Lord Hacking:

Moved by Lord Hacking

235A: Clause 31, page 54, leave out lines 40 to 44 and insert— “(b) the names and home addresses of the parent or parents who are taking responsibility for the education of the child;”Member’s explanatory statementThis Amendment seeks to identify the minimum requirement for providing information for the register and ensures that information is only included on parents who have responsibility for educating the child.

My Lords, the grouping of these amendments is becoming a bit confusing. This Amendment and Amendment 237 are directed to the protection of sexually abused children, but so are Amendment 236A, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and Amendment 254A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I will therefore be addressing the problem of protecting sexually abused children at this stage in this group. I did not intervene earlier because I thought it sensible to collect all my words dealing with the same issue together. Before I go any further, I should like to refer to when my noble friend the Minister got to the Dispatch Box at the beginning of this stage of the Committee and kindly mentioned my name and the names of the noble Lords, Lord Crisp and Lord Lucas, and other noble Lords who have participated in this Bill. She also referred to the meetings that have taken place at the Department for Education with her officials and with her colleague the Minister, Stephen Morgan. I wish to express extreme thanks to my noble friend and the officials for their helpfulness. On this Bill, the Government are listening. This has not been exactly a feature of recent Bills, either from the Conservative Benches or my Benches. On this Bill, however, the Government are listening and we are grateful.

My attention was drawn to this problem by a mother who had a serious problem with her husband abusing her son. That kind lady has been very objective and forceful in presenting her case. She spoke to the noble Lord, Lord Frost—I am sorry that he is not in the Chamber. She also came to speak to the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. I do not know whether she came to speak to the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, but he has certainly been in contact with her. It has been helpful to have the evidence that she provided. I am not going to identify her, although I should also mention that the Minister himself, Stephen Morgan, met her. My noble friend’s officials also met her and exchanged emails with her. A lot of information has been exchanged, which has been helpful.

In brief, her son was sexually abused by her husband, I think from the age of four. It went on for several years. When the mother found out, she was absolutely horrified and wanted, as do all mothers who face the same situation, the maximum protection. That is what these amendments are trying to do. My submissions on this issue are not based on just one case. I am afraid that a number of cases of sexual abuse of children are undetected, unreported or both. This brings me back to many years ago, when I was a barrister appearing at the Lincoln Assizes. I was involved in a case of incest. The prosecution case against the accused was that he was committing incest on the complainant, who was both his daughter and granddaughter. That illustrates how horrific the problem of sexual abuse can be.

Under these amendments, the protection sought is that the misbehaving husband should not have access to any information, particularly, as my noble friend identified, as to the whereabouts and address of the abused child. He should be entirely separated from that poor child. One can do that in a number of ways —that suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, in Amendment 236A, or by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, in Amendment 237. Amendment 235A was his amendment, not mine, but somehow his name was lost from the Marshalled List. I apologise but I hope he has forgiven me. He is a very forgiving Peer. The position, which is the point I really wanted to establish, is that the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, is still with the amendment and supportive of it. I did not quite get a nod from him but I will work on that basis because it is a very sensible amendment.

The Minister was quite right—she referred to data protection too—when she said that there is a strict rule in new Section 436C(5) that puts a strong prohibition on the publication of any information in the register and on it being made “accessible to the public”. I keep calling the Minister my learned friend—she is very learned, but I should stick to the correct parliamentary description of her as my noble friend. Anyway, Section 436C(5) provides a strong prohibition, but of course that means that the officials with access to the register have to be trusted to follow Section 436C(5).

The lady to whom I just referred, who has been so helpful in our deliberations on this issue, recalls a situation when a husband, who had been convicted of the sexual abuse of his child—actually, in that case it was two girls—had been sent to prison but had rung up to collect information from the register, which was given. The only way that we in this House can properly protect the abused child from being traced by the abusing father is by making sure that the information is not in the register. Of course, if it is not in the register, it cannot be released. I suggest that that is the best approach.

I end by thanking my noble friend again for how she has conducted this entire Bill, with helpfulness, a willingness to listen and, above all, a willingness to work with this House. That is a matter deserving of great congratulations and great thanks. I beg to move.

My Lords, I must apologise: I should have advised the Committee that, as the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, alluded to, Amendment 237 is in an incorrect place on the Marshalled List—hence my calling Amendment 235A now.

My Lords, this is the point at which I will make one of the two main interventions that I propose to make today, on my Amendment 254B. Before I come to that, I will comment on two other amendments. I added my name to Amendment 239, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, which would leave out the bit about the split between parents of how many hours are provided per week. This seems completely redundant information and is not necessary. I understand the point that the register should include some reference to the fact that parents are providing the education—it is not all being done through a private tutor—but it seems to me that the split is unconvincing.

When the Minister responded, essentially to this point, in an earlier group, she said something about wanting to know the number of hours of education taking place during the week. I may have misinterpreted but I think that is what was said, and it prompts me to ask a question of the noble Baroness. Does she have a number of hours per week that are expected to be covered by education? I should be interested to know if there is some number that the department has in mind.

The second amendment to which I have added my name, Amendment 260, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, is about local authorities being able to ask for any other relevant information. That is too much of a catch-all; enough information is already provided. I should be keen to hear her arguments on this and hope that the Minister will accept them.

My main Intervention is on Amendment 254B, which concerns the first point at which parents are asked to provide a lot of information about who is providing the education. My amendment picks up the point that this is a large set of possible providers. As written, it could include the occasional organised event. It could include regular visits to the Guides, which is an educational charity, I understand. It could include a rugby club and other such things—anything that has an educational component as the amendment is written. I should say in parentheses here that I have received one reference from a provider of home education, a wildlife trust in the Midlands—I will provide the name to the Minister—which has already written to the people for whom it provides home education, saying that it will put this on hold until the Bill’s impact is clear. Already this wildlife trust—I do not know what level of education it provides—has stopped providing education to home-educated children because of its fears of what the Bill might mean for it in terms of the amount of information the trust has to provide in future.

