Gideon Amos

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Barker. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross (Jamie Stone) for introducing this really important debate. My feelings are very much aligned with the around 300 people in my constituency who signed the petition. At the heart of this debate is a fallacy: that children are more at risk in home educating families than they are at school. In fact, the figures show the exact opposite. I will come back to that point in detail. My concerns are about not only home educating families but rural schools and rural environments, where the limited resources mean that the Bill’s more onerous requirements on schools could drive some smaller rural schools out of the system and lead to them being closed. Rural areas have fewer and smaller schools, and rural schools have fewer administrative resources to deal with the new administrative burdens such as supporting staff to meet the new qualified teacher status requirements, dealing with increased monitoring, handling fluctuating pupil numbers and budgets, and so on. There are significant risks to small rural schools that may well lead to even more pupils ending up in home education settings as a result of the lack of choice and lack of diversity of supply in rural environments. If pupils do end up in home educating families, they will find the environment is even harsher and the support from the Government is even more non-existent than it was before, and that the general environment is less and less helpful. We have to take concerns about safeguarding seriously, as every hon. Member across this Chamber would agree. My hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr Forster) has done serious work on that issue. I am happy to accept some of the Bill’s provisions, but there are real concerns about its more onerous requirements. I have significant concerns about the single unique identifier in particular. Let us remember that it gives any public body the ability to share any information, whether or not it is right, correct and accurate, without the knowledge or consent of parents. Anyone who thinks the public sector is good at looking after our data, and getting it accurate, has probably been living on the moon.