Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Wei Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and to give a nod to his amendment. I rise to speak to my Amendment 499 in this group, the purpose of which is incredibly clear: every child is entitled to an excellent education, but that does not mean that every child should receive the same education. The great joy of being born human is that we are born with rich, bright, beautiful diversity from the moment of entering this human world.

The difficulty with the Bill as set out is that it does not fully appreciate this fact or the difficulties parents have in achieving that excellence of provision for their children. In no sense is that a criticism of anybody in the system. Teachers do tremendous work, day in, day out, often in the most pressing, difficult of circumstances. This amendment is all about recognising the particularity of individual provision—not least for children and young people who may be disabled or have special educational needs—the difficulty for parents in trying to get an EHCP, and the often prohibitive cost involved, even if they can go through that time-consuming and terribly intense process.

The amendment simply asks the Secretary of State to produce a focused, “support-first” attendance code of practice that understands the particularities of those circumstances and that does not have an almost forced presumption that school is necessarily the best and only place for excellent educational provision. As I say, the amendment speaks to children, young people and parents across the piece, but it is often children who are disabled, who have special educational needs, and the parents of those children, who find themselves at the sharpest end of this current situation. That is why Amendment 499 suggests a support-focused, support-first attendance code of practice. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

[Lord Wei (Con)]

My Lords, I rise in support of Amendment 499, tabled by my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond, which would require the Secretary of State to issue a statutory attendance code of practice. I believe this is a modest proposal, yet one that could transform how attendance is enforced and supported across England.

First, I thank my noble friend Lord Lucas for stepping in for me last week, when I was unable to be here due to a family wedding. My own attendance record that day did not pass without comment. In fact, when the Whips discovered that the wedding was taking place on the Tuesday, business seemed to be swiftly and suspiciously rescheduled from Monday to Tuesday. In any case, I was unable to attend, but I am grateful none the less both to colleagues and to the staff of the House for their patience with me. My amendments have been submitted in large numbers, and some were received with humour, others less so, but they all make in their different ways the same point. At their heart lies concern about the overreach of this Bill and the heavy burden it will place on families and already overstretched local authority staff and systems.

Talking about attendance, practice across the country is wildly inconsistent, at present. One parent reported that, in their local authority, they have a 75% chance of being issued with a notice to satisfy, and a 35% chance of receiving a school attendance order. That authority issued 270 notices in a single year to just 320 home-educated children. In other areas, parents face nothing like this. This does not seem like safeguarding to me; it is a postcode lottery, and it is indefensible.

The current approach, regrettably, often defaults to enforcement and sanctions, rather than genuinely seeking to understand and address the underlying reason for unattendance. Over the summer, it was reported that Hampshire County Council had netted £1.6 million in revenue by fining families over the past three years. Government data shows that almost half a million penalty notices were issued last year, an increase of 22% from the previous year. This can exacerbate distress, erode trust between families and schools and, ultimately, fail to secure a child’s right to education.

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Moved by

[Lord Wei]

426D: After Clause 35, insert the following new Clause—
“Sharing local authority best practice on home education(1) All local authorities must provide an annual report to the Secretary of State setting out—(a) the total number of home educators in their area (A),(b) the number of complaints they have received from home educators in the preceding year (B), and(c) the number of School Attendance Orders they have issued in the preceding year (C).(2) The Secretary of State must make funding and resources available to any local authority which performs in the top ten percent of both—(a) B as a percentage of A, and(b) C as a percentage of A,to facilitate those local authorities sharing best practice regarding management of home education with local authorities performing in the bottom ten percent of the same metrics.”

[Lord Wei (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to speak in support of Amendments 426D and 426E tabled in my name. These amendments, though modest in scope, address two fundamental issues in the way that our system interacts with families who choose to home-educate or educate otherwise: the sharing of best practice across local authorities and safeguarding children from harm that may arise when legal action is pursued without due regard for their welfare and education.

Amendment 426D would require all local authorities to provide an annual report to the Secretary of State setting out three simple but highly revealing metrics:

“the total number of home educators in their area … the number of complaints they have received from home educators … and … the number of School Attendance Orders they have issued”.

These figures are important because they shed light on how local authorities are engaging with families. They provide a means of comparison, showing where relationships are constructive and where perhaps mistrust and conflict are more frequent. This amendment goes further: it would introduce a mechanism to reward local authorities that demonstrate strong positive performance under these measures—specifically, those in the top 10%—and whose complaints and attendance orders are low relative to the number of families. They would receive funding and support to share their best practice with authorities that find themselves in the bottom 10%. This is not about penalising weaker authorities but about equipping them to learn from others, improve their systems of engagement and, ultimately, foster more trusting relationships with home educators.