However, my intervention here concerns the information that the parent or parents need to provide. In our useful discussions with officials, they made it clear that they would put in regulations something that implied that there was a certain amount of time beyond which one-off events would not count, and that events that happened once a week but were only three hours long, or primarily social and recreational, would be taken into account. That is fine in regulations but you need some parameters in the Bill to state:

“The requirement to provide the information set out in subsection (1)(e) only applies to providers which are providing regular education sessions amounting to 10 hours or more a week, which are not primarily social or recreational in nature, and”— importantly, a point that we have not discussed at all—

“where the information has not already been provided to the authority in other formats, such as an annual report.”

Let me pick up that point about duplication. I am as keen as anyone to weed out fake or failing home-educating parents or arrangements. However, this register is not the way to do it. Form-filling will not catch the diversity of a child’s needs and of educational methods. It is the match between the two that is so vital, particularly as we know that more than half of those who are home educated have special needs of different sorts. This really is not one size fits all, yet the Bill seems to be treating it as though it is. Nor, I believe, will inspection of a child’s work and timetable, without the wider context of a parent’s own assessment of their child’s needs, be an effective method of doing so. The Bill misses out the most important evidence of all: the reality of that particular child and their circumstances. That is why the attempt to use the register to make any meaningful assessment of the quality of education provided is fundamentally flawed. There is an existing alternative.

I understand that existing case law means that an authority is entitled to ask for an annual report or meeting, and parents have the right to determine the content of that report or meeting. I said this before the recess and nobody has contradicted me, so I assume that this is the case. That seems entirely sensible. Since then, I have seen several annual reports which describe, among many other things, the reason the child is being home educated. It may be about special needs, bullying, having been excluded from school or parental preference. It also describes the needs of the child, the educational approach, what is planned and what has been achieved. That seems a much more effective way of assessing the quality of the education than filling in a form of the sort that we are looking at. It also helps build a relationship between the home education officer and parents, through which, if appropriate, the officer can offer guidance and support or, if appropriate, encourage them to send their child to school. This need not and should not be a confrontational exercise, and it is not in many local authorities at the moment.

I suggest that the best approach would be to have as little detail in the register as necessary for safeguarding purposes and to use the annual process for assessment processes, together with regular meetings between the officer and home education groups—I am not suggesting individual home-educating parents but home education groups—which would help set mutual expectations in an area about what is reasonable. At the moment, it seems that the quality of home education is being poorly assessed through a system primarily designed for safeguarding, and it is certainly an add-on, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, to his original Bill of eight years ago, that all this detail is in there.

It is also worth remembering that any such assessment should also take account of what is available in the local schools and the quality of education they represent. Some are not good and many home educators took their children out of schools primarily because they are failing their children. Home education is expanding and I suspect it will continue to do so as parents vote with their feet, taking on enormous responsibilities for the sake of their children. There has been recent press comment on this, as the Minister and other noble Lords will know. Policy needs to develop equally quickly.

It is also worth noting that many parents home-educated only one of their children because of their particular needs, and many have plans to bring their child back into school at the right time. I suggest that there are three promising areas here for policy development, some of which could be done even during the course of the Bill. The first is to review the case law on the annual process that I have described and consider whether it should be brought into legislation in some way as an alternative to some of the requirements in the Bill. There is also an important point about reviewing flexi-schooling, encouraging head teachers to be more flexible and allowing children who need it to take regular time out—perhaps some half days, or one or two days a week of home education, for example—to decompress, as I believe the language is, from the constant pressures of noise, stimulation and social interaction, which affect some people so strongly. It is also important, as the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, to strengthen the role of home education officers and encourage and support home education groups and the relationships between them, issues that I shall come back to.

Going back specifically to the detail of this amendment, it makes it clear that parents need give information only about providers that provide four things:

“regular education sessions amounting to 10 hours or more a week, which are not primarily social or recreational in nature, and where the information has not already been provided to the authority in other formats such as an Annual Report”.

My Lords, having listened to the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, he has totally persuaded me that Amendment 254B should be adopted, and I hope the Minister will respond sympathetically to it.

Amendment 257A in my name would require the statutory local registers of children not in school to include whether a child is a young carer, and whether a young carer’s needs assessment has been carried out. It is a revised version of Amendment 251 in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and the noble Lords, Lord Russell and Lord Storey. The wording is identical, but by amending new Section 436C(2) rather than new Section 436C(1) it makes it easier for local authorities to comply, because new Section 436C(1) is compulsory with no exceptions, whereas new Section 436C(2) refers to information that the local authority has or might reasonably obtain.

I thank the Minister’s officials for the constructive discussions that they had with the Carers Trust and local carer services on this issue. They led to this new amendment, which I hope improves its chances of acceptance. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and the noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, for indicating their support for this revised amendment. The amendment is closely related to Amendment 209, which we discussed on 3 July. That would require local authorities to ensure that they have offered a young carer’s needs assessment if they are notified of a pupil who is being withdrawn from school. Amendment 257A, which we debate now, complements that by including such information on the register.

I will not repeat the arguments for improving the protection for young carers, but I mention very briefly the case of Salma, who is caring for her mother, who has physical and mental health issues, and her father, who has physical health issues. She was taken out of school after being subject to bullying. The parents stated that they were home-schooling her while always working towards getting her back into specialist provision. After Salma returned to that specialist provision, she admitted that no home-schooling had taken place and she had been caring around the clock. She had missed one and a half years of school before she was given a permanent placement in that specialist provision. So, repeating what I have said before, I am not saying that a young carer should never be home-educated—I have listened to the powerful arguments from my noble friends and from the noble Lord, Lord Crisp—but we need safeguards for the reasons I have just given so that children do not slip off the radar, to use a phrase that the Minister used in an earlier debate.

Related to the previous amendment and this one are delays in carrying out a young carer’s assessment. I raised this in July and the Minister wrote to me on 9 July—I am grateful for that. She told me that the Care Quality Commission is currently assessing how well local authorities perform their relevant duties under the Care Act 2014 and that every local authority will have been assessed by next March. She also strongly urges all local authorities to sign up to the No Wrong Doors for Young Carers initiative. Following the CQC report, I hope that the Government will take strong action against local authorities that are underperforming.

Turning specifically to the amendment, the addition of young carers to the school census is helping to increase the visibility and understanding of young carers within schools and of the impact that caring can have on educational opportunities. For example, we now know that young carers in our schools are missing over a month of their education each year. So including young carers on this register will help ensure that local authorities can comply with their statutory duties under the Children Act 1989, which requires them to take reasonable steps to identify young carers who might be in need of support. By including young carers on the education not in school register, local authorities will be better able to work with families and local young carers services to ensure that caring responsibilities do not mean that the child misses out on education.

