Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Bill

My Lords, I share doubts, especially those expressed by my noble friend Lord Baker, about whether the Bill will turn out to be a good thing in the end, but doubtless there are good things in it. I start, though, with something which is not in it but which I think the Government intend should be in it, and that is home education. I smell a rat when it comes to home education. A few months ago we heard very critical remarks from the NSPCC—since withdrawn—about the link between home education and child abuse. This was followed fairly rapidly by the appointment of a review into home education by Graham Badman, who is not at all a bad man but quite a sensible and well integrated individual. None the less, he is due to report this month. A typical pattern would be that we then get a rushed Henry VIII clause inserted at Report, giving the Government power to do what they want with regulations concerning home education. I do not think that is appropriate. First, it strikes at the heart of our attitude to education, which is that it is the responsibility of the parent to educate the child. An attack on that needs to be very carefully considered. Secondly, many of the people indulging in home education have done so to escape just the sort of situations that the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, described of terrible schools, terrible circumstances, insupportable effects on a much loved child and parents giving up their lives to support that child. To be corralled back into school under a Henry VIII clause, however well intentioned, is not something that I am prepared to contemplate. I have talked to the Minister about this and have offered her two ways forward: she can give me a promise in her speech that nothing will appear in Committee, or on Report or at Third Reading to implement any of the recommendations of Graham Badman’s review, or we can have some long debates in Committee on home education and the many aspects of it which need to be considered, because they do need to be considered. As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said, there is a move to integrate the whole business of child protection so that many more agencies work together to take an interest in what is happening to children. We have the children’s database, which will mean that for the first time local authorities will know who in their area is being home educated, and will not have the excuse that many of them have used to date for not paying much attention to this and letting parents get on with doing it in their own way. Therefore, the need to understand what is happening, to protect what is happening and to support it where it should be supported is going to get to us one way or another. In my view we should be extremely positive about home education. We went through an analogous process a decade or so ago with the National Health Service when we started to recognise that people caring for the ill at home were doing a useful job, that enabling old people to stay in their homes was a useful thing and that, rather than standing back and just letting these people suffer and pay on their own, the state should offer support because that benefited everybody. That, I think, is the case with home education. Most of these people are doing an excellent job but receive absolutely no support from the state. They are not even get allocated centres where their children can take examinations. Putting your child in for a GCSE is an immensely difficult thing to do if you are a home educator because there are no facilities for that. Local authorities provide all sorts of facilities for children in their charge—including swimming, first aid and cycling proficiency lessons—that are closed to home educators. The Government could do many things to support home education, and it would be great progress if that happened. It would benefit not only the children but the parents and the Government. The first thing to do in that direction is to open proper, permanent and well understood communications between the Government and the home education community. All sorts of things are happening in legislation. The current Welfare Reform Bill is one area, but there has been secondary regulation in other areas which impact on home education. The Government ought to understand how home education works, the way in which it will be dealt with when it comes to child protection, and assessing the quality of education needs to be understood and thought through and be done in a positive way. In Committee, I shall be encouraging the Government to take up the suggestion by Education Otherwise, the principal charity in this area, that there should be a permanent conclave within, I suspect, the Department for Children, Schools and Families, where discussions will take place between officials and home educators about how the regulation and support of home education should evolve. That may be the limit of it, or it may be much more extensive, depending on what the noble Baroness says to me. The second matter I wish to cover is in the Bill, but you would not know it if you had not been told about it. I refer to specialist colleges. Colleges for the blind, the deaf and so on provide specialist education to children, mostly aged 16 and over, and are seemingly being cast into limbo because of the end of the Learning and Skills Council. What is to happen to a college whose pupils come from half way across England because of their particular requirements? The early discussions that some of the FE colleges have had with their local authorities seem to indicate an insistence that the colleges should do nothing that goes beyond the geographical boundaries of the sponsoring local education authority. That is difficult enough because of the way that sixth-form and FE colleges have flourished over the past couple of decades. They have reached out widely and many of the pupils at good colleges will come some considerable distance to get to them. Therefore a narrowing down, because of the local authority’s determination that its influence and the benefits of its college should be extended only to its pupils—we have seen and fought against that in schools for long enough and it is not that surprising—will be extremely difficult when applied to specialist colleges. That problem was faced by the National Health Service when it went local. National centres of excellence found that very difficult for a while, but have now been accommodated; but we need to understand how that issue will be dealt with in the Bill. Prison education now comes under local education authorities. There is supposed to be some sort of co-ordination between the local education authority in which, say, Feltham is, with all the local education authorities that its inmates come from as to the right way of dealing with these inmates in the extremely short time—a matter of a few months, mostly—when they will be in this prison. The Prison Service cannot co-ordinate itself; the idea that it can co-ordinate with a myriad of local authorities and get things right for individual prisoners is a total mirage. We shall have to think carefully about how this transition should be handled and exactly what the relationship between the local education authorities and prisons should be. We should think deeply about what kind of education should be provided in prisons. There is a great opportunity. A child who in most cases will suffer from basic educational disadvantage will certainly be suffering disadvantage in terms of their behavioural patters, and you have an opportunity, if you design the education right, to set them right at a fairly early stage. However, we need to reach into the sentencing procedures to make sure that the assessment necessary for the prison to provide the right education has been done before the child reaches prison. Otherwise, half the sentence is spent finding out what the child needs and the other half is spent waiting for someone to appear to provide it. By the time the end of the sentence is reached, the prison is just about ready to help. We need to think that through very carefully, particularly given that we are moving to local education authorities. Lastly, I echo some of the things that the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, said about Ofqual. It is terribly important that it should be independent and that it should do a real job in assuring us of the quality of the examinations that we are to take. As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said, that goes beyond just looking internally at what is happening in a particular exam. You have to look outside that; you have to do sample testing; and you have to follow pupils afterwards to see what the reality is. One of the great tests of the quality of, say, key stage 2 exams taken in particular schools ought to involve following those children to secondary school, seeing how they do there and seeing whether in key stage 2 testing you are getting real results or assisted results. It ought to show—it does show, where this analysis has been done in other jurisdictions—that following through is the only way that you can tell the difference between an easy course and one which really excites the students. You have to look beyond. Ofqual will have to be able to work with and into the university sector. The Higher Education Statistics Agency is extremely bad at collecting information on which schools university students come from. That needs to be greatly improved if there is to be real understanding of how good A-levels are in particular contexts, and whether their quality is really improving. The whole area of working with the university sector needs to be much better. As the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, said, we need to do away with the idea that the Government should interfere with Ofqual’s decisions. They do not need to; there is another acronym, JACQA, which is not mentioned in the supporting material for the Bill, but is actually a crucial, secretive and unaccountable committee which decides whether a particular qualification will be funded by the Government. If the Government want to affect what is going on in schools, they can use that lever; they do not need to use the lever that affects everyone’s appreciation of how good a qualification is and whether the standards are changing. Ofqual needs to be the body which sets the points allocation for qualifications. Whether a GNVQ is actually worth four GCSEs or only three-and-a-half or three, must be set by Ofqual. Otherwise the believability of the performance tables suffers, as it has suffered under successive Governments when they introduced new qualifications and overrated them to boost their popularity. That absolutely must end. We will have an interesting Committee stage. I can see that I shall be paying great attention to many different aspects of the Bill and I hope that, despite my noble friend Lord Baker’s reservations, we can make it a better Bill, if not a good Bill.