Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Crisp and Baroness Spielman

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister that the Government have moved on some of the concerns raised by me and others, particularly about some of the detail required on the register. However, I of course want to press her to move further. A lot of new and significant amendments have just arrived. I want to make two general points relating to those amendments and then comment on several of them.

I believe that the Government need to revisit their whole policy on home education. We are debating a significant set of amendments very late in the day which are creating a new regime, but I do not think the full implications have been thought through. Let me give one example which is relevant to this group and to other areas. As many noble Lords will know, most local authorities—I believe it is most rather than just many—hold annual meetings with or request annual reports from home-educating parents in their area. These are done regularly on the basis of case law, which says that local authorities are entitled to ask for an annual meeting or an annual report, which involves quite a lot of work.

I do not understand why these have been ignored and the additional requirements for meetings, information and monitoring are not built around them. There seems to be inconsistency in developing the policy. I would be grateful if the Minister would explain—either on this group or on one of the groups to do with information on activities on the register—why the Government have chosen to ignore this annual reporting system which exists in so many places. Presumably, it was an explicit decision to do so. Can I also ask her to confirm that parents will still have to comply with requests for annual reports or meetings? Or can they now just say, “Look at the register”?

Home education has changed enormously in the last few years and policy certainly needs to reflect this, but it needs to be based on a detailed examination of what is going on. Most importantly—we have not really spent time in Committee on this—we need to understand in some detail the causes of the big increase in the last few years, driven by parents who believe that schools are failing their children, many of whom have special needs and require special hope. These are big questions, and it is important that the Government take this beyond this Bill and look at the wider policy. After all, those parents are taking on emotionally and financially demanding responsibilities. Why do so few head teachers use their powers of flexibility to accommodate children in the way that their parents would want them to? Some of those issues are around mental health and other things that we have touched on, but they are also about how schools are governed and the increasing requirements placed on them.

Another question that needs to be considered is: how many parents are trying to home-educate for all the wrong reasons? What proportion do we think this is? I know from listening to education officers that it is quite small, but it demands attention. Let me be clear that I understand the concerns about safeguarding and educational standards. They are real, just as they are real in schools, and they need to be dealt with proportionately. In terms of safeguarding, Peers who like data may want to know that the only figures I can find are that home-educated children add up to about 1.4% of the population of schoolchildren and they account for 1.2% of serious case reviews. As noble Lords will know, those are reviews where children are seriously harmed or die. These figures suggest that home-educated children are no more at risk than children at school and conceivably less so. My point is that home education should be seen as a risk factor only for those with a record of abuse or where there is an existing concern, but not for the generality of parents, yet the approach we see in the Bill suggests that all home-educating parents are viewed with suspicion. That is certainly what they feel.

Looking ahead, once proportionate checks are done at the beginning of a relationship between parents and the authorities, I believe the approach should be one of partnership, as the Minister said. It is strange that it is not, given that in other policy areas government is considering more partnership with parents. In health, for example, it is now becoming accepted that parents know their child better than any professional can. As the Minister knows, I am working with a group of home-educating parents together with a home education officer and my noble friend Lord Hampton to look at alternative policy ideas for the future, and I am grateful to her for facilitating access for discussions with her officials about this.

Let me turn to specific amendments. Government Amendment 120 gives authorities the power to withhold permission to educate, or to decide whether they can educate, from parents of children who have been the subject of action under Section 47 in the last five years —i.e. things that have to do with safeguarding issues. To that extent, it seems proportionate and in line with what I have just said about risk factors. However, I have one significant concern. Many adopted children will end up being caught by this, because those children may have been the subject of such proceedings earlier in life before adoption. Noble Lords will know that adoption is a one-year or two-year, rigorous process. Do we really think that local authorities should second-guess parents who have been though that process about the best education for the child that they have just been entrusted with? Are they really a source of risk? I would be enormously grateful if the Minister would exempt them. My Amendment 120A makes that specific point.