Finally, to put it in perspective, there are around 15,000 children who are caring for an alarming 50 hours each week, including over 3,000 children aged between 5 and 9. A further 21,000 children are caring for 20 to 49 hours a week. This has a huge impact on their health and their future life chances. Young carers taking on significant caring responsibilities are 86% less likely than their peers without caring responsibilities to obtain a university degree and 46% less likely to be in employment. Currently, it takes far too long for these young carers to get the support they need—on average three years, with some going more than 10 years without support. That is why this amendment seeks to ensure that this group of children is at the front of our thinking when we are talking about children not in school.

The Clause, if amended, would mean that young carer status would be included on the register only if the local authority knows that the child is a young carer or could reasonably obtain such information. But, given that the Majority of young carers are not identified, will the Minister say what steps the Government are taking to ensure that local authorities are complying with their duty to identify young carers outside education?

This simple amendment is an important small step to help ensure that all young carers are able to have the same educational opportunities as their peers, whether they are educated in school or elsewhere.

My Lords, I rise briefly in support of the Amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham. I added my name to his original amendment. I am afraid I was a bit slow off the mark in adding it to his revised amendment, to which the noble Lord has just spoken. I strongly support it. The noble Lord has set out the case for it extremely well.

I want to emphasise a couple of points. I have always had concerns about young carers being withdrawn from school for home-education. I am concerned that they do not get the necessary breaks from caring responsibilities. We all know how important respite care is for all carers, particularly young ones. Young carers can find themselves taking on ever-increasing levels of caring responsibility. Some of the case studies I have been looking at may well be at the extreme end of the spectrum, but they were talking about young carers who were looking after mum and dad with multiple physical and mental health needs, as well as looking after two or three younger siblings. I really do not know how on earth they can take on that caring responsibility and still ensure that they are educated.

I was also very struck by the statistics mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Young. He said that over 15,000 children were caring for 50 hours or more per week. This is not compatible with a child receiving the degree of education that we would all want them to have for their own life chances.

I am also concerned that they will be missing out on the support that can be provided for young carers just because they are not in school. I know that some schools are very good at running groups for young carers, such as peer support, mental health support and additional academic support. It is critical that young carers can still access this kind of support if they need it and are being educated at home.

My main concern is the inappropriate or excessive levels of care that these young people are being asked to take on, because of the feeling of isolation and the emotional impact it has on them. This amendment is essential to protect them. The word the noble Lord, Lord Young, used was “safeguards”. We need strong safeguards if we are to be satisfied that young carers with significant caring responsibilities at home are also being home-educated.

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 250 in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, whose support I greatly value. This amendment would oblige schools to ask for and record why the child is to receive home-education. This is not done at present and the Department for Education lists the reasons as “unknown” in 42% of cases. The current census estimates that 111,700 children are being home-educated, a 20% rise since last year—hardly an endorsement of what has been going on in some schools. The reasons must be collected to get a better understanding of why children abandon the advantages of school and where feasible, deal with them. We know there are many reasons, some of which, like the bullying which so many Gypsy, Traveller and Roma children endure, must be more effectively and specifically tackled; among those reasons, regrettably, is the desire of some schools to ensure their exam pass rates reach a certain level, thus neglecting the children who most need their education to work. I hope my noble friend the Minister can accept this amendment.

My Lords, I will contribute very briefly to this debate. I thought that the amendments by the noble Lords, Lord Young and Lord Crisp, showed the difficulty of the Bill in that very different groups of young people are being referred to and both sets of needs need to be met. Therein is the difficulty of getting the legislation right. I very much took the point about children with caring responsibilities and hope that we can take this opportunity to improve that; it is something about which I have been concerned for a while.

I want to seek some clarification on Amendment 254B tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp; I have a great deal of sympathy with it, and I hope that it can be resolved. I am really just asking the Minister to offer some reassurance or explanation when she winds up. I have three points. First, I am not quite sure whether the information is before the education, ie in the forward- looking education plans of a home-educated child, or whether it is retrospective, ie, what you have done with the child this term or this year. The timing of when this information is needed could make a difference.

Secondly, I am a trustee of the Royal Institution. I went there one day, and a group of children were being educated there. They were home-educated but had come together for that particular experience because there is a very good quality science education in a laboratory with specialised teachers which was not available otherwise. I suspect that they do that only a few times a year. If I take that as an example, I am not sure whether that needs to be recorded and whether the Royal Institution will have to provide its postcode, fill in and sign a form and collect the information. Some sort of clarification around that would be important. The main point of this—and I know the Minister will understand this—is that those of us who have spent our lifetime in formal education see time very differently from those who are home-educating a pupil. We have lived a life of splitting learning into blocks of time. If I say a period or half a day or whatever, everyone who has ever taught, or been a parent, knows that we are thinking in 40-minute or one-hour chunks. One of the things I have been attracted by from parents who educate at home successfully is that they use time, space and skills in a completely different way from how those of us who are teachers in formal education use it. I just worry whether we are trying to make them fit into our concept of who taught it, how much time was it and what did you cover? If that were the case, I think that we might be losing the good essence of what some parents are doing with home-educated children.

My last point is that when that information is provided, against what is a judgment being made? If it is being sent to somebody like me, who has a very particular understanding of what education is like, or if it is somebody who already has a background in home education, our judgment will be different. I am not clear whether this is provide it so we have it or provide it and a judgment will be made about whether it is appropriate. If it is so that a judgment will be made, presumably by a local authority, what assurance can we have that it has sufficient understanding and experience to judge it not just against the criteria of what formal education usually constitutes?

My Lords, I declare an interest: I am now a member of the Northern Ireland Curriculum Taskforce Advisory Committee. I support amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran, and I support and echo some of the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, my noble friend Lord Young and others.

To put it in context, we are one of the most permissive countries in the world on home education. We have a strong default presumption that parents should be able to home-educate if they choose and no expectation of tight supervision of that. When I was chief inspector, my counterparts in other countries were often astonished at the degree of freedom that parents in this country have. There are countries where home education is simply illegal, and there are many countries where there are quite significant controls on quality.

