My Lords, I rise to speak in your Lordships’ debate with some trepidation because education is not my subject and never has been.
First, I follow my noble friend Lord Bird in apologising for not having spoken at Second Reading. I followed that debate quite closely and I think the best words I can use to cover my feelings about it are those of the noble Lord, Lord Bilimoria, in debate on the withdrawal Bill: noble Lords must “get real” if they think that home education is the way to deal with excluded children. I say that because my third daughter—a video editor by profession—went to her local authority in a fairly poor part of north London one day and said, “I really want to do something. Seeing the number of excluded children in this authority, I’d like to offer my services because, having been a freelance video editor, usually working on film sets, I may be able to help these children in some way”. She has done so; over a number of years, I can safely say that she has been of some help. If they are willing and she has spotted them as being possibly suitable for this kind of experience, she has met children who have been excluded for violent behaviour, come from very poor backgrounds and have not co-operated at school at all, for whom exclusion is an option—although I deplore it. Like the noble Lord, Lord Adonis—if I understood him correctly —I think exclusion is an absolute disgrace. My daughter thought she could see something that came within her field in the children she had spotted. She said she would encourage them to come up with an idea, either fictional or from their experience, and give them the opportunity to learn how to create a story and put it in visual terms—in others words, they were going to film it together and produce four to five-minute films. She has been doing this for three years and shown a number of examples of her work with these children, including in your Lordships’ House.
I would say, as would noble Lords who have seen some of it, that her work tells one something about excluded children: they generally come from very poor backgrounds and bad homes, so it cannot be said automatically that if school does not suit a child, they should be educated at home. The kind of homes that the children taught by my daughter come from would
not be interested. That is why those children are what they are and have imaginations that have turned negative —which she tries to turn positive and creative again—so it would not work. Now a raft of pupils has passed through her hands and some of the films have been quite brilliant. Those children, who would hardly speak to anybody and found it difficult not to resort to violent behaviour, have found being encouraged to use their imaginations and being taught to turn that into a film an enormous success. I say that without exaggeration and without exception. First of all, the children generally get praise for what they do. When you begin to use your imagination as a child, it shuts out all kinds of resentments that you might have following a poor home background and a lack of success at school.
10.45 am
I am sorry if this sounds like a Second Reading speech—I have apologised for not being there—and I hope that I am not ruffling too many feathers. I know that there are a lot of education professionals in the House—I often listen to them and wonder what I am doing here—but I think my daughter’s work and her success qualifies me to stand up and say to your Lordships that the Bill is a nonsense. I say that about the way it is expressed; I am not saying that anything done by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is a nonsense. If noble Lords generally think that recalcitrant children will benefit from being educated at home and that this will answer all the questions—in a way, I agree to an extent with what the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, said—they are living in cloud-cuckoo-land. We have to identify the children, of whom there are plenty, who want to be different but have to break out of the prison they have been in with their families and because of their lack of success in school. In fact, from the children my daughter has dealt with, who have produced these remarkable films, one young boy—who was totally out of control—has now been accepted at a drama school as a potentially successful actor. My daughter has been asked by a number of drama schools to talk to them about what she has done with excluded children, because the pupils—not the teachers; we all know what teachers are like—are very impressed and fascinated that children from such backgrounds have broken the chains of deprivation.