Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Committee (8th Day)

12:03:00

My Lords, I should inform your Lordships that if this amendment is agreed to I will be unable to call Amendments 195A to 197A for reason of pre-emption. Clause 29: School uniforms: limits on branded items Amendment 195

Moved by

195: Clause 29, page 49, leave out lines 9 to 16 and insert— “(1) The appropriate authority of a relevant school in England may not require a pupil at the school to have to buy branded items of school uniform for use during a school year which cost more in total to purchase than a specified monetary amount, to be reviewed annually.(1A) The Secretary of State may by regulations specify the monetary amount that may apply to—(a) a primary pupil, and(b) a secondary pupil.(1B) A statutory instrument containing regulations under subsection (1A) may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.”Member’s explanatory statement This amendment imposes a monetary cap, rather than an item cap, on branded uniform items.

My Lords, education is frequently described as a great leveller: a powerful force to close the gap between opportunity and background, between privilege and disadvantage. As someone who experienced that divide, I can say that unless we tackle entrenched inequalities that quietly shape a child’s journey before they even enter the classroom, that idea will remain stubbornly out of reach. That is why I will speak on two amendments to the Bill. They might seem modest in terms of admin but they carry immense significance for families across the country. Amendments 195 and 201 have been tabled alongside the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester. They focus on a subject that is too often overlooked in our education debates: the affordability of school uniforms. Specifically, I propose a statutory monetary cap on the cost of branded school uniform items and an extension of VAT zero rating to include all compulsory school uniform items for pupils up to the age of 16. These are not abstract proposals; they are informed by data from the Child Poverty Action Group. In 2024, approximately 4.5 million children lived in poverty, with 2.9 million living in deep poverty, meaning that their household’s mean income was below 50% of the median income. The amendments are also informed by personal experiences and by listening closely to families, teachers and welfare advisers who witness the strain at first hand. I grew up in inner city Sheffield in the 1980s, a working-class child in a household that often struggled to meet ends. My father, like many, worked in the local steel industry. When he lost his job, we lost our financial security. I know intimately what it feels like to rely on free school meals and I benefited from school clothing grants, not as a charity but as a lifeline. The grants provided by Sheffield City Council, at the time under the leadership of David Blunkett—now the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett—meant that I could walk to school on my first day wearing a jacket and shoes that fitted and a jumper that did not single me out. It gave me more than clothing: it gave me confidence, and that in turn allowed me to focus on learning rather than surviving. It is that lived experience that brings me to this Bill with urgency and conviction. I turn first to the statutory monetary cap on branded uniforms. In 2024, the average cost of compulsory secondary school uniforms and sportswear stood at just over £92 per pupil. That figure is already burdensome on many families, but it often disguised a more troubling reality—the steep and sometimes punitive cost of branded school items. In recent years, we have seen the provision of branded and school-specific clothing, logoed jumpers, custom trousers, embroidered polo shirts, and even branded socks. One school in West Yorkshire required 10 different branded items, none of which could be purchased in supermarkets or high street stores. These requirements are no longer about promoting school identity; they have become a barrier to participation. The consequences are clear. In 2023, research showed that 18% of families borrowed money to pay for uniforms, 10% missed rent payments and 27% struggled to cover energy costs, all so their child could comply with school dress codes. This is not just a matter of inconvenience; it is about access. As one 14 year-old said, “You need it for every day and it costs a lot of money and there are some people who don’t go to school because of the uniform. It ruins your education”. Despite existing Department for Education guidance that encourages schools to limit branded items, compliance remains inconsistent, and 70% of secondary schools still require five or more branded items. That tells us that the voluntary guidance has reached a limit. What is needed now is a legislative floor—something firm, fair and enforceable. That is why I propose a statutory monetary cap, tailored by phase of education and reviewed annually. This would ensure that no child is excluded or penalised simply because their family cannot afford a school’s preferred uniform. Schools will still set their uniform policy, but they will do so within a reasonable, defined cost ceiling. In doing so, we would also encourage schools to adopt a more affordable and flexible approach, such as allowing iron-on logos or sew-on patches for supermarket-bought garments and improved access to second-hand uniform schemes. I turn to the VAT issue, which is even more egregious in its injustice. Under current UK VAT laws, a school uniform item for a child over 14, or for a child taller than 1.2 metres, is taxed at the standard rate of 20%. This includes blazers, trousers, shirts and even footwear, despite these items being compulsory and often identical in form to those worn by younger pupils. To give your Lordships an example, a school blazer in size 36 might be VAT-free but the same blazer in size 38, required by a taller pupil due simply to growth, is taxed. This means that the families most likely to face additional costs during adolescence are hit hardest. It is a system that penalises families for their growing teenagers. We would not dream of taxing GCSE textbooks, so why do we tax the clothing required to sit in the same classroom? According to the Schoolwear Association, parents in England are paying close to £9 million annually in VAT on school-specific uniforms. That is equivalent to around £2,604 per year per secondary school—money that could be far better spent on food, housing and transport. Removing VAT on all compulsory school uniform items up to the age of 16 is a clean and easily implemented solution. It reflects the reality that school attendance is mandatory up to age 16 and that school uniforms are not an optional accessory but a requirement. I emphasise that this is not about undermining school identity or discipline. I support the principle of a smart, cohesive uniform, but smartness must mean affordability and identity should not mean exclusion. If Parliament adopts these two amendments, capping school uniform costs and removing VAT, we could go further. We could reinstate the Sheffield school clothing grant scheme from the 1980s and offer a modern form of school clothing support for families on free school meals or universal credit, for example, whether through digital vouchers, local authority grants or school-managed credits. This is about designing support systems that match the realities that families face, because the cost of not acting is far higher than any tax foregone. When a child feels ashamed to walk to school or sits in a classroom worried about how they look, they learn less, their confidence flattens and their attendance drops. Teachers and heads know this, and increasingly they are personally covering the gap, reaching into their own pockets, running second-hand shops, and making judgment calls between discipline and compassion. This is not how we should run our schools. In the sixth-richest country in the world, no child should be left behind because their shoes do not fit or their jumper lacks a crescent. This Bill and these amendments offer a chance to say that we see the child behind the blazer, the family behind the invoice and the value behind the policy. This is not about handouts; it is about dignity. It is about a society that does not penalise children and it is about reaffirming in practical strategic terms our belief in equality. I urge your Lordships to support these amendments, not just because they are fair and efficient but because they are right. Sometimes real change does not come in the form of grand reform or a national strategy; sometimes it starts with a blazer—a blazer that fits.

My lords, I shall speak to my Amendments 196 and 197 and declare, as ever, that I am a teacher at a state academy in east London. Before I talk to these amendments, I want to rather cheekily add a little thing. Given that the Minister kindly committed to getting the Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance out in good time for the inset days in August, is there any progress on the recent news that the framework has been delayed and is going to be published only this month? There is a lot of concern among our safeguarding heads about this uncertainty, and I wonder if the Minister could write to me about that.

12:15:00

Back to the amendments. All the amendments in this group are pretty much on the same theme. Mine are simple amendments seeking to raise the number of branded items allowed in a school uniform. The manifesto pledge is a laudable attempt by the Government to do something about poverty and help with the cost of living crisis, but it is a bit of a red herring. Children have to wear clothes to go to school, but school suppliers seem to have become these Dickensian villains. According to the Schoolwear Association, new data covering 548 schools, representing 520,000 students, shows that the average cost of compulsory branded items, daywear and sportswear, remains affordable at £92.45 in 2025, and the average mark-up on school uniforms is 7%.

I suspect most schools are like our school, where a full second-hand uniform, indistinguishable from new, can be bought for £50 or less. Katherine Birbalsingh, of the high-performing Michaela Community School, reports that its school uniform costs £76 new and a second-hand uniform costs about £20. This stuff lasts—a school blazer can last the whole of a child’s school career.

Properly established school uniform policies are important. They promote a sense of well-being and pride, as the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, so movingly described. They also allow children to subtly rebel. Having an untucked shirt and being told to tuck it in means honour is satisfied before other things get rebelled against. I have noticed a growth in badges being worn on school blazers for success in subjects; this does not work on a tracksuit top or a sweatshirt. A blazer allows children, especially girls, to change shape unnoticed. I have talked before in your Lordships’ House about a 14 year-old girl I taught who was pregnant, and you would never have known. If you give people a choice of brands, the have-nots and the haves become obvious. And please do not get me started on Premier League shirts—what is an away shirt?

Other amendments in this group talk about the cost of an item, rather than the amount. Either way, there will always be a cost of sending a child to school. These amendments are an attempt to help keep the cost as low as possible, while avoiding some of the more hyperbolic rhetoric that has sometimes accompanied the subject.

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 199ZA in my name. It was previously brought forward by my noble friend Lord Moynihan who, regrettably, cannot be here today, despite his enthusiasm for the subject. I will keep my comments short, as much has been said already on the subject. This probing amendment goes further than my noble friend Lady Barran’s Amendment 199, out of concern that the Government’s proposals could lead to some schools excluding PE kit altogether as a branded item. This could disincentivise schools and pupils from meeting the Prime Minister’s commitment, made with the Lionesses, that every child across the country should benefit from and have equal access to high-quality PE and sport. A survey by the Schoolwear Association carried out among school leaders found that over 50% of schools indicated that they would remove PE kits from their uniform policy if a strict cap were imposed, risking reduced sports participation due to the pressure to wear the latest brands, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, particularly among teenage girls. Worryingly, it believes that the Bill, as drafted, would lead to increased PE costs, as mentioned, and pose a risk to sports participation in our schools. We know why PE uniforms are important: they promote a more equitable environment for students, and inclusivity. Importantly, they remove the pressure to wear the trendy—and, usually, more expensive—kit and create a level playing field. They promote safety, equality and a sense of unity among students, and they enhance school spirit. Schools need to foster a sense of community and belonging. I of course support the ambition of keeping the cost of school uniforms down, but not at the expense of reducing participation in sport and physical activity in our schools. At a time when we are seeing an increase in the obesity figures for children and concerns about their lifestyles and well-being, we should not put in place barriers to their getting active. In fact, we need to do more to support and encourage activity. Above all, accepting this amendment would raise the profile of PE in schools and the importance of a healthy lifestyle for all our children.

My Lords, I am in favour of Amendment 196, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. That may surprise my colleagues on the Front Bench—to some extent, it surprises me—but I will speak from personal, recently lived experience. My son is in year 9 at an academy in London. In the Easter break, he moved from one academy to another, so we had to have a complete change of uniform in that period. It was interesting to compare the two schools, because one required considerably more for its badged uniform than the other. The school he originally attended needed a jersey, a blazer, a tie, two PE shirts, two pairs of PE shorts, a house t-shirt, two pairs of monogrammed sports socks, a rugby shirt and a football shirt. The school he has moved to requires just a jersey, a blazer, a tie, one PE shirt, one pair of PE shorts, a rugby shirt and a football shirt. I accept the point that the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, made on her amendment—which was originally brought forward by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan—about encouraging young people to be as active as they can in sport. Being active in school may, on many occasions, lead to being active in clubs and societies outwith school; that is self-evident. However, I do not believe that having the school badge on what they wear really makes any difference. I am therefore not in favour of necessitating sports gear being badged. If boys and girls represent their school, when they play against another school they clearly need to have a jersey with the school badge on it and with proper school colours. But if they are just playing rugby and football, they can do what I did at school: there was a blue top and a white top, which were interchangeable depending on what team you were in that week in preparation for matches at the weekend, and then you got the school top for the actual match on Saturday. Unless you are actually representing the school, you do not need anything with the school’s name on the breast—that would be unnecessary. I do not believe that that will disincentivise people getting involved in sport. PE is compulsory anyway, and it is very much the job of PE teachers and parents to encourage children to be physically active; whether they are wearing a red or a blue top with the school badge on it will not really make much difference. I take issue with one point that the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, made. He said that a blazer can last the whole of a child’s career. I take it that he is not including both primary and secondary schools. Even in secondary school, there are five years between year 7 and year 11. My son turned 14 last month and he is five inches taller than he was this time last year, so the blazer he wore then certainly would not go anywhere near meeting his needs now. It is not impossible, but it would be unusual for a child not to gain much height or girth between joining and leaving a school. I think that most children will probably require three blazers for those five years. That brings me to another other point about blazers. I am not convinced by the idea that just buying a blazer from a supermarket, and then getting a badge sewn on it, is of any great benefit in tackling the problem of less well-off parents facing the burden of the costs of sending a child—or, in most cases, children—to school. These blazers are not of such good quality. It is well known that blazers bought in a supermarket will not be the same quality as those purchased in bulk by a supplier for a school, which can therefore sell them at a reasonable price because they are bought in bulk. Incidentally, I checked up on that in relation to my own son. The blazer that we had to buy for him two months ago cost £34; on Amazon, the alternative without a badge was £31. So there was very little difference in price, but the difference in quality—in terms of having to replace the uniform—is important. While I very much support what the Government are trying to do here, I believe that five items, as well as a tie, is perfectly reasonable. This should be given further consideration by my noble friend the Minister and her colleagues in government. Finally, I am very much committed to children wearing a school uniform. At the moment, we see many children from other countries in and around Parliament, who are clearly on school visits, not wearing school uniforms. In many countries, having a school uniform is unknown. That is unfortunate, because there is undoubtedly the issue of peer pressure, which, incidentally, is not dealt with by some uniform swap system. In many cases, a child wearing a recycled uniform will probably have it pointed out to them by—let us say—not too well-meaning friends, and it may well be obvious. If a child does not wear a uniform, other kinds of peer pressure very much exist, as the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, said in his introduction. That is why uniform is so important. A uniform school uniform, as opposed to various brands of uniform, is worth having and retaining for a school’s identity, while at the same time not being overdemanding on parents. As I said, I speak from my own recent experience, which, to some extent, surprised me; I thought that all schools had more or less the same requirements, but they do not. However, requiring just three items, as well as a tie, risks parents buying items that are not exactly the same colour or style as that worn by the boy or girl sitting next to their child in class. For that reason, Amendment 196, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, is worthy of support. Amendment 202, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, covers school uniform swaps. In theory, that is a good idea, but it could exacerbate the problems of peer pressure rather than overcoming them.

My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of the Knowledge Schools Trust. Before I speak to my amendment, I offer my support to all the uniform amendments proposed so far by noble Lords. Schools need a bit more flexibility around uniforms than is allowed for by the Bill. My amendment, much like Amendments 195A and 199ZA, would caveat the ban on schools being allowed to mandate three items of a branded uniform, excluding branded items that have been provided or lent to pupils free of charge. Why? One reason, as we heard from my noble friend Lady Sater, is that some schools have sport kit sponsors which provide more than three branded items free of charge. The more important reason is that this prohibition would throw up an obstacle to the expansion of the Combined Cadet Force programme in state schools, which the Government have said they are in favour of. My reading of Clause 29 is that the prohibition would apply to CCF troops, because it says: “For the purposes of subsection (1)”— the limit on the number of branded items a pupil is required to have— “a pupil is required to have a branded item of school uniform for use during a … year if the pupil is required to have it … to participate in any lesson, club, activity or event facilitated by the school during that year”. A school-based combined cadet force would be an activity facilitated by the school. I was surprised to see this clause appear as written, because an article in the UK Defence Journal published on 29 May 2025 began: “The Ministry of Defence has welcomed the findings of a recent academic study highlighting the positive impact of school-based Cadet Forces, and confirmed plans to expand Combined Cadet Forces (CCFs) in state schools as part of a broader effort to improve youth development and opportunity”. When responding to a Parliamentary Question, from the noble Lord, Lord Stevens of Birmingham, on 28 May, shortly after this report was published, the Minister of State for Defence, the noble Lord, Lord Coaker, affirmed the Government’s support for the report’s recommendation that school-based cadet forces be expanded: “We very much welcome the excellent research by the University of Northampton on the impact and value of school-based Cadet Forces in the UK, a study commissioned by the Ministry of Defence”. He went on to describe the report as “compelling reading for anyone interested in the development of young people”, noting that it contained “many useful insights … for school leaders to help support their efforts to seek wider opportunities for all their pupils”.

