Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Soley Excerpts

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

I ask the Minister to reflect on this regime she is bringing in. I am pleased to see that she has ministerial responsibility for home education, so I am not just talking to the person responsible for taking the Bill through—this is also in her policy brief. I remember as a Minister that you would make the basic, principled decision about the policy and then have to trust officials to draft the legislation accordingly. I know that she is a listening Minister. I hope that, as part of her reflections on how regulation is being used generally in the Bill, she can include whether regulation is being used too liberally and whether the Secretary of State is taking on too many powers, which in the end they would pass on to local authorities, some of whom—a minority—might use them in a draconian fashion.

[Lord Soley (Lab)]

If I may come in at this stage, I first thank the Government for putting in this Bill my original Private Member’s Bill, as they said they would. It was brought before this House in 2017—a mere five years ago—and went through with support on all sides and the key bit of it, of course, was to create a register. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, for this, as well as the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, the first Minister I dealt with, and the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, who also understood my argument and supported it. I also thank the clerk to the House who helped me draft it in the first instance, even though I have forgotten some of the things they drafted. It was well drafted and I was pleased about that. I see that most of it is in the Bill, which is great. I also thank my noble friends Lady Morris and Lord Knight, who have been very supportive on this, and others, including the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who came up to me the other day and said, “Clive, you’ve won”. I thought that was some sort of accolade. I am not sure I have won yet—I want to see the Bill on the statute book before I leave this place. That is what I am after.

I have just a couple of points. I will want to return to this issue, probably on Amendment 112A in my noble friend’s name, because there is the question about the appeal process which we need to look at. I will perhaps speak on that when we come to that amendment. On this group, the important point, which the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, made very well, is that there is a right to home educate. I have never had any doubt about that; I have supported it fully, and that right is clear. Again, the fact that this is in the Bill is one of its positives. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, was keen on that too. I want to make clear that it is very important that we see this as a supportive measure, not a punitive one—supportive of parents who are home educating either by choice or because of necessity.

One of the things I learned in promoting my Bill back in 2017 and 2018, when I consulted very widely—with remote meetings on Zoom and other things, meetings in this House and individual meetings with people who are home educating—is that I would put home educators broadly into three, very rough groups. There are a group who do it extremely well, are very keen on doing it and, frankly, are likely to give their children a better education than you get almost anywhere else. Then there are probably the biggest group, who are doing it either because they want to try it out and see if they can do it or—this is very common—because they have special problems of one type or another. They are not necessarily the child’s problem; it may be a problem with the school or the local authority, which parents feel, rightly or wrongly, cannot deliver the education they think their child needs. They are a very big group. Then there are this thankfully very small, but profoundly worrying, group who do it for all the wrong reasons. One reason might be radicalisation. I want to emphasise here that it is not just Islam, which people tend to think of; I have been given examples in the Christian and Jewish faiths of unreasonable behaviour or radicalisation. We perhaps need to remember something I have said to people a number of times about religion: God is an idea, and there either is or is not one, but religion is more like an ideology. Of course, with ideology, people have different interpretations. As I say, in Christianity, Judaism and Islam, I have seen examples of abuse and radicalisation. It is important that we look at it in that way and not just at one particular religious group.

In the course of that consultation, I had other letters which were very deeply moving. I remember one man who wrote to me, who I think was in his 30s or 40s. He said, “I don’t want to criticise my parents. They home educated me and they really meant well, but it meant I never mixed with other children and I ended up profoundly lonely. I’m still a very shy person and I find it difficult to hold down jobs and mix in company.” There are all sorts of things to consider, and that is why I say the provisions on home education have to be supportive in a way. If the parents are trying to do it well but are missing out on certain opportunities that might be available, it is the child who loses as well. The support aspect of this, which we might spend more time on later, is very important. One thing that education authorities have to be much better at is finding out what level of support the parent and the child need and providing that. It might be some of the obvious things, such as support in more complex subjects such as physics or maths, but it might also be simply having a way for the child to mix with others who are learning and dealing with the problems of isolation and loneliness.

