Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Debate between Baroness Barran and Lord Lucas(1 week, 3 days ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I very much support what the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, has said, as the Minister will know from my numerous amendments later in the Bill, which I look forward to discussing with officials.
I have three amendments in this group. Amendment 204 inquires after the process in subsection (3) describing condition A. I hope that the Minister can describe today what the Government’s reasoning is in making this change. When it comes to what the process is going to be and whether there is the capability in system to do it, I am happy to leave that to discussions with officials.
Amendment 210 questions the meaning of “without undue delay”. If the hereditary Peers Bill was amended to say that we were leaving without undue delay, I would regard that as a plus. Such phrases in the mouths of government tend to mean quite a long time. I would have thought that in these circumstances, where the education of a child is concerned, something tighter might be advisable.
Amendment 221 says that, if this is what it looks like, the parent really needs access to a tribunal. If a local authority is on song and doing things quickly and it all goes smoothly and fairly, fine, but there are a lot of local authorities—my noble friend Lord Wei named the most notoriously worst of them—where this is not the case, often just temporarily because of staff changes or short-staffing. In those circumstances, the parent needs some recourse, because it is the child that matters.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I have two amendments in this group. Amendment 204 in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Lucas would narrow the scope of local authority powers to withhold consent to home education, in this case to exclude children in special schools. The driver of this—I looked at the Explanatory Notes but could not see anything that explains why special schools are all included—is that we seem to be treating parents of children with special needs in the same way as parents where there is an active investigation from children’s services and that feels disproportionate. There is also a risk of a conflict of interest where home education could be discouraged if the costs of providing therapeutic support to a child might be higher in that setting than in a special school, even if that was in the child’s best interests.
My Amendment 219 is a sort of common-sense amendment on an issue that I hope the Minister can clarify at the Dispatch Box. It seeks clarification that, if a local authority was to refuse consent to a parent to educate their child at home, it would need to provide the parents or carers with a statement explaining the reasons why, including the costs and benefits to the child. I assume that this would be good practice anyway, but if the noble Baroness can confirm that, that would be helpful.
I am sympathetic to the clarity that Amendment 210 in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas would bring in terms of timings, but I think that Amendment 215A would be unduly onerous for local authorities. The noble Lord, Lord Hacking, expressed concerns about the complexity of Clause 30. I am with him in that I think there is work to be done on Clause 30. He also focused on Clause 31 in his remarks, but I will cover those points in the next group.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I will also speak to Amendment 206. My concern here is that Section 47 has a very broad class of orders. Some are extremely serious and some, frankly, are irrelevant to whether someone should be concerned about a child being home educated. The amendment is to get some sense, which I am very happy to leave to further discussions, of how one deals, for instance, with spurious complaints from a former abusive parent who just wants to mess up the other parent’s life.
The overall statistics show that home-educated children are twice as likely to be referred to children’s social services, yet are much less likely to have a child protection plan result from that referral. There is a prejudice towards referring children who are home educated or whose parents are thinking of home educating them. We need to understand that in order to provide some circumstances that allow officials in local authorities to feel comfortable about taking informed professional decisions, rather than feeling vulnerable doing anything other than refusing. I look forward to discussing this at a later opportunity. I beg to move.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 207. Ever the optimist, I hope the Government will take it seriously and bring it back on Report with a “g” in front of it.
The amendment has two parts: the first extends the right of a local authority to withhold consent to home education for a child or their family who is in receipt of services under Section 17 of the Children Act 1989; the second extends this to children who have ever been classified as a child in need of protection under Section 47 of the Act. To be clear, both parts would give local authorities just the discretion to withhold consent on a case-by-case basis. Clearly, I am not proposing a blanket refusal, but, as drafted, the Government’s position is not altogether clear, although I suspect that the noble Baroness will tell me that my drafting is not altogether clear either.
All children who are in special schools would now be within scope, as we debated in the earlier group, of the local authority’s right to withhold consent, but not those under Section 17 where there are safeguarding or neglect concerns. That just feels the wrong way round in terms of priorities. I appreciate that my drafting could focus more narrowly on those children defined under Section 17 of the Act to focus on safeguarding and neglect, but it is curious not to focus on those children. Unlike my noble friends, I do not think it is easy to get either Section 47 or Section 17 status and I worry that the bar is too high with just the current Section 47.
On the inclusion of children who have ever been subject to a Section 47 child protection plan, we talked earlier about the tragic case of Sara Sharif. The Minister in the other place said that
“we cannot say for sure what might have made a difference, but we will learn lessons from the future … local child safeguarding practice review”.—[Official Report, Commons, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill Committee, 30/1/25; col. 297.]
I think I am right in saying that Sara Sharif had been put on the child protection register at birth. She came off the register and, as we know, was removed from school and died, tragically. Without the changes in my amendment, the one thing we can be sure of is that the proposed law as drafted would not have made any difference to her.
I know that both Ministers on the Front Bench want to get this right; I am just trying to state the reality that if a child has ever been considered to be vulnerable enough to be subject not to a Section 47 investigation but to a child protection plan at any point in their short life then that is a massive red flag that needs to be removed before consenting for them to be educated at home. I respect the probing Amendments 205 and 206 in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas, but I support the Government’s approach to giving local authorities the power to withhold consent in cases involving child protection.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I very much support what my noble friend said about young carers. We ought to be much better at collecting information on what is going on with young carers. The whole business of collecting information is getting easier with AI. The government AI team is a sight to be seen. I have not, in government, come across such an enthusiastic and effective team. I very much hope that the Department for Education will make contact and make use of the blockers. When you are faced with a difficult problem and need to find a way of collecting data that does not put a burden on the organisations that are having to do that data collection, and it is diverse and complicated, AI is a really good approach. I urge the Government to help look after young carers by taking that step.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, there is a large number of probing amendments in this group and, in the interests of making progress, I will not comment on most of them. I am very sympathetic to the intent behind Amendment 209 in the name of my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham. I would hope very much that a child who is a young carer would be supported to stay in school, given the obvious risk that their education would suffer and conflict with the care needs of their parent if at home, but I have no further comments on the other amendments in this group.