Mr.
Laws: I agree completely with my hon. Friend on those
important
points. I
draw the Committee’s attention to two other deficiencies, both
of which the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton has
mentioned. It is relevant to registration as well as monitoring that a
lot of concern has been expressed about the extent to which the new
apparatus for the oversight of home education would pursue issues not
only of education, but welfare and child protection. It has caused
great resentment among the home educating community. It thinks that the
Government and the Badman report, intentionally or otherwise, has
associated home education with welfare and safeguarding concerns for
children. Sometimes, Ministers have said that the intention is not to
oversee home education, but in spite of those statements of good
intention, we see from the policy statement issued by the Department
that that is exactly the
intention. The
Government’s view is that the job of the architecture under
schedule 1 is not only initial registration and the policing of
education, but policing for all home-educating families of welfare
issues, whether or not there is cause for concern. That is set out
clearly in paragraph 40 of the policy statement. It makes it clear that
the responsibility of the regulator will not be to check whether
education is suitable, which is difficult enough to define at the
moment but at least seems to be a core competence of such regulations,
but whether
education “accords
with their application for registration; what the child’s wishes
and feelings about education are”,
and “whether
it is harmful for the welfare of the child to continue with home
education”. We
do not agree with the presumption that the state should not only be
seeking to satisfy itself that some home education is going on, but
essentially whether all home educating families throughout the country
should be presumed to need some sort of welfare check. That is
something that has driven the Bill, and many of the groups that are
passionate about children’s rights outside this place are clear
about their motivations in that regard. I respect them. They view it as
important that, at the moment, children who do not come into contact
with schools and other agencies should have some other oversight. They
are concerned about the scope for the abuse of a tiny minority of
children, who might be away from schools and other secondaries. I
understand that, but I do not believe that it is right for the
architecture of the system to presume that there is a need to inspect
the welfare of children in every home educating
family.
Bill
Wiggin (Leominster) (Con): I agree absolutely with the
hon. Gentleman, but does he agree that the sort of people who are most
terrified by such an intrusion are those whose children have been
bullied? Presumably, any local authority officer who heard of bullying
would do everything that they could to prevent it. Given that that
fail-safe has already let down such families, what does the hon.
Gentleman think is likely to happen to any family worried that their
bullied child is again being inspected by a local authority? If they
feel that the local authority is failing them again, what are they
likely to
do?
Mr.
Laws: The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point to which
the Minister rather than I should respond. The point is that, as far as
I am aware, we have not established that there is a difference between
the vulnerability of the most vulnerable children—not the
average child—in home-educating families and in school
settings.
The final
area in which the Bill is
deficient—
Mr.
Stuart: The effect—there has been little comment on
it so far, because so much horror has been expressed about the
Bill’s general provisions—is that the most traumatised
and vulnerable children and their parents, who have been let down so
badly by schools, will cut off all links with the local authority in
response to the provisions. In order to escape from those who have let
them down the most, they will seek to elude and escape the attention of
the local authority. They will not seek to use its facilities. The Bill
should be responding to an agenda to open up public services and
support to home-educated children, particularly the most vulnerable,
but its effect on those whom we care about most could be precisely the
opposite.
Mr.
Laws: I agree strongly. The hon. Gentleman brings me to my
next point, which is the Bill’s lack of support and positive
reasons for home-educating parents to engage. I take seriously his
concerns that it will drive many home educators away from dealing with
local authorities. I did not particularly welcome the evidence that we
took from some home educators who said that they would not adhere to
the law and the regulations if the Bill were passed, because none of us
likes to hear people say that they will break the law. It is a serious
concern. If people feel that the laws imposed are unfair, unreasonable
and inconsistent with a liberal society, we are driving them not to
comply.
What I would
have liked to see—in notification procedures, not application
procedures—is linked support so that notifying, if it became
part of the Government’s policy, would include a series of
potential measures, funding support and access to other means of
support open to home educators. That might be the type of environment
in which a home educator might receive something from the process that
was actually of value to them.