To take just one example, in Belgium, I recently talked to the Flanders chief inspector. Parents must have their child do the end of primary school test. If they fail, they have one further opportunity; if they do not pass either time, they must be registered in a school. Similarly, there are provisions that if parents repeatedly refuse to allow a local authority employee to visit them at home, the child must be registered at school. I am not advocating these things specifically, simply putting it in context.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, made a important point that this is not a single community. People have referred a number of times to communities. There are communities of what you might characterise as the archetypal home-schoolers, many of them excellent, which include many parents of children with special educational needs of various kinds. They are strongly represented in forums, support groups and lobbying, and they are valuable and important people. There are also many parents who do not take part in these kinds of forums. They are the parents of children in illegal schools where children are nominally home-educated but actually in illegal institutions. They are parents of children who have been essentially forced out of school and off-rolled, who typically have substantial behavioural problems and often significant educational needs, whose parents are disproportionately unlikely to be able to give them a suitable education. There are parents who have simply withdrawn their children to avoid prosecution for non-attendance, and there will always be a few sad exceptional cases, but I will not go into that.

My Ofsted work made me strongly supportive of a register, and I spoke regularly about this over many years, but it is important to be clear about a couple of things. My understanding is that this is not reversing that historic presumption that parents are free to home-educate. So, if we draw out the questions that a register helps local authorities to answer, they are, first: “Is there any reason to think that this child will not be getting a suitable education?” It is not microassuring that, yes, it is definitely suitable; it is slightly the other way. Secondly and similarly, it is not aiming to provide absolute certainty around safeguarding; it is asking, “Are there warnings or flags that suggest that some more work might be needed?” Thirdly, it is about gathering some of the administrative data that central and local government need in order to understand what they need to provide and where rules and incentives need to change.

Quite a lot of what we have heard today has been on the assumption that this is about completely reversing that presumption and moving to microjudgment of the quality of what every parent is doing at every stage. I do not think that that is there, but it would be helpful for it to be explicit that that is not the case. It is important that this does not become just a register of concerns. The requests for exemptions are, sadly, a little misguided because they would narrow this down to being a register of concern. Broadly, it is much clearer if it is simply an objective that the register of children in school plus the register of children not in school adds up to the totality.

I started today intending to support the pragmatic amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran around limiting the information that has to be collected to the things that genuinely support those purposes. What I have heard has led me to think that there is a simplification that the Government might consider that would help to draw together and streamline the thrust of the points that have been made on carers, for example, and those made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. It is that if it is information that we would normally expect to be collected in the administrative data section of a school register, it should also be in the not in school register. We are perhaps over- complicating it.

On what is collected about the education itself, I have another point. It is important not to push this too far. To the extent that this register contains subjective information about how children are being educated and about how much time children who are being educated with flexible models spend on maths, English or whatever it might be, it will not work well. Different parents will interpret it very differently. It is the kind of information that it is hard to do well even when constructing a research study. I suggest that there is room to take this back a bit in the light of the purposes I outlined and to commission research studies and sample studies where appropriate.

Similarly, lovely as it would be, the register will never provide all the information that a social work department might need to decide that an investigation is necessary. We need to think about what is straightforward to collect and not subjective to answer and what will help to create the join-up we expect, while not creating an administrative monster with information that turns out to have relatively little value in practice.

That is all I wanted to say. I support this register strongly, as I said, but one iteration further could be done with these provisions to make the register as clean, effective and supportive as it should be.

My Lords, I wish to follow on; in fact, my noble friend has given an introduction to the comments that I wanted to make in relation to Amendment 260 in the names of my noble friend Lady Barran and the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. She mentioned phrases such as “not push it too far” or “take a step back from this”, and the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, outlined on a previous group that this should be proportionate reporting and information collection, which is really important.

On Amendment 260, we get down to the clauses— I am a lawyer by training and have been in government as a Minister, and I know that government loves such clauses—which require the collection, if it is reasonable to obtain it, of

“any other information about the child’s characteristics, circumstances” or needs. The only caveat to that is that those should be included in the register

“for the purposes of promoting or safeguarding the education or welfare of children”.

My first point in relation to that is that that is new paragraph (m), so we have already asked for an awful lot of information before we have our lovely “scoop it all up” Clause. But is “characteristics” limited to protected characteristics? That is a separate paragraph in Clause 31, so I suspect it is not. What kinds of characteristics will be asked of families in relation to their children, what kinds of circumstances and what limit on that or on their needs? Obviously, we are not talking about special educational needs because that, again, is somewhere else. It is an enormously wide power for them to be able to reasonably obtain this information.

The only limit on it is

“for the purposes of promoting or safeguarding the education or welfare of children”.

Part of that limitation is well known. It apes the Children Act, which says that we are there to promote and protect the safeguarding of the welfare of children. But here it is about the safeguarding of education, a slightly new concept that is there as a key limitation, in the way the paragraph is put together, on what local authorities can ask of families.

So I strongly support Amendment 260 on that kind of “scoop it all up” information about parents in these circumstances, particularly parents who may have, for good reason, withdrawn their children. I can see all kinds of headlines and problems if this kind of information, on such a broad basis, is asked of parents by the local authority. I think that there will be legal challenges to define such a broad clause that the Government seem to want, and that it will be the subject of complaints of intrusion. Although I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, obviously this is not to take back that presumption that it is the parents’ right, but such a wide clause that gives the local authority such extensive powers to ask for basically any other information risks changing that presumption, or at the very least it creates a perception for parents that it has been changed.

My Lords, I rise briefly to add to the support given to Amendment 257A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young, from all sides of the Committee, and just to emphasise almost the moral case for it.

Earlier on in Committee, when we were talking about the important role of kinship carers, I think we recognised the enormous debt that we as a society owe to them for the burden that they take on and the large number of young children they keep out of the care system, at disproportionate cost financially and to themselves socially and developmentally. The same is true of young children who end up being carers. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, said, we have 15,000 children caring for 50 hours or more a week, of whom 3,000 are between five and nine years old. If I remember dimly myself at that age, and if I think of my children at that age, the idea of taking on the responsibilities that some of these young carers take on, through no choice of their own, is extraordinary.

