My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for stepping in and moving the Amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei. I thank all noble Lords for their contributions to this short but thoughtful debate. I will not take it personally.

Fundamentally, the Government believe that the department’s understanding of children not in school can be improved through the measures in this Bill. Although we currently have collected and published aggregate data on home education and children missing education from local authorities since 2022, our understanding of this cohort of children can be enhanced further through improved quality of data collected by the department. This data will help identify trends among the cohort of children and help determine future policy needs. I assure noble Lords that any data handled by the department will be dealt with in accordance with data protection law and GDPR principles.

I turn to the substance. Amendment 271 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, would disallow data held on a local authority register from being stored on or shared with any other database that is held and managed by an organisation such as the Department for Education. We believe there is considerable value in the Secretary of State being able to receive data from local authority registers to improve oversight and understanding of this cohort on national and local levels. It will make it easier to identify when children have fallen through the gaps.

The information collected will be used for straightforward reasons, as outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Addington. Analysis to identify trends to feed into policy development, maintaining the integrity of the register and supporting safeguarding, education and welfare will allow us to identify why some children are moving out of mainstream education. The adoption of this amendment would therefore undermine our efforts, as outlined in the Bill.

Amendment 307 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would require certain public bodies that process data to create a transparency register. As we have heard, this would require those bodies to produce and maintain detailed records of all data processing including the form and publication of the record, retention period and disclosure circumstances. Transparency is an important principle, but current statutory accountability mechanisms and audit provisions already provide appropriate oversight. For example, as part of the department’s commitment to transparency, details of all organisations with which we have shared personal data are published quarterly on GOV.UK, alongside a short description of the project, which I hope the noble Lord considers to be an appropriate safeguard.

Amendment 308, also tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, would, as written, make local authorities unable to share individual-level data with the Secretary of State unless it related to making a direction about a school attendance order. Other information concerning home-educated children or children missing education would be shared only at an aggregate level.

The data processed through children not in school registers is envisaged to have wider uses than just determining whether to issue a direction regarding a school attendance order. Allowing the Secretary of State access to individual-level data will provide for more robust data analysis and research and the join-up of functions aimed at promoting a child’s education or safeguarding. For example, the sharing of individual-level data will enable cross-referencing with departmental databases to locate children who have slipped under the radar due to relocation or changing educational provision.

The provision in the Bill for local authorities to share information from registers with Welsh Ministers could be used in a similar way to enable the location of children who have disappeared from registers due to moving from England to Wales or vice versa. This amendment would therefore undermine the purpose of the registration system, limiting the use of the data it could contain to statistics and exceptional cases concerning school attendance orders. For the reasons I have outlined, I kindly request that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, withdraw his amendment.