Lord Storey (LD)

I have listened to Members talk on all these amendments, and it raised some thoughts in my mind, which I just want to mention before dealing with the amendments. One of the things that we will perhaps appreciate even more as a result of having a register is that, never mind home education, there are currently 100,000 children missing. They are not in home education or schools but are missing. I hope that when we have established—if we establish—a register for home-educated children, we will know the exact number of missing children and have a similar opportunity to work out how we do something about it. It is one of the highest levels in western Europe. That is my first thought. My second thought is that we constantly hear from schools about the workload that teachers have to have, and maybe some of the discussions about what we are requiring of home educators in terms of the information from them would be music to teachers’ ears as well. In my days as a probationary teacher in my first school, I remember that the head did not require me to keep any records at all. He trusted me as a teacher. There was a single school syllabus and you just got on with it. After five years, I moved on to my second school. It was a huge culture shock because the head teacher demanded that we all had our record books and that we wrote down in great detail a paragraph for every subject from maths, literacy and numeracy right through to technology on what we were doing in that week. Perhaps this discussion also relates to issues for schools as well. Each of these amendments has important things to say. I thought that the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, was absolutely right to ask, what in these amendments adds value and what adds little value? Sometimes it is not in plain sight. For example, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, dismissed Amendment 244 as more bureaucracy. I am surprised that the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, did not get up. His later Amendment 333ZA is about safeguarding. I do not think that many parents know that, currently, under UK law, an individual barred from working with children due to safeguarding risks or serious offences—including imprisonment—can legally offer one-to-one tuition to children when hired directly by the provider. So the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Wei, which seeks to avoid having to provide details of staff at, for example, online schools, is a mistake. We should know the details of individuals who are not parents and who come into schools to do tutoring. That is hugely important.