Lord Lucas (Con)

My Lords, I very much support what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Crisp. This is really the nub of things—how we can make support work. I also support what the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has just said. It is absolutely clear that some local authorities take any opportunity to tip home-educating parents into getting their children back into school. We want to be encouraging parents, at all times, to approach local authorities to say that they need some help—that is a perfectly ordinary thing to do. If you as a solicitor are sued by someone else, the first thing you would do is find another solicitor. Even if you are an expert, you go and ask for help. It should be regarded as ordinary. No one should take on something such as home education without looking all the possible sources of advice, because there will always be someone who has insights that go beyond your knowledge. Protecting against the misuse of that approach is important to making sure that we have a strong relationship between local authorities and parents. My Amendment 311 would require local authorities to explicitly take account of the needs of the child and the educational preference of the parents. That is a very important part of the attitude; the local authority should understand the parents and work with them, not try to impose its own formula. I will also speak to a number of amendments in this group tabled by my noble friend Lord Wei. Amendments 390, 401, 402, 407, 419 and 422 address the financial asymmetry borne by home-educating families. Every child educated at home saves the state around £7,500 a year. However, the entire burden of curriculum costs, exam fees, tutoring and lost parental income falls on the families themselves. Amendment 390 would introduce tax relief for education expenses, while Amendment 401 would grant rebates when families home-educate due to a lack of suitable school places. Amendment 402 would adjust council tax to reflect that home-educating households are not drawing on local school budgets. Amendments 407 and 419 explore models for direct funding, whether through per-pupil allocations for individual families or co-operatives, which would bring a measure of parity to a system that otherwise risks confining high-quality home education to the affluent. Amendment 422 recognises another imbalance: where the state compels parents to spend hours compiling reports or attending overnight meetings while simultaneously providing the labour of teaching, they should not do so entirely unpaid. Compensating that time, at least to the level of the minimum wage, is not only fair but respects the immense commitment that parents undertake on society’s behalf. Amendment 396 presses the Government to fund independent research into home education practice. It is striking how much policy in this area proceeds on assumption and anecdote rather than robust data. What does successful autonomous learning look like across different family contexts? How do educational outcomes compare when we look beyond narrow test metrics to include well-being, creativity and lifelong resilience? Speaking with my own voice now, that is something that I would very much support. As the Minister said, it is difficult to get a grip on how education is doing just from incomplete exam statistics. Doing some proper research would not only benefit the Government and their policies but enable the home education community to become a self-improving community and to do better by their own children, which is a huge motivation for them.