Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Crisp Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash (Con)]

My Lords, my Amendment 279 would allow local authorities to inspect the materials being used in the child’s home education and to see the child’s work. I also support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Meston. I strongly support the Government’s measures in relation to home education in this Bill, and in this respect I find myself in disagreement with a number of noble friends on these Benches with whom I generally share a common view of life. I was delighted to hear the Minister’s opening remarks on this group. I thought she put the situation exceptionally well.

As we have heard, the home education lobby is very concerned about these provisions, and I am sure it will be concerned about my amendment. However, the number of children apparently being educated at home has grown exponentially over the past 10 to 15 years, probably from 20,000 to 30,000 to somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000, and that is without allowing for the 300,000 children estimated by the Education Policy Institute to be missing from education. My noble friend Lord Frost says that only 1.4% of home-educated children get a school attendance order, which is unsurprising as without a register local authorities just do not know who these children are. As for the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, about the majority of home-schoolers being university-educated people, that may well be the case for those home-educated children who are being suitably educated, but I believe there are many more children who are apparently being home-educated but who do not have that benefit.

Of course, many children are educated exceptionally well by their parents at home or in other settings, and I respect parents’ right to do that. These are not the parents who concern me, and nor should these parents be concerned about the provisions in the Bill or my amendment. If they are providing a suitable education, why should they be? But those of us who work in schools know that many children apparently being educated at home are not receiving a suitable education, or indeed any education at all. Many are active in gangs. Surely, we must be concerned about these children. Children have a right to be educated, and I invite the home education lobby to reflect on whether its objections to the Bill, and no doubt to my amendment, are a little selfish and lacking in public spirit in some respects. I understand what my noble friend Lord Lucas was saying about the importance of children being seen. I assume, therefore, that he supports going further than my amendment, because the whole point is that too many children are unseen.

England is an outlier in relation to home education. The noble Lord, Lord Hacking, talked about the relatively low number of children being home-educated. We have the highest proportion of children in home education and the lowest amount of regulation. No other European country has a higher rate of home education. The next highest is France, which mandates yearly inspections. The 2018 European Commission report into home education concluded that students’ progress is monitored and assessed everywhere in Europe except in the UK and in the Netherlands. I refer noble Lords to an excellent report by the Centre for Social Justice dated November 2022, entitled Out of Sight and Out of Mind. That report made a number of recommendations, including that local authorities need powers to conduct visits and see the child in person at least every six months, and that home-educated children should complete an annual light-touch progress assessment in English and maths. My amendment goes nowhere near as far as that.

The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel has uncovered incidents of harm involving children reported to be in home education, including a number of children who have died. The panel concluded that such children were often invisible, were not in school and did not receive home visits. A 2021 report by FFT Education Datalab found that children with additional vulnerabilities are disproportionately likely to be out of the school system by the end of key stage 4, and it is estimated that about half these children are in home education. It found that a child who has been persistently absent from school is more than three times more likely to end up with no final destination than a child who has never been persistently absent, and a permanently excluded child is two and a half times more likely than the child who has never been permanently excluded.

Local authorities do not like serving school attendance orders because by the time the matter gets to court, the parents are lawyered up and, even when they are not providing a suitable education, may well be pretending to be doing so by producing documentation that they have only recently obtained. My proposal would cut through this dance. Unless a child who is home-educated is known to social services, how is a local authority to know whether they are receiving a suitable education?

While Sara Sharif had previously been under a CPP, she does not appear to have been at the time of moving into home education. On my noble friend Lord Wei’s point about scaremongering, we should certainly be concerned about children who are home-educated and suffer abuse or are murdered. I believe there are many more children, not in this category, who are apparently being educated at home but are actually not receiving any education at all. Sadly, in the last decade or so, the world has moved rapidly to this appalling state of affairs.

My amendment is consistent with the recommendations made by the Education Select Committee in its report Strengthening Home Education, although it does not go anywhere near as far as its recommendations of annual contact with the family and a minimum annual assessment of a child’s progress, particularly in relation to literacy and numeracy.

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 202C from the noble Lord, Lord Frost, and Amendment 226 from my noble friend Lord Meston. As this is the first time I have spoken in Committee, I would like to make two preliminary remarks. The first is to declare a personal interest, as I have a relative who is home-educating, and therefore I have learned at second hand some of the issues involved here. Secondly, that has also caused me to want to investigate more and to thank the many people both inside and outside this House who have provided me with information about the whole field of home education and how it relates to local authorities.

I am very grateful to the Minister for having a meeting with me early on in this process and to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for also having meetings with me to discuss these issues. I very much appreciate it, and I very much appreciate the fact that the Minister has offered to meet Peers. I am available in August, so we look forward to having further discussions and perhaps saving some time in Committee around some of the relatively minor details that need to be cleared up in the Bill.

I do not want to take up too much time; I will simply make three or four points and then speak to the amendments. If noble Lords want to see a real approach to personalised education, they can find that in some of the successful examples of elective home education perfectly attuned to the needs, capabilities and aspirations of the child. That happens at all levels of achievement.

