Baroness Spielman (Con)

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 There are parents who have simply withdrawn their children to avoid prosecution for non-attendance, and there will always be a few sad exceptional cases, but I will not go into that.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.