Contribution
My Lords, I will move Amendment 231 on behalf of my noble friend Lord Wei, who regrets that he is not able to be here today, as he has to attend a close family member’s wedding.
The day looks as if it will be devoted to elective home education and, owing to my imminent defenestration and general crumbling health, I am in a position to say—since I shall be disengaging from this arena after 15 years in it—that I have found the home education community a total delight to work with. It is a collection of extraordinary people, and I find it very easy to understand how the Government do not find them easy to work with. I very much hope that, in the course of the Bill, we will help lay the foundations for a good, strong relationship.
I thank very much the Minister and her civil servants for all the time and effort they took over the Recess to work through the amendments in this section and to look at how we might gain a better understanding of them and share that with the home education community. I look forward to the continuance of that progress through Report. My approach today will be to be very concise where I can—I will await what the Minister says about individual amendments and respond to that. So much has passed between us and civil servants that rehearsing my amendments as if that had not happened would seem futile.
A large number of the amendments arise from uncertainty over the Government’s intentions, so it would be good to have something clear and unequivocal from the Minister that supports the rights of responsibilities of home educators; that celebrates the contribution they make both to the state—they save the state a great deal of money—and to the education of their children; and that requires local authorities to be supportive.
The role of local authorities is crucial here; it is clear that the role they play is vital. There are many instances where people are set on home educating for the wrong reasons or where home educating goes wrong. Looking after the children in those circumstances is hugely important. However, if the relationship between local authorities and home educators is to work, it must be based on trust and mutual appreciation. If you can get that to work, as many local authorities do, you get a strong information flow into the local authority on what is happening; you get really good support for the children involved; and it is much easier for a local authority to focus its efforts on the things that are going wrong.
As it is written—obviously, there is a lot to come in regulation—the Bill gives local authorities huge powers. Just a comma out of place in some detail on the education that you provide for your child and the local authority can tip your child back into school. That is the way it is written. I understand that that is not how it will work in practice, but it has raised considerable concerns in the home education community. Also, in talking to local authorities, I have found that their impression is that the Government’s wish is that they be much stricter on home education and push children back into school wherever possible. These are misapprehensions, I think, but I very much look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say on them.
Local authorities are thoroughly oversubscribed and financially stressed by adult social care and special needs. The home education department is usually small. Sometimes people have been pitched into it for the first time and are having to learn their way through it. Sometimes it contains people of supreme intolerance. Portsmouth gets mentioned frequently, but I know that the Minister has had shared with her a letter to home educators from Bristol Council, which shows, I think, a deep lack of understanding of how the relationship between local authorities and home educators should work. We need to come out of this Bill clear ways in which the Department for Education can steer local authorities, help them improve their practices and provide a method of recourse for parents who feel that they are being badly done by by their local authority. I also hope to see a way of celebrating the good practices that go unnoticed; too often, those local authorities that are really doing their job well go unnoticed.
I come now to the amendments in this group. We are looking at a request for information, which is very loosely described and might be interpreted at a really detailed level. What is the child doing for each five minutes of the day? With whom are they interacting? Home education can be a very varied, loose way of educating a child. It is often child-led, even if there is a lot of parental direction in there, and follows no clear, predetermined path. Recording that in the way the Bill seems to ask for would require a daily report being sent by the parent to the local authority. This cannot be what local authorities want to receive. They just are not set up for it. Here, we need something sensible and practical; understanding what that is will be really important. There is certainly an established practice in some local authorities of an annual report, which can vary in length from six to 60 pages and allows a parent to present a clear, consistent picture of the education that their child has been receiving to put everything in context.