Lord Lucas:

Moved by Lord Lucas

231: Clause 31, page 54, line 18, at end insert—“(6A) A child is not required to be registered under this section if the parent has submitted a portfolio annually demonstrating suitable education and learning progress.”Member’s explanatory statementThis Amendment allows an educational portfolio as an alternative to registration, offering a less intrusive way for parents to demonstrate their child is receiving suitable education.

My Lords, I will move Amendment 231 on behalf of my noble friend Lord Wei, who regrets that he is not able to be here today, as he has to attend a close family member’s wedding.

The day looks as if it will be devoted to elective home education and, owing to my imminent defenestration and general crumbling health, I am in a position to say—since I shall be disengaging from this arena after 15 years in it—that I have found the home education community a total delight to work with. It is a collection of extraordinary people, and I find it very easy to understand how the Government do not find them easy to work with. I very much hope that, in the course of the Bill, we will help lay the foundations for a good, strong relationship.

I thank very much the Minister and her civil servants for all the time and effort they took over the Recess to work through the amendments in this section and to look at how we might gain a better understanding of them and share that with the home education community. I look forward to the continuance of that progress through Report. My approach today will be to be very concise where I can—I will await what the Minister says about individual amendments and respond to that. So much has passed between us and civil servants that rehearsing my amendments as if that had not happened would seem futile.

A large number of the amendments arise from uncertainty over the Government’s intentions, so it would be good to have something clear and unequivocal from the Minister that supports the rights of responsibilities of home educators; that celebrates the contribution they make both to the state—they save the state a great deal of money—and to the education of their children; and that requires local authorities to be supportive.

The role of local authorities is crucial here; it is clear that the role they play is vital. There are many instances where people are set on home educating for the wrong reasons or where home educating goes wrong. Looking after the children in those circumstances is hugely important. However, if the relationship between local authorities and home educators is to work, it must be based on trust and mutual appreciation. If you can get that to work, as many local authorities do, you get a strong information flow into the local authority on what is happening; you get really good support for the children involved; and it is much easier for a local authority to focus its efforts on the things that are going wrong.

As it is written—obviously, there is a lot to come in regulation—the Bill gives local authorities huge powers. Just a comma out of place in some detail on the education that you provide for your child and the local authority can tip your child back into school. That is the way it is written. I understand that that is not how it will work in practice, but it has raised considerable concerns in the home education community. Also, in talking to local authorities, I have found that their impression is that the Government’s wish is that they be much stricter on home education and push children back into school wherever possible. These are misapprehensions, I think, but I very much look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say on them.

Local authorities are thoroughly oversubscribed and financially stressed by adult social care and special needs. The home education department is usually small. Sometimes people have been pitched into it for the first time and are having to learn their way through it. Sometimes it contains people of supreme intolerance. Portsmouth gets mentioned frequently, but I know that the Minister has had shared with her a letter to home educators from Bristol Council, which shows, I think, a deep lack of understanding of how the relationship between local authorities and home educators should work. We need to come out of this Bill clear ways in which the Department for Education can steer local authorities, help them improve their practices and provide a method of recourse for parents who feel that they are being badly done by by their local authority. I also hope to see a way of celebrating the good practices that go unnoticed; too often, those local authorities that are really doing their job well go unnoticed.

I come now to the amendments in this group. We are looking at a request for information, which is very loosely described and might be interpreted at a really detailed level. What is the child doing for each five minutes of the day? With whom are they interacting? Home education can be a very varied, loose way of educating a child. It is often child-led, even if there is a lot of parental direction in there, and follows no clear, predetermined path. Recording that in the way the Bill seems to ask for would require a daily report being sent by the parent to the local authority. This cannot be what local authorities want to receive. They just are not set up for it. Here, we need something sensible and practical; understanding what that is will be really important. There is certainly an established practice in some local authorities of an annual report, which can vary in length from six to 60 pages and allows a parent to present a clear, consistent picture of the education that their child has been receiving to put everything in context.

I would have thought—and the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, has been pushing on this too—that that would be the very best basis for a relationship of reporting from a parent to a local authority: something which does not require the local authority to do more than read, understand and criticise it; where everything is in the one place and set out in a consistent way; and which helps the parents think through, look through and assess the education that has been provided. The detailed powers in the Bill, if they were to work as set out in the Bill, would be hugely disruptive for local authorities and parents. We also have to look at the consequences of the failure to provide detailed information. There is far too much scope there for things to get really difficult and distracting.

