My Lords, I thank you all for your thoughtful contributions. I start by saying that I could not agree more with my noble friend Lord Lucas. I had the pleasure of talking to a number of home educators from Gloucestershire yesterday and to the local authority, thanks to an introduction from my honourable friend Siobhan Baillie. Clearly, the relationships between the two were extremely strong and good, as my noble friend pointed out.
I will start my remarks with Amendments 112A and 137C, tabled by my noble friend Lord Lucas, and Amendment 171X from my noble friend Lord Wei. The issues of appeal are extremely important. I will summarise the current routes for your Lordships, but also make some commitments to the Committee about how we can make sure that the concerns that have been aired this afternoon, and by home educators I have spoken to, can be addressed.
5.45 pm
As your Lordships are aware, several existing routes are already available to parents, such as a local authority’s internal complaints procedure, the Local Government and Social Care Ombudsman, which the noble Lord, Lord Davies, referred to, and the Secretary of State’s powers under the Education Act 1996, as well as the Information Commissioner’s Office where concerns relate to the handling of data. The law already enables a parent to apply to the Secretary of State to intervene and make a determination if a local authority has refused a parent’s request to revoke a school attendance order.
A number of your Lordships, led by the noble Lord, Lord Soley, and my noble friend Lord Lucas, made the critical point that this needs to feel like a supportive system. I would go further and say that it is really important that we have a system that feels fair to parents and which builds trust and confidence. Therefore, we propose to create, in close collaboration with local authorities and home-educating parents, new statutory guidance for local authorities which will cover all the powers and duties of local authorities regarding the register and support. This will include advice on how to promote positive engagement with the home education community.
We will also continue to consider what more we can do to support parents and strengthen independent oversight. I thank the noble Baroness opposite for the suggestion she put forward and that other noble Lords have mentioned. I of course welcome the offer from the noble Lord, Lord Soley, to support us in that work and for his very generous offer on behalf the noble Lord, Lord Laming, in his absence, which I am sure he will be delighted about.
I again thank my noble friend Lord Lucas for his helpful suggestion in Amendment 137C. The preliminary notice stage already provides parents with the opportunity to evidence that their child is in receipt of a suitable education. They would still need to demonstrate this if they were to appeal to the First-tier Tribunal, so we are not clear that my noble friend’s amendment makes any practical difference to parents.
Turning to Amendment 130 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, the Bill includes a range of examples of the types of support that local
authorities can provide. As I mentioned, we plan to publish statutory guidance to support local authorities to discharge this duty. This will include more detailed examples, which could include support for exams. As I said, we will work with stakeholders, including parents who have chosen to educate their children at home, on this prior to publication.
However, there is a principle that underpins this: by electing to home educate, parents accept full responsibility for their child’s education and the costs associated with this, including exam fees. There will not be a legal requirement for local authorities to provide specific funding to home-educated pupils for examination fees as part of the support duty, but it would be one way they could choose to discharge the duty.