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Children, Schools and Families Bill

My Lords, I grow potatoes like this Bill—they look pretty good when you dig them up, but when you have washed them, knocked the knobbly bits off, peeled them, cut out the rotten bits and dug the slugs out of their holes, you wonder why you bothered. The first part just seems to me to be sheer electioneering. What is the point of a guarantee which is no guarantee? What is the point of promising people things that are so ill defined that they do not really know what they are getting? How on earth is a personal home-school agreement practical? The point of home-school agreements is that they apply to the whole school; that they are universal, simple and understandable. You may need a few personal ones in very extreme cases, but you are going to need an extra head teacher just to handle home-school agreements, if you give them the time that they will require. I am not at all confident that we should move ahead with the Rose review, as proposed in this Bill. The abandonment of knowledge in favour just of learning seems to me to be against all experience. There is no mention, as the right reverend Prelate remarked, of religious education. There is precious little mention of foreign languages. There is no specification of the knowledge which should underpin learning. We are really drifting into some very strange territory. It is a nice report, but there is no real underlying evidence that this is the right thing to do. As the noble Lord, Lord Alton, has said, we are moving into some very strange territory in the PSHE requirements. It is not at all clear to me where this Government now stand in relation to the rights and practices of faith schools. It is in the nature of faiths, or at least some parts of them, that followers believe that they are the only ones who are going to be saved and that certain practices are a sin and should not be contemplated. How can you compel those schools to go against the fundamental tenets of their religion? It does not seem to me that the Government have worked out that contradiction at all. It disappoints me, too, that we seem to be looking at PSHE in a very old-fashioned way, as a collection of things that children are to be told to do or not to do, rather than teaching children how to make decisions for themselves and how to tackle the unexpected and the unknown as well as they will tackle the predetermined questions that go into the PSHE syllabuses. That part of the Bill deserves a lot of attention. The same applies to the rest of it, but the part about home education is the bit that I would wish to cut out. The noble Baroness said today that in a very small number of cases education is not satisfactory. She told me, when we met to discuss the Bill a day or two ago, that there was no intention to impose a curriculum; and that there was unequivocal support from the Government of the right to home-educate. I share the view of the noble Lord, Lord Soley, that legislation in this area is inevitable, but why then is the Bill as it is? Why is the home education community up in arms? I share with the home education community the fears that it expresses on the blog, on my blog and elsewhere. There seems to be something in the DCSF, which I have not identified in any of the people I have met, that is malevolent to home education and wishes to destroy it. Why else does the Bill start from the principle that you are only allowed to home-educate if the local authority gives you permission to do so? It may withdraw that permission, on review, every year. Why do we start with the idea that you have to produce a syllabus to be allowed to home-educate, when the basis of autonomous education is that the child follows their own path, with you at their side? You cannot produce a syllabus until a year has passed and you look back. Why do none of those good things in the Badman review, about training and support, appear in the Bill? What has done the damage in making progress in what, I agree, is an inevitable direction, is what is written in the Bill. The Badman report was hard enough. The thing that hurt there was the idea that it should be compulsory for your child to spend time alone with an inspector. Having time alone with an inspector is not something which one would readily allow for one’s own children, even though they are in school. It is not in the Bill but it was in the Badman report. It is in the Bill by implication. If you do not allow the access to your child that the local authority requires, it can refuse home education, and that access may include—if the local authority judges it right—time alone with an inspector. We seem to have set out, in going down a quite proper road, with the wrong foot and, as a result, trodden on a landmine and found ourselves blown up. We must realise that we cannot carry on, particularly with no Committee stage, to make something of Clauses 26 and 27 and Schedule 1. They must be restarted and revisited. There are some good principles on which this can be done. The first is to recognise what my noble friend Lady Verma said. Our school system is far from perfect and for children in care we do even worse. We should not expect something from home-educating parents that we do not deliver in the system which we present as an alternative. We should show respect to home-educating parents, who are, in most cases, shouldering burdens and responsibilities which, otherwise, we would have to shoulder. There are people who home-educate purely out of conviction. There is certainly a strong stream of those. However, there are many parents who home-educate children with special needs or children who, as the noble Lord, Lord Soley, said, have been bullied. It is fine to work with the school. I thoroughly encourage the remedy that the noble Lord, Lord Soley, suggested; but schools are not perfect. Many schools still do not deal with bullying properly. You can get to the point where a child is prostrate at the thought of going to school, cries continually, will not do it and is obviously very distressed. You know—because you have seen the head teacher or tried to get through to the school—that they are not dealing with the bullying but are allowing it to continue. Under those circumstances, home education is a totally reasonable alternative. Where children with special needs are not being properly dealt with, it is also a much better alternative. The situation is much better than it used to be, but it is not perfect. Many schools do not deal well with special needs. These parents are taking on often difficult children but always difficult cases and are looking after them without support. That deserves our respect. Where we have evidence—evidence is pretty thin on the ground in this country but it has been produced in other countries—home education seems on average to be at least as good as school education. We should not have fundamental prejudices against it but we have to recognise that in most cases the style will be different. There are things you can do one-to-one that you just cannot do in school. In school you require structure, curricula and timetables. If you are one-to-one, you can go without that. The Bill ought to start out by respecting all those things and then go on to provide assistance. Children who are being home educated find it very hard to take exams because there is nowhere for them to take them. Where do you find a centre to take GCSEs? How do you deal with the modern GCSEs that require moderation of coursework? There is no capacity for that in home education. As the noble Lord, Lord Soley, pointed out, it is extremely difficult to get remedial help or specialist help when your child has problems in a particular area. There is much good practice in providing special educational needs support, but it is extremely deficient in some areas. If you provide support for home education, most—but not all—home educating parents will take advantage of it. You will get to see as much of those children as you need to just by them turning up at classes that are provided. Children with special needs get no special access to swimming pools, have no facility to learn first aid or to be taught how to ride a bicycle. They do not get taken on a week’s holidays in Wales. All sorts of things that are available to ordinary children could be made available to home-educated children. The budget is there because, through the Bill, the Government are proposing to spend £40 million a year—£2,000 per home-educated child, on average—that is £20 million on observing them and another £20 million on corralling into school the 20 per cent of home-educated children who they say are not up to scratch. That is another reason why the department is not trusted. It has produced a range of figures in the impact assessment that are frankly daffy. It said that 20 per cent of children are not receiving a suitable education: 15 per cent of that figure are children who have not been assessed, and only 5 per cent have any question mark over them. The real figure of pupils who ought to be being better educated is something like 2 or 3 per cent. It said that there was a double risk of children who were being home educated being the subject of safeguarding concerns. Again, it has messed up the figures there. The absolute number—51 children in home education—were giving cause for concern, but it divided that by the number of children in home education that it knew about, whereas it knows that there are two, three, or four times as many who are not registered. However, any of those who are not registered and who become the cause of concern immediately move into the registered section. Therefore, rather than looking at double the risk, you are looking at about half the risk of children in home education causing concern if you do the statistics right. The Government’s deliberate distortion of the position has really upset the home education community, and I am not at all surprised. A bit of honesty and openness would go a long way. As the noble Lord, Lord Soley, said, we will get regulation at the end of the day, but there are underlying concerns. There are changes in our society that are bound to have an impact on home education. My basic message to the Government on home education is: let us begin again. Let us forget about this section of the Bill, cut it out when it comes to the wash-up, and begin again. That way we have a hope of getting something which will do justice to the home education community and calm the fears and concerns we have for the children involved.