12:30:00

If the Government are genuinely in favour of expanding the CCF programme, and I hope they are, they must accept my amendment, since the uniforms that members of CCFs have to wear contain more than three branded items. With the exception of combat boots, all the items are provided free of charge by the Ministry of Defence, meaning that if you caveat Clause 29 in the way I am suggesting, it would solve the problem.

I have listened with interest to what the noble Lord said, as I always do. I prefer the politics of his father, the author of the 1945 Labour manifesto, rather more than his own, but that is something else. The point he is making about the Combined Cadet Force is interesting. Earlier, I mentioned my son; he is in the air cadets, not associated with a school. The Combined Cadet Force should be available in schools, but it would not be compulsory. It would surely be something that boys or girls would opt in to. Only in a situation where the school made it mandatory that all children join the Combined Cadet Force would the argument he is advancing have any weight.

As I read it, the clause does not just limit the prohibition to items mandated by the school for every pupil. If those are mandatory for an activity facilitated by the school, I believe this prohibition would still apply. That is my reading of the clause, but perhaps the Minister will correct me on that point when she responds. To sum up, I welcome the Government’s intention here, which is to avoid schools placing excessive financial burdens on low-income families, but making an exception for items given or lent to pupils would not impose any additional burdens on those families, so I cannot see how the Government could possibly oppose my amendment or the other similar amendments hoping to achieve the same purpose.

My Lords, I tabled two amendments in this group. The first, Amendment 202, follows on in a complementary manner to the amendment moved so excellently by the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, because it addresses the cost issue of uniforms by asking for the mandating of second-hand uniforms in schools. I am sure the Minister will say that there is already statutory guidance encouraging schools to provide secondary sales of school uniforms, but her own department did a survey in 2023 and found that some 65% of parents said that their schools provided second-hand sales. That is a significant minority of schools that are not providing it. It has been estimated that more than 1.4 million quality items of school uniform are lost every year, which is a loss to parents in savings, a cost to us all when local authorities have to deal with the disposal of those uniforms and a cost to the environment in dealing with the plastics and the carbon that comes from disposing of those garments. In this amendment, I call for the mandating of schools to provide second-hand uniforms. If the Minister is not able to agree to that at the end of noble Lords’ remarks, I hope that in the refresh of the upcoming sustainability and climate change strategy she might think about the issue of uniforms, which was not in the previous strategy. Clearly, looking at the affordability of uniforms and sustainability could a be a win-win for parents and for the environment. My second amendment, Amendment 202A, deals with a slightly different issue: the health impacts of school clothing on young people and the inclusion of forever chemicals, PFAS, in much of the clothing that young people are wearing. They are called forever chemicals because they do not break down in the environment. There is now emerging evidence of significant negative health impacts in terms of cancer, impacts on fertility and, crucially for young people, neuro development. These PFAS are mainly picked up by people through the skin. For young people, this is a really important issue. PFAS are added by the manufacturers to give a stain-resilient quality or make clothes ironing-free. But these stain-resistant surfaces do not last—they will be kept on an item of clothing for a maximum of 10 to 20 washes before they are washed away—so there is a limited benefit for a long-term potential health impact on our young people. For this reason, both France and Denmark have got rid of PFAS in clothing. My amendment would insist that the Government stop allowing PFAS to be used in school clothing because of the impact on the welfare of our children.

My Lords, I put my name to Amendment 202A in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Bennett. This is a fantastically important amendment, and I will be very distressed if the Government do not seize the moment as the knowledge comes into view about what these kinds of chemicals in cheap clothes provide and are putting into our children’s systems. Jeremy Grantham, who many people may know, has been one of the main funders of climate change research across the world over the last 40 years and indeed was one of the funders behind the LSE and Nick Stern report. I met him about three weeks ago and he said he is no longer providing climate change funding, largely because he thinks it is a more or less foregone conclusion that things are not going well. He has turned his entire industry and scientific might behind looking at PFAS and the chemicals that are in not just our clothing but our soils. Let us look specifically at clothing around the world. American Airlines has recently been sued because it produced very cheap uniforms for its stewards and stewardesses. They have started to develop incredible ranges of different skin illnesses and internal illnesses. As the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, found, research in Denmark has shown that prenatal contact to cheaply made fabrics with PFAS in them has led to reductions in IQ among children. France is banning all school uniforms containing PFAS from next year. Interestingly, Fidra, a big company that works on and looks at the environmental impact of chemicals, says that people want these chemicals in clothing because it is very easy to wash, it dries almost immediately and you never need to iron it. But interestingly, it discovered that people treat these clothes in exactly the same way as they treat something of better quality. Every time you wash it—it is not just when you put it on your skin—bits come off in the washing machine. They are now in circulation: they are in breast milk, placenta and our plants. Our plants are looking at 25% reduction in whole fertility within the next 10 years. Some of the work that Jeremy Grantham is doing is looking at male fertility. Some people may say we have too many people in the world, but this is probably not the way we want to do it—crashing male fertility and all sorts of things. These are dangerous. As everybody knows, I have worked on ultra-processed foods. One of the interesting things about these chemicals is that a single one of them on their own may not be dangerous, but they are if you mix them up. That is the whole point of chemistry. That is why we went into chemistry labs for our GCSEs and had fun making things explode. They change. Those chemicals go into these fabrics. They can be manufactured at immense volume and cheapness. As I say, it is not just the school uniforms but the stuff kids are buying when they can buy 20 garments for 20 quid through a company such as Shein. These are dangerous. We can stop this. I completely support all the amendments in this group. Yes, I want school uniforms because they are fair, and I want them to be cheap, but I do not want them to be dangerous to our children. Please can the Government start doing something about it? Europe is ahead of us. Other countries are ahead of us. We can do this.

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baronesses, Lady Boycott and Lady Parminter. The noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, just made an extremely powerful case for Amendment 202A, to which I attached my name. In the interests of time, I shall mostly focus on the two amendments that appear in my name in this group, which are Amendments 202B and 484. Amendment 202B is essentially an expansion of the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. She focused on the health impacts of PFAS; I am focusing on the broader issues of the health of school uniforms. This amendment “seeks to allow the Secretary of State to regulate school uniforms, given the human and environmental health risks they represent”. That is not written in the amendment, which is written broadly to have a review within a year, but I say that in the explanatory statement and that I am particularly thinking about “artificial fibres and chemical constituents” —so it includes PFAS, but is much broader than that. This is actually a narrower version of an amendment I tabled to the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill that was debated on 11 December. I included a great deal of evidence in that that I do not have time to include today, but I said then that these products, chemicals, plastics and other substances are accumulating in our bodies day by day. That picks up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott: we have a cocktail effect of bodies being bombarded from our clothing, our environments and our food. We are talking about young people, who are going to live for decades, accumulating more and more PFAS and more and more plastics in their bodies. This is particularly important when we think about school uniforms, because we are forcing pupils to wear them. This is the state mandating that our children wear clothing which is highly likely to be doing them harm. Think about how it will go from the clothing into people’s bodies: for a blazer, a pupil is running for the school bus or running around in the playground. Smaller children touch their clothing and then they put their hand in their mouth, or they touch something else. They will be ingesting whatever is in their clothing. It is literally week by week now that we get more medical and research reports on the impacts, but just this week microplastic particles have been found in human semen and female reproductive fluids. There is great concern about the potential impacts on fertility, as has already been referred to. There are microplastics in samples of human penises, and this may have a role in erectile dysfunction. There is a study out just this morning from the Netherlands. Every person in the Netherlands—and there is no reason to think that we are any different—has multiple types of PFAS in their blood, and virtually all of them are above healthy limits. We do not have a detailed explanation of exactly what impact this cocktail has, but we apply the precautionary principle to the environment, so surely we should apply it to the health of our young people and the clothing we are putting them in. As has already been referred to, France is moving towards a ban on most PFAS imports and manufacture, and by 2030 will ban all PFAS-treated textiles. I note that, in the debate on the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill, the noble Lord, Lord Sharpe of Epsom, who is not currently in his place, got quite concerned about what had made his shirt non-iron. I had to go away and look this up: it is formaldehyde. Europe has stepped up and has stronger regulations on formaldehyde exposure in products than we do. In 2019, the National Trust recognised that the artificial fibre fleeces it supplied to its staff and put in its shops shed an estimated 1.7 grammes of microfibres every time they were washed. It was also concerned that, when people walked through its wonderful, beautiful, natural environments with them, they were shedding plastics everywhere. This is, of course, an environmental health issue as well as a human health issue, but in the context of this Bill, the human health issue for children and young people is overwhelming. Shifting topics slightly, my second amendment in this group, Amendment 484, is about school hair requirements. It says: “Pupils must not be denied opportunities to take part in classes, or any other school activities, by reason of their hair style or cut, unless for reasons of health and safety”. The origins for it go back to a couple of events I have been to with the World Afro Day campaign group. To quote Michelle de Leon, the founder of that group, the bias against Afro hair has become ingrained in some parts of the education system.

12:45:00

There is a background to this. Of course race is a protected quality under the Equality Act 2010, and that has been taken to include Afro hair, cornrows, plaits and head coverings. Yet, since 2018, the Equality Advisory Support Service has had 50 calls about hair discrimination cases in schools. In 2020, the EHRC successfully funded Ruby Williams’s case, which resulted in an out-of-court settlement with no admission of wrongdoing over the exclusion of that pupil because of their Afro hair.

In 2022, the EHRC delivered non-statutory guidance to schools to try to ensure that they do not indulge in hair discrimination. However, a simple scan through the news pages shows that this is a continuing problem. I go to a case in May 2024 of 12 year-old Farouk James in London, who was excluded from school and threatened with expulsion because of his hair. His father comes from Ghana. He requested a cultural and medical exemption. The school refused to grant it. In 2023, there was the case of Jade Samuels, the mother of a child who was at Bishop Challoner Catholic College in Birmingham who had neat non-coloured braids that had a very discreet heart shape in the braiding. Again, she was forced to sit at the isolation tables at lunchtime. There was another case in 2023, of Mayla, at the Barr Beacon School in Walsall. For a wedding, she had had hair braids that had some red colouring incorporated in the braids. Again, she was put into isolation, while other pupils in her class had hair that was dyed in colours.

This is a problem that we must tackle, and the EHRC has tried to tackle it. I tried to think how I could write an amendment that would do a better job than the EHRC to tackle this issue, given that it has failed. I thought, “I don’t think I know how to do this”, but it is clearly a continuing issue. Then I thought more broadly about the issue of hair, not just children with Afro hair. We look at cases such as that of 10 year-old Evie, who was excluded in September last year from Kincraig Primary School in Blackpool because she had had her hair died in a split style: one side was a different colour from the other. Apparently it was off-putting and disturbing to other pupils, and that was why she was not allowed to come to school with this hair colour. We go to the case of Strood Academy in Kent. A 15 year-old boy had his hair cut very short to help control his eczema; he also had a skin fade. He wore it at school for four days and then he was placed in the behavioural unit because of his haircut and because of his skin fade. He got a doctor’s letter and finally, on 30 September, apparently the hair had grown out enough and he was allowed back into class.

We hear again and again in this Chamber great concern about the number of pupils who are not in school, attending lessons or getting the education that they need. It is really striking that, in nearly all these cases, pupils are from disadvantaged communities. Pupils are being sent home, threatened with exclusion and put into isolation because of their hair. We must say that teachers and pupils can cope with people having different coloured hair and having different haircuts. If we are to get serious about education for all, we should absolutely not exclude pupils because of their haircut or hair colour.

My Lords, I am taking a slightly different approach with my Amendment 200, which relates to school uniform policy. It is important to recognise that a tiny minority of schools use the cost of uniforms as an unpleasant instrument to screen out children in poor families—I am not in denial of that. However, that relates to perhaps 1% or 2% of the 20,000 or more state schools. Nor am I in denial that we should do something about it. A lot has been done, which I will come to in a moment. Nevertheless, the solution proposed in this clause is heavy-handed and bureaucratic. It is a classic example of the dead hand of the state intervening in an entirely impractical way to cause more harm than good. Does Whitehall really know how many branded items a school would like to use? Where does the magic number of “three” come from? For example, schools encouraging sport and competing with others are trying to foster an identity, and branded sportswear is a basic part of that. Have the bureaucrats found out how much a branded iron-on logo costs? A quick search of the internet suggests that you can buy them, custom designed, for £1.16 each. How can we do this? I refer to my interest as the chairman of Inspiration Trust. Let me quote some of the bullet points from our uniform policy: “We will make sure our school uniforms … are available at a reasonable cost … Provide the best value for money for parents/carers. We will do this by … Carefully considering whether any items with distinctive characteristics are necessary … Limiting any items with distinctive characteristics where possible. For example, by only asking that the blazer, worn over the jumper, features the school logo … Limiting items with distinctive characteristics to low-cost or long-lasting items, such as ties … Considering cheaper alternatives to school-branded items, such as logos that can be ironed on, as long as this doesn’t compromise quality and durability … Avoiding specific requirements for items pupils could wear on non-school days, such as coats, bags and shoes … Keeping the number of optional branded items to a minimum, so that the school’s uniform can act as a social leveller … Avoiding different uniform requirements for different year/class/house groups … Avoiding different uniform requirements for extra-curricular activities … Considering alternative methods for signalling differences in groups for interschool competitions, such as creating posters or labels … Making sure that arrangements are in place for parents to acquire second-hand uniform items … Avoiding frequent changes to uniform specifications and minimising the financial impact on parents of any changes … Consulting with parents and pupils on any proposed significant changes to the uniform policy and carefully considering any complaints about the policy”. It is all there—I am sure, in large part, just following the DfE guidance. Your Lordships will see a similar approach on most of the larger academy trusts’ websites. The bit missing is the cost, but, according to the Schoolwear Association, uniform costs have undershot inflation by 34% in the last three years. According to the House of Commons Library, the cost of a secondary school uniform in 2014-15 was £232 for a boy, while today it is around £94. Great progress has been made—that has been driven by guidance, which is a good thing. However, does this really need a central government mandate? In the last three years, my chief executive has not had a single complaint about uniform costs—that is for over 11,000 pupils in 18 schools. Let us say that something has to be done, but, rather than a top-down Whitehall diktat, we suggest that the members mechanism that the Labour Government themselves originally conceived be given the task. The extraordinary power of this structure and the protection of stakeholders’ interests is not well understood by many DfE officials. For noble Lords not familiar with it, I should explain that, in essence, members of an academy trust act as the proxy shareholders—a trust, of course, does not have shareholders, as it is a charitable entity—but they sit above the trust board and have certain enshrined rights and responsibilities. The problem at the DfE was that officials had allowed the two groups—members and trustees—to become intermingled. This undermined the whole point of a separate body being able to step in when governance failures by the trustees occurred. It is reasonable that the chair of the trustees and one or two others are members, as long as the members who are not trustees are in a majority, which is now the case. At the moment, members have several key powers. These vary slightly depending on the time of the creation of an academy trust. The original trusts set up by the Labour Government gave more protection to “sponsors”, as they were putting in £2 million of their own money to take on the school. However, the following key responsibilities apply to the vast majority: appointing and removing trustees; appointing and removing members; amending the articles of association, subject to legal and regulatory restrictions; directing trustees by special resolution; appointing auditors; and safeguarding governance, which I stress. Members must assure themselves that governance is effective and intervene if it is failing. These powers ensure that members can intervene if the trust governance or performance is inadequate, but their involvement is otherwise minimal. Members must always act to further the academy trust’s charitable objectives. The solution would be to add a specific requirement for members to monitor costs of school uniforms and report on it in the annually audited accounts. The members are already answerable to the DfE. Noble Lords will see from those six key responsibilities that I listed that it would be logical and straightforward, if prescribed, to add something specific—such as overpriced uniforms. “Directing trustees” and “safeguarding governance” are there to protect children if a trust is badly run. Overpriced uniforms are part of bad management; it is as simple as that. Noble Lords will have seen from the statement on its website that the Inspiration Trust already deals with most of this. However, adding something simple such as, “The members of the trust have scrutinised and approved our uniform policy and its cost”, would close the loop. It is important to mirror the governance oversight in local authority schools, as nearly half of primary schools are not academised. This can be done by requiring directors of children’s services, or DCSs, to assume the same responsibility as that set out for members of academy trusts. There is separation between local authority governing bodies and DCSs. This would give consistency across the English state system. When the Prime Minister was elected last year, he said that he wanted to lead a Government who would “tread more lightly” on people’s lives, but here we have primary legislation that seeks to do exactly the opposite and control lives from Whitehall in a rigid, top-down way.

