Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Humphreys Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Humphreys (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to the question that Clause 31 stand part of the Bill. I apologise to the Committee for not having taken part in Second Reading.

I also thank the Minister for her very clear statement at the start of this debate. I want to make a relatively short contribution to highlight one of the issues the Welsh Government wish to take forward in this Bill, and to acknowledge the constructive collaboration of the two Governments and their officers on this and other issues raised in the Bill. In particular, I want to make a few comments on children not in school registers. Liberal Democrats have long called for such a register, including in our recent manifesto. Here I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Storey, who initiated this work in his Private Member’s Bill on the subject.

We agree with the NSPCC and the Children’s Commissioner that the register can be an important tool in keeping children safe. We understand the legal responsibilities parents have to ensure that their children receive an education. As liberals we believe that parents have a right to choose home education where they feel this is the right choice for their child. However, we are very concerned that the whereabouts of hundreds of children in England and Wales are simply unknown.

Education is devolved to Wales, and the Welsh Government already operate a register on their children missing education database. However, the Welsh Education Secretary states in the legislative consent memorandum to this Bill that

“the children not in school provisions proposed in this Bill would enhance the”

children missing school

“policy (from a safeguarding perspective) with the CNIS register, school attendance order (SAO), strengthened suitability assessment and child protection clauses applying alongside the CME database arrangements”.

I am pleased that the Welsh Government have recognised that the provisions in this Bill as introduced would have resulted in local authorities in England having greater levels of contact with elective home-educated children than local authorities in Wales. If the provisions were not extended to Wales, as proposed by the tabled amendments, duties on families in Wales would be considered less stringent than those in England. I welcome the Welsh Government’s pragmatic approach, which should produce a seamless system between the two nations.

The action of the Welsh Government in taking this opportunity to enhance child protection measures is also commended by the Children’s Commissioner for Wales, who recognises the importance of addressing the gaps in provision to ensure that children not in school have all their rights fulfilled. It is to these rights that I would like briefly to turn. When we talk about a children not in school register, we tend to have discussions, as we have had today, about the rights and responsibilities of parents. But in her letter to the Senedd’s Education Committee chair supporting the LCM, the Children’s Commissioner for Wales highlighted the three tests her office has published in relation to children’s rights on home education. They are:

“First, that all children in Wales can be accounted for and that none are invisible. Second, that every child receives a suitable education and their other human rights, including health, care and safety. And third, that every child is seen and their views and experiences are listened to. This is essential for the first two tests to be met”.


These three tests help us to focus our attention away, slightly, from the needs and rights of parents, and to consider the needs and rights of children.

The Children’s Commissioner for Wales points out that the Welsh Government make no reference to children’s rights in their LCM and is surprised that no children’s rights impact assessment has been produced with the proposals. She said that such an impact assessment would help ensure that the Welsh Government fulfil their own duties to consider children’s rights, provide valuable transparency for key stakeholders, and assist in identifying and mitigating any unintended consequences.

I am sure that the Welsh Government will rise to the challenge and produce a children’s rights impact assessment to ensure the rights of the children of Wales, but can the Minister say whether the rights of children in England will be similarly addressed? It seems that the Bill, and Clause 31 in particular, goes a long way to ensuring that the rights of children are met in both England and Wales, but the Government need to make it clear that that is their intention.

[Lord Wei (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a parent of home-educated children. I take this opportunity to echo the earlier tributes to the many home-educating families who have worked so hard over such a long period to raise their children well, which, as another Peer mentioned, the data shows. I also thank the Minister for her offer to meet Peers, including the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I am around in August and, if officials can meet us to discuss our concerns, I would like to join some of those discussions.

I support Amendments 202C, 227, 227A and 286, which collectively interrogate what I believe is a sweeping new framework that Clauses 31 and 34 impose. These clauses lie at the heart of the Bill’s proposals to establish this compulsory register of children not in school, and to empower local authorities to demand detailed information from parents about how and why they are educating their children outside the mainstream system.

Let us be clear: I fully accept there are very few tragic cases where parents, intent on harming or neglecting their children, have cited home education as a smokescreen. However, in pretty much every instance, the abuse was already present when the child was still enrolled in school—or, indeed, in state-run care, as has just been mentioned. To take these horrors and use them to justify a regime that treats all parents who choose to home educate as presumptively suspect is not only disproportionate but profoundly unjust. It risks creating a system that soaks up scarce safeguarding resources chasing bureaucratic compliance by good families, while truly at-risk children continue to slip through the net precisely because professionals are mired in routine paperwork.

Clause 31 in particular gives local authorities extraordinary powers. It requires the registration of any child not attending school full-time, regardless of whether there is any reason to suspect unsuitable education or harm. The data that can be demanded under this clause is extensive, including personal details, philosophical convictions, protected characteristics, information on supplementary educational providers and more, which will be held indefinitely and cross-referenced with other local records. As I mentioned at Second Reading, I totally oppose this register on principle.

Here we can see exactly the concern raised by Reclaim Rights for Children and other expert bodies, including many academics, that the proposed children not in school register requires information far beyond what is necessary. Even the Department for Education itself has conceded that simply having a child’s name, date of birth, home address and the names and home addresses of each parent should be sufficient to support the existing duties of a local authority to try to identify those children not in school and ensure they are receiving efficient, suitable education. Yet the Bill goes on to say that there may be other data that it would be helpful to capture. That is not how lawful data processing works. Under well-established principles of minimisation, personal data processing must be limited strictly to what is necessary and not exceed the purpose for which it was collected. You do not gather more than you need simply because it might be helpful.

Clause 34 compounds these concerns. It not only record facts but makes local authorities active interrogators of family choices without clear statutory boundaries. There is no real limit on what might be demanded under the vague heading of sufficient information. This invites mission creep, allowing data collected ostensibly for educational oversight to be repurposed for broader monitoring. It risks empowering officers who may be ideologically suspicious of home education to harass families, treating any non-co-operation as evidence of neglect and flipping the burden of proof entirely.

That is why I strongly support Amendment 286 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, which probes how these sweeping new powers would intersect with children who have special education needs. Children with education, health and care plans or who receive Section 19 or Section 61 provision are already under a robust statutory framework. Pulling them into an additional generalist register not only duplicates bureaucracy, which does not sound very efficient to me, but risks destabilising finely balanced arrangements, often secured only after long struggle and hard evidence of need. The local authority already knows exactly what education these children are receiving; they do not need another compliance net.