Amendment 233 in the name of my noble friend Lord Wei proposes that qualified teachers be exempt from registration, and there are similar suggestions in other amendments of his. I think this reflects the difficulty that we sometimes see, where the people—the local authority staff—performing the home education roles do not have sufficient background, confidence and support that they will trust their own judgment. If you have two qualified teachers bringing up their own child, or somebody who clearly has a good history of successfully home-educating children, it ought to be easy for the local authority personnel to place trust in that and to say, “No, we do not have to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’. This is clearly a good place. I have seen the children, and I understand what the education being provided here is. It is clearly quality. I need to turn my attention in other directions”. That system works in many local authorities; in others, it has completely broken down, which I think the Bristol letter illustrates. We need ways in which that sort of relationship can be encouraged and, where it breaks down, we can get some restoration and some movement back towards the centre.

Amendment 318 from my noble friend looks at the difficulty and concern about people who are distant from maintained schools. Amendment 321 is looking, again, at people who are clearly succeeding. Amendment 322 looks at how you deal with nomadic families. All these are details on which I hope to hear from the Minister or, later, from her officials. We need to understand how these things work. But if there is the basic arrangement of quality local authorities supported by clear direction from the Government, a lot of these difficulties are clearly superable without getting too fussed about them in legislation. I beg to move.

My Lords, as this is the first time I am speaking in Committee, I declare various unremunerated positions in Gypsy, Traveller and Roma organisations. I wish just very briefly to comment on Amendment 322, on nomadic organisations. I should say that all the evidence I have seen, and many conversations, attest quite firmly to the fact that most Gypsies and Travellers, that small minority who lead a nomadic life, welcome registration and the offer of support from local authorities—although I shall have something to say about that later. This amendment does not correspond to the experience of Gypsies, Travellers, boaters or showmen. I just briefly add that it seems that most of these amendments are at odds with the reality of the situation of most children who are not in school, and with the intentions of the Bill, but I will not prolong the debate at the outset at this stage.

My Lords, I am delighted to have the chance to speak after the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and his eloquent and rather moving statement to the Committee about how he sees this. Echoing those important points, in the end this is about relationships, and about children and their needs and relationships. As the noble Lord said, with the Bill there is a real danger that this will be hugely disruptive for local authorities and parents, and in many ways could be a recipe for trouble to come if we get this wrong. But there are ways in which we can get this right and get proportionate reporting around the Bill. So there is a lot to get right here.

I will come back to various of those points later, but the simple point I wanted to make here was in relation to Amendment 238, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, which is about the requirement to know which parents are educating, how and for how long. We will come back to that point in various ways in later groups. There are two key points here. One is about safeguarding, where there is an issue with at least one of the parents, which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, has an amendment on, and there is one about the Division of time between parents educating, which the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, has an amendment on.

This whole section needs to be rethought. What do we really need to know? We need to know which parents are taking responsibility, and where they are and how they can be contacted, but it seems that the rest of it is superfluous. I simply make those points in response to Amendment 238.

My Lords, I support Amendment 234 in particular, to which I have put my name, and, more generally, endorse the views that my noble friend Lord Lucas and the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, just set out.

I have just begun to engage with home education as a concept and as a community, and it is clear right from the start that the community is very well motivated and, indeed, deeply reflective about education in this country and how it works, and it has a lot of expertise into which government should be trying to tap and learn from rather than regiment and regulate. If it should turn out that the worst happens and my noble friend Lord Lucas is indeed forced to step back from advocating support for this sector, I am sure that I and other noble Lords will be very willing to pick this up and continue the discussion.

I thank the Minister and her team for all the communication that there has been over the summer, as there have been some very comprehensive communications and emails that have been very helpful and will be very useful today.

I want to make just one brief point today, which is relevant to Amendment 234 but also to all those in this group, which is the point about trust. Trust is the way home education works—trust and mutual understanding. In many ways, the Bill as drafted gives huge powers to the Government which appear to be based on a lack of trust and a determination to regulate. They are very detailed and prescriptive and will cause all sorts of practical difficulties, and are based on a misunderstanding about how much of home education actually works.

Now, it is true that some local authorities are not as positively motivated as others. It is certainly true that all are extremely overworked in this area. It is difficult to see what is gained by generating vast amounts of paper and reporting which go into a drawer and are not much looked at.