My Lords, I fully understand the Government’s desire to limit the cost here, but I support the principle behind most of these amendments, particularly those of my noble friend Lord Agnew and the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. The noble Lord, Lord Hampton, made an excellent point, which was supported by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, that if uniform is not standardised, parents with students who can afford it may well “show off” through the clothes which their children wear. That is why we ban trainers in the schools in the multi-academy trusts that I chair, and why they are banned in most schools. We want all our children to feel equal. As the Minister previously responsible for the school cadet programme, and as for the point that my noble friend Lord Young made, if the clause works as he says it does, this would seem to me an obvious and easy give by the Government. I hope that the Minister can reassure us on this point. As for the amendments from the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Bennett, I thought they made an excellent case for more, rather than less, uniform, because that would be the easiest way to regulate and monitor what it is made from.

My Lords, I apologise for being a minute or two late arriving in the Chamber. I support Amendments 196 to 199 proposed, respectively, by the noble Lords, Lord Hampton and Lord Young, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and Amendment 201, from the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed. If these are not accepted, the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, and Amendment 195 from the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, also have considerable merit. Every autumn, there is a rash of stories about children being sent home for not being in the correct uniform. However, most often, these disputes are about not branded items but a child’s reluctance to wear something in the style that has been approved for all pupils. It is encouraging to note that household expenditure on clothing and footwear as a proportion of household spending has fallen substantially over the past 50 years. In historical terms, it has probably never been cheaper to clothe a family, though I note the concerns that have been expressed about cheap synthetic fabrics and finishes.

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Reassuringly, poorer families are not spending a substantially higher proportion of their incomes on clothing than others. According to the latest ONS data, 3% of household income nationally is spent on clothing and footwear. For the poorest fifth of households, the proportion is only very marginally higher at 3.1%. I also believe that most schools are acutely aware of which families are in real need and have arrangements to make sure that uniform that is no longer needed or has been outgrown can be passed on second hand or free to those who need it.

The universal constraint proposed will be significant on overloaded head teachers. It is a new burden that carries risks, because head teachers still have the job of creating a shared ethos, a positive culture and good behaviour in their schools and they will be more limited in the ways that they can do that. I echo the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, on the practicalities of a three-item limit.

Against this, these provisions do nothing to help heads with the kind of uniform issues that are creating problems for schools, where they need reinforcement. For example, are schools required to accommodate children wishing to wear the uniform of the other sex? Some schools are sidestepping this with a unisex uniform, but not every girl wants to be pushed into a unisex uniform, which typically ends up as what previously would have been characterised as a boy’s uniform.

To take another issue, are schools required to set uniform policies that accommodate clothing that may be considered a matter of cultural preference rather than religious belief? I have come under attack in the past for defending a school’s right not to include hijabs in its uniform policy for five and six year-olds, who are clearly well below the age of puberty. I stress that this is not about being hostile to Muslim practices; many people are not aware that there is a wide range of views on this subject within the Muslim community, though not everyone feels equally able to express them publicly.

Schools need to know that the Government stand behind them on the difficult choices that they must make. These are things that a Government who really want to make schools work better could address, as well as cost, so I support the simple and practical amendments proposed by the noble Lords, Lord Hampton, Lord Young, Lord Agnew and Lord Mohammed, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. They would contribute to a simplified and workable regime that recognises the value of school uniform and incentivises schools to make the effort to provide new or second-hand branded items free or at minimal cost to those who need them.

I add to the comments from the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, on school uniforms that the VAT regulations seem to cut directly across these provisions. For clothing sized for most teenagers, the only items of uniform that are unequivocally zero rated are those that are clearly branded with the colours and/or logo of a specific school, so there is a risk that items that were formerly zero rated would now have to be standard rated. This means parents paying not less but more. I am sure that Ministers would not want a provision that was intended to save parents money ending up costing some parents more. That really would be an own goal.

My Lords, I think there are two things on which all in this Chamber can agree. First, school uniforms are important. I think the phrase used by my noble friend Lord Mohammed was that they give confidence to learning, and I think they give a sense of identity to young people. That is the first thing that we can all agree on. Secondly, we can all agree that we have to ensure that school uniforms are affordable and that parents of children from poorer families do not feel discriminated against. I want to give two practical experiences. I should declare an interest as a governor of the King’s Leadership Academy, Wavertree. My first practical example is that, when I was a deputy head teacher, the school governors did not believe in a school uniform. That was not a particularly good decision, because young people from well-off families would wear the latest trainers and show off the latest T-shirts, designer gear and so on. My second example is my own daughter. She went to King David High School and had a very simple uniform of a sweatshirt, a polo shirt and a grey skirt. A new head came along, who was anxious to make the school stand out, and the uniform changed to a kilt, a blue blouse, a V-neck pullover with the school colours in the V-neck, a blazer with a badge and a tie. The cost went through the roof, so that was clearly stupid. If you want to deal with this issue, the current proposals from the Government are a bit of a dog’s dinner—or Eton mess might be a better phrase. I just do not see how it is going to work. My first question to the Minister is: what about the poor old book bag? In my school, infants carry their little, green, nylon, £3.20 book bags and it means so much to those children; they encourage them to value books and to read. That would be included as one of the branded items and presumably would go. Primary and infant heads would have to decide whether the book bag is going on the altar of correctness in terms of uniform. My second concern is that this is just not workable. If a school decides that it wants other branded items, it can write to parents and say, “This is the law of the land but, if you want additional branded items, it is up to you”. Is the Minister going to enforce this and say to parents, “No, you cannot have this additional item”? Of course they are not. Sport was mentioned. You see teams playing in the dominant school colour. Let us say that it is red; they will play their football, rugby, hockey, lacrosse matches or whatever wearing red. What happens if they turn up for a match and both schools have the same colour red? They have to notify teams beforehand which colour to wear, which is absolutely nonsensical. If you want pride in schools, you will also want pride in sport. I do not see this happening at all. If you really want to deal with this issue, two things should happen. My noble friend Lord Mohammed talked about the Sheffield situation. I think that it was either the Macmillan Government or the Wilson Government that brought in school uniform grants, by which every local authority could provide money for families in poorer circumstances. This was not just in Sheffield; in Liverpool, Birmingham or elsewhere, this happened. But my noble friend’s two points are absolutely right: it is not about trying to limit the number of items, but about trying to get the costs correct. If the Government were serious about this, they would reduce VAT on clothing and they might look at an acceptable level of expenditure. The noble Lord, Lord Agnew, was right to talk about the “magic three”. Imagine the Government saying, “We want to do something about this but how can we do it?” The civil servants and Government would get together and say, “We don’t want to go back to grants because the budget would go through the roof. We want to keep VAT; if we go down that route, there will be requests for other items to be excluded. I have an idea: why not limit the number of items that can be branded?” That is not the way it works; it will just not happen in the future. This is totally different, but I am reminded of when in the Blair Government there was talk of school assemblies. The Government of the day said that every school had to have a collective act of worship every day and that it had to be mainly Christian. You go into schools today and that does not happen because it is totally unworkable, as people come from different circumstances and faiths. I am giving that example to the Minister to show that legislation has to work—and collective worship did not work in schools. That is the point I am trying to make. If this is carried, it just will not happen. If we really want to make a saving for children and families, we have to support the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed.

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendments 195A, 195B, 198 and 199, and Amendment 199ZA, from my noble friend Lady Sater, which I have signed. We all recognise that the Government committed in their manifesto to bringing down the cost of school uniform by limiting the number of branded items of uniform and PE kit that schools require. I wonder whether those who wrote the manifesto might now, having listened to this debate, wish that they had phrased it slightly differently and just stopped at committing to bringing down the cost of school uniforms full stop. The amendments in this group, as we have heard, all seek to find ways to give schools more discretion and flexibility in the uniform they require pupils to wear, particularly regarding branded items, while meeting the Government’s goal of keeping costs as low as possible. As we have heard, Amendments 202A and 202B seek to limit the environmental damage from branded uniforms. We have heard, very eloquently, from across the Committee, about the value of uniform, the sense of community it brings, the safety it provides for children travelling to and from school, the fact that it saves parents money and encourages participation in sport, and—a new one to add to my list that appeals to me a lot—the subtle rebellion point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. The Government’s approach raises a number of questions, particularly given the recent Private Member’s Bill, now an Act, passed under the last Government and sponsored in this House by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett, who is not in her place, and the fact that, as my noble friend Lord Agnew said, the current guidance states: “Schools should keep the use of branded items to a minimum … ensure that second-hand uniforms are available” and avoid using items that are available only from a single supplier. The guidance is very clear: “Parents should not have to think about the cost of a school uniform when choosing which school(s) to apply for. Therefore, schools need to ensure that their uniforms are affordable”. A real merit of the current guidance is that it talks about the cost of the total uniform and not just the branded items, because that is what parents pay for. As we have heard, the cost of branded items has fallen significantly in real terms in recent years. Furthermore, the definition of “school uniform” in the Bill is very broad. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, made the case for the nylon school bag—I have several of my children’s in cupboards at home, fondly full of school reports. It also includes any clothing required for extracurricular activity, including items without a logo but which are only available from “particular suppliers” and have a “distinctive characteristic” such as its “colour, design” or “fabric”. We know from the Answer to a Written Question that, based on the department’s Cost of School Uniforms Survey 2023, which surveyed parents, an estimated one-third of primary schools and seven in 10 secondary schools will have to remove compulsory branded items from their uniforms to comply with the proposed legislation. The impact of the Government’s changes will be felt far and wide but not, it appears, in reduced costs to parents, which is rightly the Government’s objective. Given all the recent legislation and guidance, it is hard to see how this is the best use of time for school leaders, governors and trustees. Amendment 200, in the name of my noble friend Lord Agnew, would achieve two goals. First, like the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, it approaches the issue from the perspective of cost, rather than being prescriptive about the number of branded items a school is allowed to require its pupils to wear. Secondly, it addresses the issue of responsibility for the cost of school uniform and makes it absolutely clear that this should rest with the members in an academy trust and the local authority for a maintained school, rather than with the Secretary of State. Both these points are important; cost is at the heart of the issue, but so too is the need to keep responsibilities clear and delegated to the responsible bodies, rather than centralised. It is extraordinary to imagine that the Secretary of State has any time to worry about book bags and ties. That is why, although I agree with the principle behind Amendment 195, I believe that my noble friend’s amendment is stronger as it captures both points.

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If the Minister does not agree to accept Amendment 200, she has a range of options to choose from to make sure that the Government’s ambition to address the affordability of school uniforms is met but also workable for schools—a point made very powerfully by the noble Lord, Lord Storey.

Amendments 196 and 197, from the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, would introduce a slightly more generous limit on the number of items, reflecting the practical realities of schools and the importance of avoiding children ending up with a more expensive school wardrobe, with peer pressure to have designer jackets and so forth.

Alternatively, the Minister could accept Amendment 197A, in the name of my noble friend Lord Young of Acton. I hope she will address his very important points about the CCF and other clubs. Having re-read the Bill while listening to my noble friend, I agree with his interpretation of the way it is drafted.

The Minister could accept my Amendments 195A and 195B, which would allow a school to exceed the specified limit on the number of items if the parent did not have to pay for them. Why would the Government want to deny schools the flexibility to provide an item of uniform to all pupils if it is available to them? My Amendment 198 would give the Government an option to include paid for, new or second-hand items where they are offered at a lower cost than non-branded items, and so aligns directly with the Government’s aims.

More broadly, we support Amendment 202, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, although my understanding is that the current guidance already stresses the importance of having a good second-hand uniform offer.

As well as tabling my Amendment 199, I have put my name to Amendment 199ZA, in the name of my noble friend Lady Sater. Amendment 199 is obviously a narrower version of Amendment 199ZA, in that it excludes from the three-item cap any items of PE kit that are needed if a child is representing the school in a sports competition, while Amendment 199ZA would exclude all PE kit. I am not sure how the Government expect competitions to work without branded items, if only for the benefit of the referee and spectators. I know that some schools hand out sports kit for matches that belongs to the school, but that is not how the clause is phrased and, currently, rather like the point regarding the CCF, even if children are given these items, it would not comply with the proposed legislation.

Amendments 202A and 202B, in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, seek to address the environmental and health and safety impacts of school uniforms. Some of the points made by the noble Baronesses and by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, about the risks associated with PFAS are very concerning.

I also thank my noble friend Lady Spielman for raising some of the real issues that schools are worrying about in relation to school uniforms. It would be interesting to hear the Minister’s reflections on that.

Returning to the issue of the cost of uniforms, and cost has been the issue with widespread agreement across the House, the single most expensive items of school clothing are not uniforms but the fashion brands that children will urge their parents to buy for them. I hope very much that the Minister takes these amendments in the constructive spirit in which they are tabled.