However, Amendment 121A from the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seeks to change the five-year period into a lifetime requirement and include proceedings under Section 31, where children have been taken into care, and Section 17, where children have ever been in need. I believe this is disproportionate in its impact. It will draw many people into this group. Do we really want to treat disabled children differently simply because their parents have asked voluntarily for some help, or because they were in care before adoption? I know of cases where children were taken into care at the request of the wife during proceedings against an abusive husband.

Amendment 121B tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, is potentially extremely dangerous for that last group of parents, who are seeking to avoid abusive ex-partners, as it will reveal their location and possibly their address. I cannot make this point strongly enough. I know women who are in this situation. The amendment says that all parents should be consulted. The Minister will also know that where such partners discover the authority or address, they may well bring allegations against their ex-partner under Section 47, causing as much damage as possible. I note in this context that deregistering a child from a school requires only one signature, not the signature of all the parents involved. This seems inconsistent.

However, Amendment 123 by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seems eminently sensible in requiring that local authorities should spell out reasons for refusing permission to deregister children in special schools. My Amendments 122 and 124 would serve similar purposes. They are about holding authorities to account for their decisions. The wording of Amendment 122 relates to local authorities judging that staying at a school is in the child’s best interests. There needs to be some appropriate mechanism for confirming or challenging this, and I propose that it should be confirmed by a court. My Amendment 124 addresses cases where parents appeal against an authority’s decision; it asks that the Secretary of State or Welsh Ministers issue guidance on how they would judge an appeal. This seems to me a very straightforward ask. People will need to know how their appeal will be judged. I hope the Minister agrees. The more transparency here, the better.

I agree with the Minister that government Amendment 125, about meetings at the point of deregistration, seems generally sensible and worth taking forward as a pilot. I believe they should also be treated as exit interviews, asking why the relationship between the school and the child has broken down—if that is the case, because it may not—and making that information available to the education committee and Ofsted. Schools and authorities need to use that information to improve their services, and that is the purpose of my Amendment 125A, which I believe from my correspondence the Minister agrees with.

I turn to government Amendment 131 along with Amendment 131A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, about requesting meetings in the child’s home. This is the most controversial area, and I suspect other Peers have had more correspondence about this than anything else, raising a whole range of issues about access to people’s homes. I note that this is not mandatory, although there are implicit penalties for not complying. What relationship are they trying to establish? This is problematic legally, but I am not going to dwell on that; my earlier comments on Amendment 121 by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, apply here: do the parents of adopted children have to apply?

I have two further points. First, I am not clear what this inspection is about. What criteria will be used? The home as such is not a proxy for the standard of education. Surely we need to know the criteria that are involved. The only criterion that I can possibly think of is that the child has some quiet space at home or elsewhere to study, although that raises questions about Travellers.

Lastly, even more importantly, why should the child be subject to two meetings in 15 days? This is a real issue, involving the invasion of what is, for many of them, their safe space. This is very problematic for many children. We need only think of adopted children, many of whom are terrified by any officials and live in a constant fear of being rejected or taken away again. This amendment requires more debate and more answers. I certainly feel it is important that the child should be at one or other of the two meetings that are proposed in the first 15 days, but two meetings with officials in 15 days seems excessive.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 121A, relating to local authority consent for the withdrawal of certain children from school, and to Amendment 131A, empowering local authorities to make home visits to children who have ever been subject to a care order or on a child protection plan. Both amendments have been proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran and are supported by other noble Lords on other Benches.

Broadly, I have welcomed the provisions in the Bill strengthening protections for children not in school or removed from schools, and I am grateful to the Government for the amendments that they have tabled since Committee, but I do not believe that is enough. We need to recognise more clearly that, in some circumstances, the declared intention to home-educate can in itself be a signal that some risk or harm has resurfaced.

No safeguarding system can ever be entirely comprehensive and infallible, and indeed safeguarding work should always be proportionate, but schools are an important part of that system, especially for children at higher risk. Social work always involves a difficult balance. A care order is a drastic intervention. Maintaining a child protection plan is expensive and intrusive into family life. We do not keep children in care or on protection plans by default, and it is normal for the level of intervention to be adjusted in line with circumstances. So, while a child is of school age, schools provide an important continuing residual line of sight to the child and are responsible for alerting local authorities if they believe that a child’s circumstances have deteriorated.