My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is right that we need to know about all children, whether in school or not. In this part of the Bill, the problem is the focus on a one-size-fits-all approach that is all about truants or bad children, when we have already heard about the complexity of the difficulties that many of these children are facing—often, but not only, SEND.
The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, talked about a unique pupil number. We had the same debate during the passage of the Health and Care Act about a unique child identifying number, and an amendment was passed. As a result of that, there are certainly discussions going on with the DfE to have a unique children’s number because often, for the most vulnerable children, the information is not shared between different departments—health and education are the two obvious ones, but there are others as well. It will be interesting to hear the Minister’s response.
This group moves us on to some of the detail about how the register of children who are not in school will work, and I share many of the concerns that have already been expressed about whether this part of the Bill is ready to be enacted and whether it will actually ever really work in practice.
My Amendment 129AA picks up on the last group of amendments, where I outlined the long list of children currently being let down by schools and local authorities, many of whom are not in school for their own health reasons. I will not repeat that detail. My amendment in this group seeks to ensure not just that the local authority must have regard to the parent’s request but that it takes account of
“the advice of an independent expert familiar with the particular circumstances of the child.”
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Given the focus of my remarks in the last group, noble Lords might think that we need to talk only about a doctor as the relevant expert. But, thinking about children with difficulties who are likely to end up out of school—they may be children in care; there are also young carers, who for understandable reasons may not be able to attend school for some long periods of time—the best expert to talk to the local authority about them may well be a senior social worker. It may also be the case that the youth offending team might wish to advise that a child in the criminal justice system on a community sentence might, for their own safety, not attend school for a fairly long period. It may even be that this information is confidential and, in that case, a youth offending officer would be the relevant expert.
I have signed Amendment 135 from the noble Lord, Lord Storey, too. I think there is considerable benefit in having an annual report from the Secretary of State laid before Parliament to outline the children not attending school regularly and, if our amendment in the next group, Amendment 102, is accepted, the reasons for that absence. Noble Lords have talked earlier in Committee about their concerns about the focus on the register, school attendance orders and parental fines.
The Special Educational Consortium has written to the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and me to say that it supports Amendment 135 because of its concerns about the overrepresentation of children and young people with disabilities and special educational needs in the out of school figures and about the lack of focus and analysis on the reasons for children being out of school. But without information about the reason for being out of school, there is no potential for any analysis of these reasons, and without this analysis it is not possible to identify and address systematic inherent disadvantage for children and young people who share protected characteristics under the Equality Act.
There are high rates of unexplained pupil exits from school, and Ofsted has identified a rapid increase in the number of children of secondary age being educated at home. The 2019 Ofsted report found:
“As at autumn 2018, there were an estimated 58,000 children known to be educated at home, which is an increase of approximately 27% from the previous year … More children with additional needs are now being educated at home. Growing evidence suggests that, overall, a disproportionate number of children who are removed from the school roll of a secondary school and do not move to another setting have special educational needs, are from disadvantaged backgrounds or are known to social care services, or have a combination of these characteristics.”
Shockingly, Ofsted also found
“examples in our inspection evidence of schools giving parents an ultimatum—permanent exclusion or leave—or pursuing fines when a reasonable adjustment for a disability would have been more appropriate.”
It heard from one school leader who explained that vocational studies
“works for the pupils but not for the school data”.
That is absolutely appalling, and it is why the Bill needs to make sure it is absolutely clear why children are out of school, so that we can start to analyse the data and then to understand how the country and our education system can support these most disadvantaged and vulnerable children.