Contribution
The point is that this is just an additional measure to ensure that children like her are safe.
I want to reiterate to colleagues across the House that we absolutely support and champion the right of parents to home-educate. This is not an attack on home education; it is about ensuring that all children are safe. That is the view of the Children’s Commissioner, the National Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children and many other organisations, and in fact parties across the House. The Conservatives themselves started to legislate for this in the last Parliament but then binned the provision. There is cross-party consensus on this measure.
There are areas of detail that we need to dig into during the Bill’s progress, but in headline terms, the register is a crucial tool in the armoury that we give local authorities to ensure that our children are safe. As I have said, it has been called for by many organisations and all parties. However, the volume of information requested from parents places a significant and potentially intrusive burden on those who choose to home-educate for the right reasons, so we must ensure that data collection is strictly necessary and proportionate and is being used appropriately.
Clause 24 sets out the cases in which parents and carers must seek permission to withdraw children from school. I would question the inclusion of children placed in special schools. When there are safeguarding concerns about a child, the local authorities should be able to step in to ensure that they receive their education at school. However, some children’s needs will not be met in the special schools in which they are placed, and parents may feel that they have no option but to home-educate. In such cases, should not the presumed options be to improve the child’s experience of the school or to work with the family to secure alternative provision, rather than using the blunt instrument of clause 24?
We know that, after years of neglect and mismanagement by the Conservatives, our schools are crying out for support. For students, parents and teachers enduring crumbling buildings, persistent underfunding and a spiralling SEND crisis, hearing the Conservatives’ rhetoric today will be utterly galling. The Bill takes welcome steps in restoring local authorities’ powers to propose new maintained schools—especially given the desperate need in many areas for new special schools, which local authorities have regularly been prevented from establishing in recent years—although, it is disappointing that it does nothing else to start addressing the reforms that are so desperately needed to improve the special educational needs system. We also welcome the co-operation on school admissions criteria. Together, these changes empower communities to allocate educational resources locally, but some clarifications are needed.
Let me ask specifically what assessment the Government have made of the impact of requiring every single teacher to have, or to work towards, qualified teacher status, and whether they have spoken to the sector about that. We all agree that we want qualified teachers in our schools, but there may be some unintended consequences when non-qualified teachers are brought in to run certain services and extracurricular activities. Are the Government confident that this measure will not lead to those unintended consequences?
The provisions on pay should seek only to set a minimum floor, not a maximum ceiling, on what staff can be paid. I take on board what the Secretary of State said in response to an earlier intervention—that no one’s pay would be cut—but that is a retrospective reflection. I hope that in future all schools, whether or not they are academies, should be able to pay a premium in order to attract the right staff, if they have the resources to do so. [Interruption.] From a sedentary position, the Conservatives are saying that they will not be able to do that. In Committee, we will seek to amend the Bill to make it clear that this should be a floor, not a ceiling.