My speech to the House on day 9 of committee stage of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill:

I declare an interest as a grandmother of three home-educated children. My experience tells me that school is not suitable for all children. Not all children can find a suitable school and you do not need to be wealthy to create a very rich educational learning environment out of school.

I, like many Lords, have had quite a lot of emails on this topic and I sympathise strongly with parents and grandparents of children with neuro diversities. Home education can take on myriad forms that are far removed from the classroom but are, none the less, educational, informative and far better suited to neurodiverse minds. Neurodivergent children are often repeatedly failed by the state school system, but the truth is that every child deserves a tailored education. Parents with the time and inclination to provide their children’s education know that no teacher can possibly have their child’s interest as much at heart as they do.

This Bill reads as if school is the safest, best place for all children to be. For many, that is simply not true. In fact, for many children school is a hostile environment. By making home education harder for parents, we are discouraging them from doing what is best for their child and for many others. Home educators give up their working lives to improve the lives of their children; to ask them now to continuously justify that choice and to make it even harder by adding bureaucratic hoops and hurdles is not in the best interests of all these children. You do not have to specifically disallow home education to make it unworkable, and home educators believe that this register will place an unworkable administrative burden on families.

I also believe that there is an inaccurate conflation of home education with a safeguarding risk. Evidence shows that children at risk are usually already known to social services, home education is not the source of that risk. Subjecting home educators to intrusive monitoring is neither justifiable nor helpful. We need to improve children’s social care and to support action, not just documentation, for those children who are at risk, but we do not need another diversion targeting huge swathes of decent people and ignoring those in real need.

Setting up a register for children whose parents are not doing anything illegal or dangerous, requiring the collection of a significant volume of personal, sensitive and often impractical information from home-education families, is discriminatory. We should be supporting people to home-educate their children, not criminalising them.

My amendments so far have tried not to put further administrative burdens on families who home-school. It can be vast, complicated and very difficult for them to achieve. However, my Amendment 315 follows on very nicely from the contribution from Lord Crisp, because, at the moment, there are huge financial pressures on local councils. We know that local authorities are struggling. I am told that the special educational needs and disabilities system is creaking at the seams—some people are using the words “breaking point”. So the premise that local authorities are best placed to judge the needs of any child, especially over and above their own families, is perhaps foolish, because local authorities vary enormously in expertise and understanding of alternative education approaches.

Officers who visit families might be very unfamiliar with the sort of experience they see. They may be unfamiliar with home education and special educational needs, and they may not know much about child development. They might make subjective and perhaps inconsistent judgments about the family they are seeing and might penalise families who are supplying excellent education simply because it does not look like “school”.

It is quite important that we understand that local authorities have to exercise extremely difficult judgment. Putting a further burden on families is really unwise.

There are quite a lot of tweaks in this section, which suggests that it is perhaps not quite right and that it needs to be rewritten in some ways.

We heard from Lord Storey, just now that school is a very safe place, but I am sure he is well aware that school is not a safe place for everybody. Young people get bullied and it can be extremely distressing for some children, specifically if they have prior trauma, special educational needs or unmet needs, or have never attended school. There are all sorts of people for whom school is not the best and safest environment. I am trying to protect families who have already indicated that school is not meeting their child’s needs.

I hope we understand that local authorities sometimes judge in a completely erroneous way what families are doing with home education. We have discussed this, but I think Clause 32 is perhaps not fit for purpose.

Read the complete debate here