My Lords, to pick up on what the noble Lord, Lord Warner, said, a local authority that has a decent history of being collaborative with home education knows a great deal about people who home educate because it interacts with them, provides facilities and services to them and talks to them—not to everybody, but the core of home education will be known. The local authorities that have trouble are generally those which have adopted bullying attitudes to home education and then get widely mistrusted.
The solution to this problem lies mainly in institutionalising an attitude of support and providing the funding to enable that support to be good and consistent. Under those circumstances, if you are really offering something—not just the possibility of being criticised and attacked and having people trying to remove your right to home educate—then registration serves a purpose. It serves a much better purpose, however, if it is part of a consistent attempt by government to keep in touch with everybody, particularly, as the noble Lord, Lord Warner, says, those who are least cared about and least supervised, of whom the home educators are at the best behaved end.
Noon
When a child leaves a school by reason of being excluded or just being told not to come in, what real track is kept of them? Who is really in charge of them?
The interim education that local authorities offer—are they really good at that? Do we know exactly what is happening? No. This is a pretty woolly area. Those children seem to me to be much more in danger than home-educated children. The statistics on abuse within home education, as far as I can establish, indicate that it is no worse than elsewhere.
We should not be seeking to do something to special education just because it is easy. It comes back to what the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, said on an earlier amendment: that providing support and money for home education made it all right for schools to push children into it, because it was provided for. Thought needs to go into that process. Here, we sort of solve the problem of not knowing where children are by picking up a small extra group of children who are not particularly vulnerable and making them register, but it does not solve the important bits of the problem. I urge the Government to look at this question as a whole, and at the need for registration within the context of the need to know where children are as a whole. I am not stopping them taking this in stages, but I do not want it to become like House of Lords reform, where the first, easy step turns out to be the only step. This needs to be part of an articulated plan to make sure that we know where children are and that they are properly looked after. That works with what the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, was saying earlier about the need to make sure that everybody gets a good education and we do not have a chunk of the community that is just forgotten, neglected and left on one side.
This was very much an opportunity to discuss this issue; I certainly do not intend to press it to a Division now or later, so I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.