That is why
we tabled these and other amendments. I will refer briefly to the ones
in the present group. If you will excuse me, Mrs. Anderson,
I will not comment on those tabled by others, as our time is seriously
limited. Amendment 210 would change the process of registration and
application to make it a process of notification. In other words, it
would require compulsory notification by every home educator, but it
would not require them
to submit the same type of information required by the
Government’s proposals, which essentially turn notification into
a process of application. If I had
thought about it at the time and seen the people from the Chard Home
Education Centre early enough, I would have tabled an additional
amendment linking notification to the provision of direct support as a
consequence of notifying, which might enable access to the support that
we have been discussing. That might take the form of vouchers or other
entitlements, so that people who notify can see that they are getting
support of the type that many home educators do not receive at
present.
Amendment 211
would ensure that parents of home-educated children needed to provide
only a limited amount of information to the local authority rather than
having to go through the complex process of registration and
application proposed in the Bill. Amendment 217 sets out what types of
information we think would be necessary for a light-touch notification
rather than the type of application and registration envisaged in the
Bill.
Amendments
213, 215, 216 and 214 are all pretty similar and would strip out the
elements of welfare oversight from what should, in our view, be an
attempt to oversee the issues of education. Amendment 212, which has
already been mentioned by the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and
Littlehampton, would give a specific period of time within which to
register what, under our model, would be a
notification. 3.15
pm I
should like to finish by saying while we have the concerns that I have
set out, we also take the view that the Committee has had a seriously
deficient amount of time to consider such an extensive Bill. We have
only one and three quarter hours left to deal with 92 amendments and
new clauses, and a very complex debate. I have always hoped that the
Government might reconsider this excessive legislation and come back to
us with a much more limited scheme of notification, with some
incentives to notify, because that is all my party would be able to
support.
I have
reached the conclusion, along with my colleagues in the Commons and the
other place, that by trying to botch together this very bad job on home
education, the Government have made it almost impossible for the
concerns of people outside this place to be taken into account in a
sensible way, particularly as there will not even be a serious
Committee stage in another place. Therefore, I say to the Government
that it is inevitable that we will have to vote against this aspect of
the Bill and throw out all the proposals on home education, and I hope
that that is something that the Conservative party will
support.
None the
less, in a spirit reflecting a residual desire to find some sort of
sensible conclusion, I say to the Minister that her only way out of
this is to bring back on Report a very modest schedule focusing on this
limited issue of notification with which we could deal before this
Parliament ends. Unless the Government do that, it is our strong view
not only that the provisions to which amendments have been tabled
should be deleted, but that the whole of clause 26 and schedule
1—everything related to home education—should be dumped
before this Parliament comes to its end.
Caroline
Flint: I will try to keep my comments brief because I know
that the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness has done a lot of work
in this area and wishes to
speak. When
I started to consider this part of the Bill, I wondered why we should
not know the position of all our children who, in any other
circumstances, would be in our state education system. However, after
reading the documentation that was sent to us and listening to the
concerns of one of my constituents, I now have some doubts. Gordon
Whitehead has brought jobs into Doncaster. He supports learning and
opportunities for young people, and wants to offer apprenticeships and
opportunities in IT through his company. However, he has huge concerns
for his own home-educated children because of what the propositions in
the Bill will mean for him and other families who home
educate.
I do not want
to repeat everything that the hon. Member for Yeovil said, but I have
some concerns about a process through which, for understandable
reasons, there is a desire to know that if children are not in school,
they are being home educated. Needing to know that information has
turned this proposal into something that is bureaucratic and
overburdening to families and local authorities. Those authorities are
not confident that they can carry out the Government’s ask on
this matter.
To echo the
hon. Gentleman, I have read the statement from the Government about
what is not expected of parents who home educate. However, although
earlier paragraphs say that parents need to produce only two pages on
what they provide, we then find that they will be asked to explain
their philosophy as well as other things. I find that very confusing.
