Children, Schools and Families Bill

Public Bill Committee, 4 February 2010.

Clause 14

Janet Anderson (Labour, Rossendale and Darwen)

I remind the Committee that with this we are discussing the following: amendment 162, in clause 14, page 15, line 31, leave out ‘15’ and insert ‘14’.

Amendment 163, in clause 14, page 15, line 33, leave out ‘and relationships’.

Amendment 164, in clause 14, page 15, line 34, after ‘school’, insert

‘if that parent has met with the head teacher of the school or the relevant teacher to discuss their concerns and establish the nature of what is to be taught’.

Amendment 65, in clause 14, page 15, line 35, leave out from ‘withdrawn’ to end of line 36.

Amendment 64, in clause 14, page 15, line 36, leave out ‘15’ and insert ‘16’.

Amendment 112, in clause 14, page 15, line 36, leave out ‘15’ and insert ‘14’.

Amendment 195, in clause 14, page 15, line 36, after ‘15’, insert

‘unless the pupil expresses a wish to be excused from receiving such education.’.

New clause 7—Removal of exemption from sex and relationships education

‘Section 405 of the Education Act 1996 shall be omitted.’.

Before we begin our deliberations, I wish to draw the attention of hon. Members to the fact that, as Chairman, I have a duty to ensure that as much progress as possible has been made in our consideration of the Bill by the time we conclude our business at 5 pm today. I therefore urge members of the Committee to be succinct, and I shall be listening carefully to ensure that all contributions are relevant to the amendments under consideration.

Annette Brooke (Liberal Democrat, Mid Dorset and North Poole)

I belatedly welcome you to the Chair, Mrs. Anderson. We had an interesting debate up to 10 o’clock on Tuesday, in which we heard many weasel words but, in reality, nothing has changed for the Conservatives. In supporting compulsory personal, social, health and economic education, I wish to make the point that all the major children’s organisations support the provision, including the National Children’s Bureau. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children also supports it, as does UNICEF, which has provided briefings for me in the past. We should operate from such a background. There has been a strong call for the move for a long time; it is critical.

The clause allows us to deal with the opt-outs. I have tabled four amendments, two of which propose the age of 14 instead of 15. They are probing amendments to find out why the Minister favours the age of 15. There are strong arguments for making sure that all children have education about sex and relationships earlier than at the age of 15. My personal view is that there should not be opt-outs. I accept that the Government agree, but I am interested in why they favour the age of 15.

The other amendments relate to my concern that the age of 15 is late for many pupils. I suggest in amendment 163 that the curriculum for children and young people should still have a relationships part. That is important. It should cover not only sexual relationships but getting on with one another, not bullying and confidence and self-esteem. Important education centres on the whole issue of relationships.

If the opt-out remains, amendment 164 suggests that it should apply only if the parent has met the head teacher of the school or the relevant teacher to discuss their concerns and to establish the nature of what is to be taught. There are many misconceptions—sorry about that—about what sex and relationships education involves. I have received a letter from a parent begging me not to take the innocence away from their child. If I thought that such education was taking innocence away from children, would I support it? No.

The hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham challenged me on the subject of children being allowed to opt out. He needs to take on board the views of the very organisations that always ask us to put forward the rights, wishes and feelings of children. They are 100 per cent. behind this approach, particularly the Children’s Rights Alliance, which does not support an opt-out. It sees matters in terms of the rights of the child and says that the

“state has the duty to ensure children and young people receive a good, broad and balanced education”—

we have discussed that before—

“which develops their personality, talents and physical and mental ability. SRE education is part of this duty.”

It does not see sex and relationships education as any different from history, citizenship or science. No one would want to suggest that a child should have the right to withdraw from history or science; that would not fit in with the vision of the curriculum objectives. Currently, parents can withdraw their children from sex education, but not from the parts of the science curriculum that teach the biological aspects of human growth and reproduction. What nonsense. To teach children about the mechanics in the abstract and without providing the important relationships education that goes with it would be a disaster. People who argue against this are living in the past. There is no modernisation at all.

It is clear that children and young people want to receive high-quality sex and relationships education. We have already mentioned the United Kingdom Youth Parliament. The state has a duty to educate children on health. The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, which monitors Government implementation of children’s rights, including the right to express their views, is clear that all children and young people should receive good-quality, age-appropriate health education, which includes sex and relationships education. That is important.

In the England submission to the Committee on the Rights of the Child in 2008, more than 100 non-governmental organisations endorsed a report recommending that the Government remove parents’ right to withdraw children from sex and relationships education in school. The case for compulsory PSHE is well made.

Tim Loughton (Conservative, East Worthing and Shoreham)

The hon. Lady started by saying that one of her amendments was a probing amendment to find out the Government’s justification for 15. Her amendment reduces the age to 14. She has said nothing to justify why 14 rather than 13, 12 or whatever age. Will she address the reason for her amendment?

Annette Brooke (Liberal Democrat, Mid Dorset and North Poole)

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. It is pretty obvious that I am simply asking the question, “Why 15?” The easiest way to probe that was to table an amendment. I am sure that the Minister understands the reasoning behind it. “Why not 12?” is a perfectly reasonable question. There should not be an opt-out at all. I want to hear from the Minister why 15. Organisations consider this to be so important that they reached a consensus around the age of 15. I am not sure that that is right, but I know that we must get this on the curriculum. We must have high quality PSHE and sex and relationships education, in particular.

With those words, Mrs. Anderson, and bearing in mind what you said earlier, I beg to move the amendments tabled in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Yeovil.

Ken Purchase (Labour, Wolverhampton North East)

The question is, “What message are we sending out?” It is perfectly clear that there is overwhelming support in the country for properly structured, well-delivered, high quality sex and relationships education. When a poll is taken on such matters, more than 80 per cent. of people approve. They wish it to remain compulsory and on the curriculum for all children. I move that section 405 from the Education Act 1996 is removed, which would render the new clause—“Exemption from sex and relationships education”—redundant.

I understand the arguments with regard to “Why 16 or 15?” “Why 35?”, as I mentioned the other day. There is no logic in any of the answers. The other day, we had an exchange about the works of Piaget, the child psychologist. He identified differences between the maturation rates of boys and girls and between each boy and girl. We know that girls in particular are entering puberty at an earlier age. Many girls need help and often that is not forthcoming.

The argument here is not about the quality of sex education or whether it should be taught—we all agree on those things—but about the messages we are sending out. I share the view of my hon. Friend the Minister for Europe that:

“Britain has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Western Europe and the second highest, after the USA, in the world. Depressingly, the map of teenage pregnancy is the map of British deprivation.”

I have no argument with people who decide that the way in which a school delivers sex education does not suit them and so take their children elsewhere. However, in Wolverhampton and another 300 or 400 constituencies, that choice does not exist.

Tim Loughton (Conservative, East Worthing and Shoreham)

Although there are close links between deprivation and teenage pregnancy levels, it is not exclusively so. Last year or the year before, the highest increase in teenage pregnancy levels was in the royal borough of Windsor and Maidenhead—hardly a ghetto of poverty.

Ken Purchase (Labour, Wolverhampton North East)

I accept the hon. Gentleman’s point. Of course the levels can be quite random. However, when mapped across Britain, the picture is as the Minister for Europe described it last year.

The message is all important. As far as we know, only a small number of children are withdrawn from sex education; about 40 children in every 10,000. That is almost too small to measure. Why do we make this fuss? Is it really about parental choice, or is it about parental prejudice? When the matter was challenged in the European Court, there was an unequivocal ruling that it was an infringement of a child’s rights to take them out of sex education lessons.

Let me make it clear that I think it is the right of the child to withdraw from Christian prayers or those of other religions, but not to withdraw from religious education. I do not believe a parent should be able to withdraw a child from religious education. Without a good knowledge of the King James Bible, the whole world of English literature is probably closed off for many children. Education must be seen in a broad sense. There must be consensus about what should be in the curriculum. Sex education is included.

We are talking about a tiny minority of people who insist that this matter is very personal to them and that in the broad sweep of education, they must be an exception and be able to deny their children the right and opportunity to have good-quality sex education. I agree with the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole that quality is at the heart of this issue.

I believe that there is no age at which withdrawal from SRE can be justified. As Opposition Members said, why is it 15? Why should it not be 16, 19, 12 or 14? We do not include this equivocation in any other subject in the curriculum. Children in my constituency learn their sex in the playground, in dirty books and from TV. The other night in “EastEnders”, two younger people were clearly having sex in a cabin. It was aired just after 8 o’clock. These people were virtually stripped off. In my opinion, the 9 o’clock watershed is sensible and should apply.

Children are so far down the road of knowledge that it is vital that they get advice from expert teachers in the calm atmosphere of a classroom. The TUC argues that health workers should be involved so that they can support teachers who do not have the wide experience that is necessary to deliver the subject in a top-quality way. I argue that clause 14 is redundant and out of date, that it sends the wrong message, is an infringement of children’s rights and a sop to prejudice that we should not be considering in 2010.

Ann Cryer (Labour, Keighley)

I assure you, Mrs. Anderson, that I will be as brief as I can. I agree with much of what has been said, and there is no point in repeating it because we want to finish this matter.

Over the weekend, I was fortunate enough to address two meetings. One was a group of Asian women between the ages of 30 and 40 who were discussing problems with divorce, and the other was a group of people who were concerned with health matters. I took the advantage of the two gatherings to ask for people’s opinion on this clause. The view, by and large, was that those parents who wish to withdraw their children from sex and relationship lessons are very likely to be the same parents who will not broach the subject themselves at home. Therefore, their children will be completely deprived and very vulnerable. The other view was that 16 is far too old, and most thought that the age should be brought down to 12 or 13, but I will not go down that path.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

Welcome back to the Chair, Mrs. Anderson. This group of amendments deals with a parental right of withdrawal from SRE. Amendments 63, 64 and 65 put forward the argument that pupils should be excused until they attain the age of 16. Amendments 162 and 112 propose that there should be a right to withdraw up to the age of 14. Amendment 163 would substitute references to sex and relationship education with references to sex education only. Amendment 164 would qualify the parental right to withdraw their child from sex and relationship lessons by making it a requirement on parents to talk to the school about any of their concerns. Amendment 195 would give a child over the age of 15 the right to withdraw from SRE, and new clause 7 would remove a parental right completely to withdraw their child from SRE.

Late on Tuesday evening, I was very interested to hear the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham. His comments on the high rates of chlamydia and teenage pregnancy, and his acceptance of the need for good-quality PSHE and sex and relationship education were very welcome. I am sure that all parts of the Committee are in agreement on that today. Moreover, in an article in The Daily Telegraph, the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) said that we needed good sex and relationship education, so that is all very positive. I was astonished, therefore, when the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham confirmed late on Tuesday evening that Conservative policy was to retain the right of parental withdrawal for any pupil in compulsory education, and those in further education up to the age of 19, from SRE. That approach seems most illogical when we all know that the age of consent is 16. It means that 16, 17 and 18-year-olds, who can quite legally be having sex, can be withdrawn from any sex and relationship education. That is an untenable position, and it also prompts a question about the modern face of the Conservative party, because it is failing to look at the realities of life and listen to what key stakeholders, parents, young people, faith groups and the third sector are saying to us about this particular issue. It is not defensible to continue to allow parents to determine whether or not their children receive SRE potentially up to the age of 19 when the age of consent is 16.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

Will the hon. Lady tell the Committee what responsibilities parents have to enforce the duty to participate in education or training until the age of 18?

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

Just on the point of parents’ involvement, what we would say and what has been said by all members of the Committee, is that we are absolutely clear that parents have a positive role to play with their children and young people not only in sex and relationship education, but generally in the whole of area of PSHE, and that they should make sure that the values relating to the importance of education are instilled in young people. We want children and young people to reach their full potential in education, so parents absolutely have that role to play.

I will come on to talk about why the Government initially took the view that we should accept Sir Alasdair Macdonald’s recommendations in full. I know that, on Tuesday night, the hon. Gentleman wanted a response to that particular issue. The reason why we have changed our position is that we started to have in-depth discussions with experts and interested parties, including representatives of faith groups. We looked at research findings from samples of parents and adults who were concerned about that issue, and we concluded that it was right to say that there should be a right of withdrawal from sex and relationship education, but only to the age of 15.

We believe that is right because it is balanced, deliverable and legally enforceable, and it maintains the right of that small number of parents who wish to exercise the right of withdrawal. We also believe that setting the age limit at 15 offers the best chance of building a strong consensus on the subject. We have consulted with Sir Alasdair on that decision and he has supported it as a way forward. The trend in English law over the past 20 to 30 years has been to afford young people the right to make decisions for themselves, when they have the maturity to understand the implications of those decisions. That sits very well with international law and the development of human rights law.

The measure would bring together and balance the range of perspectives on an important and sensitive issue. The age of 15 is an age that key stakeholders—parents, professionals, young people and most faith groups—accept as a sensible compromise. That means that every young person will receive a minimum of one year’s sex and relationship education before they reach the age of 16. Also, those parents who wish to withdraw their children from sex and relationships education will be able to see that their child is withdrawn throughout primary school and well into their child’s teenage years.

I think that most 15-year-old children have already been introduced to the issues around sex and relationships through their friends and the media. My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East talked a few moments ago about what was on the TV this week. Young people at 15 are well aware of such issues, so it is vital that all children have access to this education for that final year in school.

Ken Purchase (Labour, Wolverhampton North East)

This 15 business defies logic. Although my hon. Friend wants to argue that it is a matter of balance and we can agree it, we are agreeing with people who are way off the pace with these matters. I used the illustration of the TV soap for the effect of pointing out what was on TV at 8 o’clock in the evening. The truth is that the points she makes about a playground education, the TV and so on are the very reason why compromise on the matter is foolish, childish and not grown-up politics. Such an approach completely fails to recognise the realities of today. I cannot go into that now because I know the Chairman wants to move on, but the fact is trying to decide between 12, 15 and 19 is a ludicrous position. There is no logic, sense or reality to that. We get to a point in our lives when we ought to recognise for once that it is time to stop the hypocrisy and get on with a proper job.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

I note my hon. Friend’s passion on the subject. We are very much talking about grown-up politics and making sure that we get compulsory sex and relationship education into our schools. We have to accept that a small number of parents want to retain the right to withdraw. If we are going to have the bigger prize of making sure of at least one year of compulsory sex and relationship education, for grown-up politics we have to agree the compromise. That is my answer, but my hon. Friend makes a persuasive case and a lot of hon. Members agree with him.

In answer to the question asked by hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole, the view is that 14 is a little too young and 16 would mean that some young people received no sex and relationship education before they reached the age at which they are legally able to have sex. Having talked to key stakeholders—parents, faith groups—14 is not something that we can get agreement on, but we can with 15.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

The Minister says that 14 is too young. On what basis is 14 too young?

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

What I have been trying to express throughout is that we have reached the age of 15 as a compromise, balancing different clear views: no right of withdrawal or keeping the age at 19. We think 15 is the compromise that the majority of people can coalesce around and say, “That’s workable, we are willing to accept that.” Fourteen was not an age that the majority of stakeholders, parents and faith groups were willing to accept. For the sake of grown-up politics, it is much more important to get the compromise of 15 on to the statute books than not to have anything at all or, as the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham would like, to keep the age at 19, which is completely ridiculous.

The amendment to give a young person over the age of 15 the right to be excused from SRE if they express such a wish would give a child a right of veto. That would also give the right of veto over the wishes of the vast majority of parents who support the teaching of sex and relationship education in schools. The right of withdrawal would effectively pass from the parent to the child once they reached the age of 15. The starting point has to be the extreme importance of pupils receiving at least some of that education about sex and relationships to keep them safe from harm and provide them with essential health information.

Martin Linton (Labour, Battersea)

May I ask the Minister about the 0.04 per cent. of parents who withdraw their children from sex and relationship education? Is that done on any promise that they will provide their children with sex and relationship education? If so, is there any check on whether they have done so or not? After all, when parents withdraw their children from school education, as we shall hear in the clauses on home education, there is strict control on whether they provide the equivalent.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

I understand that there is not.

I want to move on to the issue about 15-year-olds being able to decide for themselves. We do not think that we should pass that right to a 15-year-old. We are concerned that from no other area of the national curriculum can a pupil withdraw themselves. I agree with the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole. Although saying that a 15-year-old should be able to decide on withdrawal for themselves is superficially attractive, it is difficult to determine whether that is the wish of the young person or whether they are saying what their parents want them to say.