My Lords, I rise to speak to the amendments in group one. Just to be clear, the Government believe that uniforms have an important role to play in our schools, for many of the reasons that noble Lords have outlined, but we are committed to cutting the cost of school uniforms for families. This is why we have chosen to support families by limiting in this Bill the number of branded items that schools can require pupils to have. This will enable parents to buy more items from a range of retailers, including high street retailers, allowing them the flexibility to make spending decisions that suit their circumstances. On Amendment 195 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, we want to ensure that any action we take provides schools and parents with clarity and offers parents choice in how to manage the costs of school uniforms. Ensuring that parents can buy more items from a range of retailers gives them that flexibility. The argument has been made that a cost cap is simpler than the Government’s proposals. I cannot see that argument. A cost cap would mean that schools would have to review uniform policies annually, as the noble Lord said, to ensure that they remained within the cap. It could mean schools changing their uniforms more frequently, thereby increasing overall costs and restricting choice for parents. A cost cap would be complex for schools and suppliers to administer, and the need to meet a particular price for items could also increase a school’s reliance on specific suppliers, whereas a competitive market benefits all parties, allowing parents to take advantage of lower prices, better-quality goods and services, new and innovative products, and greater choice. Responding to the points made about the school uniform grant, we recognise that parents are struggling with the cost of uniforms—that is why we are bringing forward these provisions—and that in England some local authorities provide discretionary grants to help with buying school uniforms in cases of financial hardship. We are facing difficult choices about how we best support families. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, in a rather dismissive comment about government officials, which has been a bit of a regrettable theme this afternoon, suggested that it was somehow unreasonable of the Government to be considering the cost of the proposals they are bringing forward. A national grant, even if targeted to those most in need, would be a considerable commitment in the current financial climate, so, rather than subsidising expensive uniforms through a grant, this Government have chosen to reduce the cost of uniforms for all parents through these provisions. On Amendments 195A and 195B in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, as previously mentioned, it is a key priority of these provisions that we provide clarity on what the measure means for parents. These amendments could create confusion for parents about whether a given branded item of uniform would be captured within the statutory limit, depending on how it was acquired. There is also a risk that schools may subsequently attempt to charge parents for expensive replacements if branded items provided for free are lost or damaged. Furthermore, allowing schools to set different uniform policies depending on the school’s ability to provide or source branded items for free could also risk increasing inequalities between schools and pupils. Amendments 196 and 197 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, seek to increase the number of items that secondary and middle schools can require from three to five, or six if one of those items is a tie. We believe that the limits in the measure that the Government are bringing forward provide the best balance between reducing costs for parents and ensuring that schools, parents and pupils can continue to experience the benefits that allowing a small number of branded items can bring, while ensuring that schools retain the flexibility needed to set uniform policies that work for them. Increasing these limits would significantly limit the impact of this measure, depriving many parents of the opportunity to enjoy greater choice in where to buy their child’s uniform and the flexibility to make spending decisions that suit their circumstances. Amendment 197A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young, is, as written, as opposed to some of the points the noble Lord made, which I will come to, unnecessary as the measure does not restrict the ability of schools to offer branded items for sale or to provide or loan branded uniform items, such as competition kit, as long as these items are optional. This is an important point, because there has been some suggestion that it would not be possible for schools to offer branded items or to provide or loan branded items. It would be, but they would have to be optional. If wearing the item is optional for participation in the activity, it is not counted in the limit of branded items. We also do not want to place an undue burden on schools by suggesting—

I am sorry, perhaps the Minister is about to come to this: that is what normally happens when I stand up. I think my noble friend was saying that in the CCF, you have to wear the CCF uniform. Similarly, if you are representing the school in a sports competition, I am not sure it is really optional. But maybe the Minister is about to clarify that.

On the sports competition, I think it is wholly possible to envisage that the school would provide a set of branded uniform for the school sports team, while not suggesting that it was compulsory to wear it. Of course, I understand all the arguments for wanting to have a clear identity for the school while you are doing sports. On the point about cadets, which I was specifically coming to—sorry, I will make one other point before I come to cadets. There is a challenge. We do not want to place an undue burden on schools by suggesting that they should routinely be supplying additional, expensive, branded uniform items to their pupils at no cost. The point about cadets is important. We do not intend the legislation to prevent cadets, and we will consider how to make that clear. Our view is that the legislation does not do that, but we understand the point being made and we will ensure that that is made clear, because of the benefits of students being able to take part in cadets in the way in which the noble Lord outlined.

Just to be clear on this, I heard the Minister say that, in the case of cadets, where wearing a uniform is required and it is given for free, the Government will clarify that that is acceptable. She also said that she does not want to place undue burdens on schools, understandably, but, in a sports competition, whether pupils wear the kit that is provided for free is going to be optional. That feels unworkable and very inconsistent.

What I said was that this measure does not prevent schools providing or loaning branded uniform items, such as competition kit, but, if that were to be compulsory, that of course would need to be included in the three branded items. As long as those items are optional, I do not think it is too difficult to envisage that schools might be able to make that work.

So if the shirt provided by the school is blue and the opposition plays in red, and this has all been arranged in advance, and some pupils decide to be difficult and turn up in red, which will create chaos, that is okay, but if you say “You’ve all got to turn up in blue”, that is breaking the rules. It does not sound very practical. I ask the Minister to take a bit of time with people who run schools and officials to see whether we can work our way through this in a practical way, while at the same time trying to make sure that all children are treated equally and that we limit the costs as far as we can.

I am certainly willing to continue thinking about the issue of school sports, because it is very much not the intention of the Government to prevent the loaning of branded items for school sports. On the example that the noble Lord mentioned, in my day, when I played hockey, if we ended up playing against a school with a similarly coloured kit, we wore bibs to distinguish ourselves. My point is that I do not think it is impossible to overcome this. Let us come back to it. I take the point that noble Lords have made here.

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Amendment 198 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seeks to allow schools to require more than three branded uniform items where the school provides additional items that can be purchased for significantly less than generic alternatives or, for second-hand items, for less than buying a new branded item. Our view is that this amendment is also unnecessary as, just to reiterate, nothing in the Bill will prevent those schools capable of providing branded items for less cost than generic alternatives from offering them, but as an optional item.

Amendments 199 and 199ZA also relate to PE kit. Amendment 199 would mean that schools could require those pupils who wish to represent the school in sporting activities to have a potentially unlimited number of branded items, while Amendment 199ZA would mean that schools could require any pupil’s PE kit to include a potentially unlimited number of branded items. I think we are all agreed that the cost of sports kit should never be a barrier to representing a school or participation in sport. It is therefore right that schools currently asking for large numbers of compulsory branded items are required to reduce them.

I turn to Amendment 200 proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Agnew. As has been identified, the department’s existing statutory guidance already requires that, when developing their uniform policy, schools should prioritise and engage with parents and pupils on cost issues and should be able to show how parents’ views have been taken into account. It also requires that schools publish details of their uniform policy on their websites. However, while some schools are taking action to reduce the cost of school uniform, too many families tell us that it remains a financial burden. That is why, according to a Children’s Society survey, 78% of parents believe there should be a specific limit on the number of branded uniform items. That is why this measure is needed.

Amendment 201 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, is on the issue of removing VAT. Under current VAT rules, all children’s clothing and footwear designed for children who are less than 14 years of age, including school uniforms, already attracts a zero rate of VAT. Indeed, the UK is one of only two among the 37 OECD member countries to maintain a VAT relief for children’s clothing, which costs the Exchequer £2 billion per year. I know the Liberal Democrats are feeling flush and calling for further expenditure, but going further on the current VAT provisions would come at a cost to the Exchequer, and I am not convinced that this would be the best use of public money. Therefore, we have no current plans to go further on this issue at this point.

Turning to Amendment 202 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Parminter, on the issue of requiring schools to provide access to second-hand uniform, I strongly agree that access to second-hand uniforms is extremely important for parents, but I think this amendment is unnecessary. Our existing statutory guidance, as she has already identified, requires schools to ensure that arrangements are in place for parents to acquire second-hand school uniforms. It is for the school to decide how this will be best achieved—for example, through periodic second-hand uniform sales or swap shops. This gives schools the flexibility to keep their existing second-hand arrangements or set up new arrangements that work best for their circumstances.

Amendment 202A seeks to ban the use of PFAS in school uniform, and Amendment 202B from the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is on regulating school uniforms that pose a human and environmental health risk. Of course, we want our children’s clothing to be as safe and sustainable as possible; indeed, we want all clothing to fulfil those requirements. That is why we are working across government to help assess levels of PFAS occurring in the environment, their sources and potential risks, to inform policy and regulatory approaches.

My Lords, when the Minister said that we are working across government, what actually is happening? Is there a review? Is there something specific about school uniforms? Is it just about PFAS? Can we get some details so that we who are concerned can keep an eye on it?

The point I was making was that it relates to all clothes and is considering the risks from PFAS used in textiles, but I will be happy to provide further information about how that work is being carried out. In the interim, our statutory guidance is already clear that it is important that schools consider sustainability and ethical supply chains, as well as engaging with parents and pupils when tendering for uniform contracts. I know that many high street retailers already offer school uniforms without PFAS treatments for many of the reasons that noble Lords have outlined today. Furthermore, UK product safety laws require all consumer products to be safe, and manufacturers must ensure the safety of products before they are placed on the market. We already have robust systems in place to identify the impact of chemicals under the UK registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemicals—UK REACH—and to regulate them effectively. On Amendment 484 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, discrimination has no place in our schools or, in fact, in society. Our guidance is clear that in setting uniform and appearance policies, including on hair, we expect schools to meet their existing obligations under equalities law not to discriminate unlawfully. Guidance also already exists for schools on preventing hair discrimination, published by the Equality and Human Rights Commission. The noble Baroness had a lengthy list of cases. I do not know the details of all those, but I think it is reasonable for schools to develop and implement behaviour policies, to uphold school rules and to use sanctions that are fair and proportionate, and that could well also relate to uniform and expected appearance within schools.

Would the Minister care to address my point about the fact that we have great concern about pupils not in school, yet we are excluding them for this reason? It is reducing the amount of education that pupils are getting.

I do not think the main reason why pupils are being excluded from school is because of issues to do with their hair, but I do think it is right for schools to have the ability to set the criteria and the constraints within which they expect their pupils to behave. While not being across all the individual cases that the noble Baroness outlined, I can imagine circumstances in which it would be justifiable to take action against students who perhaps persistently fail to comply with the rules that have been set by a school, including about their appearance. We have had a wide-ranging debate, and I hope I have responded to all the points raised.

Will the Minister go away and consider the fate of the branded book bag, which means so much to primary and infant schools? It should not be included as part of the three, because it is a way of encouraging reading and literacy in our schools.

I also very much enjoyed the bookbags my boys carried backwards and forwards to school, but I am not sure that trumps what the Government are trying to achieve in reducing the cost of school uniforms. Of course, any school that felt that was crucial could of course include it in the three branded items in the legislative proposals.

From the debate we have just had, It is clear noble Lords have a keen interest in school uniforms. I am going to keep my submission brief. I thank everyone; I think we are all on the same page in the sense that we want to reduce the cost of school uniforms. We have different ideas, but that is what your Lordships’ House is about; we come here together to improve legislation from the other place. I am keen that we pursue this. I see that in the other place the Government are in a spirit of reflection and review of policies. I hope that spirit wheels its way down the Corridor to here. Then we can also say that, yes, the Government have an ambition of reducing the cost, but we also have ideas that warrant looking at. They may well be ideas that work better. I hope the Government think about it as we move to the next stage of the Bill, so I beg leave to withdraw Amendment 195.

Amendment 195 withdrawn.

Amendments 195A to 199ZA not moved.

Amendment 199A had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.

Amendment 200 not moved.

Clause 29 agreed.

Amendments 201 to 202B not moved.

Clause 30: Local authority consent for withdrawal of certain children from school

Amendment 202C

Moved by

202C: Clause 30, page 50, line 32, leave out “withdraw the child from school” and insert “remove the child’s name from the school roll” Member's explanatory statement This is a probing amendment seeking to establish how these provisions would relate to flexischooling children, that is, children who are not full-time in school with the agreement of their school and therefore remain on the school roll.

My Lords, I rise to support Amendments 202C and 227A, in my name and the name of my noble friend Lord Wei. We are now, at last, beginning consideration of the large number of amendments on home education. It is a pleasure and an honour to be able to kick off what I think is going to be a lengthy and important discussion. The proposals on home education are an important part of this Bill and have perhaps got less attention than other aspects of it. I guess that is because most people have been to school and not many people have any direct experience of home education. As a result, it is a sector that does work well but is often misunderstood. I hope that by the end of our discussions, however long they take, and our consideration of these amendments, noble Lords and especially the Government will have a clearer understanding of some of the difficulties home educators have to deal with. This group contains a slightly miscellaneous, heterogeneous collection of amendments. Some of them touch on ground that we will probably consider more extensively and debate at greater length later, so for now I will focus on the two amendments standing in my name that are on a specific but very specialised aspect of the general issue of home education: flexi-schooling. I will make a couple of more general remarks at the end on the broader aspects of home education, as the question of whether Clause 31 should stand part of the Bill is formally in this group.

13:45:00

I turn to Amendments 202C and 227A on flexi-schooling. The first important thing to understand is that flexi-schooling is not home education as commonly understood, and as we will discuss over the next however many groups. Flexi-schooling is something a little bit different: it is a legal arrangement whereby a child is registered at school full time but the school agrees that the child can be educated at home for part of the week.

Flexi-schooling has been around since the 1980s. It is not a parental right, and, at least in England and Wales, it is currently granted at a head teacher’s discretion. It can be granted for various reasons, such as the study needs of the individual child or the child’s ability or inability to fit in with that particular school environment, and there are many other perfectly good reasons why it happens. Perhaps that is why over 700 schools across the UK have agreed to flexi-schooling arrangements—I have had a small experience of it in my own family. Indeed, some small schools at risk of closure due to low pupil numbers have even adopted a whole-school flexi-schooling approach to successfully keep the school going.

As far as anyone can tell, the system works very well to everybody’s satisfaction. However, the Bill will change it, possibly inadvertently or possibly not. First, the Bill proposes that the local authority has to consent to flexi-schooling arrangements because they are classed as

“education otherwise than at school”,

and flexi-schooling is included in the Elective home education guidance. However, as I say, flexi-schooling is not like elective home education; it a discretionary arrangement whereby children are under the authority of the school; they are still registered at school and are still seen regularly at school.

Secondly, the Bill also says that flexi-schooling pupils must be registered with the local authority on the register that we will no doubt discuss at greater length later, with all the bureaucracy, paperwork and process that is proposed to go with that. Again, that seems an inefficient, costly and unnecessary duplication of oversight and data since, as I say, flexi-schooling pupils are registered at school full time already and are being seen at school by education professionals who have agreed that a flexi-schooling arrangement is in the child’s best interest. Flexi-schoolers have regular reviews with the school, families already share evidence of learning at home and the school can end the arrangement at any time if it has any safeguarding concerns or thinks the education is unsuitable in any other way, so it is a very different sort of arrangement.

There is a real risk in making flexi-schooling more difficult for no good reason. It is a hybrid model of education that can meet the needs of numerous children and families whose needs are not being met in full-time school and for whom full-time home education is perhaps not a viable alternative, for whatever reason. Equally, it may also be a way to help some children to continue to access a school-based education, at least part time, in an achievable way. Otherwise, they might feel forced to choose home education against their preference.

My Amendments 202C and 227A would deal with these difficulties. They would make it clear that the children not in school register does not apply to children who are in school on a flexi-schooling basis, precisely because their education is managed by the school. Secondly, my amendments would ensure that the local authority’s consent is not needed to put in place these arrangements, precisely because the school’s consent is needed, and that consent can be maintained or withdrawn at any time.

So flexi-schooling is something different. It is similar to home education but not the same thing. I hope that the Minister will look at this question wherever the debate on home education goes more broadly and consider whether some flexibility and adjustments to these arrangements can be made.

