My Lords, I am very grateful to my noble friend for her careful explanation of the regulations and her replies to our various comments. I will certainly take her up on the offer of writing to her with examples of information not being provided well. If she will allow me, I will also pick up again the argument about a machine-readable format. If somebody is telling my noble friend that this is difficult, what she is being told is not right.
This information is in a machine-readable format in local authority systems, so it is merely a question of flicking a switch and dropping this out into a common system. That should not take a local authority more than five minutes and, as there are only 100 of them, nationally this will take a few hours’ effort. It would do enormous good because parents need to know which schools their children might get into. If they
have to research each school individually, they will never see the ones that are a little further away or a little more obscure that happen, for one reason or another, to be available to them because of their particular characteristics and admissions criteria.
You can get into some very good schools on some very odd criteria. If you are disadvantaged and not well-informed, and you have to research everything individually, you will never get there. This becomes a privilege for the middle classes. Making things available automatically means that all those who are setting out to help the disadvantaged suddenly have all the information at their fingertips; it is as easily available to them as it is to everybody else. If I may, I will put that to my noble friend.
These regulations make some decent improvements to the way that looked-after children and similar children are treated. I very much hope that my noble friend will gather information over time as to how they are working. From what hints I have been able to gather, I suspect that the previous facilities were not as well used as they should have been and that many looked-after children were not helped to take advantage of the privileges they had to get into really good schools. We should know that the advantages being given to them are being well used, or else understand why they are not. That said, I am immensely grateful to my noble friend and I thank her for the attention she has given to this Motion.