Caroline Flint (Labour, Don Valley)

I, like other colleagues on Committee, have some sympathy with the view about children and young people continuing to have access at whatever age to sex and relationship education. Can the Minister confirm that we are not in an ideal world? If we are to have the chance to put sex and relationship education on the statute book as a compulsory part of the curriculum, even with the proviso of 15, unfortunately we sometimes have to have trade-offs in the real world to move forward. I would hate for us and the other place—which personally I voted to abolish some years ago—to lose the opportunity to stop it getting on to the statute books.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

My right hon. Friend makes a valid contribution to the debate, about making the measure through with agreement.

We believe that the Liberal Democrat amendment about requiring parents to talk to the school first, if they are concerned and want to withdraw their child from SRE, is too much of a burden. There would be pressure on parents to debate and propose arguments in an inappropriate way. We think that schools should have an ongoing dialogue with parents about SRE, and it would not be appropriate to accept the amendment.

New clause 7 was tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East. He spoke to it passionately and persuasively, and we have some sympathy with the new clause, in as much as we would prefer no parent to withdraw their child from SRE. However, as I have been saying throughout my speech, we recognise that, for some parents, the teaching of SRE can conflict with their sincerely held views and religious beliefs. As a consequence, we believe that we should preserve the right, but with the limit at age 15.

I urge the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham to withdraw his amendment.

Tim Loughton (Conservative, East Worthing and Shoreham)

We have had an interesting debate, both on Tuesday and tonight—[Interruption.] This morning; it seems to have been going on for so long.

Returning to where we started this debate, I absolutely want to see better quality sex and relationships education in and out of our schools, with more imaginative ways of getting the message across to children and young people so that they will listen to, understand and act on it. I spent a fascinating fact-finding day working in CosmoGirl magazine before it went out of business. The problems page dealt with amazingly serious and distressing problems about sex and other things from young girls, which were handled intelligently by the magazine. A number of other magazines handle such problems intelligently too, despite some of the criticism that they get for talking about sex.

The problem is that there is no equivalent for teenage boys. Magazines such as Zoo and Nuts are all about fast cars and fast women, rather than responsible sex and relationship advice. There is a huge vacuum out there, particularly for young boys. We need to consider how we get the message across in an environment in which boys will listen and take note, so we desperately need better quality sex and relationships education in whatever forum we can have it. The quality is absolutely key. As I pointed out when I challenged the Minister before, nothing that she has said, and nothing contained in the arrangements, guarantees an improvement in quality. The second consideration is that SRE should not compete with the already highly stretched curriculum time within our schools, thus having a diluting effect on other subjects. The third consideration is about parental choice.

I agreed with much of what the hon. Member for Wolverhampton, North-East said. Interestingly, both this week’s episodes of “EastEnders” so far have involved sex scenes between various characters in Portacabins and bathrooms—[Interruption.] I have been a devotee of “EastEnders” ever since the first episode. What is interesting is the big impression that soaps such as “EastEnders”, of which I am a big fan, can make, particularly on young people. Some of the messages that they teach can be a great force for good. Storylines on “EastEnders” have included children in care, gay relations and HIV, which are tremendously educational for and influential on people who watch it.

However, if one looks at the relationships within “EastEnders”, one can hardly count the number of children living in stable families with married parents—it is not the norm in that soap. There have been a disproportionate number of children born to teenage or single mothers compared with the rest of the population, and that can create the impression that that is the way things are done.

I am not criticising that particular programme. What I am saying is that that programme, similar soaps and the media have huge influences on our young people. If they run responsible messages, that can be good, but when they do not run responsible messages, and if there is a skewed image society, that can give rise to some of the copycat behaviour that we see.

A while ago, when I visited a school not far from me in a deprived area of Brighton, a teacher made the interesting comment that because the soap opera of choice in that area was mostly “EastEnders”, teachers knew the storyline because it could reflect the way in which parents would respond to the teachers. The programme is hugely influential.

We must ensure that kids are getting the right message in a way that they will listen to. However, taking away parental choice is not the way to do that. I thought that it was rather patronising of the Minister to say that parents have a big and positive role to play in their children’s life. Parents have the biggest and the most responsible role to play. They are the most important people in the lives of their children. This approach takes away the rights and choices of those parents to do what they think is best by their children, without taking away any of the responsibilities—it still loads those responsibilities on them. I have no problem about teaching sex and relationships education to children in school with the safeguards that I have mentioned, and particularly with the safeguard of parental choice and the ability to withdraw their children from it.

Why is that a problem? As we have seen, the only existing statistical evidence shows that a tiny number— 0.04 per cent.—are affected, which represents fewer than 3,000 children in this country. There is no evidence that those children are more susceptible to immature sexual relationships or sexually transmitted diseases than those who have sex and relationships education. That might or might not be the case, but there is no evidence for it. As we heard from Gill Frances, one of our witnesses, the whole age thing is a complete red herring. I would like good quality sex and relationships education that is well communicated to kids. Its purpose should be well communicated and consulted on with the parents so that that 0.04 per cent. of children becomes even lower without having to introduce compulsion.

Martin Linton (Labour, Battersea)

May I ask the hon. Gentleman the same question that I asked the Minister? Should there be any check on whether the small group of parents who withdraw their children from sex and relationships education provide that education themselves? Is it enough to let them watch “EastEnders”?

Tim Loughton (Conservative, East Worthing and Shoreham)

It is not enough to let them watch “EastEnders”, but I would like to see some empirical evidence from a survey of the parents of those 3,000 children. If that showed that those 3,000 children had a much higher tendency to teenage pregnancy or everything else that we are trying to avoid—[Interruption.] Hold on. If that was the case, there would be a stronger case for amending the law. However, no empirical evidence exists, and no evidence has been put forward by the Government to support making this change. No convincing case has been made by the Minister as to why the Macdonald report has gone out of the window nine months on.

Ann Cryer (Labour, Keighley)

I want to point out briefly that, in going along this path, the Opposition are withdrawing the rights of children. Some of those children will be vulnerable. As I said earlier, the parents who withdraw children from these classes are likely to be the very parents who will not discuss such matters with their children. Therefore, they will be going out into the world without any enlightened knowledge.

Tim Loughton (Conservative, East Worthing and Shoreham)

Well, by the same token, there is no evidence to back up the hon. Lady’s claim. There is no evidence to suggest that the 3,000 children involved are not acting much more sexually responsibly than those who are left to have the compulsory lessons in school. We need legislation that is based on empirical evidence, particularly in these sensitive areas, and the Minister has failed to produce that.

Caroline Flintrose—

Martin Lintonrose—

Tim Loughton (Conservative, East Worthing and Shoreham)

We do not want to carry on the debate for too long, but I shall give way two more times.

Martin Linton (Labour, Battersea)

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, but is he not waiting for research that cannot be conducted? Are the names of the 3,000 parents who withdraw their children not protected by the Data Protection Act? Is it not impossible to conduct the research that he thinks would be necessary?

Tim Loughton (Conservative, East Worthing and Shoreham)

In which case the status quo should be kept. Until it can be shown that there is a problem that would be undermined by not allowing parents the right of choice about whether their children remain, the legislation should not be changed.

We all want to achieve what I set out at the beginning: much better quality sex and relationships education. We think that can be done without removing the rights of parents, and that more children could be involved and exposed to higher quality sex and relationships education without making it a compulsory subject. Making it compulsory has knock-on effects and potentially undermines the relationship—I cited quotes about this—between parents, communities and schools, which have no choice about how this is taught to their children.

Caroline Flint (Labour, Don Valley)

Obviously the debate always comes back to the point that the issue is about having sex. For those young people who have withdrawn from sex education, it is not necessarily about whether they are having sex or not, but about giving them information to assert themselves at some point in their young adulthood with knowledge that is non-biased and helps them to make choices. It is about talking about their rights in marriage, domestic violence and other issues. We have a terrible problem with discussing sex and relationships in this country, but that is what this matter is about. If the Dutch or people from other countries with far more successful outcomes on the issue were looking at us, they would think we were mad.

The hon. Gentleman talks about quality, but he does not will the means. What does he say to all the children’s charities that think that making this area of education statutory will, in some small way, help to raise the quality levels and consistency of what needs to be delivered for our children?

Tim Loughton (Conservative, East Worthing and Shoreham)

If that were the case, there would be a stronger reason for these changes, but the right hon. Lady and her hon. Friends have not made the case for how the proposal will automatically lead to better quality. The reason we are talking purely about sex is because we are on clause 14, which is purely about sex and relationships education. We discussed the merits of the other elements of PSHE in our consideration of earlier clauses. I wholly agree with the points that the right hon. Lady makes. The subject should be taught in schools. It is being taught in schools, and it needs to be taught better. However, there is no need to make this so prescriptive and compulsory.

We will not reach an agreement on the proposal but, before we get to the debate on Report, we need the Minister to make a more convincing case for why she is going to take away the rights of many parents, in relation to whom there is no empirical evidence to suggest there is a problem. How will she deal with the subject of quality, because she has not done so by purely describing the mechanics of how the subject will have a different status within schools? How will it fit with the other pressures on the curriculum, and why has the arbitrary figure of 15 been plucked out of nowhere? I do not think there should be any such figure.

The right hon. Member for Don Valley accused us of undermining children’s rights, but one of our probing amendments refers to giving extra rights to children to make that choice. That might be workable or not, but we cannot be accused of doing one thing when we are trying to do exactly the opposite. The Liberal Democrats have not made a cogent case for why the age should be 14. We should do away with the reference to age, which is why we have said all the time that there must be a compulsory aspect. However, there should be a safeguard so that a tiny and, hopefully, diminishing number of parents can opt out their children when they have a particular case and want to do so. If we then concentrate on the quality, that would get the message across more effectively to a broader number of people without undermining the relationship between parents, the communities and their schools, which I fear the clause will do.

I do not want to press the amendment to a Division at this stage because we need to move on to other important matters. However, I make a plea for the Minister to do more homework and to prepare a much more cogent case before we get to the debate on Report, if she wants there to be such a big change to the status quo that has been in place for many years. For 13 years under her Government, it was perfectly tenable for parents apparently to have the choice to remove their children from sex and relationships education. She needs to make the case why—13 years on, and after an expert report that disagrees with her—now and only now she thinks that all that should be changed. That case has not been made, although I hope that it will be on Report. In the meantime, however, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

On a point of order, Mrs. Anderson. I do not want to detain the Committee, given how much we have to do, but can I raise one issue of concern with you? In a spirit of helpfulness on 28 January the Minister raised on a point of order a correction of some statements that he had made to the Committee that morning, about the powers of the ombudsman to award financial compensation.

The Committee will be aware that we have now received a letter, which I have only this morning seen, from the local government ombudsman, saying that in his view the corrected information that the Minister supplied us with was wrong. I am concerned that people who read the record of the sittings may draw the wrong conclusions from the Minister’s point of order. Have you, Mrs. Anderson, received any request to correct the record?

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

Further to that point of order, Mrs. Anderson. It may be helpful if I clarify matters.

I have of course, seen the letter sent by the local government ombudsman, Tony Redmond, to the Committee on 2 February, to which the hon. Gentleman referred. I think it right to say immediately that the essential point on which we agree is that neither a school governing body nor a local authority can be compelled to pay financial compensation to a parent or pupil as a result of a complaint to the LGO under the guarantees. That was the point that the hon. Member for Yeovil was concerned about during our exchanges on this point on Tuesday 28 January.

Both the Apprenticeships, Skills, Children and Learning Act 2009 and the Local Government Act 1974 require schools or local authorities, as appropriate, to decide whether to make a financial payment to a complainant after considering a report or statement. That remains the position. Whether that is called a recommendation or not is something on which we can agree to differ. We are in discussion with the LGO on those matters.

Janet Anderson (Labour, Rossendale and Darwen)

Thank you. May I, before we proceed, urge members of the Committee to exercise some restraint. We have had many sedentary contributions, and background conversations. It is important that all members of the Committee can be heard.

Clause 15

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I beg to move amendment 234, in clause 15, page 16, line 20, at end add—

‘(5) The Secretary of State shall publish guidance for schools on how they should respond to applications to provide community facilities including applications about which the governing body has concerns.’.

I welcome you to the Chair, this morning, Mrs. Anderson, and thank the Minister for the statement that he made a moment ago. I do not want to detain the Committee on the clause for too long, given the other matters that we must get through. My intention, as I believe that the Conservatives do not intend to speak on the matter, is to raise both the amendment and a wider issue on the clause without the need for a stand part debate, unless you correct me and feel that it would be appropriate to deal with the two separately.

Clause 15 deals with the power of schools to provide community facilities. The clause would amend section 27 of the Education Act 2002, so as to require governing bodies in England to give consideration, at least once in every school year, to whether to use the powers to provide facilities for community use. I hope that the Minister can deal with two issues.

First, many of the representations that we have received expressed the view that it would be helpful, as set out in amendment 234, to have clear guidance. [Interruption.]

Janet Anderson (Labour, Rossendale and Darwen)

Order. I apologise to the hon. Gentleman, but I am afraid some of the background conversations are making things very difficult for the Hansard writers. I once again urge restraint on members of the Committee.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I am grateful, Mrs. Anderson.

The purpose of the amendment is to obtain clarification about whether guidance will be given to governing bodies in exercising their freedoms and responsibilities under clause 15. In particular, what guidance will they be given about dealing with applications from certain groups in the wider community, when a school might have concerns about granting them access to its facilities? Those might include extremist political parties, or other groups that promote views that lead the governing body to think it inappropriate to welcome them on to school property.

The other issue that I want to raise, Mrs. Anderson, to avoid a stand part debate, is the intention behind the clause. I should also like to put it on the record how such freedoms are to be used. In paragraph 27 of a memorandum submitted to the Committee, the NASUWT said:

“Significant caution must be exercised in taking this proposal forward. The money delegated to governing bodies is intended to ensure that they are able to undertake their core responsibilities for the provision of high quality teaching and learning”.

In other words, it is concerned that money should not be diverted from educational purposes into community and other activities.

The impact assessment says that

“schools are limited to spending their budgets on the purposes of the school.”

It goes on to say:

“The objective of this clause is to include community facilities explicitly within the definition of purposes of the school, for spending purposes”.

Interestingly, it goes on to say:

“This is to support closer partnership working between schools and to enrich provision - and thus outcomes - within an area.”

That leaves me rather unclear whether the purpose of the clause is to allow partnership working between schools, or whether it is to facilitate groups outside education using the facilities of the school for community purposes. Those are two very different things, and it might be considered appropriate to spend money on one and not another. Subsection (2), which deals with the additional flexibility that the Government want to grant, says:

“Subject to regulations under paragraph (b), subsection (3)(a) has effect as if amounts spent on providing facilities or services under section 27 of the Education Act 2002...were spent for purposes of the school.”

I find that confusing, because it appears to redefine any expenditure on community facilities as school-related expenditure. My concern, and I expect that of the NASUWT, is whether it is possible for expenditure that has nothing to do with education or school provision to be hidden by this particular amendment, which seeks to redefine more or less anything that the school is spending money on, including in the community, as for a school and educational purpose. I hope that the Minister can clarify that point.

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

Good morning, Mrs. Anderson, and good morning to the Committee. It is nice to be back here; I felt a bit strange sitting on the Bench behind. The hon. Gentleman raised a couple of very important points, but the power for governing bodies to provide community facilities is not new. In the clause, we are asking governing bodies to consider each year whether they should use the power. So the clause does not provide a new power. It simply requires them to consider whether it is appropriate for them to use the power.

Alongside that, non-statutory guidance is given to governing bodies, advising them how to use that power. It deals with some of the important issues that the hon. Gentleman raises, such as what sorts of community groups can use school facilities. It is my understanding that very little concern has been expressed about the matter to the Department, and that governing bodies have felt confident about using that power when they feel that it is appropriate. Having said that, we can look at the non-statutory guidance to ensure that it is as it should be, but we do not think that it will be necessary to make any changes with respect to that, although the amendment raises an important point.

We are trying to focus on the way in which schools are becoming a bigger part of the community. We want to draw out that purpose and say that it might include working with parent groups and other youth groups outside the traditional school environment. There is still a school purpose in trying to build aspiration within a community. Another aspect may be schools work with other schools to provide a facility. Two secondary schools half a mile apart may work together to provide a joint opportunity for young people or parents in the area that would benefit both schools. That would fit the purpose. The hon. Gentleman raises some important points, but I hope that with that—

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I am grateful to the Minister. He has, I think, been helpful, but can he give an assurance, in relation to the NASUWT representations that we have received, that this measure does not ultimately mean the diversion of money for education to non-educational purposes?

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

My last point was to be that there are of course limits on the exercise of the power to provide community facilities and those limits are already set out in legislation. The governing body cannot do anything that detracts from its core purpose of ensuring the quality and standard of education in the school.

Martin Linton (Labour, Battersea)

I am a governor of a nursery school and children’s centre and we have a budget covering both educational and community facilities, so many governors already have a budget for community facilities. Obviously, the children’s centre has to be opened up to general community use as well as the parents of pupils at the nursery school.