While I have mainly focused in Committee on the problems that arise when local authorities overreach, it is important to recognise that there are many examples of thoughtful and constructive engagement which deserve to be commended. Parents have spoken warmly of meetings in which their children have felt valued. One child enjoyed showing his work after initial hesitation, turning what might have been a stressful encounter into a positive one. Authorities such as Salford have invested in training staff to understand diverse approaches, from structured to child-led learning, while families in Cambridge have noted that their efforts to educate officials about progressive methods have borne fruit. Portsmouth has piloted three-way meetings between school, parent and LA to support families considering elective home education, fostering collaboration rather than conflict.

Other good practice includes the creation of parental advisory boards—informal events where families and officials meet in a supportive environment—and commitments to provide local exam centres and fairer access to resources. These examples remind us that, when authorities choose partnership over prescription, families respond positively and children thrive. In my view, this is precisely the sort of light-touch but constructive intervention that respects both the duties of local authorities and the rights of parents. It recognises that the challenges of home education are best addressed not by top-down prescription but by the careful exchange of experience, knowledge and good practice.

Amendment 426E is motivated by an equally important principle: that the welfare and education of the child must always come first. It makes it clear that no parent should be subject to criminal prosecution, penalty or sanction under the provisions of this Bill, if such legal action would cause harm to their child’s welfare or, on balance, cause greater harm to their education than if the action were not taken. The amendment is carefully drafted. It grounds the definition of welfare in Section 1 of the Children Act 1989, the bedrock of our child protection framework, and it ties the understanding of education to both Section 9 of the Education Act 1996, which requires respect for parental wishes, and to Article 2 of Protocol 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to education. In other words, this is not about creating a loophole; it is about ensuring that the pursuit of enforcement powers does not, in itself, become a source of harm.

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The amendment proposes not to preclude local authorities from taking other non-legal actions and providing support rather than pursuing legal actions. It is, of course, wholly right that local authorities, as we discussed last week, should take a supportive role to provide advice and guidance to parents. However, in some cases such actions will not be effective in securing a child’s education and the option must be open to local authorities to have that child registered at a school, even as a final measure. Without that option, a child could be left in a situation where they are not receiving a suitable education for an extended period. That would certainly not be in their best interests. I hope, therefore, that the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Wei (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister for her response and look forward to this letter. I am also grateful to the department for the correspondence that I and other noble Peers received relating to our questions.

I just want to reflect on some of the contributions. First, to clarify, the request for information from local authorities is asking them to provide data that they already have. Even though it might seem a little bureaucratic, I do not think it would require much more than a few minutes, or an hour or so, probably once a year. This is to be balanced with the tremendous bureaucratic demands that will be placed on over 100,000 families, for all the information pertaining to the education of their child, all the providers, which, in many cases will take many hours, days or weeks even, based on testimony I have received from families. So, I do not think it is unreasonable to ask for a set of data to be provided, to share good practice and highlight where there are areas for improvement on the local authority side, given the disproportionate bureaucratic demands, proposed in this Bill, to be placed on parents.

On Amendment 426E, I want to also clarify that we are not talking about mainstream schooling for the majority of pupils or schools in this country. When I talk about some of the distress, the suicides or attempted suicides of children who are forced back into school through some of our measures, we are talking about extreme cases in this country, where it is inappropriate for that child to be sent to a school. Perhaps they have been home educated all their life. Perhaps, as I have testimony of, the parents who have been busy home educating have been repeatedly asked by the local authority for information—even recently and then asked again. They have said, “We can’t share any more. We need to educate our child”. That very statement that they cannot share the information that they shared very recently is interpreted as the child not receiving a suitable education by the local authority.

At the moment, there is no protection. Ultimately, you go down a legal process. I agree that many of the schools will take great care to ensure that whatever they ask the family to do will not harm the child or harm their education, but there is a gap. I would urge the Minister and department to look at this gap, when it is not the school deciding but the local authority deciding, in some cases without much resource or experienced people. They are having to make a very significant decision about whether to take action against that family. All I am saying is, why do we not pay attention to the harm that might cause? Schools, I think, are cognisant, on the whole, of this if they are functioning well. I am not sure that in every case, every local authority is able to make that decision on its own properly.

By the time you get to the courts—including the European courts and so on—and they enforce the principles, that is great, but that has already taken many months, perhaps a year or two, during which the family has had to face tremendous uncertainty and stress, which will inevitably have an impact on the child’s education.

I have heard the response from the Minister and will reflect on what has been said. I may wish to return to this at a later stage but, for now, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 426D withdrawn.