To conclude, if it is not too late, a rethink in this area would be helpful. There could be a pulling back of some of the prescriptiveness and a better understanding from government—centrally and locally. There could be more support for local authorities and a clearer direction from the Government to get the approach right. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

My Lords, I look back to eight years ago, I think, when I had a very simple Private Member’s Bill, which said that home educators should register. That was it. It was as though I had ignited a bonfire of education, because the online abuse and letters that poured in were just unbelievable.

Together with my noble friend Lord Addington, I, perhaps stupidly, decided to organise a round table to discuss home education with home educators, teacher associations and anybody else who was interested. That was a real learning curve for me. Since that beginning, I have got to know many home educators. In fact, one recently sent me a wonderful, illustrated book on home education. However, when we met at the round table there were pointed and jabbing fingers; it reminded me a bit of the local city council. Nevertheless, we became quite good friends and I understood home education quite well. Since that time, we have all been on a very important journey. We have to ask ourselves why we want to do this. It is for one reason only—for our children and young people. If every home-educated child went to school, the system would not be able to cope.

The points made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, are correct. It is all very well our agreeing legislation, but we must always have at the back of our minds whether it will work. It is important not only to know where our children are and that they are being educated, but that there is a correct relationship between the local authority and the home educator. There are some fantastic examples where local authorities work closely and successfully with home educators to the benefit of both. There are some learning curves where local authorities do not have that good relationship with home educators—where they think that giving the cane and waving the statute is more important than trying to do what is in the best interests of the child.

There are thousands of wonderful home educators, but there are also children who are not being educated but are languishing at home for all sorts of reasons. As I have said, there are children who are being home-educated in a religious setting. This is not about giving them a wide education; it is about them understanding their particular religious texts. To my mind, this is not beneficial for the child as a whole.

I am glad that we have almost got to the stage where we think we should register home-educated children—not least so that we know where they are and can, we hope, make sure that they are safeguarded. I am not sure that having an education portfolio is the same as registering; I am not sure that being a chess grand master entitles you to say, “I do not need to register”; and I am not even sure that teachers with formal educational qualifications should not have to register. That seems bizarre. We live in a society where one of the important words is “equality”—equality of opportunity, whoever and wherever you are.

I hope that, when we continue this journey on Report, we are not just mindful of home educators but—I speak as a local councillor mindful of the capacity issues for local education authorities—that we make sure that local authorities are able to cope with the legislation and that it works, not just for the family and the child but for the local education authority as well.

My Lords, all the amendments in this group in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, ably presented by my noble friend Lord Lucas, seek exemptions from or exceptions to the basic principle that there should be a register of children not in school. Rightly, my noble friend stressed the importance of the relationship between the local authority and home-educating parents. As other noble Lords pointed out, the Government need to take great care in this legislation so that the requirements set out in the Bill do not inadvertently damage that relationship and potential trust.

Having said that, I cannot support these amendments and their aim to find exemptions. First, at its simplest, the point of the register is to ensure that a local authority knows which children are not in school and, obviously, the amendments would undermine that. Secondly, one of the key points of the register, as I understand it, is that it would allow home-educating parents who need support from the local authority to access that support. Again, excluding these children would prevent that. Finally, these amendments assume that in these conditions it may indeed be preferable to educate the child at home. Even if this is the case in the Majority, if not the vast majority, of cases, it remains reasonable and proportionate to record that that child is not in school.

With regard to Amendments 234 and 238, my noble friend Lord Lucas raised the important point of principle that the information collected should be proportionate, which, in simple terms, means that the local authority needs to actually use that information, as my noble friend said in his opening remarks, rather than just record it. The Government’s proposals for the information collected go a lot further than the legislation we brought forward in 2022. I share the doubts of my noble friend Lord Lucas and other noble Lords as to whether it is all necessary.

Going back to the point about the relationship between the local authority and parents, a good test for this legislation, and one I tried to use when we debated the 2022 Bill, is that the legislation needs to feel fair to parents. There is a risk that the amount of information and detail being requested could feel unfair and damage that relationship with the local authority, which is so important. I hope very much that when the noble Baroness closes, she will be able to reassure the Committee that that is not the case.

My Lords, I thank the noble Lords, Lord Wei, Lord Lucas and Lord Crisp, my noble friend Lord Hacking and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester for taking time over the summer to meet my officials. Having the opportunity to discuss in detail with noble Lords how the provisions for children not in school are intended to work in practice was extremely beneficial and instructive. I am giving careful consideration to some of the finer details of the provisions with which noble Lords have indicated that they are not wholly satisfied.