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

That is a helpful comment. Again, to reassure the hon. Member for Yeovil, there is a duty on the governing body to ensure that its primary function is the quality and standard of education in the school. It cannot do anything that detracts from that, so if it was spending money in a way that did, the legislation says that it should not be doing that.

We are saying that the governing body should consider whether it could use some of its budget to provide community facilities that in the broader sense of education and community, to which my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea referred, could contribute to the quality and standard of education in the school by supporting activities outside the school that would impact on what happened inside the school. With those comments, I hope that the hon. Member for Yeovil will withdraw the amendment.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I am grateful to the Minister for those reassurances and I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Clause 16

Ken Purchase (Labour, Wolverhampton North East)

I want the clause withdrawn. I shall go into a little detail, but I will try to take full note of what you have said, Mrs. Anderson. First, it is necessary to understand what we mean by a company limited by guarantee. What it does not mean is that no one ever makes any money out of it. A company limited by guarantee is not a not-for-profit organisation. Often, we find members of organisations who adopt this method—a company limited by guarantee—who say that of course they have no ability to distribute profits to shareholders, because the shareholders are limited to a share of the value of £1 each and there is no dividend payable on that share. That is what they mean by not for profit. They mean not for the profit of the shareholders, but of course we find that that is a very convenient position when we start to examine some of the salary structures involved in companies limited by guarantee.

Many housing associations, arm’s length housing companies and other organisations adopt the company limited by guarantee approach. Of itself, it is of course harmless, but it can be used in a certain way. We may find that the chief executive of a company limited by guarantee that provides services previously provided by the local authority earns more—often considerably more—than the chief executive of the local authority. It becomes a way of obfuscating a nice money-making venture.

The Government, in their wisdom—or naivety, in my opinion—propose to allow schools that want to establish academies to form companies limited by guarantee. We know what is going on. Often, people who have set up academies palm off an otherwise useless, finished, worked-out, down-at-heel executive from their company on to a school and pay his salary—it is usually a man—from school funds. That is how we get into the position we have in London, where head teachers in academies are paying themselves £200,000 a year. Recently, The Sunday Times reported that the head teachers or principals of at least 11 academies are paid more than £150,000 per annum. That is more than some directors of education who run 40, 50, 60, 70 or 100 schools. It is simply a way of putting money into the back pockets of people who would otherwise be working in education for salaries on the scale that everyone else works for.

The proposal that the

“governing body of a maintained school in England may...form, or participate in forming, a company to enter into an agreement”

is simply another way of allowing public funds to be put into private pockets. We have seen quite enough of that over the past 20 to 30 years. People have been able to enrich themselves from the public purse. Whether academies are good or bad in educational terms is not the point. The point is whether we want people to enrich themselves at the cost of taxpayers through the obfuscation of forming a company limited by guarantee. The answer has to be, “No we do not.”

Where does the money come from? I have some figures from the north of the country, which is not known for having an embarrassment of riches in education. Sir Peter Vardy writes to complain that his academies in Northumberland get about £1,000 per pupil less than his academies down the road in Middlesbrough. He quoted figures showing that the amount per pupil for Emmanuel college was £5,900 and for the King’s academy was £7,463. His complaint was that Middlesbrough received about £1,000 per pupil more. So we are talking about £8,500 per pupil.

I want to tell the Committee what grants schools that are not academies in the same area receive. Cramlington high school receives £3,628 per pupil, Astley community high school receives £3,924 per pupil and Blyth community college receives a bit more at £4,413 per pupil. None of those grants approach even the lowest amount received by the academies. That is where the academies get their money; the Government have filled up their pockets. We need to know what they are doing with the money. We do not know that any more because academies are outside the Freedom of Information Act in any event.

This proposal will allow them to obfuscate even further. The Government must think carefully. I know that the Opposition would put as many such measures in place as they could. They would probably privatise the whole education system. We all know where the so-called Swedish business is heading. We all know it is about enriching privateers at the expense of the public purse.

Mrs. Anderson, I am trying hard to obey your missive to be brief. There is so much more to say. It is an utter disgrace. I wish that my Government would recognise that the track that they have gone down in this regard, including further measures being taken now, are not in the interests of schooling generally. There is a similar measure on the next page, but I shall not bother to mention it because I think I am making the point with this one. Further assistance to academies and those who are enriching themselves is unnecessary. If academies are to play any part in the serious education of people in this country we need to get rid of this enrichment culture and get down to the brass tacks again.

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

May I say to my hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East that there is clearly a difference of view? He is right to ask all of us questions all the time and to challenge all of us all the time and, where there is a policy difference, to try to get the Government to justify what we are doing. By reiterating the points that he has made passionately, forcefully and clearly, he reminds us that those of us who think that academies have a role to play should justify that thinking. It is right that he does that.

To respond to my hon. Friend, we have tried to see that academies play a part over the past year or two. He knows that many clauses apply to academies and that they challenge us about that, saying, “Why are you making this apply to us?” We say, “Because you’re state schools.” Academies have certain freedoms, which I know that my hon. Friend disagrees with, but they are state schools, and that places certain obligations on them. However, they have a role to play in certain circumstances to try to help raise achievement, alongside other types of schools. We do not regard them as the only answer. The Opposition want every school, both secondary and primary to be an academy—the “let the market rip” approach—whereas we believe that differences in schools, and different types of schools, help raise achievement. That is a point of difference between my hon. Friend and me. We do not disagree on many things, but we disagree on this matter. I respect my hon. Friend for making that point, because he passionately wants to raise achievement.

I should like to reassure my hon. Friend on two points that he specifically raised. Academy trusts cannot make a profit, although I know that he was making a point about the diversion of funds into some of the companies, and so on, which he feels should be spent on the front line.

On my hon. Friend’s point about freedom of information, I understand that that matter is under consideration at the moment. He might be interested to know that there is discussion in the Ministry of Justice about the extension of freedom of information and whether that should include academies.

Clause 16 will give maintained school governing bodies in England the power to form an academy trust to enter into a funding agreement with the Secretary of State to establish an academy. Currently, maintained school governing bodies do not have the power to set up an academy trust directly; they must first set up a school company. The clause allows them to form an academy trust, should they wish to do so, to try to help with the general improvement in secondary education that we are seeing, and where appropriate to establish an academy, if that fits in with the general secondary school provision in a particular area.

Ken Purchase (Labour, Wolverhampton North East)

The point is that this power will allow schools to become trading entities. Telford College of Arts and Technology already does that, although under what guise I am not sure. It sells educational materials and lectures to schools in the rest of the area and makes a tidy little sum, which all goes back to Telford, where the head teacher is paid far more than the chief executive of Shropshire council, who runs the whole county. This is what happens. My hon. Friend the Minister must see that the trading-company approach to education is an “open sesame”—an open door—to those who would enrich themselves at the expense of the public. He mentions freedoms, such as they might be, but if he thinks they are so good and so essential to education, why not give them to every school?

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

Part of setting up academy trusts is about trying to share good practice. In the example he uses, the head teacher and services from one school go to another school to share that good practice and to help it develop its own good practice. Yes, this may add a cost in terms of teacher time or resources and materials, but that is not used as a profit in the traditional sense of the word. It is then reinvested into educational services either in that school or in the general educational provision.

I know that my hon. Friend and I disagree on this point. I think that academies make an important contribution to secondary school standards. I want every secondary school, whether academy, national challenge trust, local authority maintained school or whatever, to achieve the very best. We are seeking to help those governing bodies who would want to establish academy trusts to do so in a controlled and collaborative way. By sharing that experience and expertise, hopefully we can raise standards across every school.

Clause 18

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

I beg to move amendment 67, in clause 18, page 17, line 20, at beginning insert

‘Subject to the provisions of section 8(1),’.

Janet Anderson (Labour, Rossendale and Darwen)

With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment 66, in clause 18, page 17, line 24, leave out from ‘State’ to end of line 26.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

Welcome to the chair, Mrs. Anderson. I will be brief. According to the impact assessment, the policy behind the clause and the preceding clauses is to make

“it easier for maintained schools that have the right combination of educational excellence, capacity and track record and are therefore accredited to be brought in to lead school improvement interventions in weak schools through Academies, majority Trusts and federations and also to propose to establish new maintained schools.”

There appears to be some question about whether governing bodies of maintained schools already have this power to establish new schools. But the Government’s view is that they do. It would be helpful, therefore, if the Minister could expand further on whether maintained schools already have this power.

The purpose of amendment 67 is to probe this issue further and to ask how the clause ties in with the policy behind section 8(1)(b) of the Education and Inspections Act 2006. Under that provision, LEAs can publish proposals for a new school under the competition procedures of section 7 only if certain conditions prevail and only with the consent of the Secretary of State. Those conditions relate to the track record of the education authority concerned. The Minister will recall how controversial that measure was and why those safeguards were inserted into the Bill. Originally the intention was that local authorities could not propose any school under the competition rules.

The impact assessment says that since 2006 there have been 31 new school competitions, of which 11 have been won by existing schools which have been or formed part of a trust. Could the Minister expand on the details of those 11 schools? Were they schools in local education authorities with a proven track record, for example? What does he mean by maintained schools that have the right combination of educational excellence, capacity and track record? Can he define which schools will meet that threshold? Amendment 66 simply removes from the Secretary of State the ability to pass decisions over whether a school can have these powers to another person or body. These are important judgments and ought to be made by someone who is directly accountable to Parliament. We have debated this issue on a previous clause, but the principles apply equally to this clause.

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

Under clause 18, new schools can be proposed by a governing body. We are trying to make it clear that governing bodies have that power—it is currently unclear. That goes to the heart of the hon. Gentleman’s comments about the clause. We want to ensure that governing bodies have that power.

The hon. Gentleman talked about the accreditation process. He will know that we have consulted on that process, which has just finished, taking into account what we believe about accredited school providers and groups. He asked what we mean by “excellence”. That is the point of the consultation. We do not want new governing bodies to have the power to create new schools or join other schools if we are not certain of their quality. Clearly, there must be some assurance and certainty. We must have some criteria by which we judge whether an institution has the capacity, educational talent and ability and quality in itself to share with others. That will be a part of the accreditation process. As I said, we are consulting on that, and we hope to publish the first list in the next two or three weeks—perhaps it might interest the hon. Gentleman.

Only the Secretary of State will be able to designate other people who can allow governing bodies to act. Again, we think that that is right. There may be other bodies to which it would be appropriate for the Secretary of State to give the authority to designate or accredit a particular governing body. We are trying to ensure that those who propose new schools—if they are to share them with other schools—have the ability, talent, expertise, experience and standards that we want.

With those assurances, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will withdraw his amendments.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

I am grateful to the Minister for his response. He has confirmed that the purpose of the clause is to firm up the vagaries of the law. I am grateful to him for spelling out that there is a consultation process in play to determine what is meant by educational excellence, capacity and track record. It would have been helpful to have an indication of whether it means a proportion of GCSE grades or an Ofsted judgment of outstanding leadership, management or something else.

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

All those things—the standard and quality of education, extra-curricular activities and Ofsted inspections—will be taken into account. The weight that we give to each of them is also important.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

I am grateful for that further clarification. I look forward to seeing the first list of schools that are regarded as having educational excellence, capacity and track record in the next two to three weeks, and I will look at that list carefully.

I was disappointed in the Minister’s response about other bodies. It is important that such important judgments are taken by Ministers who are accountable to this place, and not by quangos and other non-departmental public bodies that are not directly accountable for their decisions to this place. In the current atmosphere of trying to make politics more transparent and accountable, I do not think that it is right that we start to devolve decisions to such bodies. It undermines confidence in the parliamentary system and the purpose of elections if decisions are ultimately taken by people who are not subject to elections and parliamentary accountability. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Clause 19

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

I beg to move amendment 68, in clause 19, page 17, line 33, after ‘other’, insert ‘educational’.

Janet Anderson (Labour, Rossendale and Darwen)

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: amendment 198, in clause 19, page 17, leave out lines 35 to 38.

Amendment 194, in clause 19, page 17, line 38, at end insert—

‘(2A) After subsection (2) there is inserted—

“(2A) A person may not be appointed as, or remain, a school improvement partner unless he is for the time being approved by the governing body and head teacher of the school.”’.

Amendment 87, in clause 19, page 18, line 3, leave out ‘must’ and insert ‘may’.

Amendment 199, in clause 19, page 18, line 5, leave out subsection (4).

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

Clause 19 extends the role of SIPs from that of improving standards at a school to that of improving the well-being of pupils. It is odd that the Government want to widen the role of SIPs beyond that of education when they were established only in 2006. There has been no proper evaluation of whether they are a useful development and provide value for money. I have spoken to heads throughout the country about SIPs, and I have found mixed views. Some see them as an expensive distraction. The NASUWT shares that perception, and states:

“The NASUWT already has concerns about the effectiveness of the SIP programme and whether it does provide appropriate support and challenge to head teachers and governing bodies on school standards.”

On clause 19, it says:

“The NASUWT remains unconvinced that it is necessary to widen the scope of the role of School Improvement Partners...so that they provide not only advice...for the purpose of improving standards at the school but also other prescribed services to improve the wellbeing of pupils in the school.”

The General Teaching Council appears concerned and says that there

“are risks associated with this development.”

It fears that enhancing the role might restrict the ability to recruit

“if the SIP role became onerous for many serving head teachers, there would be a loss to the system in terms of knowledge transfer.”

It goes on:

“The GTC is also concerned about the local authority being over-reliant on the SIP for evidence of school performance, given its responsibility to intervene in underperforming schools.”

It seems that the role of a SIP is transforming and has transformed over the past three years from one of providing advice to more of an accountability mechanism. Amendment 68 would insert the word “educational” into the clause before “services” to confine the advice that SIPs offer to educational matters. The key role of SIPs should be to help raise educational standards. If they are meant to give both educational advice and advice about well-being, we move beyond the expertise of any one person into the realm of poor quality either of educational advice or advice on well-being. It is easier to be an amateur in someone else’s field than a professional in our own. The danger with the policy is that we would be encouraging amateurism.

Amendment 194 was inspired by the worries of the NUT, which states:

“The NUT believes that it would be desirable for this clause to be amended to introduce an appeals process for governing bodies, in the event that they consider a designated SIP to be unsuitable.”

The amendment requires the approval of both the head teacher and the governing body of a school before a SIP is appointed. As the purpose of a SIP is to help and advise rather than to inspect or criticise, I cannot see why the amendment would be a problem for the Government. A SIP need not be somehow independent, like some form of inspector. A SIP is meant to be a critical friend, so schools should have a say in who that critical friend ends up being.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I should like to talk to the amendments we have tabled on the clause. Although we are all conscious of the limited time left for scrutinising the Bill, the clause is important. According to the Government’s impact assessment, the clause is the most expensive part of what is quite an expensive and bureaucratic Bill, with an estimated cost of some £325 million, in net present value terms, for the school improvement partners.

As ever, the impact assessment gives us an interesting insight into the Government’s present view of the role of SIPs. Yet again, the individual writing those frank impact assessments is to be commended for their clarity in describing and criticising existing Government policy. The impact assessment says that the

“current role of the SIP in schools is an inefficient use of resources as the role of the SIP is too heavily focused on educational attainment, where schools could better benefit from challenge”,

and that

“the role of the SIP is often duplicated by other LA staff.”

Inevitably, for the Government, it says that government intervention is necessary to correct the inefficiency.

Janet Anderson (Labour, Rossendale and Darwen)

I remind the Committee that with this we are discussing the following: amendment 198, in clause 19, page 17, leave out lines 35 to 38.

Amendment 194, in clause 19, page 17, line 38, at end insert—

‘(2A) After subsection (2) there is inserted—

“(2A) A person may not be appointed as, or remain, a school improvement partner unless he is for the time being approved by the governing body and head teacher of the school.”’.

Amendment 87, in clause 19, page 18, line 3, leave out ‘must’ and insert ‘may’.

Amendment 199, in clause 19, page 18, line 5, leave out subsection (4).

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

Welcome back to the Chair, Mrs. Anderson. Before the Committee adjourned, we were discussing the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton and those in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole. I was looking at the impact assessment, which is always interesting on this Bill, and I mentioned the criticisms in that impact assessment of the existing SIP system, which was described as an inefficient use of resources.

The impact assessment also makes clear what the clause is designed to tackle—the inability of SIPs to get involved outside the narrow area of educational attainment—and the issue is whether the system could be restructured to provide SIPs with a greater role and to reduce the role of link advisers. The amendments relate directly to those issues and to whether this is a sensible way of focusing the role of SIPs and whether the expenditure of public money is justifiable, especially as the Government estimate it to be about £325 million at present values.

