Lord Lucas (Con)

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.