If one were going to write a script for a television play where one tried to emphasise just how difficult these situations can be, you just need to look at some real-life examples. There is a young lady called Ashley in Newcastle who is 11 years old. She cares for three members of her immediate family. Her father has a mental health illness, her mother has a number of physical health issues and her sibling is autistic. To compound matters, one would imagine that it would be helpful that her mother, who has physical health issues, was in a previous life, when she was better, a teaching assistant. As she was a teaching assistant, she knew exactly how to respond when the local education authority sent a questionnaire asking about what was going on in home-schooling. The mother was able to fill in the form to make it appear that everything that should have been happening was happening, when in fact it was not. The reason for the mother, in a sense, not writing the truth was that she felt that, in the situation that she and the family were in, there was a greater need for the family to have the more concentrated time of the 11 year-old caring child looking after them than it was to pay attention to her need for home-education. That is the situation that one can find oneself in.

If you look at the statistics, last year the number of children in England who were home-educated was about 111,000. The 15,000 children who are caring for 50 hours or more, more than 13%, are a significant proportion of home-educated children. I think that we have a moral duty to recognise the enormous help that those children are providing through no wish of their own to the care system. However, the enormous burden that is placed on them needs to be recognised, and I hope that the solution that the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Young, has found—with, I understand, the active support and engagement of the Government—will happen, because these children deserve all the help that we can give them.

My Lords, I was going to rise very briefly to speak to Amendments 243, 249 and 260 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to which I added my name, but the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, has put it far better than I possibly could. I was going to talk about concerns about the home-schooling fraternity, but my noble friend Lord Crisp has put it far better than I could. I have also been persuaded by my noble friend Lord Russell and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, that Amendment 251 is extremely powerful. I am greatly looking forward to the Minister’s reply to these powerful arguments.

My Lords, I should just say “ditto” to that, should I not? What the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, said is hugely important, as is the response from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the words of my noble friend Lady Spielman. It is unclear how this set of amendments is going to work. It unclear whether they are proportionate. We would like to get a good understanding. We can see that there is a purpose and that they are important, but we have concerns about how the demands of this Bill fit with reality and are going to work in particular circumstances. I will not go into the detail of the amendments that I have in that space—I will wait for the Minister’s reply—but I will pick up on some of the points made by my noble friend Lord Wei on his amendments. Amendment 245 provides that, if a private tutor teaches online and never sees the child in their home, there should be no need for that tutor to supply a private address. There are other aspects. It appears that a company has to provide details of all the people it employs. What happens with online companies where you are not interfacing with anyone at any obvious location but are just interfacing with the software? It is really hard to read what you are supposed to produce and why it is reasonable to produce it.

Amendment 248 highlights the absurdity of trying to quantify every minute. Many parents rightly say that their children learn continuously through conversation, trips and hobbies, without rigid slots. Precise time-logging is trying to force home education into a classroom straitjacket.

Amendment 260 and, in particular, Amendment 261, which my noble friend Lord Frost has supported, seek to address what is breathtakingly open-ended stuff. What is required here and why? What is the underlying purpose being served? We have to be careful about going in for open-ended data collection. Those of us who have been here for a while will remember what happened after we passed RIPA, and the way in which local authorities started using it to find out parents who might be cheating when it came to saying what their address was in school applications. Anything that is collected under such a register does not just sit quietly in a database; it becomes available throughout government and will be swept up into the profiling systems used by the police and the security authorities.

We know from history and from the work of those such as Professor Eileen Munro that these systems tend to record deficits, not strengths, and to build up negative pictures of people. This results in children from black and other ethnic minorities being racially profiled as being bad. People worry about them and so something appears in the database, and then they are seen as a problem. That information will appear everywhere that the authorities look them up. We need to be really careful about how we allow information to be collected.

I do not see any practical provision that would allow anyone to know what is on the register or to correct what is on it. There must be some process for making it accurate when the local authority has added stuff of its own volition—it does not have to tell anyone that it has done so, and the information might be completely daft and inaccurate. There is no provision for how information should be assessed and removed. We need to look carefully at this. Dr Stephen Crossley’s work on the troubled families programme illustrates that this leads to intrusive interventions justified by mass data trawling and families being

“bullied to no good effect”,

with little evidence of positive outcomes.

In this area, we should legislate with humility about what the state can know and manage and about what is useful and practical. We should be careful about turning supportive families into defensive ones, educational flourishing into compliance anxiety, or safeguarding into a byword for intrusive bureaucracy.

My Lords, this group is about gathering information, and I am struck by certain things. Are we collecting the right type of information? Are we ignoring other information?

I was particularly struck by the Amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Whitaker, which seeks to include on the register why the child is being home-educated. That would be a useful addition, though I am fully aware that others are saying that we might get a sea of information that ignores the key reason. As somebody who comes at home-education from a special educational needs background, I am familiar with lots of people who have removed their children from school because the school simply did not have the capacity to teach them accurately; teachers are trained to teach those who more closely conform to the norm and these children’s learning patterns do not correlate with that.

The same will be true about the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, when she said that blocks of time sitting down and studying is what education is. This is the type of education that has failed that group. For instance, many schools say, “We are going to give them extra help”. If you do not give them the right help, for this group, because the learning patterns are different, it still will not work. There are lots of little things in here that I would like the Minister to start to clear up. Too much information and the wrong sort will not help.

Even then, there are certain other bits that probably should be there. Are we going to review this periodically? Are we trying to get a feel of it? If we do not do so, there is a danger that we overload. But the register should be there because every child—it comes back to this—is entitled to an education. As was movingly put and supported by my noble friend Lady Tyler, who is a carer, that child is entitled to some support. Carers are entitled to function as an adult in the outside world after they have finished their caring duties—indeed, if they ever finish them. If we do not get away from that, I should like to know a little more on how we are going to use this information. It is a difficult subject, and I do not envy the Minister when she comes to answer on this group, but it is one we are entitled to extract the information from.

There are lots of situations here where we need to get an approach more than we need to get the detail—something that says whether it will be flexible enough. Is it going to understand the types of situations involved? We have heard they are variable, and anybody who has looked at this knew they were variable. So I look forward to the Minister’s reply and do not envy her her task.