I should like to echo some of the criticisms and concerns that were expressed earlier by the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton. Amendments 68, 198 and 199 raise the issue of whether we want SIPs to have a wider focus. Do we want them to be involved in well-being and other matters, or is it sensible for them to focus on what is presently the core responsibility of educational attainment?

In part, the answer depends on what role we see for SIPs. In our view, SIPs could play a role as part of the accountability mechanism that enables schools to deliver, particularly on their core educational requirements. That could be a mechanism for local authorities to engage with schools through individuals with relevant expertise, so that they understand what job they are doing, find out whether educational attainment is being improved, and potentially, as the Government indicate, broker support from other organisations. Some people might feel that the local authority is often not qualified to offer much of that support, but there could be a role for SIPs in brokering support. However, there is an issue about whether that is the right way for SIPs to deliver on that responsibility.

The amendments raise three issues. First, whether it is sensible for SIPs to have that responsibility for well-being. I am not clear that it is sensible, which is why amendments 198 and 199 essentially support the thrust of amendment 68. The second issue relates to amendment 194, tabled by the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, and is whether schools should have a veto over their SIP. That is not something that we would support, as we believe that SIPs should have a role not only in supporting schools, but in holding them to account.

We certainly would not want local authorities to ignore the situation where a school expressed concerns that a SIP was not appropriately qualified. If that is part of the accountability mechanism, we are not convinced that it makes sense for schools to have an outright veto over their SIP, as it is possible that the SIP might deliver unpleasant news or have a view that a school is failing. If the governing body is able to veto the SIP that seeks to hold it to account, it would not be a very effective mechanism for holding a school to account.

Is this the right way to deliver that type of school improvement and accountability in the future? We need to look at the prescriptiveness involved, not only in the way that the Government want to widen the role of SIPs, but in the assumptions made in the impact assessment about how SIPs will operate in the future, the number of days that they will spend in individual schools and how that will be linked to highly or poorly performing schools.

We appear to have a prescriptive, top-down mechanism for central Government to deliver a system of local accountability and improvement. Typically for this Government, the system is not genuinely localised: local authorities cannot decide whether they want SIPs, whether they want to use existing link advisers, how they want to support schools and how many days they want the SIPs to spend in schools. It is extremely top-down and prescribed.

We are also worried whether the policy will deliver the zero net impact, which is what the Government are estimating and which depends heavily on the assumption that the scrapping of links advisers would offset the additional costs of school improvement partners. Amendment 87 would allow local authorities greater freedom and flexibility in how they use SIPs. It would allow them to opt out of the guidance that the Government otherwise intend to impose on local authorities.

Such changes would genuinely deliver a SIPs system that would be adaptable on the basis of a local authority’s priorities and correspond with its views of what it needed to support school improvement. It would not be a top-down approach that would tell local authorities how to use SIPs to deliver local accountability—a role that should be provided by the local authority. The clause is typical of the Government, and what we fear is embedded in it.

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

Good afternoon to you, Mrs. Anderson, and members of the Committee. The amendments tabled by the hon. Members for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton and for Yeovil would remove the two emphasises given to the SIP’s role to improve the well-being of pupils at the school. The hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton believes that the clause would dilute the emphasis that a SIP should have on improving educational attainment at the school. Both emphasises are necessary.

In many of the schools that have featured in our debates, we cannot talk about improving standards without considering the well-being of the pupil. Someone acting as the broker between the school and the local authority would need to be involved in what was happening outside a school in respect of health, families, youth provision, social services, children’s services, employment and housing if that person is to address school improvement overall. The school improvement partner is the right person to do that. We will not take away the responsibility from the local authority, but the person will act as a direct contact with the school. Action or improvement plans will be a matter for the school to work out to the SIP’s satisfaction. I am a little surprised at the amendment, as it is a fundamental part of a SIP’s role not to see the school in isolation.

The hon. Member for Yeovil is right that significant investment will be used in such matters. It is expected that SIPs will spend more time working with schools to deliver an outcome, which is extremely important, particularly if it is seen in the context of the holistic view of improving standards in schools. Of course, it matters to the hon. Members for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton and for Yeovil that we focus on educational standards. I am not saying that there should be no such focus, but just that well-being should be a part of it.

On a further point made by the hon. Members for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton and for Yeovil, a national strategies survey indicates that 80 to 90 per cent. of head teachers think that their schools benefit from school improvement partners. Another amendment proposes that schools should be able to disregard advice with respect to SIPs. I do not accept that; we would to go too far if we said that a SIP could not stay in role if the heads and governors say that they did not want them. It may be that there is a breakdown in the relationship or that a head teacher is not willing to confront the improvement that is necessary in the school, rather than the school improvement partner being the problem.

If we were to pass amendment 194, tabled by the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, a head teacher could say, “We don’t like that improvement plan,” even though most other people thought that it was a good idea, and the school improvement partner would be left with no role at all, which would not be an appropriate way forward.

School improvement partners are an important part of the school reform system. Including well-being as part of their tasks and responsibilities is a crucial part of raising standards and ensuring that opportunities exist for all our young people in all our schools. With those remarks, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will withdraw his amendment.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I shall not prolong the debate too much. It is clear that there is a difference of opinion between ourselves and the Minister on at least two of the issues in the amendments. I want to register our continuing concern that, although the rhetoric of Government policy focuses on local accountability, the extent to which the provision seeks to prescribe how each local authority should essentially run its own systems of school accountability and the delivery of advice about school improvement is very depressing and reflects still a mentality in which Westminster and Whitehall know best, rather than assuming that local areas have the skills and ability to design systems that are based on their own needs, rather than on some central prescription.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

I am keen to progress rapidly, so that we can get to the home education clauses. Many people, both inside and outside the Committee, are keen for us to consider such important issues for a considerable time, so I shall make two quick points. I do not believe that a concern over diluting the emphasis on educational standards is my worry; it is whether the same person can, with expertise, advise both on raising educational standards and on the well-being issues, because they are very different matters.

My second point relates to a breakdown in the relationship between the SIP and the head. Such a breakdown may well be the head’s fault in some circumstances. None the less, if a SIP is meant to be a critical friend and not an adversarial inspector, regardless of who is to blame for the breakdown in the relationship, a new SIP is needed. The National Union of Teachers is concerned about that and feels that there should be an appeals process for governing bodies in the event of a breakdown and the SIP is regarded as unsuitable. I have made my two comments; we have had a good debate; and I ask leave of the Committee to withdraw the amendment.

Clause 20

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I beg to move amendment 200, in clause 20, page 18, line 9, leave out subsection (1).

Janet Anderson (Labour, Rossendale and Darwen)

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: amendment 69, in clause 20, page 18, leave out lines 11 to 16 and insert—

‘(a) for subsection (2) there is substituted—

“(2) For the purposes of this section—

(a) information as to the views of prescribed persons about the school,

(b) information about the continuing education of pupils leaving a school,

(c) information about the employment or training taken up by such pupils on leaving a school,

is to be treated as information about the school.”’.

Amendment 201, in clause 20, page 19, line 15, at end insert—

‘(c) assist in making informed judgments about the comparative effectiveness of individual schools and colleges in providing high quality education, by facilitating comparisons of schools and colleges which have similar pupil characteristics in relation to special needs, economic advantage and disadvantage, and other relevant factors.’.

Amendment 202, in clause 20, page 19, line 19, after ‘England’, insert

‘the OFSTED, subject to the approval of’.

Amendment 235, in clause 20, page 20, line 3, at end add—

‘(4) The use of any information obtained as a result of this section shall be the subject of an annual report to Parliament.’.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

Like the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, I am convinced of the need at least to touch on the issue of home education, even though we clearly have not been given enough time for the scrutiny of the Bill. Before we get to home education, however, we have to deal with a couple of incredibly important clauses, which could have a major impact, for better or for worse, on the schools system. One of those issues is the licence to practise, which we will come to in a moment, and the other one is the provision of information about schools. In shorthand terms, that is known as the school report card.

Given the time constraints, you probably want to avoid a stand part debate, Mrs Anderson, so I hope that you do not mind if I set out some of our views at the beginning and then link in the amendments.

We are sympathetic to the idea that the existing school accountability framework needs fundamental review. All sorts of different elements of school accountability have grown up over time. John Dunford, the widely respected head of the Association of School and College Leaders professional group, often presents to me—and, I suspect, to those in the other two major parties—a diagram with schools in the middle surrounded by the vast array of different organisations and mechanisms that are supposed to hold them to account. When he first showed me the diagram a couple of years ago, I did not even know what all the bodies were, because there were so many.

School accountability is clearly incredibly important, but so is accountability not being excessively expensive, not replicating itself, and being useful to parents and those responsible for holding schools to account—from the head teacher and the governing body to local authorities and others. At the moment, there is concern that the accountability system replicates a lot that need not be replicated, and does not often provide information that is useful to parents when making decisions. Teaching organisations are often critical of the league tables, although my response is that once information is available about school matters and school performance, keeping such information secret is impossible, as we have discovered in this place.

A legitimate concern is that existing league tables reflect to a large extent the social catchments of the schools in which they sit, and do not always give us an idea of whether schools in tough areas are performing particularly well or badly set against their challenges. Sometimes the tables do not give us an idea of whether schools in leafier areas, or in middle-ranking areas for social deprivation, are doing a good job.

If we are not simply to end up with an unreasonable focus on the bottom 10, 20 or 30 per cent. of schools, but are to hold them all to account, we need to find a better mechanism. That has been offered to us in the school report card, a version of which I have obtained from the Minister, who kindly circulated a draft the other day—I assume that the size had been blown up to help those with defective eyesight. It was useful to have a copy before the debate so that we could reflect on how useful it will be and on whether the process will get rid of information that we do not need.

My first comment is that I was expecting the Government’s idea to be a rather big one—something rather radical—that would, for example, help me, as a local MP, to make judgments about the schools in my area. I expected to see more refined information about how schools were performing set against their catchments so that we could compare performance to the degree of challenge. However, when we look at the report card and, even more so, the impact assessment—I commend its precision, detail and helpfulness to the Committee—we discover that we have not a mountain of a policy but a bit of a molehill.

Instead of the report card delivering a better, more refined judgment about individual schools, the impact assessment says that all it will do is consolidate existing available school information on, essentially, one piece of paper, and deal with what is described as the market failure of imperfect information by combining information sources, therefore presenting economies of scale. Another clue comes from the annual cost of the proposal: a total annual cost for the entire thing, in net present value terms, of £1.269 million. The costs all appear to be one-off, up-front transitional ones, because some information is already collected by the Department, while other information is held by Ofsted and other bodies. The assessment says that “significant additional running costs” are not expected, so there will be a tiny set-up cost and, apparently, no average running costs at all, as well as no collection of additional information or any processing of data—that is why there is a low cost.

I wonder whether the report card will deliver the real improvement in school accountability that I hoped we might see. As I have said, I do not think that the existing mechanisms of school accountability are good. The way in which the Home Office now compares the basic command units of different police forces is an example of better practice, although not necessarily of best practice. If I want to compare the east Somerset BCU with other forces, I compare it not with a tough part of Bristol that will always have more crime, and so always flatter east Somerset, but with BCUs with a similar level of challenge.

The Government will probably say that the pupil progress element demonstrates an element of value added, but I think that this is a missed opportunity. We should find an accessible way—pupil progress is not accessible for most people—in which to compare schools depending on their catchments so that people have a clear idea of whether a school is performing well or badly compared with other schools with a similar level of challenge. No doubt other hon. Members will have better suggestions on how we could compare schools.

We need to get away from the problem that much of what is in the league tables—although not all of it, before the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton says anything—is determined by social catchment. That is not to say that we should have low expectations of schools in tough areas. We should have high expectations of all schools. There are schools with all kinds of social catchments that perform incredibly. A comparison using a simplistic league table of a school in the richest community in the country with a school in the most chaotic community will deliver meaningless information. My concern is that this is a missed opportunity to deliver more meaningful information.

I am sceptical about whether much of the information on the report card will prove useful. I might sound a little Gibbish or Bognorish saying these things, but I baulk at the bits about pupil perception, parent perception, pupil well-being and partnership working. I fear not only that it is all rather vague and meaningless and does not come to the crunch of whether a school is doing a good job, but that those things will be put into the computer somewhere in the Department for Children, Schools and Families—I will come back to that later—to produce the overall grade in the corner of the school report card, which is the only new element. I assume that the six measures from pupil progress down to narrowing gaps will be turned into one grade that sums up the quality of the school.

At first, I was sympathetic to the idea of straightforward and blunt accountability and thought that delivering one grade would give clarity. I say that with reservations because if hon. Members were asked whether our performance should be measured by one grade, we would quickly come up with 20 or 30 good reasons why doing so would be meaningless. One of those reasons might relate to the experience of school report cards in New York. I understand that when they were first introduced, the grade was regarded as giving a clear signal of where improvement needed to be made. There was a fairly predictable distribution of grades among the schools, with about 20 per cent. of schools getting As, Bs, Cs, Ds and Es. Although I do not have the figures at my fingertips, I read recently that over the past few years, the number of schools graded A had rocketed and that the overwhelming majority now have As.

Precisely the same thing would happen if MPs were graded on five or six things, such as making interventions in Committee or signing early-day motions. We would all sign every daft EDM without any scrutiny because we would want to move up the league table. We would also do all the other things and all suddenly get As. Everyone would realise that it was a waste of time because all the MPs would have As, whereas people would know that they were not all As.

I therefore think that the A, B, C, D grading might be counter-productive. It will certainly anger schools and it will lead to the inevitable inclusion of all sorts of other things. Schools do not want to be compared only on the basis of attainment and results; they want a wide range of other issues to be taken into account, but the measure would start watering that down. The only new thing in the school report card will probably not be valuable, and needs to be dumped.

Martin Linton (Labour, Battersea)

The reason why report cards for MPs are not necessary is because we are on maximum five-year contracts. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman is not suggesting that schools should be put on a five-year contract. Will he concede that, in the absence of anything else, it will be helpful to parents?

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I am not sure whether teachers would share that view. I think that they would say, “Look, we are accountable day to day and term to term in all sorts of ways.” If parents do not like a school, they can take their children away, and there is immediate accountability. As a Member of Parliament, we have accountability every five years, which is not very much. If someone was in an area that has always had a Conservative or Labour MP with a 20,000 majority, or even a Liberal Democrat MP these days—with a large majority, anyway—the amount of accountability, if they are unhappy, is quite limited. I think that when the hon. Gentleman meets his local teachers, they might not be quite as attracted by his argument. There are also all the other things that do not give us a clear idea, such as partnership working, to which I suspect the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton will object in a moment.

It therefore seems likely that the measure will be—I say this with great disappointment, and without a determination to resist it for its own sake—a bit of a waste of time and a big missed opportunity, which is something that I care about. This mechanism could be valuable, and we could end up with two or three—please not four, five, six or seven—meaningful comparators. It would not initially be perfect, and schools would complain about it, as would be the case with comparators of MPs, but it would be fairer than existing league tables. It would shed light on why some schools do better than others and enable us to be fair to the people who teach in and govern schools when we make comparisons about their jobs.

The amendments that we have tabled, to which I will speak briefly, try to address some of the problems. Amendment 200 and the Conservative amendment 69 address the question of whether it is worth the candle to collect all the information to put into a school report card that is not delivering anything new from schools, but no doubt imposing some burdens on them. Amendment 201 suggests that as part of the school report card, there should be a better attempt to assist people to make informed judgments by facilitating comparisons of schools and colleges that have similar people characteristics, in the same way in which the Home Office compares BCUs.

Amendment 202, which I have not touched on so far, questions whether it is sensible for the Department for Children, Schools and Families to be the guardian of the school report card. One of the things that has been corrosive to education over the past 10 years is that because the Government are so determined to improve schools, for all the right reasons, we have ended up with incentives for the Government to conspire in a situation in which results are seen to be rising—where we put all the attention into the continuing development borderline—instead of one of trying to deliver for all young people. If we are to have a school accountability system and the As and Bs are published annually, the Minister will get it in the neck if the number of As go down, as the system will also hold the Government to account. What is the point of the Government being held to account in such a way when they themselves are the guardians of the new system? If the new system is to be effective, it should be run either by local authorities, who should, in our view, be the first tier of accountability, or, if we do not trust local authorities because they are compromised by their job of school improvement, by Ofsted. The last people who should be running the system are the DCSF.

Finally, amendment 225 would require the information collected on schools in this way to be subject to an annual report to Parliament.

I hope that the Minister will comfort us on those issues. However, at the moment, I fear that this is a good idea badly delivered, and not worth implementing in its existing form.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

I listened carefully to the hon. Gentleman. I share many of his observations regarding the school report card. He is right that there are many things in here that, as he described, are “Gibbish”, although I am not sure when I became an adjective—[Interruption.] Perhaps the hon. Gentleman meant “gibberish” rather than “Gibbish”.

