, this family is doing well—will not be questioned. We must have a confident appeals process, we must gather data—as we are not doing at the moment—and, when something is going wrong, we must deal with the rogues crisply.

And so to the Bill. A register must be of all children in the country, not just home-educated children. There are some dark corners of state education that are really not well enough documented. We must document children in private schools better than we do at the moment; they are not included in the national schools census.

I have some substantial problems with the wording of Bill. If the Government wish to proceed with the Bill, or with their own, a meeting would save a great deal of parliamentary time.