Lord Lucas in the House of Lords 26-11-09

I struggle to formulate thought in a calm and structured manner on what is happening in HE world. Especially when so much misinformation has been bandied around by the press such that I am subject to criticism not only by complete strangers but even by people that know us. People are horrified we have never had an inspection and that Chloe has never been seen. This does not mean she is an unseen child, she is very much visible as we are rarely at home! Chloe's education is not lacking, it is a rich and full education yet because it is achieved by her not attending a school, as a home educator I am now slurred in the public's eye with charges of neglect and abuse. We do not follow a curriculum and our approach is autonomous - or as I have coined, "opportunity led".

I am never going to be a campaigner and admire greatly those few who put so much time and effort into the cause that I share. I do what I can, I am developing a relationship with my MP and will sign lists and co-ordinate petitions where I am able. Persuading my friends and family to sign and take note is not as easy as I find the discussions peppered with so many spurious statements that are uncorroborated that it becomes yet again a discussion where I am defending my right to educate my child as I see fit.

Ofsted (who possibly see a revenue generating opportunity?) suggests that Home Educators should be CRB checked before they receive their Home Education licence, at an Ofsted meeting this week it was suggested that Home Educated children wear a badge to distinguish them from truanting children, Local Authority staff want the power to enter my house and speak to my child on her own - for upwards of 4 hours! These powers then are able to be extended to all families, whether they school their children or not. Surely any rational person would say these are unreasonable demands in a supposedly free country?

Yesterday, Lord Lucas spoke on the Bill currently in progress. Please, please take the time to read his words and try and put yourself in my shoes and maybe, just maybe, you will get a sense of the persecution I feel.

4.13 pm
Lord Lucas: My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow that speech, and I think that I agree with every part of it, especially the bit saying that we have the right to spend our own money on ourselves and have fun, so our children had better learn to work for a living. As I get older I agree with that more and more, although I do not think I did 40 years ago.

I am going to devote my speech to the home education part of the education Bill—although I cannot call it that because the word “education” has been expunged from every Bill and from the title of the department. I shall refer to it as the schools Bill. Several clauses are devoted to the regulation of home education; that is, people who educate their children at home. This part of the Bill is ill thought-out and unjustified, and I hope very much that we will delete it. In its current form it is a skeleton exposing home educators and their children to the unknown because so much will depend on how the regulations are written. Nothing in it secures their rights as home educators to look after their children in the way they see best. There is an unfortunate conflation of education and welfare which makes the business of improving or looking after the education of these children much harder.

There is no recognition in the Bill of the curricula and forms of education which are commonly used in home education, particularly in autonomous education. Instead, the impact assessment refers to the exemplar curricula which will be produced by the QCDA. In other words, everyone is to be corralled into state education and not allowed to go their own way. There is no reference to the training of local authority staff, which is recognised to be one of the major deficiencies in the current arrangements. There is no proper arrangement for independent appeal when a local authority decides that a person may not home educate. There is a skeleton in the Bill, but it is a skeleton that could be filled out in almost any way.

In this country, we have long had a duty as parents to educate our children and a right to decide how they should be educated. Many of us choose to entrust the state with their education—but that is us entrusting the state with our duty and us exercising our right to choose. The Bill turns that on his head. The arrangement here is that you cannot home educate unless you get the prior permission of the local authority, which has wide grounds for refusing. It can object in any way to your plans to educate your child. It can object and refuse you permission to home educate if you do not allow someone from the local education authority four hours of unaccompanied access to your child every year. Would we contemplate allowing that for our children under any circumstances? What right have these people to do that to home-educated children when there is no real cause for concern?

We are considering a section of the Bill which will cost £20 million per annum, which is about £1,000 per home-educated child. These children receive no money to help pay the costs of examinations; no money to buy textbooks; no money to buy materials; no money and no tuition to help them over difficulties in education. Now the Government can find £1,000 for each of these children—and will spend it on auditing them. Not one penny will go to help the children; it will all go on auditing them. What have these people done to deserve that?

Four separate communities are bundled together under the title of home education. First, there are those who opt for what might properly be called “elective home education”. They are people who have decided, as a matter of principle, that they will pursue an educational philosophy which is not available from the state. Most of this is autonomous education; most of it is a form of education which does not involve curricula or planning but involves going on a journey with children which results in education. This is, of its nature, foreign to many school-based systems, but it has proved immensely successful.

The second group might be called “the despairing”. These are people whose children have been bullied at school to the point where they will no longer go to school; or those who have children with special educational needs which are not being properly catered for and who have therefore decided to turn their lives upside down and educate their children themselves. These people do society a great deal of good by doing so.

The third group consists of the Travellers, who are bundled in here as home educators, which many of them are. Finally, there is what one might call the “year 11” children—those who have always been trouble; who have always truanted; whose truanting has got worse and worse; whose parents are not in control of them either; and who in the last year or so of school just go home and sit watching television. They are classed as “home education” because it is a convenient way for the local authority to classify them.

We do not have a coherent pattern that can be used to produce a coherent set of statistics. All this has been conflated with a worry—I associate it with the NSPCC; perhaps it comes from elsewhere—that a lot of abuse is somehow going on in the home education community. Page 90 of the impact assessment quotes the NSPCC:

“We are concerned that the child’s safety and welfare should be paramount and that there is nothing in the current guidance or framework that would prevent children from being abused by people who may claim to be home educators”.