I have listened to Members talk on all these amendments, and it raised some thoughts in my mind, which I just want to mention before dealing with the amendments. One of the things that we will perhaps appreciate even more as a result of having a register is that, never mind home education, there are currently 100,000 children missing. They are not in home education or schools but are missing. I hope that when we have established—if we establish—a register for home-educated children, we will know the exact number of missing children and have a similar opportunity to work out how we do something about it. It is one of the highest levels in western Europe. That is my first thought.

My second thought is that we constantly hear from schools about the workload that teachers have to have, and maybe some of the discussions about what we are requiring of home educators in terms of the information from them would be music to teachers’ ears as well. In my days as a probationary teacher in my first school, I remember that the head did not require me to keep any records at all. He trusted me as a teacher. There was a single school syllabus and you just got on with it. After five years, I moved on to my second school. It was a huge culture shock because the head teacher demanded that we all had our record books and that we wrote down in great detail a paragraph for every subject from maths, literacy and numeracy right through to technology on what we were doing in that week. Perhaps this discussion also relates to issues for schools as well. Each of these amendments has important things to say. I thought that the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, was absolutely right to ask, what in these amendments adds value and what adds little value?

Sometimes it is not in plain sight. For example, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, dismissed Amendment 244 as more bureaucracy. I am surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, did not get up. His later Amendment 333ZA is about safeguarding. I do not think that many parents know that, currently, under UK law, an individual barred from working with children due to safeguarding risks or serious offences—including imprisonment—can legally offer one-to-one tuition to children when hired directly by the provider. So the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, which seeks to avoid having to provide details of staff at, for example, online schools, is a mistake. We should know the details of individuals who are not parents and who come into schools to do tutoring. That is hugely important.

I want to speak briefly to the first amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, which was slightly changed. We have heard from right across the Committee how important this matter is. The noble Lord, Lord Russell, gave examples. I can give my own examples from teaching. I think I have mentioned in the House before a young carer whose name I can still remember—Terence or Terry—and who was always late for school because he was a young carer looking after his baby brother. His mother was not fit to look after him, I am afraid, because she was a lady of the night—a prostitute. He had to get up in the morning, look after and feed this child, and then get him off to nursery. Obviously, Terry was always late for school because he was a young carer. In terms of all the issues that we have discussed, this amendment is probably the most important; I thank noble Lords for highlighting it.

Looking at these amendments creates a sense of déjà vu. The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, talked about recording short activities, museums, libraries, companies and charities. The opportunity for young people to visit museums and art galleries and to go on school trips is probably educationally life-changing for them. An earlier amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Wei, talked about having a portfolio. I and other teachers were always encouraged to have portfolios of what the children did outside school. Noble Lords may remember the dreaded records of achievement, where details of everything that the children had achieved were kept. I have obviously upset the Minister; she appears to have liked records of achievement. The point I am making is that there should not be a requirement in the Bill that portfolios are kept, although it is quite a useful practice.

We seem to be coming to a consensus about this. It will be interesting to see what happens when we go away and return on Report. We must have something that works for us all—for parents and for children—and is not overly bureaucratic. I say this as an aside: I have talked to a number of Ofsted inspectors, the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, aside, who have said that they can go into a school and know straightaway, without saying anything, whether it is a good school just from the atmosphere in that school. I suspect that, if local authorities had the time and resources to go and visit home educators—that would be challenging and I doubt that it would happen in many cases, though I should like it to happen; I would like to see a relationship between the local authority and home educators—they would know as soon as they went into a house whether a good home education were taking place.

Let us take what works from these amendments and make sure that we come back with a system that is good for our children.

My Lords, I will keep my remarks brief and focus on my own amendments in this group as I know that we have a very ambitious target to complete today; that noble Lords came in early to do this; and that we have had a well-informed debate already. My Amendments 239, 243, 249 and 260 were supported and elegantly introduced by the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, with support from the noble Lord, Lord Crisp.

Amendment 239 would remove the requirement to specify the time spent by each parent educating their child, which was described by your Lordships as potentially redundant information.

Amendment 243 would set a minimum threshold of six hours weekly to avoid parents having to record every piano lesson and burdening local authorities with a volume of information that they cannot realistically assess. It has many similarities to Amendment 254B. I would not quibble with the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, as his amendment was very well drafted, but the spirits of the two amendments have much in common.

Amendment 249 would exclude weekend and holiday activities so that we bring home-educated children into line with those at school, where we would not dream of asking how they spend their weekends and holidays. Again, we do not want every visit to the Royal Institution —however fascinating—or every swimming lesson being shared with the local authority.

Finally, Amendment 260—the “scoop it all up” amendment, as my noble friend Lady Berridge described it—seeks to remove the ability of the Secretary of State to require any additional information that they see fit to be included in the register. This is an important point of principle because it leaves the door completely open for a future Secretary of State to behave in a way that many of your Lordships might consider unreasonable and unfair. It is excessive—belt and braces—and the Minister may want to reconsider it.

My Lords, we have had a good debate on this group—interestingly, with some rather different perspectives on the nature of the extent to which information should be included on the register. Let me deal with the range of points, I hope, as reassuringly and informatively as I can.

Amendment 235A was introduced by my noble friend Lord Hacking, although it seems that it had several parents—I will try to respond to the principles of it—and Amendment 239 is in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. These amendments would mean that registers would be required to contain the names and addresses of only the parents who are taking responsibility for the education of the child, rather than details of all parents of the child. Parents would also not need to provide information on how much time their child spends receiving education from each parent.

As I said in relation to Amendment 238 from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, the reason why both parents’ details are needed is because, by law, each parent has an equal responsibility for securing a suitable education for their child. This remains the case even if a parent is not providing the education themselves and is instead securing other providers to do so. Although I understand the intention behind these amendments, I worry that they would result in local authorities being unable to obtain necessary information.

My noble friend Lord Hacking gave a harrowing example in relation to access to information on the registers. I had hoped that my comments in our debate on the previous group had given some assurances around the control of and requirements for confidentiality around the register, which will provide some reassurance on that. Additionally, I am concerned that Amendment 239 would make it more difficult for local authorities to identify children who may not be receiving a suitable full-time education. Without having the time that a parent spends educating their child on the registers, how are local authorities to know whether the six hours that a child spends at a supplementary school each week is just part of their education or their whole education?