Very briefly, my noble friend Lord Lucas’s Clause 31 stand part notice is in this group. I am sure he and other noble Lords will speak to that and the other amendments in this group touching on aspects of the register. We are dealing with this slightly out of sequence, but Clause 31 is such a fundamental part of the discussion that I want to say a word about it now. I have doubts about Clause 31, and indeed much of Clauses 30 to 35, because they go to a fundamental problem with the Bill: its unspoken background belief—which I suspect is quite widely shared—that there is no aspect of life in this country that cannot, in principle, be regulated and improved by state action.

The truth is, of course, that parents doing home education can get things wrong. But the state can also get things wrong. In the many groups and amendments that we will discuss, we need to ensure that we are not comparing the real world-version of home education, where much is done very well but some is not, to a fantasy version of state education where everything works perfectly well. We need to ensure that we do not take the view that ideas imparted at home are always damaging but those at school are always self-evidently valuable. We need to make sure that we are realistic about the state and do not think it acts only with pure motives and never harasses, punishes or acts badly.

The evidence is that home education is generally done well. As I have noted before, in 2023 only 1.4% of children educated at home got a school attendance order, yet 10% of schools in the UK were “inadequate” or were said to “require improvement”. So which system is actually failing here? But, yes, some home education will not be perfect. Some people will educate their children in ways I or other noble Lords would not. I do not know that the complex bureaucracy of the register provided for in Clause 31—and the huge amount of information it will generate for local authorities—will do anything about that in the small number of cases where it is a problem.

The register will have downsides in terms of privacy and diversion of effort. It will intimidate some parents out of home education altogether, and it will begin to change the philosophy that guides home education. The current philosophy is that parents have the responsibility for their own children’s education. The requirement for local authority permission and the huge amount of information demanded by the state go in a different direction. They are starting to tell parents that the state knows best. That is why I personally am nervous about not just Clause 31 but many of these proposals: we are seeing the erosion of the vital principle that freedom and autonomy are fundamentally important and that the state does not have the right to go anywhere it wants at will. I am sure we will come back to all these issues, but, for the time being, I beg to move.

My Lords, I acknowledge that it is unusual to rise at this point in the debate. I recognise that we have lots of detailed groups ahead of us in considering the issues in these clauses, but I thought it might be helpful and important to set out the intention behind the children not in school measures before we get into further detail on the technical elements. But, first, I pay tribute to those noble Members of this House who have previously supported legislative measures introducing registers of children not in school: the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, who did excellent work in this space as part of her role in government; the noble Lord, Lord Storey, who has tirelessly worked to support and craft legislation; and Lord Soley, who has now retired from this House, who did a tremendous amount of work in campaigning for these registers. I also thank Members of the House for their engagement to date, including the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, who met with officials, the noble Lord, Lord Wei, and my noble friend Lord Hacking who met my colleague Stephen Morgan, the Minister for Early Years. The engagement and overall support for these measures from all sides of the House have been welcome and instructive, but I recognise the detailed questions that noble Lords have, as reflected in the many groups we have ahead of us. On that basis, I want to be clear that it is important for this engagement to continue as we look at the detail of how this measure is implemented. We also continue to engage with the home-educating community. The previous Government held a consultation on a children not in school register in 2019, which received around 5,000 responses, mainly from parents. We have built on this engagement and have an ongoing implementation forum made up of home educators and other stakeholders, as well as other engagement opportunities with officials and Ministers. We will also consult on the regulations and statutory guidance required for implementation of the measures, which will provide further opportunity for engagement. I have given the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, a commitment that this engagement will continue following the end of Committee. Input from noble Lords, as well as local authorities, home educators and others, will be invaluable as we move towards drafting the regulations and statutory guidance required for the successful implementation of the measures. On the purpose behind the children not in school measures, I know that noble Lords will agree that every child has the right to a safe and suitable education, whether at school or at home. This is the underpinning principle of these measures. The legal responsibility for a child’s education rests with their parents. This Bill does not change that. Some parents choose to fulfil their responsibility by exercising their right to educate their child at home. We recognise this right and we know that many home-educating parents work hard to ensure that their child receives a suitable—in fact, often an excellent—education. Unfortunately, however, that is not the case for all children. Where children are missing out on education, it is essential that they can be identified quickly and supported. Local authorities have an existing legal duty to make arrangements to identify children not in school in their areas who are not receiving a suitable education, but this is undermined by the lack of obligation on parents to notify their local authority that they are home educating. England and Wales are outliers among western nations in this respect. We are in a small minority whereby there is no requirement for parents to inform authorities that they are home educating. The noble Lord, Lord Frost—I think there may be a theme among some noble Lords on this—believes, or fears, that what is proposed in this legislation is an overstretching of the intrusion of the state into the issue of home education. I simply identify to him, as I have suggested, that England and Wales in fact have very light—arguably too light at the moment—regulation of home education. Even if all the provisions in this Bill come to fruition, we will still have a very light legislative approach, because we recognise the right of parents to choose to home educate. We also recognise that the current system makes it too easy for children not in school to fall through the gaps. The department, the Government, indeed all of us, cannot ignore the rising numbers of children not in school. Our latest data shows that, as of October 2024, there are 111,700 children known to be home educated and 39,200 children known to be missing education. An effective system of registration for children not in school is therefore long overdue. Parties across the political spectrum have attempted to introduce one and parents recognise that registers are common-sense. A recent poll commissioned by my department shows that three-quarters of parents surveyed believe that parents should be required to register their home-educated children with local councils. Together, I am confident that we can deliver on this long called-for system of registration and ensure that it works for local authorities, parents and children.

14:00:00

Some critics of the registers say that local authorities are already aware of children who are not receiving a safe, suitable education. Authorities are aware of some of these children, but, when they are identified, local authorities too often find their ability to support them frustrated by inefficiencies in the current system. That is why the Bill also seeks to make the school attendance order process more efficient.

Where it appears that a child is not receiving a suitable education or that regular attendance at school would be in the best interests of a child, subject to child protection processes, it is essential that local authorities act quickly. They must initiate the school attendance order process, which can lead to a child being required to attend a named school. This process is a proportionate consequence should parents not provide the required information for inclusion on local authority registers. I make it clear that the process is not intended to penalise parents but to provide the child with a route to a suitable education, where necessary.

We also have measures, which we will begin to discuss in the next group, focused on the most vulnerable children and those with the highest needs. For children subject to child protection inquiries or plans or who are registered at a special school, parents will be required to seek consent from the local authority before being able to remove the child from roll to home education. This is to provide a necessary check to ensure that the home education received will be safe and suitable for children who are most likely to be vulnerable or to have additional needs.

We have a lot to debate on these measures and I look forward to that. I hope that we can try to be succinct, given the amount we have to cover, but noble Lords should please rest assured that they will still receive a full answer, either in my responses or in the engagement that I have identified we will be very content to involve noble Lords in between now and the next stage of the Bill. I hope that means that some noble Lords might feel able not to introduce some of the very detailed and narrow amendments should they feel that their point has been addressed.

My Lords, Amendment 226 in my name differs from others in this group, which are more concerned with children not attending school because they are not registered at any school, and the amendments we have discussed so far are more concerned with home education in its various forms. My amendment concerns those who are on a school roll but not attending and focuses on the responsibilities of local authorities in such situations. I apologise, therefore, if my amendment seems to be somewhat out on a limb, but I think it is quite an important limb. There is no doubt that the Government are working hard to address the problem of what has been described as an epidemic of school absences. It is well understood that such absences disadvantage children educationally and socially and deprive them of the value of education and of opportunities, in both the short and the long term. I will not attempt any analysis of the many explanations for failures to attend school, but they clearly include poverty, mental health problems and the pandemic, which is thought to have led some parents to see daily school attendance as optional. In this context, the fundamental duties are those of parents to ensure that their children of compulsory school age are receiving suitable full-time education and those of schools to record and monitor attendance and to inform local authorities of failures to attend regularly. In August last year, important revised statutory guidance on children missing education was issued. It states: “Schools should monitor attendance closely and address poor or irregular attendance. It is important that pupils’ poor attendance is referred to the local authority”. The guidance is also clear that the duties of schools and local authorities are to be viewed alongside the wider duties and local initiatives to promote the safeguarding of children. In October last year, the Government announced increased investment in attendance mentoring. On 22 October, the Minister, in answer to a Question from the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, expressed her determination to bring absenteeism figures down. She also referred to the work already done by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. Between the guidance issued in August and what the Minister said in October, in September 2024 the Children’s Commissioner published a powerful and wide-ranging report entitled Children Missing Education: The Unrolled Story. This provided analysis of the procedures followed by local authorities to support children missing education and analysis of the characteristics and histories of children known or suspected to be missing education, who are among the most vulnerable in society and in need of support. The report found that there are significant inconsistencies between local authorities in the use of the term “children missing education”, which can lead to children falling through the gaps; that few local authorities take proactive steps to prevent children from going missing from education; and that there is little one-to-one support available for children missing education to reintegrate into school. It referred to the lack of a shared national definition and to differing interpretations of children missing education. It called for resources for local authorities to trace and support children missing or at risk of missing their education. The commissioner expressed her increasing worry about thousands of children being denied their right to education, having fallen off the radar of their local authorities. She said that in too many instances, no one knows where these children are or whether they are safe. She described a shocking lack of urgency in trying to trace these children. My amendment seeks to address, in terms of statutory duties, some of the main deficiencies and inconsistencies identified by the commissioner and to underpin in primary legislation what is or ought to be required by existing guidance and regulations. Absenteeism requires a fast and sometimes robust response. Good practice should not be piecemeal. The amendment seeks to provide for such a response with consistent arrangements for local authorities to be promptly informed of persistent non-attendance or irregular attendance; a duty to take urgent steps to trace any child known or believed to be missing school without authorisation or satisfactory explanation; and a duty to provide appropriate support as soon as the child has been traced. I therefore hope the Minister might take the opportunity to indicate the Government’s response to the commissioner’s report and recommendations and indicate what is already being done to ensure compliance with the latest guidance. The other trigger for this amendment is my experience of cases in the family court when the court is provided, sometimes as an afterthought, with the school attendance records of the child or children concerned in those proceedings. These can show how unexplained or unsatisfactorily explained absences can be a marker of significant neglect or mistreatment, which may have been unknown or not visible to other agencies. On occasions, with provision of those records, the court is left wondering why nothing or nothing more was done to follow up the absences much nearer the time. On other occasions, the court itself can be left to ask for unprovided information about school attendance. That explains the last sub-paragraph of the proposed amendment. All in all, I seek that the Government confirm that there will be a consistent approach, better communication and a better and faster response to absences.

My Lords, I think this is a very important amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Meston. It reminds us that, in this part of the Bill, we dealing not just with parents who choose to educate their children at home but with some very substantial problems that state education has in not keeping hold of and looking after children who are nominally registered at school. I will come on to the question of unregistered alternative education, to which the state commits many children, in a later amendment. This is about looking after the children and I think that the noble Lord, Lord Meston, has put his finger very firmly on what we ought to be doing. If there is a whole structure being built here to get better information on home-educated children, what is the point of it if we are not already using the information we have on children who are registered? Is there actually a responsive system that all this extra information is going to be fed into? Are we actually focusing on the children who need our help, or are we just making life more difficult for a lot of very responsible and successful parents? I am grateful to the Minister for setting out the Government’s approach to elective home education. I felt that there was a good deal in common in our approaches and I very much hope to be able to build on that as we look at these amendments. I will very much endeavour not to take up the time of the House if I can avoid it. In that context, picking up on the Minister’s very kind offer of conversations with officials, might it not help if those conversations could take place between today and 1 September? That would mean that I would not have to take up time in Committee: we could short-circuit it before then. I am in the UK all August, but perhaps that might not amuse her officials.

I can clarify for the noble Lord that that is what I had in mind.

If I might address the general issues first, I remain unclear about many aspects of the Government’s policy. I was unaware of conversations with the implementation forum: if the noble Baroness is able to share who is on it, so that I can understand what been going on, that would be very helpful. My understanding is that, following the provisions of the Bill, all children will have the educational route that they are following clearly recorded, on one register or another, by the local authority; so, this is not something aimed at elective family education, it is aimed at looking after children. I would be very grateful if the Minister could confirm that, so that we will not be left with invisible groups of children somewhere in the system. My own view of home education, though I have never tried it—I did threaten my daughter with it on several occasions, but I have never tried it—is that it is a fundamentally positive thing. One substantial group of home educators—about 60%, I would reckon—have found their child’s experience of state school to be sufficiently bad, or the child’s needs to be sufficiently non-standard, that they have taken on the challenge of educating them at home. In doing this, they are doing the nation a most substantial service and freeing the school concerned of a pupil who they have clearly had difficulty coming to terms with. They are contributing their own time and effort and they are costing the state much less than it costs to keep a child in school, particularly if that child has special educational needs, which many of these children do. To my mind, these parents deserve our wholehearted approbation and support, and I very much hope that the Minister agrees. Another group are those who wish to educate their children in a different way from what is on offer in our schools. Fundamental British values should guide us to respect and tolerate such difference, as we traditionally have. I agree with the Minister that we have a right to ask that these children emerge from their education fit for the world, prepared to make the best of themselves and safe. In our legislation, that is set out as suitable education and the surety of well-being, which can be summarised as “being seen”. A case in point here is the Haredi community. Their children undergo elective home education—plus, for the boys, an intense religious education in yeshivas. Can the Minister confirm to me that the Government wholeheartedly support the right of this community, and other similar communities, to bring up their children in accordance with their beliefs? Will she further confirm that, subject to those children being seen and it being confirmed that their education is suitable, as for home-educated children in general, there will be no government demand for their religious education to be subject to inspection or controls, as long as it is clear to all that the religious education concerned stays within legal limits?

14:15:00

Home education should be supported, particularly by local authorities, because support is the very best way for a local authority to get to see the children concerned and understand their level of education. In local authorities that work well with home-educated children—there are a good number of them—the local authority is involved in making sure that activities and opportunities are available to home-educated children. That means that those children get seen in an organised way by properly trained professionals, who are capable of making an assessment of their general level of education.

As someone who has spent a large chunk of his life going around schools, I agree that, if you want to make a detailed assessment, you have to get in very close. But you can see if something is going wrong. As long as a child is being seen and is having educational contact with a proper professional from the local authority—if that is coming up with a tick—that child can be put in the “We think that’s all right” pile. The local authority can then focus on the children for whom it does not have that confidence and for whom it has real worries.

There will always be some children in home education who should not be there, who have been tipped out of mainstream education by their school or whose parents are setting out deliberately to fail to provide education. We absolutely need mechanisms that enable us to focus on those children. Adding burdens to the great majority of home educators who do it well is not the best way of achieving that aim; it merely diverts a lot of effort.

Looking at the provisions of the Bill, I ask: why is it proposed that permission should be required to remove a special education needs child from school? We all know what a state local authority special needs processes are in at the moment: there are long queues for tribunals, real difficulty in finding the right placements and a general adversarial mindset born of a shortage of money. What is the basis for thinking that putting local authorities in a position of authority over the children will actually work, and for thinking that they have the time and expertise to make this judgment in a better way than the parents? If we are going to do this, it is my firm belief that we have to offer parents in this circumstance access to a tribunal, so that they can have a fair way of disagreeing with a local authority, as one does in other aspects of life. I very much hope that the Government will support that.

The Government’s proposals for data collection are detailed and onerous. They are the sort of things that I would like to have time to go through with officials. A lot of my amendments try to get into the details of what is going on there. My two amendments in this group fall very much into the category of questions I would like answers to that I am quite prepared to have by way of a brief answer now and a long discussion afterwards.