However, and equally, I am concerned about the 39,000 missing children mentioned who may be at risk of abuse, may be running wild or are being brainwashed and separated from society in some form. There are a whole range of different sets of issues that we must think about here.

In characterising home education, I just want to pick up one other point that I do not think has been made by anyone: some parents choose to home-educate one of their children because of that child’s particular needs but have their other children in school. Indeed, many parents will home-educate their children for a period and then bring them back into school later on when they perhaps have moved up or managed to develop in a way that allows them to take advantage of whatever the provision is locally.

We must really recognise the poor state of some of our schools and some of the stories I have heard about what has been described to me as “in-school excluded”. These are children who perhaps have difficult behaviours or whatever, have an educational assistant and end up spending the time in the corridor with that assistant rather than being educated.

There is a whole range of issues that we need to tackle here. My approach to it is, like others—I am delighted to see this spirit in your Lordships’ Committee on this—to try to find practical ways forward to balance all the different issues. Central to that, in whatever we do, is to help to frame a positive relationship between home-educating parents and local authorities. In some cases, this is excellent but, in others, this is very fraught indeed. I will have a bit more to say on that later.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Nash (Con)]

My amendment also says

“to see the child’s work”.

As those of us in schools know, seeing a child’s books is one of the best ways of finding out whether they are being properly taught. It may be that the home educators are educating their children in a particular way and you can see the materials that they are using to teach, but one needs to know whether the children are actually learning. The only way to know that is to see their work.

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

I thank the noble Lord for that intervention, and I very much understand the point that he is making. However, the issue is what happens to that material once it is inspected. How does the home education officer make a judgment on it? Most of them are not teachers—in fact, I suspect very few are. Do they go to an outside source, or do we set up some great panoply of mechanisms to decide whether those materials are appropriate?

At the moment, we have a different situation. The current position, as I understand it, is that, where authorities have cause for concern, Sections 437 to 443 of the Education Act 1996 provide for steps to be taken if it appears that there is very little or no education in place for a child, or if the local authority has no information about any education arrangements. I understand that in most, possibly all, local authority areas home-educating parents provide an annual report to the local authorities, rather than providing materials that will be judged in isolation.

I think that we should leave the law where it is. As I understand it, the attitude of the best local authority home education officers is that they build relationships; they are happy with most of the people, but can then concentrate on the problem areas—because there are problem areas—within the home education sphere. Imposing new duties such as this would add burden, bureaucracy and frustration to authorities and parents alike. We should concentrate on improving that relationship, not making it more burdensome.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Nash’s Amendment 279. It suggests a very mild tweak to the proposed legislation, largely because he is respectful of the majority of parents who do a good job in home education, which I completely agree with. However, I see at close quarters the impact of home education in deprived communities where the parents have limited education themselves and little interest in it. They are clearly unable to educate their own children and yet, when they are withdrawn from schools, there is nothing a school can do. These children are being thrown to the wolves and, as the Minister has said, the numbers are escalating.

My noble friend Lord Nash talks about a trend over the past 10 to 15 years but, according to the NSPCC, the number has increased by 186% in six years. In 14 local authorities, it has quadrupled in that time. These are not all middle-class, educated parents, but we have no idea who they are.

In 2021, the House of Commons Education Committee’s Strengthening Home Education report made a number of recommendations. Perhaps the most important was that the DfE should provide

“a set of clear criteria against which the suitability of education can be assessed, taking into account the full range of pedagogical approaches taken in EHE”—

elective home education—

“as well as the age, ability and aptitude of individual children, including where they may have SEND”.

The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, a government-sponsored group, produced a number of recommendations on home education in its May 2024 report, and many of these mirrored the report I have just mentioned. The report refers to 27 referrals received between August 2020 and October 2021, involving the deaths of six children and a further 35 suffering serious harm, including physical neglect, physical abuse and sexual abuse. There are many other good recommendations, but, as they do not fit this specific amendment, I will not list them. I recommend these two reports to any Peer interested in this vexing subject.

My noble friend’s amendment would provide a very light-touch review point. Bona fide parents would not be negatively affected. On the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, I say that the amendment is extremely light touch, but it would move the situation from what is currently a complete black hole to at least give us some indication of children’s well-being.

I want to finish with the case of Sara Sharif. Many noble Lords will know about it, but I will remind the Committee. A 10 year-old girl was withdrawn from her primary school in April 2023 under the pretext of home education. This occurred after teachers noticed bruising, which she had attempted to conceal beneath her hijab. The school referred their concerns to social services, but, after being taken out of school, she became invisible to safeguarding agencies. Neighbours reported hearing constant crying and screaming. She was murdered by her father and stepmother. They were convicted in December last year. The lack of school oversight allowed this to happen undetected. I respect the good work that most home-educating parents do, but it is for cases like hers that I support Amendment 279.