Education Bill

My Lords, I recognised that there would be a number of reasoned arguments and I stand with my colleagues who made them. I took a rather different way on this. During the summer I consulted a number of friends and my family—it was a random experiment—and it became absolutely clear that they did not believe that I was telling the truth when I said that it was the Government’s plan that when their child was going to be detained they would not be told. They said, ““You are making it up””. That was the first response. The second response from rural parents—I work and have friends in London but I live in a rural area—was, ““But there is only one bus. They cannot be detained without notice because if they do not get on the bus they do not get home at all””. We have to remember that not every poor parent in a rural area has a car; they depend on that transport. There are no other bus services or taxis; you catch the school bus or you do not get home. The third response was the sheer indignation that this was ““my”” child, not owned by anyone else. The common thread through all that was that the parents were quite keen for the child to be disciplined at school. There was no disagreement that the child should not receive their discipline, that detention might be the right answer, or that the closer it was to the incident the better little Jonny would learn from it. The disagreement was that parents had to know that their child was going to be detained so that they could ensure the protection of their child and were not worried out of their minds. I hope noble Lords will forgive my anecdotal bit of research but it was pretty consistent with the reasoned arguments that we have heard this evening.