My Lords, this is my first occasion to speak in this debate on the eighth day of Committee. As I said at Second Reading, I have concentrated and will continue to concentrate on the issues relating to home-schooling parents and their pupils. It was therefore heartening to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, his strong endorsement of home education. It was also helpful of my noble friend the Minister to intervene when she did. It gives me the opportunity at the beginning of my short speech to say that there should always be a register. The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, may remember that when she was in the Department for Education—I do not know if she is listening to me at the moment—I brought home-schooling mothers to her. The issue that I have on behalf of the home-schooling mothers is not whether there should be a register or not. I wholly endorse the ample reasons my noble friend the Minister gave in her speech just now. Yes, there should be a register, but the problem is that—these are the words I used at Second Reading—the provisions relating to home-schooling in the Bill are “too long and too complicated”.—[Official Report, 1/5/25; cols. 1414.] We have certain difficulties in the conduct of this debate. First, there are several amendments that are not on the issue of home-schooling. The second difficulty, which the noble Lord, Lord Frost, identified, is that we are not taking things in the order of the Bill. We have already jumped to Clause 31. The first clause in the Bill on home-schooling is Clause 30. As an omnibus, there are altogether four clauses relating to home-schooling in the Bill: Clauses 30, 31, 32 and 33. It would be much more convenient if we had taken them in order. The best thing that I can do at this stage, it being the first occasion I have spoken on the Bill in Committee, is to address your Lordships on home-schooling, and their parents. Altogether, home-schooling accounts for only 1% of all children eligible for state education. In England in the academic year 2024-25, there were altogether 9,092,073 children in state schools. That makes the total of home-schooling parents to be in the region of 90,000 to 91,000. This is a substantial and surprising number of pupils, but that is how the arithmetic works out. Many of the home-schooling mothers, but by no means all, are university educated. They group together in what they call co-operatives. The number of children being educated is often around seven to eight pupils per group and sometimes, on special subjects, home-schooling mothers can gather together 20 to 30 pupils at the same time. During each term, home-schooling parents have on average three educational visits to London museums and other places of education. Another feature of home-schooling is that it allows the teaching of subjects that are not available in the state system—for example, classics, and also schooling in music and drama is not always available in state schools. There was a good example given to the Minister, Stephen Morgan, when I met him with some home-schooling mothers. One cited the case of wanting to include classics in the education of one or more of her children, so she found an Oxford graduate who could take on that task. The reasons for home-schooling are a better education, an education in subjects that are not available in state schools and, sometimes, the need to take a child out of a state school for one unhappiness or another. Your Lordships can all understand that home-schooling is a big commitment—the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, recognised that—and that home-schooling mothers are very busy in their prime role of the education of their children. Therefore, to involve them in extensive bureaucracy as proposed in the Bill is wrong and that is what I oppose.

My Lords, perhaps I might just interject here. One of the things about home education is that the education of the child should come first. That education should allow them to function independently as an adult afterwards. If we do not lose sight of that, we stand a chance of some common sense emerging on this. When somebody mentions “special educational needs”, I do not know whether it is me rising like a trout to a fly or running like a bull at a red flag, but I always look at this. The first people I ever experienced dealing with home education were doing so because special educational needs were not being met. The system is probably better than it was when they started, but we still know that there are a great many problems with it. If, for instance, you do not have the right teachers in a school or you cannot find the right school or one that you think has an acceptable plan, home education would certainly become more attractive. But do not forget that you still need a parent who is trained well enough to deliver that education. It is not an easy option. The fact is that some parents might think that they are well enough trained, but they get it wrong. I do not think that anybody here or who works in education has lacked for people who have a miracle cure—dyslexia is the one I am most familiar with—and say, “I can teach anybody to read by picturing the word and associating it”. This totally misunderstands that short-term memory is one of the primary problems. The last time somebody said that to me, I said, “Inconsequential: give me a mental image for that”. It was about the politest way I could tell them, when expletives came more readily to mind, but schemes like this are going through. I hope that we can get something here that says that education is the most important factor, because what happens to that child and the rights of the child must come first. If the state can find a way of delivering that, fine, because it has a duty to make sure that, after their education, that person can function as independently as possible, as an adult in the real world. I hope that we never lose sight of that.

My Lords, at this stage, at the beginning of the many amendments on home-schooling stretching ahead, I would like to thank the Minister for her opening remarks. They were very helpful and, as a consequence, I will not speak on all the amendments to which I have put my name, even though a lot of scrutiny is required to make sure that we get this right.

14:30:00

However, I want to raise my broad concerns, which the Minister can perhaps come back on, and why I think reassurance is needed. My interest in home-schooling is more about state overreach and a trend, which I have been writing about and commenting on for some years, of undermining parents and their autonomy in relation to the state, and getting the balance right. In that context, the proposed provisions to regulate home-schooling seem to be predicated on a change in the way the state views parents.

Let me explore what that might mean. The primary relationship that children should have in respect of their well-being, development, nurturing, education and, indeed, safety should be with their parents and not the state. Historically, we have said that parents will look to the state for schooling, but it is an option rather than a requirement. There is a danger in some of the debate around home-schooling that families and parents are being undermined, particularly by the register of children not in school. It seems to be making parents answerable to local authorities for the most intimate of details and can understandably be seen as intrusive and disproportionate. Almost by default, it treats home-schoolers as a suspect category—a risky cohort. Even the Minister’s emphasis today on safety might give that impression. I would like some clarification of this, because I genuinely do not understand the catch-all nature of some of the provisions in the Bill.

Of course, it is and should be within the scope of state authorities to have specific and special records for children about whose home-schooling there are good reasons to have concerns, as there are for those in state schooling. But can the simple fact that a child is being home-schooled itself be seen as a risk? That is what I fear is happening. If not, that is very important, because home-schoolers feel that increased state surveillance of children and their parents implies that shift in relationship.

The noble Lord, Lord Frost, gave us a very useful reminder earlier when he said that we should not presume that everything that happens with family home-schooling is potentially a bit dodgy, and we certainly should not presume that everything that happens with state schooling is in and of itself a good thing, or that there is no room for queries. It was useful when the noble Lord, Lord Addington, reminded us a moment ago that for many parents, home-schooling was initially a response to feeling that schools were not able to provide the special educational provision that was needed.

In recent years, we have been reminded of the many children who are now not attending school. Many of us gave a warning about that during lockdown, saying that state closure of schools across the board would lead to a breach of the educational social contract, and that there would be problems later on with those children returning. We were treated as though the threat was that we wanted schools to be kept open. At that stage, the fact that children were being forced to stay at home did not mean that there was any concern about home-schooling in that situation. I think the state made some catastrophic errors during that time.

At the moment we are dealing with the aftermath of the rape grooming gangs. I am glad that the Government have taken that on board and that there is now going to be a national inquiry; we have read the Casey audit and so on. We should remind ourselves that many of those young victims were in state care homes and many went to school, and we know that teachers knew what was going on and looked the other way. It is a useful reminder—when we say we are looking at home-schooling only through the prism of safeguarding, we have to be careful that we do not end up smearing parents or becoming complacent about the weaknesses of state provision over the years.

My Lords, I will speak to the question that Clause 31 stand part of the Bill. I apologise to the Committee for not having taken part in Second Reading. I also thank the Minister for her very clear statement at the start of this debate. I want to make a relatively short contribution to highlight one of the issues the Welsh Government wish to take forward in this Bill, and to acknowledge the constructive collaboration of the two Governments and their officers on this and other issues raised in the Bill. In particular, I want to make a few comments on children not in school registers. Liberal Democrats have long called for such a register, including in our recent manifesto. Here I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Storey, who initiated this work in his Private Member’s Bill on the subject. We agree with the NSPCC and the Children’s Commissioner that the register can be an important tool in keeping children safe. We understand the legal responsibilities parents have to ensure that their children receive an education. As liberals we believe that parents have a right to choose home education where they feel this is the right choice for their child. However, we are very concerned that the whereabouts of hundreds of children in England and Wales are simply unknown. Education is devolved to Wales, and the Welsh Government already operate a register on their children missing education database. However, the Welsh Education Secretary states in the legislative consent memorandum to this Bill that “the children not in school provisions proposed in this Bill would enhance the” children missing school “policy (from a safeguarding perspective) with the CNIS register, school attendance order (SAO), strengthened suitability assessment and child protection clauses applying alongside the CME database arrangements”. I am pleased that the Welsh Government have recognised that the provisions in this Bill as introduced would have resulted in local authorities in England having greater levels of contact with elective home-educated children than local authorities in Wales. If the provisions were not extended to Wales, as proposed by the tabled amendments, duties on families in Wales would be considered less stringent than those in England. I welcome the Welsh Government’s pragmatic approach, which should produce a seamless system between the two nations. The action of the Welsh Government in taking this opportunity to enhance child protection measures is also commended by the Children’s Commissioner for Wales, who recognises the importance of addressing the gaps in provision to ensure that children not in school have all their rights fulfilled. It is to these rights that I would like briefly to turn. When we talk about a children not in school register, we tend to have discussions, as we have had today, about the rights and responsibilities of parents. But in her letter to the Senedd’s Education Committee chair supporting the LCM, the Children’s Commissioner for Wales highlighted the three tests her office has published in relation to children’s rights on home education. They are: “First, that all children in Wales can be accounted for and that none are invisible. Second, that every child receives a suitable education and their other human rights, including health, care and safety. And third, that every child is seen and their views and experiences are listened to. This is essential for the first two tests to be met”. These three tests help us to focus our attention away, slightly, from the needs and rights of parents, and to consider the needs and rights of children. The Children’s Commissioner for Wales points out that the Welsh Government make no reference to children’s rights in their LCM and is surprised that no children’s rights impact assessment has been produced with the proposals. She said that such an impact assessment would help ensure that the Welsh Government fulfil their own duties to consider children’s rights, provide valuable transparency for key stakeholders, and assist in identifying and mitigating any unintended consequences. I am sure that the Welsh Government will rise to the challenge and produce a children’s rights impact assessment to ensure the rights of the children of Wales, but can the Minister say whether the rights of children in England will be similarly addressed? It seems that the Bill, and Clause 31 in particular, goes a long way to ensuring that the rights of children are met in both England and Wales, but the Government need to make it clear that that is their intention.

My Lords, I declare an interest as a parent of home-educated children. I take this opportunity to echo the earlier tributes to the many home-educating families who have worked so hard over such a long period to raise their children well, which, as another Peer mentioned, the data shows. I also thank the Minister for her offer to meet Peers, including the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I am around in August and, if officials can meet us to discuss our concerns, I would like to join some of those discussions. I support Amendments 202C, 227, 227A and 286, which collectively interrogate what I believe is a sweeping new framework that Clauses 31 and 34 impose. These clauses lie at the heart of the Bill’s proposals to establish this compulsory register of children not in school, and to empower local authorities to demand detailed information from parents about how and why they are educating their children outside the mainstream system. Let us be clear: I fully accept there are very few tragic cases where parents, intent on harming or neglecting their children, have cited home education as a smokescreen. However, in pretty much every instance, the abuse was already present when the child was still enrolled in school—or, indeed, in state-run care, as has just been mentioned. To take these horrors and use them to justify a regime that treats all parents who choose to home educate as presumptively suspect is not only disproportionate but profoundly unjust. It risks creating a system that soaks up scarce safeguarding resources chasing bureaucratic compliance by good families, while truly at-risk children continue to slip through the net precisely because professionals are mired in routine paperwork. Clause 31 in particular gives local authorities extraordinary powers. It requires the registration of any child not attending school full-time, regardless of whether there is any reason to suspect unsuitable education or harm. The data that can be demanded under this clause is extensive, including personal details, philosophical convictions, protected characteristics, information on supplementary educational providers and more, which will be held indefinitely and cross-referenced with other local records. As I mentioned at Second Reading, I totally oppose this register on principle. Here we can see exactly the concern raised by Reclaim Rights for Children and other expert bodies, including many academics, that the proposed children not in school register requires information far beyond what is necessary. Even the Department for Education itself has conceded that simply having a child’s name, date of birth, home address and the names and home addresses of each parent should be sufficient to support the existing duties of a local authority to try to identify those children not in school and ensure they are receiving efficient, suitable education. Yet the Bill goes on to say that there may be other data that it would be helpful to capture. That is not how lawful data processing works. Under well-established principles of minimisation, personal data processing must be limited strictly to what is necessary and not exceed the purpose for which it was collected. You do not gather more than you need simply because it might be helpful. Clause 34 compounds these concerns. It not only record facts but makes local authorities active interrogators of family choices without clear statutory boundaries. There is no real limit on what might be demanded under the vague heading of sufficient information. This invites mission creep, allowing data collected ostensibly for educational oversight to be repurposed for broader monitoring. It risks empowering officers who may be ideologically suspicious of home education to harass families, treating any non-co-operation as evidence of neglect and flipping the burden of proof entirely. That is why I strongly support Amendment 286 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, which probes how these sweeping new powers would intersect with children who have special education needs. Children with education, health and care plans or who receive Section 19 or Section 61 provision are already under a robust statutory framework. Pulling them into an additional generalist register not only duplicates bureaucracy, which does not sound very efficient to me, but risks destabilising finely balanced arrangements, often secured only after long struggle and hard evidence of need. The local authority already knows exactly what education these children are receiving; they do not need another compliance net.

14:45:00

We must also not overlook children in flexi-schooling arrangements, addressed by Amendments 202C and 227A, spoken to just now by the noble Lord, Lord Frost. These are children who remain on a school roll under formal agreements to spend part of the week learning at home or elsewhere. Flexi-schooling is not evasion; it is often the very means by which anxious, neurodivergent or physically unwell children can stay partially connected to school. Sometimes it is the only way that children exceptionally gifted in sport or the arts can balance intensive training with education. Yet, as drafted, Clause 31 risks pulling these children into the not in school register simply because they are not present five days a week, despite being under a formal school sanction plan. That is not only illogical, it actively endangers a valuable form of flexibility by burdening it with inappropriate regulation.

Taken together, these clauses establish a presumption that any family educating outside full-time mainstream schooling must be indefinitely overseen by the state, subject to compulsory data disclosure and liable to escalating demands that ultimately lead to criminal sanction. Is it right to imprison parents for doing this? This is not a light-touch safeguard but a profound inversion of the principle that parents are primarily responsible for their children’s education, with the state stepping in only where there is a cause for concern. Under these proposals, the state steps in universally, compelling all parents to prove their adequacy on bureaucratic terms, even absent any specific risk.

The danger here is not abstract: families have repeatedly told us that their experience of local authorities varies greatly. In some areas, officers understand and respect diverse educational choices; in others, parents face officers who are fundamentally hostile to home education, or who approach all such families as problems to be managed. These clauses, if left unamended, hand such officers powerful new tools to demand extensive personal data, impose tight reporting deadlines and pursue compliance for its own sake. This does little to help the children genuinely in danger, and risks driving a wedge of fear and mistrust between families and local authorities.

We are told that this is necessary for safeguarding. Safeguarding is not achieved by building vast registries of families against whom there is no evidence of harm, or by compelling intrusive disclosures as a matter of routine. True safeguarding depends on skilled, targeted, professional intervention where there are credible indicators of risk, and on fostering relationships of trust so that families seek help before difficulties escalate. My fear is that, by replacing nuanced relational work with a heavy bureaucratic model, we will, paradoxically, reduce the willingness of families to come forward when they need support—precisely the opposite of what effective safeguarding requires. That is why, while I support these various amendments, whether on SEND carve-outs, clearer protection for flexi-schooling, tighter data demands, or respect for mobility and cultural traditions, I remain of the view that Clauses 31 and 34 themselves are simply too broad. They must be either radically tightened to focus solely on cases where there is clear evidence of unsuitable educational risk or, preferably, reconsidered entirely.