In relation to Amendment 235A, what if no parent claims responsibility for the education of the child? Unfortunately, we must face the reality that some children in England and Wales are receiving no education at all from their parents or from anybody else. Where this is the case, how can local authorities even begin to intervene if they are missing basic information, such as an up-to-date address for both parents?

Amendments 240, 241 and 247, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seek to restrict or remove completely the requirement on parents to provide information on the amount of time their child spends receiving education from individuals other than the parent. I will come back in a moment to the point about hours and time, raised—appropriately—by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and my noble friend Lady Morris. But it is important that local authorities understand whether other persons are involved in the education of the child. This, alongside information on for how much time a child is educated by their parent, will support the authority to establish whether education is full-time or not and to fulfil their existing duty to identify children missing education. This is an important point, which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, also brought to our attention.

Will the Minister answer my supplementary question about whether the department or she have in mind a number of hours that make up full-time education that they are trying to get to through this process?

I said I will come to that—I am coming to it. I will also answer the other point about the annual report.

Once again, on this, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and other noble Lords for taking the time to meet my officials and to outline in detail their concerns about the nature of the information that we are requesting. I understand the concern not to limit the wide range of activities that effective home education may well involve, the range of different organisations that might be contributing to it and the burdens that might be placed. I reassure noble Lords that I am reflecting on the points raised.

Amendment 253, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, seeks to define what constitutes education for the purposes of for which activities parents must provide information on the registers. I anticipate that the noble Lord tabled this amendment to reduce parental burden, but it will actually do the reverse. It would bring a broad list of activities into scope of the duty to provide information, as any activity that results in the child learning would be classed as education. It is not the policy intention that registers will need to contain information on such a wide range of activities. The accepted definition of “education” is that it should contain elements of supervision and instruction that work towards defined objectives. This is supported by case law.

I recognise that noble Lords are concerned about the burden that the duty to provide information on a child’s education provision places on parents and local authorities. We will ensure that those burdens are kept as low as possible. Parents will not be required to give details on non-educational activities, for example, and we will outline this in detail in statutory guidance and, obviously, consult on the details.

Amendments 243 and 249, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and Amendment 254B, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, seek to place limitations on the providers that parents must provide information on. They set a threshold so that parents need to provide information only on organisations that offer more than six or 10 hours of education a week, that educate their child during the school day, or that are one-off or largely social and recreational activities. Although I appreciate that these amendments seek to reduce burdens on parents, the exemptions would potentially leave large gaps in the overall picture of a child’s education. This is particularly true if a child is attending multiple providers or does not follow the school timetable. In relation to Amendment 254B, as I mentioned, we will make it clear in statutory guidance that parents will not be expected to give details of non-educational activities for the register.

I turn to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, about hours. He asked why they are not defined. Of course, this question was partly answered by my noble friend Lady Morris, who rightly identified that the definition of “education” that we use in formal schooling is sometimes, almost by definition, not the form of education that those who have chosen to educate their children outside formal schooling will want to pursue. I hope the noble Lord does not think I am trying to evade the question, but I am trying to say that it is complicated. We have said that a suitable education will vary for each child, depending on their age, ability and aptitude, as well as on whether the child has a special educational need or disability; and that, as such, each individual assessment must rest on a balance of relevant factors depending on the circumstances of each child.

There are no specific legal requirements for the content of home education, provided the parents are meeting their duty under Section 7 of the Education Act 1996. This means that education does not need to include any particular subjects or have any reference to the national curriculum. There is no requirement to enter children for public examinations. There is no obligation to follow the school day or to have holidays; of course, that is part of the reason why the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, about not understanding what is happening on weekends in what would traditionally be considered school holiday time, is perhaps not appropriate for children who are being home-educated.

To be able to make an assessment based on that whole range of issues, which will be brought into consideration, local authorities will need basic information about what is being provided, as set out in the legislation. I take the point that it will not be a case of simply adding up the number of hours provided; it will be much more nuanced and careful than that in determining whether the education is suitable.

On the noble Lord’s suggestion of collecting this information via annual reports, I know that some home educators provide detailed reports to their local authorities on the content of their child’s education, which will include details of providers they may be using. However, these reports are not legal requirements and, coming back to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, local authorities have a duty to find out whether the education provided is suitable. Many do this by asking for an annual report but that is not a requirement of parents.

Parents can evidence the suitability of the education that they are providing in different ways. Authorities that receive very detailed reports about a child’s education may still, of course, have limited visibility on where they are being educated and who is providing the education. Some parents will choose not to provide an annual report but, instead, to provide information on the content of their child’s education through a visit, a phone call or another method. From the points made by noble Lords about burdens, I do not think that they are suggesting that we should move further towards mandating an annual report for home-educated children.

I turn now to Amendment 244 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, and Amendments 245 and 246 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, which intend to exempt parents from needing to provide the personal information of education providers, such as home addresses. The required information will include only the provider’s name and address where the education is taking place. The personal address of a provider would be required to be recorded only if there is no business address or the person providing the education was doing so from their private address. Where education is taking place from an online provider, parents can provide an email address or website.

Some form of identifiable information is needed so that local authorities can determine which education providers are supplying or supplementing the child’s education. Local authorities will also need contact details to exercise their power to request information from providers that fall within scope of the new duty outlined in new Section 436E.

On Amendment 248, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, and Amendment 264, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, which attempt to make how time is recorded on registers less prescriptive, notwithstanding what I have said about hours and the nature of time used in home education, not having some guidance would lead to inconsistencies across registers. The onus would be on parents and individual local authorities to determine how they define or estimate time, which would lead to reporting differences and discrepancies. In turn, this would make it difficult for the Secretary of State to take a holistic view of the education that is taking place on national and local levels and identify where support and policy development would be most effectively focused.

Amendment 250, tabled by my noble friend Lady Whitaker, and Amendments 251 and 257A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, concern additional information that local authorities should be required to record on their registers and that parents should be required to provide. I agree that information such as a family’s reasons for home education or whether an eligible child is a young carer are important context for the local authority to have. This information could reveal whether a child needs particular support or is likely to be missing education, for example. It could also be used to identify whether improvements are needed in other parts of the education system, as noble Lords have identified.