Parents’ perceptions are an important factor when judging a school. Leaving that aside, I share many of the hon. Gentleman’s concerns about the card. Clause 20 amends the Education Act 1996 to enable the information to be gathered for the Government’s policy of a school report card. The consultation paper said that the report card was necessary because league tables contain so much information that

“they can be difficult for parents to use, do not signal clearly the relative importance of different academic outcomes and, with the exception of the pupils’ attendance rate, do not contain information about outcomes relating to other aspects of pupils’ wellbeing.”

That is the view of the consultation document. The answer, according to the Government, is to have a school report card with an overall score.

We take the view that we should publish all the data currently held on schools, whether that is the proportion gaining five or more GCSEs, the proportion gaining eight or more GCSEs at grades A* to C, or the proportion gaining an A or B in physics GCSE. Different parents have different priorities about what they want from a school for their children, and we do not believe that it is possible to provide an overall score, which will inevitably involve a very subjective judgement.

When I looked at the example of the report card that the Minister circulated last week, I was concerned that the GCSE figures seemed to have been transformed into a bar chart setting out whether the pupil progress, or pupil attainment, was A, B, C or D. There was no mention of five GCSEs at A* to C, including English and maths, so there is a reduction in the amount of information available, not a consolidation of the data.

The school report card is not an original idea, as the hon. Member for Yeovil said. It was introduced in New York in 2007, and last year’s scores showed that 84 per cent. of the 1,058 elementary and middle schools were awarded an A rating, and 13 per cent. received a B grade. The New York Daily News said at the time—that sounds like a song from Barbra Streisand—that:

“The report card system makes a mockery of accountability. No one can be held accountable when almost everyone gets an A or B. No one can tell which schools are getting better or worse. Nor do parents get enough information to make good choices.”

We share the concerns expressed by the people of New York about the report card system as introduced in that city.

Amendment 69 would add a new source of information about a school’s performance, in addition to the views of prescribed persons, which is already provided for by clause 20. We would add details of the proportion of pupils who go on to further and higher education and the ultimate employment and training that such pupils undertake. If we want a more rounded set of data to describe the outcomes of a school, this would be far more pertinent information in so far as parents are concerned than some of the nebulous, “Gibbish” and subjective criteria set out in the White Paper and consultation document.

I wanted to keep my remarks brief so that we could get on to the home education provisions as quickly as possible, so with those few words, I await the Minister’s response.

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

We have had an interesting, short debate.

As the hon. Member for Yeovil knows, there is a two-year pilot on the report card, which started in September 2009, so it is not the finished article. There is a lot of work to be done on how we take it forward, but if we manage to get the report card right, it will be a fundamental and radical reform that will answer the demand of schools up and down the country, which is, “Do not let our school be judged on just the raw attainment scores.” The hon. Gentleman was at a conference with me earlier today at which that plea was also heard. Doing that is a real challenge, however, because as we all know, people will often look at just that raw attainment score.

As I have often said in Committee, the Government believe that we need to move on from that, and the fact that that is difficult and a challenge should not stop people. We all have experience of schools and, as someone who has taught, I know that people have said over a considerable period that schools should be judged not only on their raw attainment scores, but on the progress that they make with their pupils. The pupil progress part is about trying to do that. For the first time, we are laying out specifically in a report that goes to every parent something that will allow them to make a judgment about that.

Similarly, on pupil well-being—I will be brief, Mrs. Anderson—what is it that parents often say when they go into the school? Of course they are interested in the academic standards in the school, but when I was teaching—I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Stourbridge and others have experienced this—people would ask what the school was like with respect to bullying. They would also ask, “Are people happy? Do they enjoy themselves? Are they looked after?” The hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole must agree that that should be part of the whole picture, because everything for which she has ever campaigned in Parliament has been about trying to ensure that the rights, voice and happiness of the child are not seen as some glib accessory that is unimportant. Those things are a fundamental part of any judgment about how well an institution is doing. It is difficult but important to include those things. Similarly, even the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton thinks that parental perception is a good idea.

The big issue that we are all united about is narrowing the gap in pupil performance. How do we narrow the gap between social background and educational attainment? I agree with the point made by both hon. Gentlemen—it is difficult. However, if we were to accept the amendments, we would not have the primary legislation available to bring together the information that is required to try to come to a determination about the grade. Exactly how that is done is part of what the pilots are about. Some 700 schools throughout the country are looking to see how the information is gathered. If we were to pass the amendments, they would not be able to do that, and that would completely preclude any attempt to try to introduce the report card.

Caroline Flint (Labour, Don Valley)

I am not sure why pilots always have to take two years. Will my hon. Friend explain what work has been done in the lead up to the pilots with focus groups of parents and others about what information they want? I hear what he is saying about his background as a teacher and what teachers want, but parents might want something a bit different that gives them a much clearer idea about what is happening in a school. I accept his point that this is not the final article, but I am a little uncertain about whether, in the pilots, parents have just been given a sample to work with, or whether they have been able to intervene on what that sample should be providing for them in terms of oversight of the school and what it is doing.

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

That is a good point. My right hon. Friend is right to point out the need to understand parents’ views. Indeed, part of the work that was done to bring the measure together involved looking at what parents were saying. Part of the ongoing work through the pilots will be about not only teachers and education professionals, but what parents think and the information that they would find useful, so I can reassure her on that point. We have involved and will involve parents, but they have said to us that, as well as the raw attainment score, they want to know how to find out some of these other things with regards to a school. They want to have some way in which that can be reported to them.

Martin Linton (Labour, Battersea)

Does my hon. Friend agree that the only effect of the proposals of the hon. Members for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton and for Yeovil would be to drive parents back on to the Ofsted grade and the GCSE score as the only ways by which to judge schools? That would result in all the other information fed into a school report being ignored.

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

Of course, raw attainment and what Ofsted says are important, but my hon. Friend is right in the sense that, alongside that, we must have a broader picture of what a school is about and what it is achieving in a way that, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Don Valley said, is acceptable and understandable to parents and, above all, meaningful to them. We are attempting to do that.

To reach those grades, we need to gather the information. I therefore ask the hon. Member for Yeovil to reconsider whether he wishes to press his amendments further. If we want to see whether we can make the policy meaningful, we must have the power to gather the information.

As for amendment 69, the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton seems to believe that clause 20 has been used to substitute a power to collect information on the views of prescribed persons in place of the existing power in respect of information about the continuing education, employment or training of pupils leaving a school. In fact, the clause inserts a new provision on collecting the views of prescribed persons as an addition to the existing provision to collect such pupil information. I hope that the hon. Gentleman is reassured that the amendment is unnecessary. Following my brief but important comments, I hope that it will not be pressed to a Division.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I am, as ever, grateful to the Minister. This is a huge opportunity, and I agree with all that he said about the deficiencies in the existing accountability regime. The problem is that that does not take us any further. It is one thing for the Government to say that the existing accountability regime is poor, but it is another for us to vote through something that does not deal with the deficiencies of that regime. The policy has four weaknesses. First, it should be administered not by the Department, but by Ofsted or the local authorities. Secondly, and most importantly, there is no new content, even though the Government make a virtue of that in the impact assessment, in contrast to the comment made by the hon. Member for Battersea. All the system does is to consolidate things that are already available, and that is part of the problem because the things already available are not doing to the job.

Thirdly, there are already other mechanisms for assessments to be made of the non-educational attainment elements. That happens in all the Ofsted reports. Indeed, the model of the school report card reports the Ofsted judgments on behaviour, safeguarding and other issues. Finally, we have still not resolved the problem of whether or not there should be a grade. It is important to the people working in the establishments that they should have confidence that the grade is derived in a sensible way. Even the Government’s report highlights the possible anomalies that will arise when we grade, for example, one school as grade 2 on effectiveness, pupils’ behaviour and safeguarding and, at the same time, there is an overall score of A. There is already a discrepancy and we need a thought-out and considered process of reconciling an overall grade given by a report card and the fact that it is different from the grade given by Ofsted.

My problem is not that the policy is not well-meaning and not that it is unnecessary, but that it is not right. We are told by people in schools and those who represent teachers and parents, “Don’t legislate for things that are half-baked. Don’t do things that will deliver additional levels of cost and bureaucracy but will not do the job.” It is with sadness that I say that although I will not press any of the amendments to a Division, we will want to divide on clause stand part. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Clause 22

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I beg to move amendment 203, in clause 22, page 22, line 10, at end add—

‘(7) The Secretary of State shall not exercise any of the powers conferred by subsections (1) to (6) above without—

(a) consulting the local authority in which the school is located, and

(b) receiving advice supporting the planned actions from an independent body established to make impartial assessments of school standards.’.

I will not detain the Committee long on this amendment. Clause 22 deals with schools causing concern and the powers of the Secretary of State. I think I am right that it amends the last education Act to be passed, which was agreed by Parliament just one week before this Bill was published. The Government are clearly not thinking their proposals through properly and are proceeding with such speed that new legislation is replacing legislation that has not even had a chance to bed down.

I have a sense of dĂ(c)jĂ vu because, as in the last education Act, there is a strong presumption in the Bill that the Secretary of State knows best and that he or she should have powers that can be exercised over failing schools, regardless of the views of the local authority. The last education Act introduced powers for when the Secretary of State essentially did not think that local authorities were being tough enough, and clause 22 will give the Secretary of State new powers to direct local authorities.

The amendment would require the Secretary of State to consult the local authority and an independent school standards body before undertaking intervention action. That would ensure that judgments that overrode a democratically elected local authority on how school improvement was to be delivered were informed by discussion with the local authority, which is accountable for the oversight of local school performance under the Government’s model and ours. It would also ensure that there was ratification of the fact that the school concerned, which could be closed down or have other action taken against it, was a poor performing school on the basis of some form of rational assessment. That should take into account the school’s circumstances, as we discussed under clause 20.

Our concern is that this Secretary of State or a future Secretary of State could unreasonably override a local authority without discussion or independent evidence to show that a school was doing badly, and without considering whether an improvement plan had been put in place. We regard that as extremely heavy-handed, so we ask the Minister to reconsider whether these draconian powers are necessary.

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

Again, I thank the hon. Gentleman for the sensible way in which he has presented his amendment.

Nobody wants the Secretary of State to be intervening in every situation. That would be ludicrous, clearly, and would override the rights and responsibilities of the local authority to commission school places and look after school improvement in its own area.

This provision seeks to deal with those few cases in which the local authority has not taken the action that needs to be taken with respect to a particular school. If everyone but the local authority deems it appropriate to give a warning notice to a school, it might be appropriate for the Secretary of State to direct the local authority to issue the warning notice. I am not talking about that as a first step, however. I am not saying that we should immediately jump in and say, “Whitehall knows best.” It should not be an immediate reaction to a particular problem. The situation should arise in only a few instances after a series of discussions with the local authority and local representatives and reference to the school improvement partner. In such circumstances it would be appropriate for the Secretary of State to have, as the last resort, the opportunity to intervene with respect to a local authority.

I know that such a provision will not need to be applied to the vast majority of local authorities in the vast majority of situations. None the less, there have been situations—I can think of one or two—in which the involvement and intervention of the Secretary of State has led to an improvement in a particular school. There are also one or two examples of when it has been difficult for the Secretary of State to get the sort of local action that any reasonable or sensible person would expect to happen. The amendment would circumvent the Secretary of State’s ability to take any such action.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I understand the point that the Minister makes, but that is not what the amendment says. It says that before exercising such powers, the Secretary of State should have consulted the local authority and received advice supporting the planned actions from an independent body, which under his model would be Ofsted. Is he really telling us that there are any circumstances in which the Secretary of State would not want to do that before taking the serious action that he proposes?

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

I am not trying to say that at all. I am saying that the amendment is unnecessary because the Secretary of State will consult the local authority before taking action. The Secretary of State will not look down a list of schools and their results and say, “Hey, things aren’t going on very well there,” and then direct the local authority to issue a warning notice. Such a reaction would come about only after the sort of process to which the hon. Gentleman refers. Of course we will consult the local authority. In a small number of circumstances, if a local authority fails to take the necessary action, the Secretary of State should have the power to direct action in the interests of the pupils or communities in that particular area. As for the independent person, the SIP and Ofsted will be involved.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I feel that we are making a bit of progress. Proposed paragraph (b) in the amendment says that before taking action, the Secretary of State should receive advice that supports the planned actions. Is the Minister prepared to go that far? I would be satisfied and reassured to a large extent, if, before such draconian action was taken, there was not only consultation with the local authority, but discussions with a body such as Ofsted to ratify the Secretary of State’s judgment.

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

It seems that we are dancing on the head of a pin. If it reassures the hon. Gentleman, I will say that, in such circumstances, I would expect the Secretary of State to obtain advice and information from a whole range of bodies, starting with the local authority, and then to consult others, which might include Ofsted and the SIP. At the end of the day, the Secretary of State should have the power to direct something to happen in a local area when—this will be in a very, very small number of cases—the local authority is not fulfilling its responsibilities. Following that reassurance, I hope that the hon. Gentleman will withdraw the amendment.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I feel a bit more reassured. I am not suggesting that there are not circumstances in extremis in which such powers might need to be exercised, and I am pleased that the Minister says that local authorities will be consulted. When he says that he expects such things to happen, he is talking about how he would conduct himself as a Minister, but we are legislating for future Governments who might behave in a totally irrational way, and who might, for political reasons, want to be seen to be making some sort of draconian intervention, even when that is not ratified by Ofsted, which has the expertise to judge whether the intervention is necessary. That was why I wanted to tease out that point.

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

Of course in the first instance, before we direct, we may ask for action to be considered—as an intermediate step first, if that helps. As I said, we are dancing on the head of a pin.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I accept that, but we might not be dancing on the head of a pin if there has been a lot of consultation with the local authority, if the local authority has a clear view that a school is improving—it might have taken recent action—and if Ofsted takes the view that the school is improving and has taken the relevant action. However, a Secretary of State, who might be of a different political party to the local authority, could decide that he or she wished to override those two judgments. In that specific circumstance, we would have concerns. However, the Minister has at least acknowledged that he—the Government—would not wish to do that under the circumstances I have set out, so with that very modest triumph, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Clause 23

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

I beg to move amendment 336, in clause 23, page 22, line 22, at end insert—

‘(2A) Regulations under subsection (2) may only be made after consulting with the Council.’.

Janet Anderson (Labour, Rossendale and Darwen)

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: amendment 204, in clause 23, page 23, line 43, at end add—

‘(3) (1) None of the measures set out in subsection (1) and (2) shall come into effect until the Secretary of State has commissioned an independent report into—

(a) the most effective ways of improving continuous professional development for teachers, and

(b) any necessary changes in the system of performance management for teachers.

(2) The Independent Report must be informed by consultation with the General Teaching Council for England, the Select Committee for the Department of Children, Schools and Families, representatives of the teaching profession in England, and other suitable bodies.’.

Amendment 196, in clause 24, page 24, line 6, at end insert—

‘(1A) Regulations may only be made under subsection (1) after the council has issued a statement expressing its support for the introduction of a licence to practise as described in section 23 of the Children, Schools and Families Act 2010.’.

Amendment 337, in clause 24, page 24, leave out lines 18 to 20.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

The licence to teach, as it is called in the White Paper—it is the licence to practise in the clause—has been launched to widespread opposition. The NUT said:

“The NUT can see no argument advanced by Government which justifies the introduction of the licence to practise for teachers”

and that the licence to practise

“is likely to have little or no impact other than angering the profession.”

The ASCL said:

“Until the Secretary of State conducts a full cost-benefit analysis demonstrating the need to create a Licence to Practise we believe that legislating on this matter is premature and unwise.”

In the Committee’s evidence session, John Dunford went on to say:

“what value does a licence to practise add, over and above performance management, CPD and capability proceedings”?

Chris Keates said:

“The NASUWT has opposed the introduction of the licence to practise, basically because of concern in the profession about how it might be portrayed in the media.”

What was most revealing, however, was the opinion on the proposal given by Keith Bartley, the chief executive of the General Teaching Council for England—the body to be charged with implementing the licence to practise. In his evidence, he said:

“I see merit in measures that support teachers to develop and improve their practice and that confer real benefits for teaching and learning that serve the public interest. We do not yet know whether the proposals in the Bill will achieve those aims.”——[Official Report, Children, Schools and Families Public Bill Committee, 19 January 2010; c. 18-23, Q26 and 33.]

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

Will the hon. Gentleman confirm something for me? If a licence to practise is good enough for doctors, is it also good enough for teachers?

