Liam Conlon

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Ms Barker. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is an important piece of legislation for this Government. Among other things, it will drive higher standards in our schools, put more qualified teachers at the front of classrooms, bring down the cost of uniforms for families and create a new duty to establish multi-agency child protection teams. It is right that the Government are looking to implement the Bill, including all the measures around home educating. I will talk about two things in particular: first, the provisions for children who find themselves between hospital, home and school; and secondly, home educating. I speak not only as an MP on behalf of constituents, but as someone with vast personal experience of educational interruption and learning in non-traditional settings. When I was 13, the day after we broke up for the summer holidays in year 8, I had a freak accident in which I shattered my right hip and did irreversible damage to my back. From that point on, I did not walk for four of my teenage years, and I did not have a full year at school from years 9 to 12. Instead I received a mixture of home education, teaching at the Royal London hospital in Whitechapel in east London and school. When I eventually did return to school, I went back a year, which was not a great experience and was a reminder of why people do not want to wind up in the year below. I know that learning in non-traditional settings does not need to hold children back. There are challenges in delivery, despite the hard work that staff and parents put in, but these can be overcome. Having returned recently to the Royal London, I have seen the progress made in the provision of home education and education on the wards, overcoming many of these challenges. Children are now taught by a dedicated hospital school, with three onsite classrooms at the Royal London, strong provision of information and communication technology and partnerships with organisations such as the London Symphony Orchestra and the National Portrait Gallery. This morning, before I came to Parliament, I had the pleasure of visiting the Bethlem Royal hospital in my constituency, which is the world’s oldest psychiatric institution, founded in 1247. It has a thriving hospital school that I have had the pleasure of visiting many times. I have also visited hospital schools at King’s and the Princess Royal University hospital, which serve my constituents. I have raised this with the Minister before, and I know she is dedicated and committed to it: we must make sure we reflect the experiences of children who find themselves between multiple settings—hospital, school and home. Often, that can be done in parallel. I can remember being in hospital one week, at home the following week and in school the next. There are challenges in delivering that. However, I hope this Bill will reflect on that, and I know that Minister is very committed to that. I also want to touch on the importance of home educated learning. Given my experience of home education at times, I have been pleased to engage with home educating families in my constituency. That has included individual surgeries with parents and a roundtable with parents and students during UK Parliament Week, which included dozens of families and children—I told Corin, Adelaide, Peter, Harper, Paige and Addison that I would mention them today. Addison is here in the Gallery today with his mother, Penny. During these interactions, parents, as well as children such as Addison, have carefully laid out their concerns with the Bill, including issues around the right to remove a child from school, what constitutes a “suitable education” under the Bill and the administrative burden that the Bill could place on parents. Today, I wish to bring those to the attention of the Minister. First, under the Bill, removing a child from school would create a requirement for local authority consent before placing children in a special school or for those on a child protection plan to be removed from school. The local authority must consider the child’s best interests in that decision. Some children in special schools require complex, specialised care, and so it is right that local authorities ensure they would be best served by being home educated. However, parents are concerned about how local authorities, many of which are stretched thin and have let down parents before, will interpret this requirement. In Bromley, we have a Conservative-run council with some of the highest waiting lists for EHCPs in the country, and I can understand why parents who have tried to interact with that council before would have concerns about it having authority over whether they can remove their child from school. My second point is on the definition of what constitutes a “suitable education”. The Bill requires local authorities to issue school attendance orders in cases where it appears that a child may not be receiving a suitable education. We know that children learn differently. Take Addison, my constituent here today. He is certainly learning through attending this debate, but his family may worry that activities such as this will not be classified as contributing towards a suitable education. That is a particular concern for some children with SEND, who may struggle to learn in a traditional setting but thrive in other contexts. Our approach to education and what we define as being suitable must account for this. My final point on this Bill is its potential administrative burden, something I have raised previously in education oral questions—I thanked the schools Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), for his reassurance then. Many parents worry that they will have to submit large volumes of data as a result of the Bill. The way the Bill requires data to be collected does not square with the realities of home education. Will the Minister reconfirm that it will not be a requirement of the Bill for families like Penny and Addison to report on things such as accounting for Scouts groups in the evening or football activities—things that we would not ask other families to do? I know that has been said in the House previously, but that reconfirmation would be great. I would like to touch on solutions and conclusions, and I hope that the concerns I have raised will be taken into consideration. In particular, on all sides of the House we need to do a lot more work and thinking about how we support the tens of thousands of children who find themselves between hospital and school every single year, and the inequalities and disparities between some hospitals that have lots of resources—such as Great Ormond Street hospital, the Royal National Orthopaedic hospital and the Royal London, where I was—and other hospitals across the country. It is also my belief that none of the issues with the Bill that I have raised today represent innate, fundamental flaws in its logic. Instead, they represent risks in the implementation. There are risks that I, as well as organisations representing SEND and home ed parents, believe can be mitigated through minor changes and strong statutory guidance that considers the concerns of parents. Importantly, the statutory guidance must account for the plethora of different situations that local authorities find themselves in when it comes to SEND, and the different approaches that they may attempt to take. If we are successful in doing this, we can ensure that all children are protected while properly preserving the rights of those who wish to home educate their children, such as those dedicated parents I have in my constituency.