I have to say to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, that in government we have worked well and closely with home educators, who are rightly challenging on many of the issues that noble Lords have raised in the debate. Just to be completely clear, we know that the home education community is diverse and varied. Home education can take place in all walks of life, in cities or the countryside, and be delivered by those with professional teaching experience and those without. It often delivers an excellent education to children, but it is important that the registers work as intended. They should not encroach on the ability to home-educate.

I have said previously in these debates and will continue to say that we wholly recognise the right of parents to educate their children outside schools. However, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, said, it must be possible for local authorities to identify all children not in school to ensure that they are receiving a full-time, suitable education. That oversight should be underpinned by local authorities engaging positively with home educators. That is why the Bill also places a new duty on local authorities to provide advice and information when requested to do so by parents. The registers should give us a clearer picture of not only how and where children are being educated but also how local authorities engage with and support children not in school and their families. This information will support the department to identify best practice and consider how it can potentially be replicated across authorities to build strong, trusting relationships with parents.

I recognise the point made by several noble Lords that it is important that we ensure that these relationships are maintained and built on the basis of trust and a sense that what is being asked for by the Government is reasonable. We will, as the noble Lord, Lord Frost, said, use this information to support and direct local authorities to ensure that that is happening, not, as I know some people fear, to prevent parents from home-educating, but to make sure that that relationship is based on a recognition of the best interests of children and of the right of parents to educate their children at home as long as they are providing a suitable education in doing that. The department will and has stepped in where local authority practice is wrong or overbearing.

Speaking in particular on the amendments in group one, these amendments seek to limit which children must be registered on local authority children not in school registers and to reduce the mandatory information that is requested from parents for the registers. This group seeks to do that on account of evidence provided by the parents or the circumstances of the child or parents. I will respond first to all the amendments dealing with which children should be included on registers: Amendments 231, 232, 233, 318, 321 and 322. As we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, a key objective of the registers is to aid local authorities in their existing duty to identify, as far as possible, all children in their areas who are not registered pupils in school and who are not receiving a suitable full-time education. Exempting eligible children from inclusion increases the risk of a local authority failing to identify a child who may be receiving an unsuitable education.

While I do not agree with the amendments, I appreciate the intention behind them, but I am afraid that the logic does not track even in terms of the arguments made by noble Lords. For example, to exempt children of parents with formal teaching qualifications from registration, as per Amendment 233, or children of parents who have submitted a portfolio annually demonstrating suitable education, as per Amendment 231, the local authority would need to know of the children and to record details of their parents, which might be even more cumbersome than the requirements that this legislation is asking for.

Amendments 318 and 322 seek to exempt children from rural areas, unless safeguarding concerns are present, or children from nomadic families as long as education is provided. This would still require the local authority having knowledge of these children in order to make these assessments. A registration system is the obvious solution to collect an appropriate level of information about a child’s circumstances, as my noble friend Lady Whitaker identified.

Amendment 231 seeks exemption for inclusion in the registers should the parent have previously demonstrated suitable education through an annual portfolio, while Amendment 232 seeks exemption if the parent has previously home-educated a child who progressed to university, employment or vocational training. Just because a parent has previously demonstrated suitable education, has previously home-educated a child who progressed to further or higher education, or holds certain qualifications, it does not necessarily follow that the child will receive a suitable education indefinitely or at all. Furthermore, exempting children on the basis of one measure of ability, such as achieving the status of a chess grandmaster, as per Amendment 321, offers little reassurance that the child is in suitable education overall or is safe.

I turn now to the amendments in this grouping concerning the mandatory information that is requested from parents to be held on local authority registers: Amendments 234 and 238. We will, in our debates on later groups, talk further about the nature of this information. The information required of parents is necessary to build an accurate understanding of who is involved in a child’s education and where this education is taking place. Let me be absolutely clear: the only information required to be held on registers is information which is easily available to parents and obtainable by local authorities and which is considered necessary for ascertaining suitability of education and safety of the child. This includes basic information such as the child’s name, date of birth and address, as well as high-level details of education provided by the parent and others. We will go into this in more detail but, to be absolutely clear in relation to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, of course this would not require daily, weekly or even monthly reports from parents. That is absolutely not the intention here. We do not believe that this basic information is overly burdensome for parents to provide or for local authorities to request and maintain.

