http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200910/ldhansrd/text/91126-0011.htm#09112630000780
Lord Lucas: My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow that speech, and I think that I agree with every part of it, especially the bit saying that we have the right to spend our own money on ourselves and have fun, so our children had better learn to work for a living. As I get older I agree with that more and more, although I do not think I did 40 years ago.
I am going to devote my speech to the home education part of the education Bill-although I cannot call it that because the word "education" has been expunged from every Bill and from the title of the department. I shall refer to it as the schools Bill. Several clauses are devoted to the regulation of home education; that is, people who educate their children at home. This part of the Bill is ill thought-out and unjustified, and I hope very much that we will delete it. In its current form it is a skeleton exposing home educators and their children to the unknown because so much will depend on how the regulations are written. Nothing in it secures their rights as home educators to look after their children in the way they see best. There is an unfortunate conflation of education and welfare which makes the business of improving or looking after the education of these children much harder.
There is no recognition in the Bill of the curricula and forms of education which are commonly used in home education, particularly in autonomous education. Instead, the impact assessment refers to the exemplar curricula which will be produced by the QCDA. In other words, everyone is to be corralled into state education and not allowed to go their own way. There is no reference to the training of local authority staff, which is recognised to be one of the major deficiencies in the current arrangements. There is no proper arrangement for independent appeal when a local authority decides that a person may not home educate. There is a skeleton in the Bill, but it is a skeleton that could be filled out in almost any way.
In this country, we have long had a duty as parents to educate our children and a right to decide how they should be educated. Many of us choose to entrust the state with their education-but that is us entrusting the state with our duty and us exercising our right to choose. The Bill turns that on his head. The arrangement here is that you cannot home educate unless you get the prior permission of the local authority, which has wide grounds for refusing. It can object in any way to your plans to educate your child. It can object and refuse you permission to home educate if you do not allow someone from the local education authority four hours of unaccompanied access to your child every year. Would we contemplate allowing that for our children under any circumstances? What right have these people to do that to home-educated children when there is no real cause for concern?
We are considering a section of the Bill which will cost £20 million per annum, which is about £1,000 per home-educated child. These children receive no money to help pay the costs of examinations; no money to buy textbooks; no money to buy materials; no money and no tuition to help them over difficulties in education. Now the Government can find £1,000 for each of these children-and will spend it on auditing them. Not one penny will go to help the children; it will all go on auditing them. What have these people done to deserve that?
Four separate communities are bundled together under the title of home education. First, there are those who opt for what might properly be called "elective home education". They are people who have decided, as a matter of principle, that they will pursue an educational philosophy which is not available from the state. Most of this is autonomous education; most of it is a form of education which does not involve curricula or planning but involves going on a journey with children which results in education. This is, of its nature, foreign to many school-based systems, but it has proved immensely successful.
The second group might be called "the despairing". These are people whose children have been bullied at school to the point where they will no longer go to school; or those who have children with special educational needs which are not being properly catered for and who have therefore decided to turn their lives upside down and educate their children themselves. These people do society a great deal of good by doing so.
The third group consists of the Travellers, who are bundled in here as home educators, which many of them are. Finally, there is what one might call the
"year 11" children-those who have always been trouble; who have always truanted; whose truanting has got worse and worse; whose parents are not in control of them either; and who in the last year or so of school just go home and sit watching television. They are classed as "home education" because it is a convenient way for the local authority to classify them.
We do not have a coherent pattern that can be used to produce a coherent set of statistics. All this has been conflated with a worry-I associate it with the NSPCC; perhaps it comes from elsewhere-that a lot of abuse is somehow going on in the home education community. Page 90 of the impact assessment quotes the NSPCC:
"We are concerned that the child’s safety and welfare should be paramount and that there is nothing in the current guidance or framework that would prevent children from being abused by people who may claim to be home educators".
That sentence applies equally to all of us who are bringing up children. Local authorities are not conducting any supervision of me as a parent to make sure that I am not abusing my children. "That is a bad thing; something must be done about it"; that is what is being said about home-educating families-on the basis of what?
This is probably the first time that I have paid attention to a Bill’s impact assessment, but it is an immensely useful document. It sets out the rationale of the Bill and the concerns that underlie the Government’s perceived need to introduce this section. It states that local authorities estimate that,
"8% of ‘home educated’ children are receiving no education at all and 20% are not receiving a suitable education".
That would be concerning if it were true, but it is not.
To understand what is going wrong here, one needs to understand the process that the Government have gone through, with a rushed assessment of the situation under Graham Badman and three successive rounds of applications to local authorities for data, each of them seemingly compiled by a different team because they are none of them consistent with each other. None of them seems to be compiled by people who have an understanding of home education or of local authority practices. Different local authorities respond to the same questions on different bases, understanding them in different ways, providing different kinds of answers and following different rules. From that, the Government have derived a set of high-level statistics such as the one that I have just quoted.
Before Prorogation, I asked a couple of questions of the Minister on this matter. The department refused to answer, saying that it could not provide me with the underlying data because they were confidential. I shall ask similar questions again now. If I receive that same answer, we shall be off to see the Leader of the House, because I consider it deeply disrespectful of this House. These data are there and are available. The Minister may have a team looking at the data. On the other side are 10,000 intelligent, angry, committed home-educating parents finding out the same information. All the information is in the public domain, but how have the Government got their high-level results from it?
Let us look at the 8 per cent who are receiving no education at all. Local education authorities have a duty to make sure that children are receiving a suitable
education. A figure of 8 per cent would mean an astonishing level of dereliction. A huge number of local authorities would be in complete breach of their requirements and not using their well established powers to bring children into education. Of course, that is not the case at all. Part of it appears to be a deliberate misreading of the figures provided by local authorities; part of it is rolling in a chunk of the Traveller population, who are already separately provided for by local authorities which have well understood the requirements of them but have included them in the "receiving no education" category. Part of it is the "year 11" problem, which is local authorities’ own problem resulting from things going on in their own schools. When you get down to the residual question of how many properly home-educated children are not being educated, it is somewhere well under 1 per cent-if indeed one can identify any numbers at all.
Teeny would also like to learn to ride a bike, improve her swimming and hatch ducklings.