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

The trouble with the proposal is that it is not administered by something such as the General Medical Council. Although administered by the General Teaching Council, that is a state body set up by the Secretary of State, rather than a body that has come from within the profession. There is a big difference between a professional body representing the profession and one that tends to represent the state sector.

Friday’s edition of The Times Educational Supplement reported that Keith Bartley had said at a conference in London that

“he was concerned that it would be ‘unduly burdensome’ for teachers and called for a change to the way schools are judged.”

He was reported as saying:

“We need assurances that it won’t be another layer of accountability in the system”.

Finally, according to the article, he added:

“A lack of information from the Department for Children, Schools and Families...about how the scheme will work means the advantages to teachers are not yet clear”.

When the statutory body charged with implementing a Government policy has concerns about that policy and expresses such concerns in public, we all need to take note.

The amendment would prevent the regulations to introduce a licence to practise from being made until the proposals had the support of the General Teaching Council. Our view is that the policy behind the licence is wrong. It is bureaucratic, it will not lead to more continuing professional development, and it will make it more, not less, difficult for head teachers to be able to manage and develop their teaching staff.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I want to speak on the provision not only because we tabled amendment 204, but because this incredibly important part of the Bill could affect hundreds of thousands of people throughout the teaching profession. Although I feel that I keep making the same speech about our need to move on at some stage to other controversial issues, we cannot pass over the matter quickly, given the importance of the measure.

The hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton mentioned the controversy that has been generated by this part of the Bill. I have a confession to make: when the Bill was first announced by the Secretary of State in the House of Commons last year, this was one of the few bits that, in a very Liberal Democrat way, I picked out and said that the Liberal Democrats supported it. However, the more that I have considered it, the more that I have heard representations and the more that I look at the Government’s policy, the less convinced I am that this is a good idea, partly because I am not sure what the Government are trying to deliver with these provisions.

Perhaps I can draw hon. Members’ attention to the rather large difference between what is in the very helpful impact assessment and how the Government decided to announce this part of the Bill. The provision was headline-grabbing when the Bill and the White Paper were announced last year. Indeed, in July, when, I think, the White Paper came out, the subject grabbed all the headlines. In relation to the motivation for the policy, one assumes that the headlines were inspired by the Department. The headlines generated were very similar in all the newspapers, so one assumes someone from the Department was spinning the policy.

Let me cite some of the headlines as examples to try to tease out what we are trying to achieve in the measure. The Sun covered the proposal under the headline, “MoT for teachers; ‘Licence’ test every 5yrs”, and the articlestates:

“Teachers must undergo MoT-style check-ups to make sure they are fit for the classroom under Government plans unveiled yesterday... The licence will help...weed out rotten teachers and make it impossible for those who have been sacked to walk into a job at another school. Rookie teachers must apply for a licence from next year.”

It does not seem that that was a briefing given to just one newspaper, because there are other examples. The BBC report on the White Paper used the headline, “Teachers facing classroom MOTs” and the Secretary of State even commented directly on the proposal. When he was asked what impact it would have, he said:

“It would be foolish to speculate about numbers”—

in other words, the number of teachers who would fail the licence. The article goes on to state that the Secretary of State said:

“checks would make sure that schools were ‘facing up to inadequacy.’”

I shall list the headlines—The Guardian, “Teachers face MOT every five years to prove fitness to teach”; the Daily Mail,“Teachers’ MoTs every five years”; and The Times, “Teachers face sack under new classroom licence plan”. The Times included a description of how incompetent teachers will be weeded out.

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

I must tell the hon. Gentleman that that was not spun out by the Department. May I just caution him? He might not have noticed this, but everything that we read in the papers is not always true.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

That is certainly the case with Liberal Democrat policy. I find what the Minister has said a little difficult to believe. Is he saying that the licence to practise is not designed to lead to MOTs to weed out poor teachers?

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

It is certainly not the intention of the licence to practise to weed out poor teachers. There is a performance management process, which can then lead to a capability review that is in place. The purpose of the licence to practise is to raise the status of the profession and give people a proper link to continuing professional development.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

Either a U-turn is coming on, or one happened a few months ago in response to the coverage. If it is true that the policy was never designed to weed out poor teachers, why does the Secretary of State say on the BBC News website that

“Without a licence, teachers will be unable to teach... It would be foolish to speculate about numbers”,

but that checks would be necessary to make sure that schools were “facing up to inadequacy”? Why does a teensy-weensy little line at the end of impact assessment refer to the possibility of a small minority of teachers failing the test and ceasing to teach?

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

If it is apparent at the five-year point that a teacher has not met the various criteria that have been set for the licence, as a result of the CPD and the capability to which the hon. Gentleman referred, he or she will not obtain the licence. The intention of the licence to practise is to provide a positive statement about the status of teachers in this country and to help them with their continuing professional development. I repeat what I told the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton: if it is good enough for doctors in this country to have a licence-to-practise scheme and good enough for lawyers to have the same, it is good enough for our teachers, and it is long overdue.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

Newspaper headlines on the MOT are making me cynical. I must be completely wrong when I assume that someone in the Department close to the Secretary of State decided to sell it as a sensational part of the Bill to weed out head teachers. When the Government came to tell the Social Partnership about the policy after it had choked on its cornflakes, it was watered down in the impact assessment. We do not read about culling teachers, but about building on the current performance arrangements

“to incentivise teachers to undertake high-quality CPD...increasing the incentive for schools to provide high quality CPD opportunities”

and increasing the professionalisation of teachers, and all the stuff about the culling of poor teachers has suddenly disappeared.

I agree that there are two important issues. There is a powerful case for improving CPD for all teachers, particularly returning teachers who have been out of the profession for a long time and for supply teachers, too. Whether the existing performance management regimes are satisfactory is a separate issue, but head teachers have a legitimate concern that they are not. I thought that the licence was supposed to be dealing with teachers who, for example, are poor quality in the view of the head teacher. For example, when the head teacher tries to take action against them, they resign and get a job in another school. If the head teacher was right, they might be a poor teacher in that school, too. If a licence to practise was operated in a coherent and effective way, the GTC has been thinking that those teachers might have either their licence withdrawn or qualified in some way to show that there were concerns about them.

The Government seem to suggest that the policy is not about improving performance management, but only about CPD. Indeed, that makes me wonder whether it will make the performance management parts even more difficult. I cannot remember whether it was John Dunford at our evidence session or the guest of the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton from the academies movement who said that taking action against poor teachers could become even more difficult as a consequence, given that a teacher who was performing badly could say that that was because they had not had their quota of CPD. The last thing that we need is to make things more difficult for head teachers who often make the difficult decision to get rid of the minority of poor staff. A minority of people in every profession do not do their jobs well, including at Parliament. We should not make the job of head teachers even more difficult.

The Government have two things tangled up. The CPD system will be expensive, and there is no estimate of the return on its £94 million cost. It will be applied not in a discrete way to the category of teachers who might need support, such as supply teachers or returning teachers, but to all teachers in the profession. It will be an enormous bureaucratic impediment.

The teaching unions are passionate about CPD. They want improved CPD, but they question whether the Bill will deliver it. We might look at the proposal as a performance management tool, but we now know that, contrary to all the stuff about MOTs and weeding out poor teachers, it is not supposed to deliver that in any case—the Government have rowed back from that. I fear that by the time the Government have finished legislating for the measure, tying themselves up in knots and retreating from the original spun intention, it will be even more difficult for head teachers who want to take tough action against teachers to do so, as they will have to go through a mechanism of proving that the teacher had all the CPD support that they needed.

Again, like the school report card, the proposal responds to some concerns about the existing provision of CPD, which is not adequate for some categories of teacher, such as supply teachers and returning teachers, and tries to touch on the issue of performance management, but is being done in a mangled way. If we allowed the measure to pass, its outcome would look much like that of performance-related pay, for which the Government legislated 10 or so years ago.

The performance-related pay scheme was supposed to incentivise teachers to teach better, but by the time that it came in, it had been so mangled up by the Government, who did not want to offend anyone, that such pay was paid to virtually every teacher, unless they simply did not appear in the school for years on end. It was a complete waste of time and resources. The measure before us will be the same because the Government are not clear on why it is necessary and why it is being delivered in this form. It will be a waste of money and a bureaucratic impediment. If we are trying to deliver CPD, it is unnecessary to do so in this way. If the Government are no longer trying to deliver a better performance management regime, the slender string from which the policy is hanging has already broken.

For those reasons, our amendments and those tabled by the Conservative party ask the Government to do what I genuinely think they should—not to implement the measure hastily and for every teacher in the country, when many will not gain from it. They should not legislate without a clear view from the GTC, which, I understand, does not have such a view, or without further consideration by the Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families, which has played a useful part in scrutinising the Government’s policies. That could save the Government from making a big mistake.

Ken Purchase (Labour, Wolverhampton North East)

I have a few questions to put to the Minister regarding this part of the Bill. I am aware, as is everyone else in the room, of the difficulties that head teachers have had in the past regarding disciplinary matters. There is no question about the fact that the structures of local authority personnel departments have made life somewhat difficult to weed out—there are no other words for it—teachers who simply have not served our children as we would wish. It is, has been and remains the duty of head teachers to ensure that their staff are delivering education in the prescribed manner and in the way that the school wishes to happen.

I wonder whether granting a licence—I am struck in this thought by the Minister’s suggestion that it will be the same as how doctors, architects and others are licensed—would remove from the state, the school, the education department or any institution the possibility of being sued by a parent. When a child emerges from school to the parent’s dissatisfaction, could action be taken against the teacher because they have been licensed? Will the teacher be left open to legal proceedings? If so, can we look forward to a similar edifice to the Medical Defence Union and other professional organisations that have to set up funds and insurances to protect themselves?

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

No doubt, I will be corrected if I get this answer wrong. My hon. Friend is making a good point. If he is asking about the rights of a teacher and what would happen in those or any circumstances, let me say that employment law would normally apply. Normal industrial tribunals and other procedures and processes would be available.

Ken Purchase (Labour, Wolverhampton North East)

Those assurances need to be absolutely clear before the whole Bill is passed in the Chamber. These are important questions, and people in the teaching profession will want to know their legal position as a result of being granted a licence to teach. If it puts them in a similar position to doctors, architects and so on, questions will need to be answered to reassure teachers that it is for precisely the purposes that the Minister has outlined: to assist the development of the teaching profession and to get it more clearly identified as a profession. Even though a teacher might be employed by the state, a liability might still accrue. Should the licensing system not make it explicit, teachers need to be reassured that that liability remains, as the Minister has suggested, with the local authority or the school itself.

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

I will check the important point that my hon. Friend makes. I think that what I have said is right; if not, I will correct it later. My understanding is that the relationship between pupils, parents and teachers will not change in any way. If there is an employment issue, the normal employment law is available. However, I will check that, and if I am wrong, I will clarify it. My hon. Friend is right to say that we must have certainty. I think that there is certainty, but I will ensure that that is the case.

Ken Purchase (Labour, Wolverhampton North East)

I simply want to say that such assurances are necessary for the morale of the profession.

Vernon Coaker (Labour, Gedling)

I agree, and my hon. Friend makes an important point. There need to be assurances so that there is certainty about the legal position, as we have seen with other provisions in the Bill. I have said that if there is an issue that needs to be clarified, or if an assurance on certainty needs to be given—whether that is requested by my hon. Friends or Opposition Members—I will do that.

I do not want to repeat myself to the hon. Member for Yeovil for reasons of time, but it was never the Government’s intention to have a new MOT that weeds out poor teachers. There is a performance management system with capability reviews for that. I know that many people say that it does not work and that we cannot get rid of bad teachers, but I say there is a mechanism for that. We are trying to do something completely different: improve the status of the teaching profession and give it the continuous professional development that it needs and deserves. We are working with our social partners and others to ensure that there is a contractual entitlement to CPD. For the first time, it will be laid out in the contract that, as well as a licence to practise, there will be an entitlement to CPD, which will overcome the variability between different schools, different parts of the country and different local authorities. If we can invigorate CPD with the introduction of the licence to practise, that will be significant. Of course the process cannot be bureaucratic. It cannot weigh schools down and interfere with teaching and learning. The intention is to continue to raise the quality of teaching by addressing the variation in the take-up of CPD.

I referred to doctors because the system is similar in many ways. A licence is granted to doctors. Information is then collected on how they keep their practice up to date and the professional development and courses they undertake. After five years, the information is looked at to see whether it has been successfully completed, and then the licence is renewed. It is not used as a way of striking off bad doctors; there is a separate process available.

Teaching is a fantastic profession, and I return to something I said to the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton: if this is good enough for doctors and lawyers, why is not good enough for teachers? Of course there will be difficulties, which sometimes can be challenging. I should say to the hon. Member for Yeovil that he needs to keep the faith. If he thinks that the licence to practise is important, we should look to see how we can overcome the difficulties.

We are working with the GTC to try to deal with issues of practicality. Of course there will be challenges regarding how best to proceed. The GTC is asking whether we have got something right or whether it should be changed, and we are working with it to deliver a workable policy.

I do not agree with the other Conservative amendments. My hon. Friend the Member for Wolverhampton, North-East will be pleased to know that licences to practise will apply to academies, but one of the amendments would provide that the measure should be not applied to academies. The independent report that the hon. Member for Yeovil wants is unnecessary.

For decades, the teaching profession has quite rightly been asking that it is accorded the status that it deserves. The fact that, in many cases, CPD has been substandard, inadequate or non-existent is simply unacceptable. A contractual right to continuous professional development, alongside a licence to practise, is difficult to introduce, but it is a prize that we should all strive to achieve. That is what the clause is about. It will raise the status of the profession and give the teachers of this country a standard of professional development that they have not had before. With those comments, I ask the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton to withdraw his amendment.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

I listened carefully to the Minister. His comparison with the medical profession—the GMC and the royal colleges—would have more strength if the chief executive of the GTC was not opposed to the policy. He is not mildly opposed to it—making his points behind the scene, as one would expect—but making his opposition clear in public. He said that the measure would be “unduly burdensome”, and that he would need

“assurances that it won’t be another layer of accountability in the system”.

He also said that there was a

“lack of information from the Department...about how the scheme will work”.

That leads us to the conclusion that we have a cobbled-together policy at the tail end of a Government. It is the kind of policy to which schools object. As Dr. Daniel Moynihan said in his evidence, it would be a

“tick list of two pages-worth of items in the core professional standards”——[Official Report, Children, Schools and Families Public Bill Committee, 19 January 2010; c. 24, Q33.]

We have become all too familiar with such tick-box approaches over the past years. In view of the opposition from the education world and within government, I will press for a Division on clause stand part, but I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Clause 26

Schedule 1

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

I beg to move amendment 307, in schedule 1, page 38, line 9, after ‘shall’, insert ‘, for its own internal use’.

Janet Anderson (Labour, Rossendale and Darwen)

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: amendment 210, in schedule 1, page 38, line 9, after ‘a’, insert ‘notification’.

Amendment 254, in schedule 1, page 38, line 10, leave out from first ‘of’ to ‘to’ and insert ‘providing support’.

Amendment 152, in schedule 1, page 38, line 12, at end insert—

‘(1A) The register referred to in subsection (1) shall not be publicly available.’.

Amendment 211, in schedule 1, page 38, line 25, leave out ‘applied to’ and insert ‘provided the required information to notify’.

Amendment 255, in schedule 1, page 38, line 25, leave out ‘applied to’ and insert ‘notified’.

Amendment 256, in schedule 1, page 38, line 25, leave out ‘for the child’s details’ and insert ‘, that the child’s details are’.

Amendment 213, in schedule 1, page 38, line 32, leave out ‘or (7)’.

Amendment 257, in schedule 1, page 38, line 32, leave out from ‘(6)’ to end of line 33.

Amendment 151, in schedule 1, page 38, line 35, at end insert—

‘(2A) A decision under subsection (2) shall be made within 20 working days of the receipt of the application from the parent by the local authority.’.

Amendment 212, in schedule 1, page 38, line 35, at end insert

‘within 10 days of receiving the notification with the required information from the parent.’.

Amendment 258, in schedule 1, page 39, line 2, leave out from ‘(6)’ to end of line 3.

Amendment 259, in schedule 1, page 39, leave out lines 6 and 7.

Amendment 215, in schedule 1, page 39, leave out lines 8 and 9.

Amendment 216, in schedule 1, page 39, leave out lines 15 to 17.

Amendment 261, in schedule 1, page 39, leave out lines 19 to 27.

Amendment 214, in schedule 1, page 39, leave out lines 30 to 34.

Amendment 262, in schedule 1, page 39, leave out lines 35 to 39.

Amendment 263, in schedule 1, page 39, line 40, leave out ‘An application’ and insert ‘ A notification’.

