Contribution
My Lords, I do not read this amendment in the same way as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, does, but I will come to that. I start with renewed thanks to the Minister for the time that she and her officials have given to me and thanks to the right reverend Prelate for tabling this amendment.
This Bill exemplifies how we are setting clear expectations of the standards that we should set for people who choose to educate their children outside the school system. We should not be ashamed of that. This is an honourable and right thing to do. My main answer to the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, is that, if they are not achieving home education, they are in trouble. There must be home education which is up to the standard we think it should be. If not, it will be in contravention of this Bill.
However, that does not appear to be the problem, at least with the Haredi communities that I have been in correspondence with. We have principles—and they have principles—about how children should be educated. The Prime Minister and others in government have made much of their respect and care for our Jewish communities. It would not be consistent with those statements to tip hundreds of families within the Haredi community into conflict with the state and courts without doing our best to reconcile their views on education and ours.
However, tipping them into conflict is what this Bill in its raw form does, as the Government’s own impact statement accepts. The Haredi community, for all the differences between its ancient traditions and our secular ways, is entirely worthy of our care and respect. It is law-abiding. It makes a positive contribution to our economy. Its children lead productive and fulfilling lives. There is clearly a lot of good going on.
We should therefore step back from the punitive approach that this Bill allows for and enter a process of building a mutual understanding. What does Haredi education achieve in practice? What exactly are their religious red lines? What aspects of Haredi education do we want to see improved? What is the best way of getting that? We have clearly put the Haredi community, or substantial parts of it, in a state of fear. The Government are pushing through this Bill unamended, asking the Haredi community to trust in the department’s good will to devise regulations it will be able to work with. This surely is the time for a clear statement from the Minister that the Government are committed to reaching an outcome that allows both sets of principles to be observed.
I understood from the officials we met that yeshivas to be regulated as IEIs under this Bill are not to be expected to provide the whole of a child’s education. This is most welcome and a cornerstone of eventual agreement. Yeshivas provide religious education; their children’s general education is provided through the elective home education system and should be held to the same standards as we are holding all elective home education to. I hope the Minister will be able to confirm that understanding.
Discussion will throw up some areas of fundamental agreement, such as safeguarding, where the focus will be on getting the mechanisms right, and other areas of deep disagreement. We should be determined to resolve those disagreements. My limited experience of listening to the Haredi community and my long experience of listening to the DfE gives me a lot of confidence that we will see a positive outcome for both parties. We should set a reasonable timescale for this process. A couple of years, as discussed with officials at our most recent meeting, will be a period long enough not to cramp discussion and short enough for it to be clear that those discussions must reach a conclusion. We should involve all the main strands of Haredi thought. The DfE has been here before in successfully setting up an elective home education working group in an environment of strong and diverse opinions. Such a working group would build confidence within the Haredi community that it was heard and understood. A Minister should be involved, as some of the questions to be resolved clearly require the application of ministerial judgment.
We should understand the depth of our misunderstandings. We find it hard, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, illustrated, to believe that children will have the energy and focus for a good general education if the school day is full of religious studies. But as the right reverend Prelate said, they do not return home to their devices, computer games and all the other things that distract our children; they lead a much more focused life—they clearly do. If you look at the outcomes, the people they grow up to be, they clearly do absorb, very effectively, a good, broad general education. If we express our wishes in terms of the results we desire, not in terms of structures created for other purposes, I believe that we will build mutual understanding and trust. We should listen to the Haredi community’s exposition of its principles and explore how those principles can be upheld, at the same time as we uphold ours. I very much hope that the Minister will, in her reply, commit her Government to such a course.