Baroness Barran:

Moved by Baroness Barran

306: Clause 31, page 60, line 43, at end insert—“(9) The Secretary of State must publish annually the GCSE results of children listed on the register.(10) The Secretary of State must ensure that the GCSE results of children on the register are included for each set of outcome data published by the Government.”Member’s explanatory statementThis Amendment would require the Secretary of State to record outcome data for children on the register as a subsection of each set of performance data published by the Department for Education.

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 306 in my name, which would require the Department for Education to publish the aggregate GCSE results of those children registered as being educated at home. I stress “aggregate”, because I think there was some confusion when this amendment was debated in the other place as to whether we were seeking to publish the individual GCSE results of individual children, which is not the aim of this amendment.

The aim is to give some relevant insight from this data, including what percentage of children who are electively home-educated end up sitting public exams, what those results are and what percentage are not sitting public exams. Our amendment would see these results being published separately from those relating to schools, so that the data would not be confused. I suppose I am puzzled as to why the Government would not want to publish this information.

I will touch briefly on the other amendments in this group. Amendment 317 is very much in the same spirit as my Amendment 306, in the names of my noble friends Lord Lucas and Lord Wei. It seeks similar data, in relation not just to electively home-educated children but to those looked after by the local authority, those in a PRU or in special education otherwise than at school. I wonder whether the Minister thinks this would be useful or whether some of the numbers involved would be so small as perhaps to be potentially misleading.

Amendment 316, in the names of the noble Lords, Lord Crisp and Lord Storey, probes the provision of financial support for electively home-educated children sitting public exams, and the Minister will know that there are real issues in practice about these children being able to sit public exams, and finance is one part of that. I appreciate the pressure on local authority budgets, but of course these are, effectively, children who have saved the state money, and I for one would be keen to see as many as possible sit public exams. I beg to move.

My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 306 in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran. Given that this country has the joint lightest-touch approach in Europe in relation to the oversight of home education, I would have thought this is a no-brainer to enable us to understand more about the performance of these children. I also hope that those in the home education lobby will welcome and support the amendment, as it would give them the opportunity to show their paces.

My Lords, I have Amendment 317 in this group, which would rather expand the range of reporting to other groups of children who are under the care of the state and not in a specific school. It is really important for the governance of education in this country that we understand how all our children are performing. I would expect a local authority to take an interest in the examinations of home-educated children and these other groups of children in Amendment 317 in their local area. I would expect the Department for Education also to be interested, not for year-to-year panicking but in a determination to understand what the difficulties and differences are and how, over time, to drive the results up. The basic starting point of that is to get the data out.

Particularly if you are reporting at a national level, you are not reporting anything that has any element of personal or identifiable data to it, but you are putting a bit of data down on the table to draw people’s attention to what the state of affairs is. That is a very important part of the way in which the state should have responsibility for what it is providing to our children.

Equally, I agree with those who are saying, particularly as we are bringing home education within the scope of the state so much more, that we should take responsibility for making sure that home-educated children find it easy to take crucial examinations. At the moment, it is extraordinarily difficult. They may have to travel hundreds of miles to find an examination centre and pay thousands of pounds to have access to an exam. The Prime Minister is borrowing a flat so that his child may have a quiet environment in which to study for his examinations, so one would hope that the Government realise that making it easy to take exams within a reasonable distance from home and without undue stress on the family’s finances is an objective we should have—particularly when, as my noble friend says, home-educated children are saving us so much money.

My Lords, I support the proposal on GCSE results from the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. It is very important, for the reasons she suggests. I have seen some interesting results from home-educated children, which show them performing well in these areas. The results would be interesting to see and may improve the score, as it were, for the country as a whole.

Secondly, I entirely support the Amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I will say nothing more except that this is perhaps the biggest single practical obstacle in the current regime that home-educating parents have reported to me. I will leave it to the noble Lord to press that case.

My Lords, I will deal first with Amendment 306 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, which we also support. I am interested in hearing from the Minister about why we would not want to do this.

On Amendment 316, in my name and that of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, it is easy to say, “You chose to let your children not be part of the school system, so you can just get on with it. You chose to home-educate them, so we are not going to pay for exams or whatever”. That would be the wrong way to approach this. If we really want to make home education closer to local authorities, so that they support each other, there are a number of supportive things we can do.

Not every home educator has the financial resources to pay for examinations. We saw a huge rise in home-educated children during Covid, many of whom come from deprived areas. Families really struggle to find the costs for examinations, so supporting this amendment would be a hand of educational friendship. We know that home educators take huge pressure off the education budget as a whole and off school rolls, so I just think it is the right thing to do.

I am quite fascinated by Amendment 478 and looking forward to hearing the Minister’s reply. I thought that all high achievers—super-high achievers, if you like—whether they are educated at home or at a maintained school, academy or free school, would get that recognition. I do not quite understand this amendment, so perhaps the Minister will enlighten us.

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Storey, raised this issue at Second Reading. I supported him then and I support him again now. It is quite unfair that a child who has been educated privately at home should be placed in a different position from state-educated children. All children who have been home educated should be encouraged to go through these exams and not face a financial penalty. This is a very simple measure, and I ask my noble friend the Minister to give it favourable consideration. It is a much fairer system and it encourages all home-educating parents to put their children through examination, so that the quality of their teaching can be tested.

Supporting children to achieve and thrive requires parents, authorities and education providers to work together. That is what much of our debate today has been about and speaks to the amendments in this group that concern the facilitation of examinations and the publication of exam results for home-educated children.

Home education is a significant undertaking. Parents who choose to do so assume full responsibility, which includes bearing the financial responsibility of doing so. That includes deciding whether their child should sit exams and covering the costs to facilitate this. However, local authorities can and should be a source of information and advice for parents.