Amendment 264, in schedule 1, page 40, line 4, leave out ‘in connection with an application’ and insert ‘following a notification’.

Amendment 265, in schedule 1, page 40, leave out lines 10 and 11.

Amendment 217, in schedule 1, page 40, leave out lines 14 to 45 and insert—

‘(4) The only information which a parent will be required to give to notify under this Part and to have the child’s name included on the notification register is—

(a) the child’s name;

(b) the child’s date of birth;

(c) the names of the child’s parents;

(d) the names and addresses of those with current parental responsibility;

(e) the child’s last school, if any;

(f) the child’s gender;

(g) the child’s home address and place of education;

(h) the name of the person providing home education;

(i) contact telephone numbers and e-mail addresses, where available, for the parents;

(j) the details of any previous revocation of registration and of any previous school attendance order served.

(5) To meet the criteria required to notify and register, the parent shall not be required to supply any information about the nature of the child’s prospective education.’.

Amendment 266, in schedule 1, page 40, line 15, leave out ‘an application for registration of’ and insert ‘notification of’.

Amendment 70, in schedule 1, page 40, leave out lines 17 to 19.

Amendment 267, in schedule 1, page 40, leave out lines 17 to 28.

Amendment 107, in schedule 1, page 40, line 22, leave out from ‘which’ to ‘any’ in line 23.

Amendment 108, in schedule 1, page 40, line 26, leave out from ‘provide’ to ‘prescribed’ in line 27.

Amendment 153, in schedule 1, page 40, line 28, at end insert—

‘(f) the prescribed information mentioned in paragraph (b) shall not be burdensome and need not require detailed curriculum or teaching plans.’.

Amendment 268, in schedule 1, page 40, leave out lines 29 to 45.

Amendment 269, in schedule 1, page 41, line 2, leave out ‘an application’ and insert ‘a notification’.

Amendment 270, in schedule 1, page 41, line 9, leave out from ‘which’ to ‘on’ in line 10 and insert ‘notification of a child’s details’.

Amendment 218, in schedule 1, page 41, leave out lines 12 to 24 and insert—

‘(4) The registration period ends when—

(a) the parent and child move to live outside the local authority area;

(b) the child is no longer of compulsory school age;

(c) the parent notifies the local authority that the child is no longer being home educated;

(d) the local authority notifies the parent that a school attendance order has been served.’.

Amendment 271, in schedule 1, page 41, line 17, leave out ‘or (c)’.

Amendment 272, in schedule 1, page 41, leave out lines 18 to 24 and insert—

‘(5) If the child ceases to be of compulsory school age, the registration period ends with the date on which the child ceases to be of compulsory school age.’.

Amendment 285, in schedule 1, page 43, line 43, leave out from ‘whom’ to end of line 44 and insert

‘notification has been made under subsection 19B(1)’.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

We now reach probably the most controversial element of the Bill: home education. Schedule 1 implements the Badman report. The report and these provisions have infuriated the parents of 20,000—or is it 50,000 or 70,000, according to the Secretary of State, or 80,000—children in home education. As the shadow Secretary of State, my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), said on Second Reading:

“I am deeply concerned about the additional bureaucratic burden that will now potentially be placed on thousands of our fellow citizens whose only crime is to want to devote themselves as fully as possible to their children’s education. It is a basic right of parents to be able to educate their children in accordance with their own wishes, and to educate them at home if they so wish. There may be many reasons why parents take that decision: they might be dissatisfied with local provision; their child might have a specific educational need that they feel can be better supported at home; or they might have philosophical objections to the style of education on offer at the local state schools that are easily accessible.”

He went on to say:

“Ultimately however, this is a basic human right that every parent should have, and I feel the Bill erodes that right, because, as I read it, it allows the state to terminate the right of a family to educate a child at home if the education offered is not deemed suitable according to regulations that the Secretary of State writes.”—[Official Report, 11 January 2010; Vol. 503, c. 456.]

Infuriating the home-education community en masse can only be a sign that the whole issue has been badly and insensitively handled.

As Education Otherwise reported in its written evidence, one local authority told the DCSF:

“The review and its recommendations will be perceived by home educators as a direct and unprecedented attack on the family, striking at the heart of the relationship between parents and their children, and could damage the relationship between Las and home educators where there has previously been good and open dialogue”.

There seems to be confusion at the very heart of the policy. In a letter to the Secretary of State, Graham Badman said:

“In January, you asked me to review the arrangements for home education in England. In particular, you asked me to look at whether there are any barriers to local authorities and other public agencies in effectively carrying out their safeguarding responsibilities in relation to home educated children. You also asked me to investigate suggestions that home education could be used as a ‘cover’ for child abuse. Finally, you asked me to look at whether local authorities are providing the right support to home educating families.”

There was nothing in the terms of reference about the quality of education. I asked Graham Badman in our evidence session about the primary purpose of the review, and whether it was the issue of safeguarding, with home education as a potential cover for abuse or whether it was a worry about the quality of education being provided. He replied:

“On the basis of the quantum of evidence submitted by local authorities, I think my first concern would be the sufficiency and quality of the education received by a number of students.”——[Official Report, Children, Schools and Families Public Bill Committee, 19 January 2010; c. 52, Q70.]

That difference is revealing, and it matters because the policy prescription for tackling hidden abuse is very different from that of concerns over the quality of education. By conflating the two, the Government have created an unworkable and deeply unpopular policy that ends up implicitly accusing tens of thousands of sincere and honest parents of being potential child abusers at the same time as intruding into their approach to education.

If the prime concern is that of safeguarding, the purpose of a register or notification is simply to assist with ruling out parents in the hope of isolating those who might be problematic. If, on the other hand, the issue is education, we must ask ourselves against what standard will home education be measured, given that it will by its very nature be eclectic. It is a road that will lead nowhere. There is no way in which an inspector can judge the quality of such education unless he or she has a set of standards against which he or she is to judge it. Without such standards, the judgment will be sufficiently subjective to have no validity if sanctions are imposed. For someone to draft such standards would either be impossible or would constrain and constrict the very type of education that parents want for their children, hence interfering with the basic and fundamental parental rights.

In the policy statements, the Government stated:

“Our existing guidelines make it clear that a suitable, full time, efficient education cannot be determined by the same methods that apply in schools. Children normally attend school for between 22 and 25 hours a week for 38 weeks of the year, but this measurement of “contact time” is not relevant to home education where there can be almost continuous one-to-one contact and education may take place outside normal ‘school hours’”.

The guidelines go on to state that the type of educational activity undertaken can be varied and flexible. The policy statement continues:

“Home educating parents are not required to:

teach the National Curriculum

provide a broad and balanced education

have a timetable

have premises equipped to any particular standard

set hours during which education will take place

have any specific qualifications

make detailed plans in advance

observe school hours, days or terms

give formal lessons

mark work done by their child

formally assess progress or set development objectives

reproduce school type peer group socialisation

match school-based, age-specific standards.”

They are not required to do any of those things in the guidance. It begs the question, how can someone go into a home and judge education? It is hard to know what the visitor is meant to assess. The annual cost of between £130 million—

Ann Cryer (Labour, Keighley)

The hon. Gentleman keeps talking about certain aspects of my constituency, but I have been living there for a long time and the children are very dear to my heart. What if an inspector went into a home and discovered that the parent who had decided to home educate spoke no English? What is the hon. Gentleman’s remedy if we are not to have inspectors?

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

Those issues apply in other parts of the education system. The hon. Lady has been complaining that there are children who are not getting English lessons in the schools that they attend, so I do not think that that is an issue solely related to home education.

Ann Cryer (Labour, Keighley)

I have never said that children do not get English lessons. They could not possibly join or perform in the school if there were not dedicated groups of reception class teachers teaching them English on arrival. My complaint is that there is no English spoken in the home so they are thrown in at the deep end once they arrive at age four.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

I have friends who speak only French in their homes. It is not for me to object to the way those parents bring up their children. We have to be careful what powers we take for ourselves as the state, and this issue treads over the line between the duties that the state has and those that families have for bringing up their own children.

Several hon. Membersrose—

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

I will give way to the hon. Member for Battersea and then the Minister, and then I will crack on, if I may.

Martin Linton (Labour, Battersea)

Is the hon. Gentleman saying that he and his party would be happy if children in this country were educated without any knowledge of English?

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

No, I am not. The issues are very difficult and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath said during the debate on Second Reading, things are not satisfactory at the moment, and we will have to look at this issue. But this is not the right approach to tackle such difficult matters. In the words of an old clichĂ(c), it is a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and it is offending tens of thousands of people. That is the problem. We have to consider this again, more sensitively, to tackle the problems that both hon. Members have highlighted.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

Will the hon. Gentleman comment on one of the recommendations of the Select Committee? On home education, it believes that the prospect of a child gaining basic literacy and numeracy skills and a breadth of education is right. How does that fit with the hon. Gentleman’s comments on having perhaps only one language in the home, which is not English?

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

There are many schools in this country where 8 per cent. of young people are not learning to read. The way the Government are trying to tackle such matters is not right. For one thing, it is costing between £130 million and £567 million a year, which will be completely wasted if their approach is designed to change the way children are home educated.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

I wonder, following the Minister’s intervention, whether—from what she said about the system of local authority inspectors looking to see that a suitable education is being provided— any family who cannot demonstrate suitable English skills will automatically be deprived of the right to home educate? That seems to be the logical conclusion of what the Minister suggested. If that is the message she wants to send out to people in such a situation in this country, perhaps she can say it more clearly.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

I am sure the Minister will respond to that point.

In my judgment, the state will be far better using that money—£560 million a year—to provide assistance, pay exam entry fees, give access to exam centres or help to pay tutors than wasting it on inspecting an eclectic type of education that will ultimately be inconclusive. Local authorities should be focusing their efforts on the one in three schools judged not good enough by Ofsted, the 40 per cent. of 11-year-olds who leave primary school still struggling with the basics; and the 8 per cent. of boys and 4 per cent. of girls who leave primary school completely illiterate.

I want to leave time for others, in particular my hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness, who has worked tirelessly and with great principle in fighting for the rights of home educators. Therefore, I shall not touch on home visits, the rights of local authority officials to meet the children each year—possibly without parents present—and the sinister warning in the schedule of a revocation of registration

“by reason of a failure to co-operate”,

which parents fear may include simply refusing a meeting with the child without the parent being present, even though that right is enshrined in proposed new section 19E(4).

My amendment 152 proposes that the register should not be a public document—whether a parent educates their child at home is a private matter and should be left as such, notwithstanding the measures.

Amendment 151 requires a local authority to decide about entering a child on the register expeditiously, stipulating 20 days—the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for Yeovil states 10 days. Either would be good; we need to ensure that parents are not kept waiting for many weeks before a decision is reached about whether their child is to be included in the register and, therefore, whether they are permitted by the state to continue to home educate.

Amendment 70 takes out the request for the application process to include

“a statement giving prescribed information about the child’s prospective education”.

Amendments 107 and 108 are consequent upon amendment 70.

Amendment 153 states that the information requirement for registration should not be burdensome. The policy statement says that the information about the education need only be about two sides of typewritten A4 paper. However, Mr. Badman, in his evidence, seemed to imply that more than two sides might be needed for secondary-aged children.

Chloe Watson, who is a constituent of mine, represented the Home Educated Youth Council, which consists of young people who are themselves home educated and passionately in favour of home education. She said in her evidence to the Committee:

“So far, there is no evidence from an unbiased body that home education is any worse than school education. It is considered equal or better by all authorities that are not local authorities...I know thousands of”

home educated children

“and not one of them has an unsuitable education in my eyes or their eyes.”——[Official Report, Children, Schools and Families Public Bill Committee, 19 January 2010; c. 74-75, Q112.]

We saw that first hand, from the passion of Chloe, who argued her case eloquently and was clearly well educated.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I am pleased that we have now finally moved on to what is an extremely important part of the Bill. The issue has probably generated most correspondence to Committee members and has put constituents in contact with their local Member of Parliament even if their MP were not on the Bill Committee.

I start with some comments about our attitude to the schedule, in order to put our amendments in some sort of context and to prevent our having to repeat some of those points later. I do not question the motivations of the Government in introducing the provisions. We understand why the Government are concerned to ensure that every child is receiving a high-quality education. We take seriously some of the evidence given to the Select Committee, in which some of the shortfalls—for a small number of home educating families—were acknowledged.

We acknowledge that the Government are under a great deal of pressure on two sides of the argument. On one side, child welfare issues can come into the public domain, and if children are shown not to be educated, there can be a sudden media uproar about Government negligence. On the other side, when Governments try to take action, they often get criticised for over-regulating. The Government’s job is not an easy one. We understand that in some cases—probably a small minority—there may be concerns about the quality of home education and the effectiveness and ability of local authorities to discharge their current responsibilities.

However, we also understand the concerns that have been raised by home educators across the country about the nature of the Government’s proposed solution, which we feel is highly illiberal, for reasons that I will go through in a moment. The solution fails a number of tests that we would set for making legislation in this area.

I would like to pay tribute, without taking up too much of the Committee’s time, to all the home educating groups and individuals who have made representations to us, the Government and the Select Committee, and who, in spite of the fact that sometimes they are not, by their nature, part of big, powerful national umbrella groups, have been forceful in making their case over the last few months. I want to refer to some of the people in my constituency in the Chard Home Education Centre and some individuals, such as Tania Berlow, who gave evidence to the Select Committee, which took a lot of time to consider the Government’s proposals.

Turning to the substance of the proposals, we share the Government’s concerns about the existing legislation in two respects. We welcome the fact that Conservative Front-Benchers have made it clear that existing regulations on home education are not perfect and that their party has an open mind about making sensible improvements where possible. We are concerned about two areas in the existing framework for home education.

First, we think it is reasonable that local authorities have, under current legislation—I am cautious about the words I use, because the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness has some expertise in this area, and he will jump down my throat if I select the wrong words—some responsibilities in ensuring that no young person is badly home educated. If I was a local authority, with the existing responsibilities under the law, I would be nervous because I would not know many of the children and families who were home educating in my area. Of course, that is the case at present; families can move across local authority areas. I understand why, and I think that many, though not all, home educators also understand why there is some desire for local authorities at least to possess information about who is being home educated. That is directly relevant to the large cluster of amendments that deal with registration and notification.

The second thing on which we agree with the Government is that once local authorities know who is home educating, if they have genuine concerns that the quality of education—I underline education—is poor, and believe that there is no evidence that young people are being educated properly, they need to have sufficient powers to judge whether that is the case and whether action needs to be taken. It would be absurd to give local authorities a responsibility if they had no information and no means of making an informed judgment.

I return to a point made in an earlier debate. Although the vast majority of parents, home educating and non-home educating, are passionate about their children and are responsible—I have no doubt that the vast majority of home educators are deeply committed and are providing an excellent education—there are other people who are home educating for other reasons. Some groups of people do not believe that particular children should be educated beyond a certain age. Evidence was given to the Select Committee about Traveller families who thought girls, for example, should not be educated above key stage 2.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

On the point about Traveller families, one must always ensure that the cause or perceived need for a measure is matched by that measure. What in the Bill will make any difference and ensure that Traveller families, for instance, who may have the view that the hon. Gentleman mentioned, will be picked up and challenged? In the real world, I do not think that the provisions in the Bill will make any difference to those families, while they will inconvenience and intervene in the lives of many others.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

That is a serious issue, and I do not underestimate the risk that this could end up as a system to police those people who are law-abiding, rather than those who are not. Nevertheless, if I were a local authority employee responsible for this, I would want some sort of power and presumption—even if a small minority tried to ignore it—that I was entitled to know. If I had concerns, I would want to be able to take action to find out whether those concerns were substantiated.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

That takes us to the nub of the matter. Since education was made compulsory, the settlement was that parents—not the state—had legal responsibility for the provision of education. They may delegate that responsibility to the state, but that legal responsibility has lain with parents. The role of the state has been only to challenge, where evidence has arisen to suggest that parents were not delivering on their legal duty.

The implication of what the hon. Gentleman says, and certainly what is in the Bill, would make an historic shift from the parent to the state. It would be the state that must be reassured; the state must know, and the local authority must have its doubts and fears allayed. That takes the primacy of the parents entirely out of the picture. We have a situation in which local authorities, should they have serious evidence that education is not being delivered, can challenge it. All too often, they do not do that, even when they have the evidence. That is more of a problem than the one that this draconian legislation seeks to address.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

There is certainly a huge shift in presumption in the Bill. I will come on to that in a moment; I believe that I will start to converge with the views of the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness in some of my criticisms of the Bill. However, as I said to the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton when we discussed one of his amendments earlier, it is sadly the case that there is probably a small minority of individuals for whom home education—or the claim of home education—is a negative decision. That may happen when youngsters have been excluded from school, or if parents have had bad experiences. It could be with parents who have mental health problems. It is difficult for social services to intervene and take a youngster away from their parents, as that requires a high threshold. Even in my constituency, I have been deeply worried about the circumstances of some young people. In a society where everybody accepts their responsibilities—as most people do—we would be happy to leave all such matters to individual families. However, I fear that there is a small minority of young people who need the additional protections that the state can sometimes give.