We are able to read all this documentation and to hear from witnesses,
but I wonder how such information will be related to local government
officers on the
ground. In
submissions provided by parents who home educate, we have found out
about—I say straight away that I am sure that this does not
represent all local government officers—individuals giving
personal rather than objective points of view when they go into the
homes of people who home educate. It might not be my personal desire to
educate my children a certain way, but I recall one example of a local
government officer referring in a report to incense being burned in the
home. The family quite rightly questioned the report, saying,
“What has that got to do with anything? People use fresheners in
their homes all the time.” To be honest, however, there was in
that case perhaps implied criticism that the family were rather
“brown rice and sandals” and hippy-ish, and the very
mention of incense being burned conveyed an approach with which the
local government officer did not
agree. The
Committee was provided with case studies of child protection, some of
which I found rather wanting. There was an example of a woman in
Gloucestershire—I think she was a foster mother—who was
prosecuted for cruelty to children. If I have understood it correctly,
the education services had annual contact to monitor the education at
home. Having visited that home on an annual basis, the education
service came to the conclusion that things were generally satisfactory
and that no child protection concerns were noted, although perhaps that
says something about whether the service was looking
correctly. However, I could not see how anything in the Bill’s
proposals would have made any difference in that
case. Another
example was of a young person who sadly died. The serious case review
stated categorically that the
mother “complied
with all statutory requirements in relation to children in elective
home education. She co-operated with visits from the London Borough of
Enfield Education
Department” twice
in one year. The following year, it was identified
that “The
visiting officer had no concerns about the family or their
circumstances, and was
satisfied”. What
seems to have come out of those various examples linked to child
protection is that, even in such circumstances, those on the ground
have responded to the Government by saying, “We need something
bigger. We need something more overarching to deal with these issues
across the
piece.” I
am not sure whether the Bill strikes the right balance. Finding a way
through this matter is important, as is the language used. We have
heard valid points about whether something is seen as a registration or
an
application. The
law is also called into question. We have received numerous submissions
highlighting the role of the local authority in providing those
services that it is required to provide, including such things as the
national curriculum, child protection and Every Child Matters. However,
whether we like it or not, as far as I understand it, the law is
different when it comes to provision provided by parents. The locus for
the local authority in that case is very different, and I wonder
whether—presumably the legal opinion in my hon. Friend the
Minister’s Department has given views on this—it might be
open to legal challenge by other quarters in relation to the
state’s role in providing education, and the ways in which it
expects education to be provided when parents choose to do
that. I
do not think we will resolve the matter today, but I hope that my hon.
Friend will show a willingness to listen—I am sure she
will—and engage in trying to find a better way forward. Another
approach might be to make an offer that opens up dialogue between those
in the community who home educate and local authorities. If there was
money available to do that—money seems to be available to train
local authority officers to inspect and understand what they need to
inspect—it would be better used when linked to some sort of
notification system with better
co-operation. During
the evidence sessions—I think that Mr. Badman
referred to this—we heard positive examples of forums involving
home educators that already worked with a local authority. I do not
want anyone to misinterpret this, but some of those in the
home-educating community might be better gatekeepers for information
about possible legitimate
concerns.
Mr.
Stuart: The right hon. Lady is giving a thoughtful speech.
She is sending a much-needed message from this place that the voices of
home educators have at least been listened to, because many of them
feel that Members are deaf to what they say. Her fellow Labour members
of the Select Committee came to precisely the same conclusion about
improving the provision—that was Badman’s No. 1
identified need—and then seeing what happens. We should work on
a voluntary basis
with families before imposing such draconian legislation. If there was a
need, and if there was no other way of tackling it, civil liberties and
other issues could be put aside. Initially, however, the offer should
be to work with families. I hope that the right hon. Lady’s
words will influence the
Minister.
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