Vulnerable Children

Lord Warner Excerpts

Thursday 14th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Warner (CB)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, on securing this debate and her passionate advocacy.

The commissioner has already shown that about a quarter of all children in England have a wide range of vulnerabilities that we should be concerned about. I suspect that progress on tackling this would be facilitated if the Minister’s department could progress faster the adoption of a common identifier for children’s services, based on the NHS number. Can he tell us, or write to me, about where things stand on this long-standing issue?

This initiative will raise big questions about how we use our resources for vulnerable children, and the adequacy of those resources, as other noble Lords have said. We need to take a long, hard look at many of our public policies, which can put children at greater risk. I strongly suspect that we put too much of our effort into trying to cope with deeply embedded problems rather than moving upstream, with more attention being given to earlier interventions and tackling poor and ill-informed parenting.

I turn briefly to three interlinked risk areas that I have been exploring: unregistered schools, home tuition and madrassahs. First, unregistered schools: Ofsted has identified 286 unregistered schools in the past 18 months but only 116 have been inspected, with warning notices issued to 36. The Institute for Jewish Policy Research estimates that 1,400 strictly Orthodox children aged 11 to 15 are being educated in illegal Jewish schools at any one time. Ofsted estimates that about 6,000 children are attending illegal schools in England, but we do not know the true number. The previous and current Ofsted chief inspectors are clearly very concerned about the narrow religious curriculum of the schools—nearly all Muslim or Haredi Jewish—and the unsuitable books and texts being used.

Although it is a criminal offence to operate an unregistered school, recent Answers to my parliamentary Questions show that no operators have ever been prosecuted. This, Ofsted tells me, is because successful prosecutions cannot be brought as there is no satisfactory legal definition of a school. What are the Minister and his department going to do to ensure that prosecutions can be brought at scale to safeguard the thousands of children in illegal, unregistered schools? If he cannot answer today, perhaps we should have a meeting.

My second area of concern is the rapidly growing, unregulated area of home tuition, now provided to nearly 30,000 children. The noble Lord, Lord Soley, is to be commended for endeavouring to tackle the problem in this area with his excellent Private Member’s Bill, which has attracted a high level of external and cross-party support. I see no case for opposing registration in this area as a basis for some light-touch regulation. When an area of unregulated public policy is expanding as rapidly as is home tuition, Governments need to sit up and pay attention to what is going on. It is unlikely to all be good. The Minister was unduly cautious in his response to the speeches at Second Reading.

Finally, I turn briefly to madrassahs, which the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, said unequivocally in November 2015 should be registered. The Department for Education then engaged in a public consultation on the issue. We have not heard much since on what the Government will do. The silence was explained when the most reverent Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury told this House last Friday—rather dubiously proudly, I thought—how he had intervened. As far as I could make out, his opposition to registration was because it would be inconvenient for Sunday schools, despite his acknowledgement that children were being put at risk.

We know that some madrassahs, like unregistered schools and some faith schools, pose a threat to children because of what they teach, the materials they use and their complete absence of support for British values. The current and previous Ofsted chief inspectors have expressed repeated and very clear concerns about the excessive focus on faith-based education, particularly a distorted interpretation of particular faiths and how it poses serious risks to children. Will the Minister and his department listen to the chief inspectors or to the most reverent Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury when it comes to protecting children in this country on this issue? When will we know whether the Government will pursue the policy of the previous Conservative Prime Minister in the area of madrassahs?