However, in that more extreme group, there are people who sadly take the child out of school for abuse reasons, either sexual or physical. The Minister will know that a couple of children have been starved to death under the guise of home education, and that the parents are not necessarily caught until it is too late. The views of the noble Lord, Lord Laming, on this are well worth listening to, having chaired the Climbié report and others. We might well come back to this when we touch on Amendment 112A, but it is important to remember that there will be examples where the parents try to deny the education authority access to the child, yet if it does not have access to the child it not only cannot tell how much education is being delivered to enable the child to survive in modern society—basics such as reading, writing, arithmetic and so on—but cannot tell whether the child is physically well. I do not in any way want to imply that this is a social welfare measure. It is not; it is an education measure. But just as in health, where we make sure that parents of newborn children can be seen to ensure that the child is developing properly, in education this role for the local authority is essential in modern society. The local authority needs to be able to make sure that the child is getting their education. Some of the examples I had were particularly tragic; the child was being abused, radicalised, used virtually for slave labour, or in some cases trafficked. It is for that reason that we need this register.

I got quite a few strong criticisms from people who felt I was being unnecessarily authoritarian by insisting on a register, but I ask those people to understand that there is a balance between the rights of the child and the rights of the parent. At the end of the day, the rights of the child should always triumph. The parent who insists that the local authority is somehow or other abusing its powers if it asks to see how the child’s education is progressing is missing the point about the welfare of the child. That is extremely important. I do not wish to say much more on this at this point.

I agree with the point made by my noble friend Lord Knight and with quite a few made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, as well. However, before I speak again, on Amendment 112A, I emphasise on this group: please can we make sure that this is done as a supportive measure—supportive of the children and of the parent—to make sure that the child is getting a good education and is properly able to develop while enabling those parents, many of whom want to do this well but who struggle to do it as well as they can? One of the other ways they need help is that if you have three or four home-educated children sitting exams, it is an expensive business, whereas if we could bring them into a system where they were able to sit exams under local authority procedures, or whatever, the costs for those families who are not so well off would not be such a major factor.

The Minister will be grateful for a few thanks here, but thanks go to the Government for bringing this in. I will not go away until I have seen it on the statute book so I will stick around for a bit, but after that I will be glad to say that this was a good bit of legislation with regard to home educators—and a necessary bit that we should have done long ago.

I end by saying that one of the reasons I have some knowledge of this is nothing to do with my knowledge of education generally, which, frankly, is very poor. However, many years ago, before I came into the House of Commons, I was a probation officer, and one of the things I learned was that if you took a child out of school you could hide abuse. When you have seen cigarette burns on a child, you know that this is a serious matter.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, I rise with some trepidation because schools and education are not my areas, and when I hear the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lords, Lord Soley and Lord Knight, saying something and I do not quite agree, I pause. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Soley, on getting something close to his original Bill through. I hope I have the same success with my clean air Bill, which will come up in July. It is good to see such a broad coalition of Peers with concerns about this part of the Bill on the so-called children not in school register, who are bringing so many amendments to this part of the Bill.

I disagree slightly with the noble Lord, Lord Soley; no, in fact I probably do not. He talked about the three groups, but part of the problem is that the Government are trying to fix all three with one piece of legislation, and they are extremely different. We should be trying to find children who will receive no education or a dangerously poor education. However, the net is cast far too wide and it risks trapping many home-educating families within a web of unnecessary bureaucracy and red tape. I am standing up to speak on this only because some of my grandchildren were home educated and it has served them extremely well, so I feel that I have a voice in this.

A great many families are worried about this prospect in the Bill, and I am sure that they have contacted many noble Lords about their concerns. Some concerns are fairly simple, such as the time limits being too short and the registration requirements being unclear. However, others are much deeper, such as the breadth of discretion granted to local authorities to decide whether a child is receiving an adequate home education or should be subjected to a school attendance order. If the Government’s intention is to extend the grasp of the state into the lives of home-educating families, they should be explicit about it, but so far the Government justify this policy as being about helping children who are not receiving any education. If that really is the policy intent, there must be a better way of legislating for it than this bureaucratic mess.

I am sorry—I should have thanked the Minister for meeting me and two concerned people. I have not seen any letters in return but I am sure that they are winging their way.