I do not want to detain the Committee either, but my ears also pricked up at the question of six months or 12 months. I was part of the Bill Committee when we agreed that magistrates should have the power to hand down sentences of up to a year. This is a slightly odd one; I do not think I have ever seen an offence drafted quite like this, especially given the journey that people would go on to be subject to these orders. I absolutely accept that, for a situation to get this point, the circumstances would be extremely unusual. If you need to send a parent to prison for a year for failing to get their child to school, there is a lot more going on. There will probably have been multiple interventions from social services and elsewhere before we ever got to that point. Whether the child would still be in the care of a parent who needed to go to prison for failing to get them to school is an interesting question.
It is usual, I should think, with an offence such as this, for a Minister to explain why a penalty of a year will have any more of a deterrent effect then a penalty of six months, eight months or three months. I know they would be available to a magistrate, but it is unusual to see it done in this way. I do not know whether that is because it is a Bill of the Department
for Education, rather than the MoJ, which is perhaps more used to dealing with such clauses. It would be helpful if the Minister said a bit more about this.
I am content that these clauses should stand part of the Bill, but I am sensitive to the concerns of home educators, particularly those who are doing a good job. We do not want them to feel undermined or threatened in any way by this. We can stand here and say “Well, they shouldn’t; there’s no need for them to”, but the fact is that that is how they already feel, so we have a job of work to do to meet them where they are on this. At this point, it would be helpful if the Minister said what she can on that, but we do not want the clauses removed from the Bill.