We must not sacrifice foundational principles of parental primacy and family privacy on the altar of a superficially neat but ultimately counterproductive regulatory system. I urge the Government and the Minister to listen to these concerns and not merely tweak the edges of this scheme but rethink its entire balance. We need safeguarding that is smart, proportionate and genuinely risk led, not a universal presumption of parental inadequacy. This is how we will uphold both the welfare of children and the fundamental freedoms of families.

My Lords, my Amendment 279 would allow local authorities to inspect the materials being used in the child’s home education and to see the child’s work. I also support the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Meston. I strongly support the Government’s measures in relation to home education in this Bill, and in this respect I find myself in disagreement with a number of noble friends on these Benches with whom I generally share a common view of life. I was delighted to hear the Minister’s opening remarks on this group. I thought she put the situation exceptionally well. As we have heard, the home education lobby is very concerned about these provisions, and I am sure it will be concerned about my amendment. However, the number of children apparently being educated at home has grown exponentially over the past 10 to 15 years, probably from 20,000 to 30,000 to somewhere between 100,000 and 150,000, and that is without allowing for the 300,000 children estimated by the Education Policy Institute to be missing from education. My noble friend Lord Frost says that only 1.4% of home-educated children get a school attendance order, which is unsurprising as without a register local authorities just do not know who these children are. As for the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, about the majority of home-schoolers being university-educated people, that may well be the case for those home-educated children who are being suitably educated, but I believe there are many more children who are apparently being home-educated but who do not have that benefit. Of course, many children are educated exceptionally well by their parents at home or in other settings, and I respect parents’ right to do that. These are not the parents who concern me, and nor should these parents be concerned about the provisions in the Bill or my amendment. If they are providing a suitable education, why should they be? But those of us who work in schools know that many children apparently being educated at home are not receiving a suitable education, or indeed any education at all. Many are active in gangs. Surely, we must be concerned about these children. Children have a right to be educated, and I invite the home education lobby to reflect on whether its objections to the Bill, and no doubt to my amendment, are a little selfish and lacking in public spirit in some respects. I understand what my noble friend Lord Lucas was saying about the importance of children being seen. I assume, therefore, that he supports going further than my amendment, because the whole point is that too many children are unseen. England is an outlier in relation to home education. The noble Lord, Lord Hacking, talked about the relatively low number of children being home-educated. We have the highest proportion of children in home education and the lowest amount of regulation. No other European country has a higher rate of home education. The next highest is France, which mandates yearly inspections. The 2018 European Commission report into home education concluded that students’ progress is monitored and assessed everywhere in Europe except in the UK and in the Netherlands. I refer noble Lords to an excellent report by the Centre for Social Justice dated November 2022, entitled Out of Sight and Out of Mind. That report made a number of recommendations, including that local authorities need powers to conduct visits and see the child in person at least every six months, and that home-educated children should complete an annual light-touch progress assessment in English and maths. My amendment goes nowhere near as far as that. The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel has uncovered incidents of harm involving children reported to be in home education, including a number of children who have died. The panel concluded that such children were often invisible, were not in school and did not receive home visits. A 2021 report by FFT Education Datalab found that children with additional vulnerabilities are disproportionately likely to be out of the school system by the end of key stage 4, and it is estimated that about half these children are in home education. It found that a child who has been persistently absent from school is more than three times more likely to end up with no final destination than a child who has never been persistently absent, and a permanently excluded child is two and a half times more likely than the child who has never been permanently excluded. Local authorities do not like serving school attendance orders because by the time the matter gets to court, the parents are lawyered up and, even when they are not providing a suitable education, may well be pretending to be doing so by producing documentation that they have only recently obtained. My proposal would cut through this dance. Unless a child who is home-educated is known to social services, how is a local authority to know whether they are receiving a suitable education? While Sara Sharif had previously been under a CPP, she does not appear to have been at the time of moving into home education. On my noble friend Lord Wei’s point about scaremongering, we should certainly be concerned about children who are home-educated and suffer abuse or are murdered. I believe there are many more children, not in this category, who are apparently being educated at home but are actually not receiving any education at all. Sadly, in the last decade or so, the world has moved rapidly to this appalling state of affairs. My amendment is consistent with the recommendations made by the Education Select Committee in its report Strengthening Home Education, although it does not go anywhere near as far as its recommendations of annual contact with the family and a minimum annual assessment of a child’s progress, particularly in relation to literacy and numeracy.

My Lords, I support Amendment 202C from the noble Lord, Lord Frost, and Amendment 226 from my noble friend Lord Meston. As this is the first time I have spoken in Committee, I would like to make two preliminary remarks. The first is to declare a personal interest, as I have a relative who is home-educating, and therefore I have learned at second hand some of the issues involved here. Secondly, that has also caused me to want to investigate more and to thank the many people both inside and outside this House who have provided me with information about the whole field of home education and how it relates to local authorities. I am very grateful to the Minister for having a meeting with me early on in this process and to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, for also having meetings with me to discuss these issues. I very much appreciate it, and I very much appreciate the fact that the Minister has offered to meet Peers. I am available in August, so we look forward to having further discussions and perhaps saving some time in Committee around some of the relatively minor details that need to be cleared up in the Bill. I do not want to take up too much time; I will simply make three or four points and then speak to the amendments. If noble Lords want to see a real approach to personalised education, they can find that in some of the successful examples of elective home education perfectly attuned to the needs, capabilities and aspirations of the child. That happens at all levels of achievement. However, and equally, I am concerned about the 39,000 missing children mentioned who may be at risk of abuse, may be running wild or are being brainwashed and separated from society in some form. There are a whole range of different sets of issues that we must think about here. In characterising home education, I just want to pick up one other point that I do not think has been made by anyone: some parents choose to home-educate one of their children because of that child’s particular needs but have their other children in school. Indeed, many parents will home-educate their children for a period and then bring them back into school later on when they perhaps have moved up or managed to develop in a way that allows them to take advantage of whatever the provision is locally. We must really recognise the poor state of some of our schools and some of the stories I have heard about what has been described to me as “in-school excluded”. These are children who perhaps have difficult behaviours or whatever, have an educational assistant and end up spending the time in the corridor with that assistant rather than being educated. There is a whole range of issues that we need to tackle here. My approach to it is, like others—I am delighted to see this spirit in your Lordships’ Committee on this—to try to find practical ways forward to balance all the different issues. Central to that, in whatever we do, is to help to frame a positive relationship between home-educating parents and local authorities. In some cases, this is excellent but, in others, this is very fraught indeed. I will have a bit more to say on that later.

15:00:00

I come to the two amendments that I wish to support. Amendment 202C, from the noble Lord, Lord Frost, seems to me very straightforward. The children he refers to as being flexibly schooled are registered with a school and do not need to be double registered, as the noble Lord has said, on this new register as well as on their school registration, particularly as they are operating under the aegis of the head teacher of the school. Secondly, my noble friend Lord Meston’s amendment seems to have a lot of support in the Committee and to be very straightforward. Local authorities should know what is happening to children in their area and the amendment deserves our support.

I turn to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Nash, on education, which I find more problematic. What will it achieve if you are asking for home-educating parents to show you the materials that they are using? Those materials may be different depending on their philosophy of education and whether they are following a more traditional school academic approach, or, as they are entitled to, a more child-led approach.

My amendment also says “to see the child’s work”. As those of us in schools know, seeing a child’s books is one of the best ways of finding out whether they are being properly taught. It may be that the home educators are educating their children in a particular way and you can see the materials that they are using to teach, but one needs to know whether the children are actually learning. The only way to know that is to see their work.

I thank the noble Lord for that intervention, and I very much understand the point that he is making. However, the issue is what happens to that material once it is inspected. How does the home education officer make a judgment on it? Most of them are not teachers—in fact, I suspect very few are. Do they go to an outside source, or do we set up some great panoply of mechanisms to decide whether those materials are appropriate? At the moment, we have a different situation. The current position, as I understand it, is that, where authorities have cause for concern, Sections 437 to 443 of the Education Act 1996 provide for steps to be taken if it appears that there is very little or no education in place for a child, or if the local authority has no information about any education arrangements. I understand that in most, possibly all, local authority areas home-educating parents provide an annual report to the local authorities, rather than providing materials that will be judged in isolation. I think that we should leave the law where it is. As I understand it, the attitude of the best local authority home education officers is that they build relationships; they are happy with most of the people, but can then concentrate on the problem areas—because there are problem areas—within the home education sphere. Imposing new duties such as this would add burden, bureaucracy and frustration to authorities and parents alike. We should concentrate on improving that relationship, not making it more burdensome.

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Nash’s Amendment 279. It suggests a very mild tweak to the proposed legislation, largely because he is respectful of the majority of parents who do a good job in home education, which I completely agree with. However, I see at close quarters the impact of home education in deprived communities where the parents have limited education themselves and little interest in it. They are clearly unable to educate their own children and yet, when they are withdrawn from schools, there is nothing a school can do. These children are being thrown to the wolves and, as the Minister has said, the numbers are escalating. My noble friend Lord Nash talks about a trend over the past 10 to 15 years but, according to the NSPCC, the number has increased by 186% in six years. In 14 local authorities, it has quadrupled in that time. These are not all middle-class, educated parents, but we have no idea who they are. In 2021, the House of Commons Education Committee’s Strengthening Home Education report made a number of recommendations. Perhaps the most important was that the DfE should provide “a set of clear criteria against which the suitability of education can be assessed, taking into account the full range of pedagogical approaches taken in EHE”— elective home education— “as well as the age, ability and aptitude of individual children, including where they may have SEND”. The Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel, a government-sponsored group, produced a number of recommendations on home education in its May 2024 report, and many of these mirrored the report I have just mentioned. The report refers to 27 referrals received between August 2020 and October 2021, involving the deaths of six children and a further 35 suffering serious harm, including physical neglect, physical abuse and sexual abuse. There are many other good recommendations, but, as they do not fit this specific amendment, I will not list them. I recommend these two reports to any Peer interested in this vexing subject. My noble friend’s amendment would provide a very light-touch review point. Bona fide parents would not be negatively affected. On the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, I say that the amendment is extremely light touch, but it would move the situation from what is currently a complete black hole to at least give us some indication of children’s well-being. I want to finish with the case of Sara Sharif. Many noble Lords will know about it, but I will remind the Committee. A 10 year-old girl was withdrawn from her primary school in April 2023 under the pretext of home education. This occurred after teachers noticed bruising, which she had attempted to conceal beneath her hijab. The school referred their concerns to social services, but, after being taken out of school, she became invisible to safeguarding agencies. Neighbours reported hearing constant crying and screaming. She was murdered by her father and stepmother. They were convicted in December last year. The lack of school oversight allowed this to happen undetected. I respect the good work that most home-educating parents do, but it is for cases like hers that I support Amendment 279.

My Lords, I thank the Government for taking this issue on and for being aware of the problems that we face. I also recognise that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, was on to this in her role as Minister as well. I have met hundreds of home educators and considerably more have contacted me, and most of them do an amazing job. Noble Lords ought to know that some of the home educators who have contacted me by email have been concerned about what has been going on and given practical examples of that. We need to get a balanced picture sometimes. If we really want to understand this issue, I note that the noble Lord, Lord Meston, makes the point in his amendment that 39,000 children are missing—we have no idea where they are. The Government want to tackle that head-on. Imagine a society that says to those who want to remove their children from the education system that that is fine—just do it—but we will not keep any records and we will have no idea what you are doing at home, and will leave you to get on with it. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine a situation where fundamentalist religious groups set up unregistered schools and we have no idea what is happening in them, except occasionally when some of the teachers working in them report to the authorities the appalling behaviour of staff? Ofsted has on many occasions tried to close those schools down, but they re-emerge as home education settings—

On the figure of 30,000, the Education Policy Institute, of which I was a trustee until relatively recently, estimated by comparing GP registrations with school registration and home education data that in 2023 there was a gap of 300,000 children—and that was not accounting for home-educated children.

I thank the noble Lord for that. Clearly, there are different groups of home educators and we cannot just use the blanket term “home education”. First, there are the traditional home educators. Let us be honest, the most important educators in a child’s life are the parents, and some parents have the time, opportunity, money and desire to teach their children at home. They do a fantastic job. As I said earlier, I have met many of them. They organise summer camps, celebrate together, et cetera. In the main, they are probably the people who have the resources and time to do that. The second group are those whom my noble friend mentioned: parents who feel that the education system is not working for their children who have special educational needs. I think we can understand that. Then there is a third type, which the noble Lord, Lord Nash, mentioned. After Covid, children, mainly from poorer families or disadvantaged backgrounds, returned to school and could not cope. They went back to their parents and said, “I don’t want to be in school”. They nagged their mum and dad who, in the end, said, “Okay, we’ll home educate you”, despite having no experience of home education at all. Sadly, those parents did a major disservice to their children, who of course were not being home educated—they were just doing nothing at home and getting further and further behind in their learning. Some have gone on to criminal activities as well. Finally, there is the group I mentioned before: those in unregistered schools. If noble Lords knew some of the practices that went on in those schools, they would be appalled. In fundamentalist religious schools, eight year-old boys spend all their time just learning holy scriptures and have no proper education, which is not acceptable at all. I understand some parents’ concerns that they do not want to see bureaucratic procedures getting in the way of their home education, as the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, rightly mentioned. It is not beyond our wit to look very closely between Committee and Report at what we require. It is important that we know where children are. Any system we bring in has to work; we have been down this route before. In my first headship—some teachers here will remember this—there was the unique pupil number which every child had and which went on with them to whichever school they went to. The school had a duty to inform the next school that the child was moving to, et cetera. That, for some reason, has broken down; I do not understand why. Therefore, the system that we adopt here has to work—and not just between schools; in cases where children do not go to school, we have to know where they are, so that we can keep them safe and ensure that they are learning.

15:15:00

Perhaps I might build on that point. There seems to be a lot of conflation in this debate between home education and children who are missing education or invisible. It seems that all these measures are designed to try to find these invisible children. Is there not a risk, as I think the noble Lord is touching on, that we may bring in a system that does not actually find the missing children? The people who are very determined to abuse their children, or to hide them in very fundamentalist environments, are the very people who would not register their children even if we had a database. In which case, we would be going after all the people who are doing a good job in the noble Lord’s first few categories. Will the parents we actually want to get—the 39,000 or 300,000 or however many—really self-disclose? There is a real risk that we might not know this until we have imposed a huge amount of bureaucracy on all the parents who are doing a great job.

I thank the noble Lord for his question. The answer is that, at the moment, we are not doing anything, which is why the children are going missing and why we do not know where they are. We therefore need to do something to ensure that those children have the opportunity of education and are safe.

Perhaps I can help the noble Lord. I am on the Social Mobility Policy Committee. As part of the evidence gathering process, we went to Blackpool, where we met with the Department for Work and Pensions, which has a database on many children who are being home-schooled because they are in receipt of benefits. Indeed, a lot of the parents who have been mentioned today, who are not particularly well suited to home education, also claim benefits. If the Department for Education and DWP could communicate with one another, we could get to these people via the benefits system.

