My Lords, that is quite possible, but schools and parents can deal only with the circumstances in which they find themselves. It is the parents’ duty, in particular, to make the best of what they can. I agree that we ought to emphasise much more looking after those children who find school hard to deal with and bringing them through to success. There is a lot to do in that area and, as the noble Lord and I know from our long careers in this place, it has proved difficult to successive Governments. But that does not mean that we should not try. I believe that we are having another go at it and I commend the Government for that. In the local circumstances of an individual school, it may be best to encourage home education.
Home education is something that we should be prepared to support. It seems to me very strange that the Government’s attitude to children who have had such difficulty with the state schools they have access to that their parents have been forced to take them home is to immediately cut off funding and support. That seems a weird way of treating those who are finding life hardest in school. Throughout today, I shall be urging the Government to look at this from the point of view of supporting home education. Why, when a child moves into home education, does the money just disappear? Why does it not move to the local authority, or at least a decent proportion of it, so that the local authority can continue to support the education of that child, particularly in circumstances where it is clear that this is a matter not of some middle-class choice but of the best interest of the child?
The amendment is pretty technical. It is aimed at making sure there is a flow of information to Ofsted that will enable it, when it inspects a school, to understand what the school is doing, and whether the moves to home education have been well advised or whether
they are a covert form of exclusion. Ofsted tells me that it currently cannot get at the data. When it visits a school, it knows that children have moved into home education, but it has no way of finding out why that has happened. There is no record, information or contact with the parents involved. It just has to accept the school’s explanation. I would like to see circumstances where Ofsted has access to proper information so it can properly evaluate what a school is doing.
I particularly commend to the House the practice of the Magnus Church of England Academy in Newark. Its attitude to pupils who get into trouble is that it retains ownership of them. Even if they end up in the local PRU, Magnus keeps them on roll. It accepts the responsibility for the rest of their education. It accepts that they have gone to the PRU because that is the best choice for the child and that the results they achieve through that method will belong to the school. We should impose that attitude on all schools. I do not think that we should allow schools, whether by way of exclusion or off-rolling, to throw children away, to absolve themselves of responsibility for them. Children should stay on schools’ registers for the purposes of performance tables until the next point of measurement —key stage 2, 4 or 5—so that the decision the school takes about where a child goes, if they leave the school, is one for which the school will be held accountable. That would be the right way to move in this direction to produce data and evidence so that we can watch how these decisions are taken. That seems vital.
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In the general context of the Bill, we must be careful to be fair and not to single out the home educated just because some of them are different. There is not any evidence that they are a source of great problems. Sometimes what people say about the home educated just sounds like the fear of others—the sort of thing that I was brought up with, when I was told, “Don’t play with the Gypsy children”. If we want to judge what we are proposing for these people, we should imagine that the state has a supervisory role on the quality of our parenting. Would we let the local authority barge into our houses and interview our children alone to establish whether we are being good enough parents, without any evidence that we are not being good parents? That is the sort of thing we are in danger of asking of home educators in the context of education. We all have duties to bring up our children and to make sure that they are educated well.
An awful lot of the time what parents are doing with their children is commonplace in the state systems of other countries or in the further reaches of schools that we appreciate in this country. If we look at the range of schools, from the religious to the irreligious, from Summerhill to the schools run by the Plymouth Brethren, we admit a wide range of educational practice in this country. Most of what happens in home education is well within that.
We get hung up on the idea of pursuing the voice of the child, but children have no choice which school they go to. The parents decide that. Parents send children to boarding schools. I forgive my parents for that—I had a horrible time of it—but it was what was done at
the time. I was not given a choice and I would not be given a choice now—a voice maybe, but not a choice. We must put things in the context of the ordinary decisions we take. We must recognise that if we are looking at removing a child from home education we are removing them not to some nirvana where everything is perfect, but to the local state system where things may well be far from perfect. We therefore should not seek perfection in what we ask of home educators. We should just ask that they are doing, by ordinary standards, a good job. I beg to move.