That sentence applies equally to all of us who are bringing up children. Local authorities are not conducting any supervision of me as a parent to make sure that I am not abusing my children. “That is a bad thing; something must be done about it”; that is what is being said about home-educating families—on the basis of what?

This is probably the first time that I have paid attention to a Bill’s impact assessment, but it is an immensely useful document. It sets out the rationale of the Bill and the concerns that underlie the Government’s perceived need to introduce this section. It states that local authorities estimate that,

“8% of ‘home educated’ children are receiving no education at all and 20% are not receiving a suitable education”.

That would be concerning if it were true, but it is not.

To understand what is going wrong here, one needs to understand the process that the Government have gone through, with a rushed assessment of the situation under Graham Badman and three successive rounds of applications to local authorities for data, each of them seemingly compiled by a different team because they are none of them consistent with each other. None of them seems to be compiled by people who have an understanding of home education or of local authority practices. Different local authorities respond to the same questions on different bases, understanding them in different ways, providing different kinds of answers and following different rules. From that, the Government have derived a set of high-level statistics such as the one that I have just quoted.

Before Prorogation, I asked a couple of questions of the Minister on this matter. The department refused to answer, saying that it could not provide me with the underlying data because they were confidential. I shall ask similar questions again now. If I receive that same answer, we shall be off to see the Leader of the House, because I consider it deeply disrespectful of this House. These data are there and are available. The Minister may have a team looking at the data. On the other side are 10,000 intelligent, angry, committed home-educating parents finding out the same information. All the information is in the public domain, but how have the Government got their high-level results from it?

Let us look at the 8 per cent who are receiving no education at all. Local education authorities have a duty to make sure that children are receiving a suitable education. A figure of 8 per cent would mean an astonishing level of dereliction. A huge number of local authorities would be in complete breach of their requirements and not using their well established powers to bring children into education. Of course, that is not the case at all. Part of it appears to be a deliberate misreading of the figures provided by local authorities; part of it is rolling in a chunk of the Traveller population, who are already separately provided for by local authorities which have well understood the requirements of them but have included them in the “receiving no education” category. Part of it is the “year 11” problem, which is local authorities’ own problem resulting from things going on in their own schools. When you get down to the residual question of how many properly home-educated children are not being educated, it is somewhere well under 1 per cent—if indeed one can identify any numbers at all.

It is an astonishing misuse of statistics to have done what the Government have done. I shall be pressing the department extremely hard about how it justifies the figures it has produced. It does not appear to have done any research with local authorities. A lot of these figures are made up from a few local authorities that produce very high figures, but there does not appear to have been any questioning of those authorities about what those figures represent. When you do question them, as I say, you find that there are all sorts of spurious factors in there. The 20 per cent who are not receiving suitable education appear to involve people who are just refusing to provide information or are following courses that the local authority does not approve of; the number of people who have been properly evaluated and are known to be providing unsuitable education appears, again, to be well under 1 per cent. The calculation of 8 per cent receiving nothing and 20 per cent receiving less than they should is the foundation for the whole benefit that is claimed for this section of the Bill, but it is an entirely disreputable and untrue calculation.

Then it is said that home-educated children are four times as likely to be NEET as the general run of children. Again, that is total rubbish; the local authorities have just been bundling into the NEET figure any children for whom they do not have any information. Given the relationship between local authorities and home-educating parents by the time the children get to 16 and the parents no longer have to provide data to the local authorities, many choose not to. Again, the Travellers are in there, as are the “year 11” children.

Most damagingly of all, it has been said in the impact assessment that 0.4 per cent of home-educated children are subject to a child protection plan, compared with only 0.2 per cent of the general population. That is a vicious untruth. Yes, 0.4 per cent of the home-educated children are subject to a child protection plan, but the figures for the general population are 0.26 per cent with a child protection plan and 0.34 per cent who have actually been taken into care. We cannot find a single instance of a home-educated child who has been taken into care.

So, rather than the picture painted by the Government in the impact assessment of home education being a dangerous place, the actual figures, which the Government had and could easily have published, say that home education is a much misunderstood place and that, while local authorities are very cautious of it, when it comes to taking children into care, that appears never to happen—or at least almost never.

There is no evidence that this part of the Bill is needed; in fact, the reverse is very much the truth. We have just had the chief inspector saying that one-third of state schooling is unsatisfactory, while the true figures on home education say that maybe 1 per cent of home education is unsatisfactory. The phrase involving beams, motes and eyes comes to mind.

I hope that when the Bill comes to us, as I suspect it will, close to the general election and finds itself in the wash-up, my noble friends on the Front Bench and the noble Baronesses on the Liberal Front Bench will gather together and decide that this section of the Bill ought to be killed. I shall be seeking their assurances that that will be the case.

The past 12 months have done much to poison the relationship between home educators, local authorities and the state generally. It will be a slow process to rebuild it; it is a community that keeps itself to itself and, by doing so, does the rest of us a fair bit of good. It ought to have our support, not our condemnation.