Contribution
My Lords I rise to speak to my Amendments 218, 223, 381, 403 and 418. Together, they seek to introduce fairness, balance and accountability into the Bill and to support families who are simply choosing a lawful, legitimate path of home education.
I will first focus on Amendment 218, which will require any local authority officer making decisions about elective home education to have at least two years’ personal experience of home educating their own children. This is not an ideological proposal but a practical one. I recall being asked once by the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, to help create a Teach First programme for social workers. I declined, not because I doubted the value of new graduates but because lived experience matters. Pattern recognition, nuance and trust are not easily taught, especially if you have only recently graduated. You cannot understand the reality of raising and educating a child outside school unless you have walked that path yourself.
To ask someone with no such experience to judge a family’s educational approach is like asking a man to speak with authority on childbirth or someone without children to dictate how others should raise theirs. According to Education Otherwise, home-educated children are twice as likely to be referred to children’s social services as their schooled peers, and yet no more likely to be placed on a child protection plan. This points to systematic overreferral, driven in part by ignorance and in part by a narrative that wrongly associates home education with safeguarding risk. This amendment offers one step towards correcting that imbalance.
Case law supports this. In R (T) v Chief Constable of Greater Manchester 2014, the Supreme Court held that administrative decisions that infringe individual rights must be informed by proper context and not rely on rigid or generic assumptions. Without understanding the diversity and nuance of home education, decisions risk being fundamentally flawed. If flawed decisions are made persistently, structurally and without oversight, judicial review becomes not just possible but likely. My concern is that the Bill, without this amendment and others like it, will open floodgates to such challenges, and perhaps rightly so.
This brings me to Amendment 223, which would establish an independent home education ombudsman—somewhat similar to the tribunal idea but very focused—to receive and investigate complaints against local authorities that overstep in the course of carrying out their duties under the Education Act. This is frankly overdue. At present, if a parent believes that they have been mistreated, there is no meaningful avenue of redress: no independent appeal, no clear complaints process and no statutory body to oversee how these immense powers are exercised. All they can do, as we have discussed, is write to the Minister, who to our knowledge has never, or rarely, upheld a complaint by a parent in this or a similar context.
I will give noble Lords some testimonies to bring this to life here. We have talked about the legal process here, but I want to bring home how human lives are affected by what we are proposing and what already takes place. One mother, a non-UK national, withdrew her child from the UK system before school age, having mistakenly registered with the local authority on school advice. Despite their lawful departure, the LA demanded boarding passes, proof of address and school details abroad. The child was never of school age in the UK. This was not protection; it was pursuit.
A military family has described how their local authority contacted the husband’s workplace repeatedly to discuss the children, even after it had ruled that the home education was of a satisfactory, suitable level. It then had to make an apology and had clear instruction to contact only the mother. The mother said this was a huge breach of privacy because of the nature of the agreement they had established. A home-educating doctor wrote:
“After de-registering my daughter with SEND, I was referred to social services again. My son and I were followed in public. I feared for our safety. My daughter began to regress. I had done nothing wrong—just removed her from a school that failed her”.