Some very important, broader points were made in the debate about support for young carers, some of which are outwith the remit of the Bill. I think all noble Lords will have recognised the important case being made for maintaining and improving support for young carers. The point here is whether these bits of information should be mandated through the amendments in the way in which they are. My noble friend Lady Whitaker seeks to require local authorities to include the reasons why a parent of a child has chosen to home educate. I know that she is aware—

I apologise for interrupting my noble friend in her very helpful answer. My Amendment would require that schools get this information so that they can learn how they could educate children better. Of course, it is excellent that the local authorities have it, but should not schools have it too?

I understand the point my noble friend makes. When children’s parents ask for their child to be taken off the roll of a school, which of course is absolutely their right, and the school should do that, it should also, as my noble friend says, reflect on the reasons why the parents are wanting to home educate that child. More broadly, in policy terms, I think we all need to reflect on the points made by my noble friend and others about where the reason is less a positive decision about home education and more a concern about provision for children with special educational needs or otherwise. I think my noble friend is aware that the department already collects information on reasons for home education, but, as she has highlighted, there are gaps in the data. That is why the Bill already allows for this information to be prescribed for inclusion.

For example, recording whether a child is a young carer could be prescribed under new Section 436C(2)(m) of the Education Act,

“any other information about the child’s characteristics, circumstances, needs or interactions with a local authority”.

If prescribed, local authorities will need to record this information if they have it or can reasonably obtain it. We will consult on the content of these regulations, and they will be subject to the affirmative parliamentary procedure. I hope that this will help to ensure that the information prescribed for inclusion in local authority registers is appropriate and useful. However, it is necessary that the information outlined in the noble Lord’s and my noble friend’s amendments remains voluntary for parents to provide. For some parents, the reason they have chosen to home-educate is deeply personal. Requiring it could cause parents to try to avoid registration altogether, making it more difficult for local authorities to identify and support those children who need it.

Amendments 260 and 261 in some ways reverse the argument being made in the previous two amendments, a point also made by the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge. These amendments aim to restrict any further information being prescribed for inclusion or recording by local authorities on their registers other than that which is set out in the Bill. To be clear, the purpose of these powers is to ensure that local authorities can include useful information in their registers that has not been explicitly mentioned in primary legislation or prescribed through regulations. It will allow that information to be recorded. We do not want local authorities prevented from making their registers a productive tool due to a lack of flexibility but, just to reiterate once again—

Very briefly, in new Section 436C(3) local authorities already have the power in legislation to include,

“any other information the local authority considers appropriate”.

My Amendment 260 limits the power of the Secretary of State to expand it in any way that the Secretary of State sees appropriate.

I will come back to the noble Baroness about whether that provides the flexibility I am arguing potentially needs to be in the Bill. The fear is that, as several noble Lords have argued, there are arguments for the inclusion of information that could be very helpful in identifying whether a child is receiving a suitable education, and, furthermore, what support it is possible to provide and should be provided for those children. We would not want to reduce the usefulness of the registers due to that lack of flexibility.

The point I was going to come on to, which I think is important, is that I must stress that parents are under no obligation to provide any further information, even if local authorities ask for it. I think there has been concern by some parents about the extent to which they will be expected to provide that information. That is not the case; it is, as several noble Lords have rightly argued, simply about how we can ensure that these registers are effective and useful while being as unburdensome as possible. That is what we are all striving to achieve here. I hope that, for the reasons I have outlined, noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments at this point.

My Lords, I shall pick up on a couple of points that the Minister made, I think this would be a very interesting point—

My Lords, I am sorry, but I do not think this is in order. We have heard from the Minister, and now it is for the person who moved their Amendment—

My Lords, this is Committee. You can have as much backwards and forwards as you wish. That is basic Committee rules.

I am advised that it is unusual—very unusual. Could the noble Lord keep his contributions exceptionally brief? Many other noble Lords intervened on the Minister at the pertinent points during her speech. It really is now the time for the noble Lord, Lord Hacking. The noble Lord’s front bench is agreeing with me.

My Lords, having been in this House for 30-plus years, no—you listen to the Minister, understand what they are saying, and perhaps that requires some further questioning. On the business of interrupting the Minister in the middle of her speech when you have not heard the full speech, I agree that it is relatively modern but it is clear that Committee is a conversation, and the place where that is restricted is on Report. I do not intend to be long but want to ask a short question. This is what Committee is. It is not, “Before the Minister sits down” but the basic process of Committee. I will take the advice of the clerks over lunch.

I make the point here: the noble Baroness is saying that she will put things in guidance. This is a good illustration of wanting to understand the limitations of the guidance. Can guidance definitively define a term in the Bill, such as “receiving education”, which is not defined in the Bill, in a way that is legally protected? Can guidance go against those terms? The Bill clearly says that everything must be recorded. The noble Baroness is saying, “No, only some stuff needs to be recorded”. Is there power in guidance to do that? Otherwise, the structure of the Bill needs adjustment. Also, I encourage her, if she does not want to go the whole way that the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, does, at least to make it clear, probably in guidance, that doing this in an annual report is an option. Otherwise, the Bill is saying that it should be done within 15 days.

My Lords, this has been a good debate, as my noble friend recorded in her remarks, and it has now gone on for over one and a half hours. I have always been a supporter of registration, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, was wise to remind us of the large absenteeism of children who are not receiving any education at all.

I make a request of the Minister on only two points. First, after the productive discussions we have had with her officials, and indeed with her colleague Stephen Morgan—I hope we have persuaded her and her officials of the important amendments that the Government could make following those discussions. I put in the request therefore to see the drafts of those amendments before we go to Report. It would be helpful and enable us to know what to do on Report.

My second comment arises out of Amendment 251 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young, and Amendment 254 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. We heard the replies of the Minister on those amendments. The reason for me drawing attention to them is that they were both valuable and should be given close consideration. The Minister replied that we can clear it all up in provided statutory guidance. I have always been rather nervous about leaving things to the guidance notes after the Bill because the terms of the Bill are those that the nation has to follow. One is worried about what statutory guidance will say and how it will change the application of the Bill. But that said, I withdraw my amendment and thank all noble Lords for the now over one and a half hours of debate. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 235A (in substitution for Amendment 237) withdrawn.

Amendments 236 to 241 not moved.

Amendment 242 had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.

Amendments 243 to 251 not moved.

Amendment 252 had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.

Amendments 253 to 254B not moved.

House resumed.

Sitting suspended.