Amendment 306 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, would require that the department annually publish GCSE data on children included in children not in school registers. The department is responsible for driving high and rising standards in the state-funded school system and, of course, publishes performance data for schools and colleges as an accountability measure. I am afraid that carrying out the task requested by this amendment would be considerably more difficult than noble Lords have suggested and would also not be likely to provide the clear information they have suggested it would. Parents often tailor the educational experience of their children to suit individual needs and, as a result, may opt not to follow the traditional route of GCSEs or other formal qualifications.

There is no requirement for home-educated children to undertake national examinations and, as I have said, some opt not to follow that route. That means that outcomes are not separately reported as they would not fully reflect this group and would not be a true indicator of the performance of home-educated children. It is interesting that noble Lords have rightly emphasised the range of types of learning that parents undertake as part of home education. It may well be difficult to represent only that, and probably a false view of home education to represent only that, through the publication of data relating to GCSE passes in a group that is particularly selective about those who take the GCSE exams.

Amendment 317, tabled by the noble Lord Lucas, would require the local authority to provide an annual report on the educational performance of children who reach the age of 19, who were looked-after children, who were being educated under arrangements made by the local authority under Sections 19 or 61, and who were on the children not in school register. For most of these groups, appropriate monitoring of progress is already in place.

For looked-after children, virtual school heads must publish an annual report setting out strategies for supporting educational achievement. For Section 19 arrangements, local authorities must retain a record of provision, including progress. For Section 61, the local authority is required to undertake reviews at least annually, including considering progress towards outcomes specific specified in education, health and care plans.

As I previously noted in response to Amendment 306, the educational performance of home-educated children would not be comparable with that of children who attend schools and other mainstream educational settings. Furthermore, the department publishes school educational performance data to track the performance of individual institutions to keep them accountable. It would not be right for the local authority to publish data on home-educated children in the same manner.

Amendment 316 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, seeks to create a duty that would enable home-educated children to access national examinations on a parity with students with a state-funded school place. We share this desire to provide some support to home-educating families. That is why we are introducing a support duty, which will require local authorities to provide advice and information about a home-educated child’s education if their parent requests it. This could include guidance on how home-educated children can access exams, for example. Local authorities have discretion to provide support over and above that required by the new support duty.

Home-educated students can already access past papers to support exam preparation and receive help with identifying a suitable examination centre from awarding organisations and the Joint Council for Qualifications. But our guidance is clear: parents who choose to home-educate assume full responsibility for the education of their child.

Finally, Amendment 478 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, seeks to provide an official certificate of graduation for children who have completed education equivalent to A-levels before the age of 16. I agree with the noble Lord that it is important that any student, regardless of their age, gets formal recognition of the qualifications that they have taken. Any individual taking a formal qualification will receive an official certificate from the awarding organisation confirming their attainment in those qualifications. Those certificates provide formal recognition of a qualification, and individuals, including early academic achievers, will be able to use them to progress to further education or employment.

For the reasons I have outlined, I hope that noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her response to Amendment 317. I understand her reluctance to publish information as if home educators were a school, but I urge her to think how useful it would be to have that information for understanding what is happening in home education.

It is one of the long-running criticisms of home education that there is no information as to how these children are doing—you say they are doing well, but you cannot show me any information as to that. It would be really useful in understanding, as the noble Baroness has said, whether an internationally liberal approach to home education is justified. Even if it is only for the Government’s own policy formation, I very much hope they will make sure that they can put together the sort of information I have detailed in this amendment, so that they can understand the effects of policies as they are at the moment.

My Lords, on behalf of all noble Lords who have spoken in this short debate, I thank the Minister for her response. I absolutely support the sentiment just expressed by my noble friend Lord Lucas about the importance of understanding the outcomes for children who are home-educated.

In relation to my Amendment 306, the reasons that the Minister gave for not aggregating and publishing, or even aggregating and not publishing, their GCSE results was—as I wrote down—that, first, it was hard to do and, secondly, it would not produce the results that we expect. It feels curious to me that someone could not put a box on the form—that a child could tick, to say that they were home-educated—that could be aggregated.

On the expected results, the whole point, or part of the point, was to understand how many home-educated children were taking public exams and how many were not. I think that would be a useful bit of information. So I do not accept the argument that it would not produce the results that we expect; we do not have an expectation because we do not know what they are. More widely, when there were very small numbers of children who were home-educated, it was perhaps—

Just to be clear, I do not know whether I said that they would not produce the results that we expect. If I did, that was not what I meant to say. What I meant to say was that in terms of the ability to have a statistical analysis of the quality of home education, the different nature of home education and the range, quite rightly, of decisions made by parents—many of whom might decide that exams are not the appropriate route for their children—would mean that we would not be able to formulate from that data the common view of performance that the noble Baroness is suggesting would be the objective.

I thank the Minister for that clarification. What I wrote down is “not producing the results we expect”. We can check in Hansard whether that is what she actually said. I suppose the point I was trying to make is that this is a kind of entry point question. It is not going to give us a sophisticated analysis but it gives us some perspective. If we tried to estimate by taking a straw poll of Members of the House what percentage of home-educated children do GCSEs, we might get very varying results, so even just knowing that might be valuable.

On the other amendments in this group, the Minister was clear that parents are fully responsible, including on the financial implications of home education, but it was good to hear her reiterate the support duty, including on access to previous exam papers. How that support duty is communicated to parents will obviously be of great importance. With that, I beg leave to withdraw the Amendment.

Amendment 306 withdrawn.

Amendments 307 and 308 not moved.