Amendment 234, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would mean that parents would not be under a duty to provide information for registers. We know that many local authorities already maintain registers and that some parents voluntarily provide information for these, but the status quo is not good enough. It is currently too easy for children to slip under the radar. If a child has never attended a school or has recently moved to a new local authority area, for example, the local authority may be unaware that the child is in its area and not attending school. We need to be certain that local authorities are aware of all children not in school in their areas so that they can identify which children are missing education and are therefore in need of support. A parental duty to give information is the only way to achieve this. This requirement is proportionate and brings the process in England and Wales to the same level as that in the Majority of other countries. In some cases, it would in fact be much less intrusive and much more supportive of home education than in many other countries.

I hope that noble Lords will permit me a brief digression to clarify a point of confusion—I know that this has been raised by and is concerning parents—regarding the consequence for parents failing to provide information for registers. If a parent does not supply the required information, they are not subject to a fine. Instead, the consequence of failing to provide information is that the local authority may, at its discretion, issue a notice requiring the parent to satisfy the local authority that their child is receiving a suitable education.

As is the case now, should the parent fail to do this and it is expedient for the child to attend school, the local authority must then issue a school attendance order, requiring the child to attend school. If the parent breaches that order and cannot prove in court that the child is being suitably educated, only then will they be found guilty of an offence and could be subject to a fine imposed at the magistrates’ court’s discretion. Again, it is important to reiterate that the school attendance order process that would be used here is an existing process and that the fines for breaching an order are completely avoidable through compliance. With this in mind, the number of families ultimately subject to a fine for breaching an order will be low compared to the overall number of orders issued.

Amendment 238, also tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seeks to remove the requirement for registers to contain information about the education the child is receiving from the parent. But the law is clear that each parent has an equal responsibility in securing a suitable, efficient, full-time education for their child. To help determine whether this is the case, it is important that a local authority can establish how much education is received from each parent, alongside that being received from other people or organisations. We wholly recognise that some parents will use educational styles that are not school-like methods, and we will consider this when setting out in regulations how time must be recorded on registers. Regardless of the style of education, if children are not receiving a suitable education, local authorities must intervene. If fundamental information is unavailable, such as whether the child is receiving education from the parent and how much, the local authority might not have enough information to know whether it should take action.

We will go on to some of the other details in later groups. I hope I have provided explanations here for the reasons the register should exist and why we should not allow the exemptions identified here. For those reasons, I hope noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments.

My Lords, I am very grateful to the Minister for that reply, in particular her words on the relationship with local authorities. I will study that in Hansard and come back to her if I have any problem with it, but my first impression was that it was hugely positive and very helpful. I thank her very much.

She said that the Department for Education has intervened with local authorities. I will ask for a better understanding of how that process works, because it is such an important part of making sure that local authorities that are not in the best place progress to a better one.

I understand the objection to my noble friend’s “do not register” amendments. I was wondering how he would have argued for Mozart—I think Mozart might have appreciated the Intervention of a local authority in his education.

I should like to pick the Government up again on how nomadic families are to work with this legislation. Which local authority do they register with? How does that work? This is just so that it is clear. I know it is an item of detail and I will obviously not pursue an Amendment on it, but knowing how that works for nomadic families and families not consistently in one place would be very helpful.

The Minister said some very helpful things about requiring high-level information, not every day or even every three months, which comes back to the proposition of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, about focusing on an annual report. I would love to see that. The Bill does not say that. The Government are relying on their ability in guidance to take what is in the Bill, which is a very detailed, “record every minute” requirement, and say, “Actually, if you give us a report once a year, that will be fine”. Very early on, I sent a message through the department to the Government’s legal draftsman to ask what the limits on this are. How far can guidance go against what is there in the Bill? Do the Government have the power to say in guidance that an annual report would be enough? I would really appreciate an answer on that. I should like to understand where that lies.

Similarly, that applies to things such as, where parents are together, the requirement to say who is providing how much of the education. Again, obviously, that can be dealt with in regulations, but is it within the Government’s power to put that in guidance?

When it comes to the consequences of failure, I am delighted—I thought it was the case that there were no fines involved—that the process is moving towards a school attendance order. In this sort of area, the process is the punishment; it has been tipped into this process. It is about the stress, worry and effort required to fight through that process. Therefore, again, it comes down to the importance of a strong, positive relationship and a well set-up local authority, and to how important all that is to the Bill working.

For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 231 withdrawn.

Amendments 232 to 234 not moved.