My Lords, I rise with some trepidation because schools and education are not my areas, and when I hear the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lords, Lord Soley and Lord Knight, saying something and I do not quite agree, I pause. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Soley, on getting something close to his original Bill through. I hope I have the same success with my clean air Bill, which will come up in July. It is good to see such a broad coalition of Peers with concerns about this part of the Bill on the so-called children not in school register, who are bringing so many amendments to this part of the Bill.
I disagree slightly with the noble Lord, Lord Soley; no, in fact I probably do not. He talked about the three groups, but part of the problem is that the Government are trying to fix all three with one piece of legislation, and they are extremely different. We should be trying
to find children who will receive no education or a dangerously poor education. However, the net is cast far too wide and it risks trapping many home-educating families within a web of unnecessary bureaucracy and red tape. I am standing up to speak on this only because some of my grandchildren were home educated and it has served them extremely well, so I feel that I have a voice in this.
A great many families are worried about this prospect in the Bill, and I am sure that they have contacted many noble Lords about their concerns. Some concerns are fairly simple, such as the time limits being too short and the registration requirements being unclear. However, others are much deeper, such as the breadth of discretion granted to local authorities to decide whether a child is receiving an adequate home education or should be subjected to a school attendance order. If the Government’s intention is to extend the grasp of the state into the lives of home-educating families, they should be explicit about it, but so far the Government justify this policy as being about helping children who are not receiving any education. If that really is the policy intent, there must be a better way of legislating for it than this bureaucratic mess.
I am sorry—I should have thanked the Minister for meeting me and two concerned people. I have not seen any letters in return but I am sure that they are winging their way.
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It does not make sense to foist these powers and duties on to local authorities when the rest of the Government’s education policy is so focused on removing powers and duties from local authorities. Far from perhaps giving them more time to do this work, in fact it might mean that they lose those skills because they are not involved any more. Schools are becoming academies to supposedly free them from the bureaucracy of local authority control, but home-schooling families are having their freedom constrained by bringing them under local authority control. It does not add up. I would like to hear from the Minister about how this will have some sort of coherence.
The finances will not add up either. Ever-stretched local authorities are being lumbered with new duties but no new funding. They already struggle to provide their statutory special education and disability functions, and adding a whole new layer of registering, investigating and prosecuting home-educating families will give a lot of opportunities for grievance and mistakes.
All these factors feed into my Amendment 172, which would require the Government to review their home-education policy and consider what less intrusive measures would achieve it. This legislation is clearly the wrong way to do it. I do not really understand why the Government are trying to bring these measures in when they have not done their homework.