I thank the noble Lord for that point; I am sure that the Minister is listening and learning. Again, I hope that, between Committee and Report, we can be sure that what we legislate for will be workable, clear and as unbureaucratic as it can be. Finally, I will deal with the point that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, made at the very beginning made about flexi-learning. I have some slight experience with that, because, as I think I have mentioned before in your Lordships’ House, I had a pupil who was school-phobic; he literally would not come into school. His mum was a nurse and did not have the opportunity to home-educate, so we home-educated for her. Gradually, by that home education—which, I suppose, was a type of flexi-learning—we were able to bring the boy back into school. I hope that, at the end of debating these many amendments, the most important thing will be that we ensure that we know where every child is, that every child is learning and that every child is safe.

My Lords, I, too, thank the Minister for the clarity she brought with her earlier remarks. She set out the objectives of the Government and her commitment, on behalf of colleagues in the department, to work with Peers across the House—it looks as though that will be in August—to explore their concerns and, where possible, to address them. I also thank my noble friend Lord Lucas for the constructive tone of his opening remarks. The principle of having a register for children not in school has long held cross-party support and, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, described, there are very different groups of children who are educated at home. What the debate has started to explore is that, in our eagerness to safeguard vulnerable children, which we must try to do well, and to support those children who have struggled in mainstream school, we must also make every effort not to stigmatise, or to treat with suspicion, parents who make a positive choice to home-educate their children. This group and many of the others which follow highlight the complexity of creating a home-schooling register and the multiplicity of details that need to be considered. I note that Amendments 202C, 227, 227A and 286 and the opposition to Clause 31 standing part of the Bill are all probing, and I look forward to the Minister’s clarifications. I thought, unsurprisingly, that my noble friend Lord Frost made some very valid points on the risk of duplication of supervision and safeguarding in relation to children who are flexi-schooled. On the individual amendments, there are two in this group which we support: Amendment 226 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Meston, and Amendment 279 in the name of my noble friends Lord Nash and Lord Agnew. With regard to children missing education and Amendment 226, most people would be surprised if it was not already a duty to inform the court if proceedings relating to the welfare of the child were under way and that child was not in school. It seems to me highly relevant information for the court to take into consideration, since there is a lot more risk attached to a child who is classified as missing education as opposed to a child who is electively home-educated. I am not sure about the practicality of consistent arrangements to address persistent non-attendance or irregular attendance, as the noble Lord’s amendment sets out, but I absolutely support the spirit of his amendment that the family courts should be made aware of the child’s situation and the risks that accompany it. Amendment 279 in the names of my noble friends Lord Nash and Lord Agnew raised the important point of what a local authority can do if it has concerns that a child is not receiving a suitable education or, indeed, any real education at all. I hope that the Government have thought about this and have a plan for it. There is a great deal of detail in new Section 436C in Clause 31 of the Bill, but nothing about the actual education that a child receives, just the time spent and with whom. On Amendment 233A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, I remember very well the meeting with a group of home-educators—in fact, I look below Bar and there they are again, in the same place as last time; it is like Groundhog Day. The amendment would remove new Section 436C, which defines in detail the content and process for maintaining the proposed children not in school registers. While I agree with the noble Lord that the drafting appears unnecessarily detailed and potentially intrusive, it is important to have clarity about what will be recorded and how it will be kept up to date. I also cannot support my noble friend Lord Lucas’s opposition to Clause 31 standing part of the Bill, although I appreciate that this was designed to give the House a chance to explore the principles that the Government intend to follow, which we have heard from the Minister. My noble friend will remember that, in the 2022 Schools Bill, we were very clear that a register for children not in school was necessary. I think the current Government have improved on our original proposal in one way, with the increased focus on safeguarding in Clause 30—although, as I said in relation to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, I regret the extent of detail that is required in the Bill. Of course, we will probe in subsequent groups the balance between the clear right of parents to educate their children at home and the right of a child to receive a suitable education, but the principle of a local authority register for children not in school has very broad support. My understanding is that the remaining amendments in this group are also all probing amendments. I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

My Lords, as we have heard, this group of amendments relates to the purpose and scope of children not in school registers. As the first group in consideration of these clauses, it has, rightly, raised some broad issues of principle as well, so I will speak for slightly longer than I will, I hope, on subsequent groups to put some of the important principles on the record and, I hope, to begin to allay some of the concerns expressed. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for the important points he raised. I want to address the principal points, as I say, before turning to other noble Lords’ amendments in this grouping. During today’s debate, we will hear much about parents’ rights, so I want to be clear up front again that parents already have and will continue to have a right to home-educate their children, in line with their preferences, values or religious beliefs. On some of the specific points that the noble Lord raised, we will give further consideration in Clause 36 to the nature of the places in which children are educated and whether they should be further inspected and regulated. The noble Lord is right that we are attempting here to make sure that we know where children are and that they are seen. It is not about preventing them being educated elsewhere than in schools or necessarily seeing that as a risk. It is important that we do not, as some noble Lords have suggested, view the register as a statement that there is something illegitimate in the choices made by many parents to educate their children. It is about ensuring that every child, however, is seen. It is also important that we do not lose sight of parents’ responsibilities and children’s rights. The noble Lords, Lord Addington and Lord Nash, made this point very well. Parental rights are not absolute. They must be able to be evidence to local authorities that education is suitable. That is the existing position and the Bill does not change it. Children not in school registers will help ensure that children’s right to a safe, suitable education is protected. It is the Government’s ambition that no child falls through the gaps in this respect. The information that we are asking parents to provide for the registers is underpinned by that very singular goal. To be absolutely clear, the registers are not intended to drive a wedge between local authorities and parents. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and other noble Lords that positive engagement between parents and local authorities is essential. I also recognise the concerns of noble Lords that we are careful about the burdens and the process for gathering and recording information for the register. This is an area where looking at it in more detail with officials in my department may well help provide some assurance to noble Lords. Information recorded on registers and shared with the department could increase transparency and accountability; for example, by improving our understanding of reasons for home education and local authority practices. Why people choose to home-educate and accountability for local authorities are both important. I understand that data protection is a concern for many and we take it very seriously, including our data protection obligations. We are committed to high standards of information security, privacy and transparency. All data will be processed only for a specific purpose, which in this case is regarding a child’s education, welfare or safeguarding. Local authorities will also be subject to the UK GDPR as the domain data controllers. We will talk in more detail about the nature of the information collected and its use in some later groups. I will now move on to address in more detail other points that have been raised by noble Lords, beginning with Amendment 226, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Meston. Tackling persistent absence and ensuring that we can trace and support children who are identified as missing school due to persistent absence is a very important part of our mission to break down the barriers to opportunity. I thank the noble Lord for raising this important issue. However, it is not necessary to set up a new system to track and trace these children. Schools are already required to return the information outlined in the noble Lord’s amendment to their local authority. Schools are also required to share information on attendance with the Secretary of State through the school census and the department’s daily attendance data collection. As outlined in the department’s statutory guidance Working Together to Improve School Attendance, local authorities are expected to use this information to identify attendance problems and to take appropriate action. Expectations include facilitating support for families where that is required, such as in the family courts.

15:30:00

Amendments 227 and 227A, tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Lucas and Lord Frost, seek to clarify which children are eligible for inclusion on the registers. Section 436B does set out which children are eligible. This includes children not on a school roll, including children in receipt of legitimate home education and those in unsuitable education. However, registers will also include children who are on a school roll but receive some or all of their education not in school—the flexi-schooling arrangements that noble Lords have referenced. There are strong arguments for including children in circumstances where they have flexi-schooling arrangements or attend non-school alternative provisions. In these cases, while the school has some oversight of the child’s education, it does not have full oversight: in other words, the child is not necessarily seen in those parts of their education that are not carried out in school. It is important that there is oversight to ensure that the child is receiving an education that is suitable overall. It is right that they be included on local authority children not in school registers.

On the point, however, about Clause 30 and the need for consent, I am not sure whether the noble Lord, Lord Frost, meant this, but he gave the impression that every parent needs consent to home-school their child. That is not the case. The consent provisions in this legislation relate to specific children who are particularly vulnerable or are likely to have specific needs. These provisions in Clause 30 relating to consent do not prohibit flexi-schooling arrangements. However, schools should agree in those circumstances to a flexi-schooling arrangement only where the child’s parents need consent to withdraw them from school, in particularly exceptional circumstances. We will—

I am sorry to interrupt the Minister, but is it not the case that if a determined local authority objects to home-schooling, they could start a process of investigating a family under these powers and therefore, technically, the family would be under investigation and could be refused—and all parents could theoretically be prevented from doing so?

No, and we will come to that in detail. The Section 47 provision, the child protection inquiries, would require evidence of significant harm to the child. It is not the case, as we have identified, that many parents who are home-educating would get anywhere near that sort of threshold. Nor would local authorities have any incentive to do that. These provisions do not prohibit flexi-schooling arrangements. However, schools should agree to a flexi-schooling arrangement only in exceptional circumstances. We will update guidance to make this clear. In later groups we will be talking in more detail about the provisions around the consent process. I turn to Amendment 286 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. This is a probing amendment which would remove an exemption on the parental duty to provide information for registers. To be clear, the proposed exemption relates to children whose education is provided under alternative provision arrangements when special educational provision other than in schools is in place or where arrangements have been made by the proprietor of the school that the child is attending. These children may be in scope of the children not in school registers, but the local authority will already hold this information, so there is no need for a duty to provide information that rests with the parents in those cases. Amendment 233A, tabled by my noble friend Lord Hacking, aims to push on what mandatory information local authority registers should contain. The only information required to be held on registers is that which is easily available to parents or obtainable by local authorities, and that is important for ascertaining the suitability of education and the safety of the child—such as the child’s name, their date of birth, address and details of education provided by the parent and others. We will talk on later groups about the way in which that information should be provided and the ease with which I hope it can be provided. I turn now to Amendment 279, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Nash, who made a strong case for the provisions in this legislation. His amendment aims to give local authorities the right to inspect the educational materials used by home educators and to view work that that child produces. Local authorities must consider a range of factors when assessing the suitability of a child’s education. One example of how they may conduct their inquiries into suitability is to request evidence of work samples. This position was confirmed in the Portsmouth judicial review case in 2021. If the local authority is not satisfied that the education is suitable based on the information received, it must usually serve a school attendance order, which requires the child to be enrolled at a school. I turn to the Clause 31 stand part notice tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. I hope the noble Lord was satisfied by my first speech on this group but, to summarise succinctly, we need an effective registration system so that local authorities can identify all children not in school and ensure that they are receiving suitable education and are safe. This is what Clause 31 will achieve. The stand part notice tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, seeks to remove Clause 34 from the Bill. Clause 34 allows for statutory guidance to be provided to local authorities on how they should carry out their new duties in relation to the school attendance order process and children not in school registers. This guidance will provide local authorities with advice on how to exercise their new powers and responsibilities proportionately and consistently. For example, we would expect it to include further advice on how local authorities should request and conduct home visits. As part of the implementation of the Bill, we will consult on the guidance to ensure that we hear from stakeholders that the measures will have an impact. It is necessary that the guidance is statutory to help ensure compliance with the advice within it. There will be considerable opportunity for further engagement on the details of that; the House will have the opportunity to consider it, because it will be subject to the affirmative resolution process. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox, made points on why all children need to be included on registers. To reiterate, we agree that home education is not in itself a safeguarding risk, but it can mean that children slip under the radar of the services that are there to protect them. Our consent measures are a proportionate solution which, as I have said, focuses on the small but important group of children for whom there are concerns about actual or likely significant harm. We will further discuss these issues later. The registers are about helping local authorities to discharge their existing duties to ensure that children are receiving a safe and suitable education. Finally, with respect to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Humphreys, about the child rights impact and the relationship with Wales, there is, to be clear, a child rights impact assessment produced by the Government for this piece of legislation, but Wales wanted to produce its own. That is the reason for the situation that the noble Baroness outlined. For the reasons that I have outlined, and given the extensive discussions we have had as a forerunner for the further discussions that we will have, I hope that noble Lords will feel able not to press their amendments or stand part notices.

My Lords, if I might pick up the Minister on a couple of small issues, could she first confirm to the House that we will see a form of registration that will include every child? I thought that that was where we were going in Clause 4. She seemed to be talking about a register that includes only bits and pieces. In order for the local authority to know that it is not missing a child, can it use the provisions in Clause 4 and whatever comes out of that to connect to, as my noble friend said, what is going on in the benefits system and the NHS, in order to know that every child is in the system somewhere and to pick up cases where children are not being registered and seen? Secondly, when it comes to flexi-schooling, is not the school absolutely in the best position to evaluate whether a child is receiving a proper education as a whole? A school has the power to discontinue flexi-schooling if that is not the case. Why do we want to insert a local authority official into a process when the school is in much the best place to take those decisions?

If I have understood the noble Lord’s first point, it relates to whether the information-sharing provisions within this legislation will support the ability of local authorities to be able to track, so that they can ensure that children do not fall through the gaps. Of course that would be the case, but that in itself does not remove the requirement to ensure that, as he said, local authorities have information about where all children are receiving their education. The noble Lord is right that the intention of these clauses is that, obviously, if a child is receiving their education in school, it is clear and they are seen, but if they are not receiving their education in school for whatever reason, it is important that they are seen. The intention is that those are the children who should be included in the register of children not in school. I take the noble Lord’s point about flexi-schooling, but it is possible to envisage, as I suggested, models of flexi-schooling where children are receiving part of their schooling at a school where they are registered and on the roll but are not receiving all of their schooling there. Therefore, the explanation of why they should be included in the register of children not in school is in order to have sight of the other part of their schooling. The other point that I made was that that would not necessarily require parents to provide additional information, because it may well be that the information about where that education provision is happening is known by the school. There is a range of different flexi-schooling arrangements and it is important that, in line with the helpful principle that the noble Lord set out at the beginning, we are able to see children and to see the education that they are receiving.

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords who have spoken in this discussion. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, for her support on the flexi-schooling amendments and the Minister for her response and her comprehensive statement earlier in the debate, which was helpful. The brief discussion that we have just had on flexi-schooling illustrates exactly the sort of point that is perhaps better discussed in one of those August meetings than now on the Floor of your Lordships’ House. I will not detain noble Lords further. We have had a much fuller debate than perhaps I expected and I might have spoken at greater length at the start if I had known quite how large a debate we would have. I take this opportunity nevertheless to associate myself with the comments of my noble friends Lord Lucas and Lord Wei on the principles of this discussion.

15:45:00

I will make two points briefly before we finish. One I will make with great delicacy because it is such a horrific case. The case of Sara Sharif has been alluded to on a couple of occasions in the discussion. As horrible as that case is, we should use great discretion before we use it to support particular aspects of the discussion that we are having on home-schooling. Poor Sara Sharif was failed by virtually every state agency that she came into contact with and to me it illustrates that, however strong your rules are, they can fail if they are badly applied. We should be careful about such cases allowing us to make bad law.

Secondly and more broadly, as I said at the start, we need to show some humility about what can be done with education legislation and not slip into the belief that every problem can be solved by a new legislative regime. We need to remember that legislation has unintended consequences.

Those points will be relevant to many of the groups that we are about to discuss. I am sure that we will come back to all this and I will stop here. We need to get on with the important and very welcome task of banning Palestine Action shortly. So, on that note, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 202C withdrawn.

Amendment 203 had been withdrawn from the Marshalled List.

House resumed. Committee to begin again not before 4.33 pm.