I have stated the two areas where my position converges with the Governments, but we have sincere and deep concerns about the proposals in a far larger number of areas. I raised the first of those during the evidence-taking session with Graham Badman, and this is where I agree with the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness. The Bill contains a massive change in the presumption relating to citizens’ freedoms. It is set out in stark terms in the policy statement that the Department provided us with on home education, prior to the evidence-taking session.

In paragraphs 19 onwards, we see clearly—it is especially clear in paragraph 28—that what is at the moment an entitlement by the citizen in a free society to make a decision to home educate, has become an application in the Bill. In the future, instead of having the presumption that we are allowed to home educate, we must apply to the state for that right. That is an extraordinary change that I find deeply objectionable in a free society. We must not underestimate how serious that change in presumption is. It is clear that the application is not simply a process of notification, which is what we are trying to make it through some of the amendments that I will discuss in a moment. It is a fully-fledged process that involves having to supply huge amounts of personal information. On top of that, a person must supply the information contained in paragraphs 30 to 32 of the policy statement.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the presumption is that the child will be registered? That is the starting point.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

No, I do not think that that is the presumption. I had hoped that it was the presumption when the Bill was published. It was not until I read the policy statement and looked at all the representations from home educators—by golly, there have been a lot—that I understood just why they are so angry. The issue is not only that a huge amount of information must be given. I say to the Minister: look at what is in paragraphs 30, 31 and 32. Those are not things that must be done during the process of home education. That is the statement that must be supplied along with the registration procedure.

First, the statement must set out

“the educational needs of the child, and contain any relevant background information...This may include information about special educational needs, any particular aptitudes the child has”—

it goes on and on. The second type of information will be

“the educational philosophy or approach to be adopted. This might cover the degree of formality of education, any specific curricula that will be followed, or qualifications pursued.”

If that is not enough, paragraph 32 states that the third piece of information will be

“outline plans for the forthcoming year”.

That is undoubtedly a process of application to the state for someone to determine whether you or I, Mrs. Anderson, or anyone else is fit to make a judgment even to start the process of home education. It is a massive change in the presumption about the freedom of citizens to home educate.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

Paragraph 34 of the policy statement states:

“We envisage plans should cover around 2 sides of typewritten A4 paper as a very rough guide to the extent of detail that should be provided.”

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

That is fine. A plan can be one paragraph, two pages or 500 pages. That does not avoid the fact that if I want to home educate, I must write to the Minister or, in effect, a local government official and supply a very extensive amount of information, some of which is needed and some of which, I suspect, is not. Then I must tell the Minister and the local authority about the educational needs of the child and about my educational philosophy. I must produce “outline plans”.

The point that the Minister is getting wrong is that it does not matter how long the document is. The issue is that it must be approved. It does not matter whether it is a paragraph or 10 paragraphs. What matters is that it is being requested and someone has to filter it. If they are not filtering it, what on earth is the point of asking for all that information? I assumed, when home educators first came to my advice centre, so angry about this, that all they were being asked to do was submit information about their child, their home address and so on. I did not realise that they had to go through an application process to do something that they currently can do as of right. To me as a Liberal, that is deeply objectionable.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

My heart is warmed by hearing a Liberal spokesman speak from liberal principle. I am delighted. It is so rare. None the less, it gives me great pleasure. May I ask the hon. Gentleman about a particular group? Let us take an example—a poorly educated single mother. The international research evidence is that poorly educated parents have a tremendous positive impact as home educators. I suggest that a poorly educated single mother, visited by the local authority inspector, will find herself particularly challenged to deliver this set of arrangements and, although it will be the weakest and most vulnerable in our society whose children are most likely to be at poor schools, they will then have a local authority inspector from the same establishment that failed them with the school coming in to tell them that they do not pass muster and their child must go back.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I am also delighted to hear liberal sentiments from the Conservative party, which has occasionally been inclined to support rather illiberal measures in the Bill and has occasionally needed some encouragement to support our amendments. The hon. Gentleman leaps ahead of me, because I have only just got to the first objection about the application process. There are also the issues about how this will be policed, which is directly relevant to the amendments.

Martin Linton (Labour, Battersea)

When the hon. Gentleman said in his preamble—I have learned shorthand—that local authorities need to have sufficient powers to judge whether the quality of home education is adequate, what did he mean?

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I meant that if it is obvious to a local authority or if the local authority—I shall come to the issue of oversight in a moment—draws the conclusion, from all the information it has, which might include information from the school that the young person attended, that no home education is going on at all, I would want the local authority to be in a position either to ask for the evidence or to do something about that. Even the existing Act makes it clear that the local authority has some responsibility in that regard.

Martin Linton (Labour, Battersea)

I am thinking of a child who has been home educated for a long time, on whom there is no local authority information. How does the hon. Gentleman propose that the local authority obtain that information, if it does not even know that the child exists?

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I had hoped that it was clear from my earlier comments, and I shall make it clearer when we come to the specific amendments, that we believe that it is perfectly reasonable for there to be a notification requirement, so that local authorities are aware of such children. It is also perfectly reasonable for there to be mechanisms by which the local authority is able to form a judgment about whether home education is being received, and if it is clear that it is not or that there are serious concerns, to take action. That is different from what is in the Bill.

The problem with the registration process—it is both registration and an application—is that somebody somewhere has to make a judgment about whether all the submission, which the Minister says is only two pages, conforms to some definition of suitability. When Mr. Badman came to see us, we discussed what suitability means. Given the amount of monitoring that will go on and the accountability, judgements about suitability clearly will have to be made from registration onwards. Yet, what consideration have we had in Committee, or is there in the Bill, about suitability? In paragraph 43 of the policy statement, Mr. Badman himself states that in the 21st century, with all the employment demands,

“the curriculum must be sufficiently broad and balanced and relevant to enable young people to make suitable choices”.

That is precisely what he said in evidence to us. Yet, we know that providing a broad and balanced curriculum is not part of the current responsibilities of home-educating parents. Paragraph 47 contains a long list of what home educators are not required to do. We then have the supposed reassurance from the Government, in paragraph 48:

“We will soon commission work to establish whether the current interpretation of ‘suitability’ needs to be updated”.

That is completely the wrong way round. To put in all that architecture, including an application process with an educational philosophy and so forth, before we even have a clue what suitability means, seems to put us and local authority officers in a dangerous position. Based on the evidence that Mr. Badman gave to the Committee, there clearly is a big difference between what he thinks is suitable and the existing situation.

My next point is that if I were charged in a local authority with the responsibilities in the Bill, not just for oversight but for judging the applications coming in and the educational philosophies, I would want some advice from my local authority—probably from the Minister—about precisely how to interpret “suitable”. Which educational philosophies in paragraphs 30 to 32 are acceptable? What detail about outline plans should be expected? We know what will happen. Either it will all end in complete uncertainty, with local authorities policing the system in completely incompatible ways in different parts of the country, or, much more likely, certainly if this Government is in power, local authority officers and others will rightly expect to have a large document—and it will get larger—setting out what a legitimate philosophy is and the right kind of information that should be supplied regarding future plans. What is at the moment pretty light touch and terrifically vague regarding suitability will soon become incredibly prescriptive.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

Does the hon. Gentleman acknowledge that one of Graham Badman’s recommendations is better training for local authority officers who deal with the home education population? The Government accept that that is absolutely right, and money and training will be made available for officers. They will then have much more understanding of the different philosophies among the home education population, including autonomous learning. It is absolutely right and proper that we do that further research into defining “suitable education”, and that we have some principles that local authority officers can use.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

But surely that argument is the wrong way round. I am pleased that the hon. Lady is saying that she will commission research, and although there will not be time in this Parliament, I hope that there will be plenty of time in future for a meaningful dialogue with home educators. Can it possibly make sense to impose all that architecture—it will be a massive change—without even debating suitability? Even if we did debate suitability, I am not sure whether we would arrive easily at a conclusion about what it means. Suitability of home education in an environment that we are trying to make as flexible as possible is difficult to define.

On registration and ongoing monitoring, we are asking local authorities to do an impossible job. They will do it either in a varied and inconsistent way or they will end up with a sledgehammer that will crack the nut of home education for many people and drive them back to a formalised home education, from which they might be trying to escape in the state sector.

Annette Brooke (Liberal Democrat, Mid Dorset and North Poole)

It is obvious that there is a vast difference between local authority officers in their respective authorities. Some local authorities are supportive and advanced in their ways of working, while others, like one of mine, have refused to give support. The massive cultural difference between officers will be a huge impediment to change home education in the right direction unless the research is done first. Does my hon. Friend agree?

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I agree completely with my hon. Friend on those important points.

I draw the Committee’s attention to two other deficiencies, both of which the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton has mentioned. It is relevant to registration as well as monitoring that a lot of concern has been expressed about the extent to which the new apparatus for the oversight of home education would pursue issues not only of education, but welfare and child protection. It has caused great resentment among the home educating community. It thinks that the Government and the Badman report, intentionally or otherwise, has associated home education with welfare and safeguarding concerns for children. Sometimes, Ministers have said that the intention is not to oversee home education, but in spite of those statements of good intention, we see from the policy statement issued by the Department that that is exactly the intention.

The Government’s view is that the job of the architecture under schedule 1 is not only initial registration and the policing of education, but policing for all home-educating families of welfare issues, whether or not there is cause for concern. That is set out clearly in paragraph 40 of the policy statement. It makes it clear that the responsibility of the regulator will not be to check whether education is suitable, which is difficult enough to define at the moment but at least seems to be a core competence of such regulations, but whether education

“accords with their application for registration; what the child’s wishes and feelings about education are”,

and

“whether it is harmful for the welfare of the child to continue with home education”.

We do not agree with the presumption that the state should not only be seeking to satisfy itself that some home education is going on, but essentially whether all home educating families throughout the country should be presumed to need some sort of welfare check. That is something that has driven the Bill, and many of the groups that are passionate about children’s rights outside this place are clear about their motivations in that regard. I respect them. They view it as important that, at the moment, children who do not come into contact with schools and other agencies should have some other oversight. They are concerned about the scope for the abuse of a tiny minority of children, who might be away from schools and other secondaries. I understand that, but I do not believe that it is right for the architecture of the system to presume that there is a need to inspect the welfare of children in every home educating family.

Bill Wiggin (Conservative, Leominster)

I agree absolutely with the hon. Gentleman, but does he agree that the sort of people who are most terrified by such an intrusion are those whose children have been bullied? Presumably, any local authority officer who heard of bullying would do everything that they could to prevent it. Given that that fail-safe has already let down such families, what does the hon. Gentleman think is likely to happen to any family worried that their bullied child is again being inspected by a local authority? If they feel that the local authority is failing them again, what are they likely to do?

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point to which the Minister rather than I should respond. The point is that, as far as I am aware, we have not established that there is a difference between the vulnerability of the most vulnerable children—not the average child—in home-educating families and in school settings.

The final area in which the Bill is deficient—

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

The effect—there has been little comment on it so far, because so much horror has been expressed about the Bill’s general provisions—is that the most traumatised and vulnerable children and their parents, who have been let down so badly by schools, will cut off all links with the local authority in response to the provisions. In order to escape from those who have let them down the most, they will seek to elude and escape the attention of the local authority. They will not seek to use its facilities. The Bill should be responding to an agenda to open up public services and support to home-educated children, particularly the most vulnerable, but its effect on those whom we care about most could be precisely the opposite.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I agree strongly. The hon. Gentleman brings me to my next point, which is the Bill’s lack of support and positive reasons for home-educating parents to engage. I take seriously his concerns that it will drive many home educators away from dealing with local authorities. I did not particularly welcome the evidence that we took from some home educators who said that they would not adhere to the law and the regulations if the Bill were passed, because none of us likes to hear people say that they will break the law. It is a serious concern. If people feel that the laws imposed are unfair, unreasonable and inconsistent with a liberal society, we are driving them not to comply.

What I would have liked to see—in notification procedures, not application procedures—is linked support so that notifying, if it became part of the Government’s policy, would include a series of potential measures, funding support and access to other means of support open to home educators. That might be the type of environment in which a home educator might receive something from the process that was actually of value to them.

That is why we tabled these and other amendments. I will refer briefly to the ones in the present group. If you will excuse me, Mrs. Anderson, I will not comment on those tabled by others, as our time is seriously limited. Amendment 210 would change the process of registration and application to make it a process of notification. In other words, it would require compulsory notification by every home educator, but it would not require them to submit the same type of information required by the Government’s proposals, which essentially turn notification into a process of application.

If I had thought about it at the time and seen the people from the Chard Home Education Centre early enough, I would have tabled an additional amendment linking notification to the provision of direct support as a consequence of notifying, which might enable access to the support that we have been discussing. That might take the form of vouchers or other entitlements, so that people who notify can see that they are getting support of the type that many home educators do not receive at present.

Amendment 211 would ensure that parents of home-educated children needed to provide only a limited amount of information to the local authority rather than having to go through the complex process of registration and application proposed in the Bill. Amendment 217 sets out what types of information we think would be necessary for a light-touch notification rather than the type of application and registration envisaged in the Bill.

Amendments 213, 215, 216 and 214 are all pretty similar and would strip out the elements of welfare oversight from what should, in our view, be an attempt to oversee the issues of education. Amendment 212, which has already been mentioned by the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton, would give a specific period of time within which to register what, under our model, would be a notification.

I should like to finish by saying while we have the concerns that I have set out, we also take the view that the Committee has had a seriously deficient amount of time to consider such an extensive Bill. We have only one and three quarter hours left to deal with 92 amendments and new clauses, and a very complex debate. I have always hoped that the Government might reconsider this excessive legislation and come back to us with a much more limited scheme of notification, with some incentives to notify, because that is all my party would be able to support.

I have reached the conclusion, along with my colleagues in the Commons and the other place, that by trying to botch together this very bad job on home education, the Government have made it almost impossible for the concerns of people outside this place to be taken into account in a sensible way, particularly as there will not even be a serious Committee stage in another place. Therefore, I say to the Government that it is inevitable that we will have to vote against this aspect of the Bill and throw out all the proposals on home education, and I hope that that is something that the Conservative party will support.

None the less, in a spirit reflecting a residual desire to find some sort of sensible conclusion, I say to the Minister that her only way out of this is to bring back on Report a very modest schedule focusing on this limited issue of notification with which we could deal before this Parliament ends. Unless the Government do that, it is our strong view not only that the provisions to which amendments have been tabled should be deleted, but that the whole of clause 26 and schedule 1—everything related to home education—should be dumped before this Parliament comes to its end.

Caroline Flint (Labour, Don Valley)

I will try to keep my comments brief because I know that the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness has done a lot of work in this area and wishes to speak.

When I started to consider this part of the Bill, I wondered why we should not know the position of all our children who, in any other circumstances, would be in our state education system. However, after reading the documentation that was sent to us and listening to the concerns of one of my constituents, I now have some doubts. Gordon Whitehead has brought jobs into Doncaster. He supports learning and opportunities for young people, and wants to offer apprenticeships and opportunities in IT through his company. However, he has huge concerns for his own home-educated children because of what the propositions in the Bill will mean for him and other families who home educate.

I do not want to repeat everything that the hon. Member for Yeovil said, but I have some concerns about a process through which, for understandable reasons, there is a desire to know that if children are not in school, they are being home educated. Needing to know that information has turned this proposal into something that is bureaucratic and overburdening to families and local authorities. Those authorities are not confident that they can carry out the Government’s ask on this matter.

To echo the hon. Gentleman, I have read the statement from the Government about what is not expected of parents who home educate. However, although earlier paragraphs say that parents need to produce only two pages on what they provide, we then find that they will be asked to explain their philosophy as well as other things. I find that very confusing. We are able to read all this documentation and to hear from witnesses, but I wonder how such information will be related to local government officers on the ground.

In submissions provided by parents who home educate, we have found out about—I say straight away that I am sure that this does not represent all local government officers—individuals giving personal rather than objective points of view when they go into the homes of people who home educate. It might not be my personal desire to educate my children a certain way, but I recall one example of a local government officer referring in a report to incense being burned in the home. The family quite rightly questioned the report, saying, “What has that got to do with anything? People use fresheners in their homes all the time.” To be honest, however, there was in that case perhaps implied criticism that the family were rather “brown rice and sandals” and hippy-ish, and the very mention of incense being burned conveyed an approach with which the local government officer did not agree.

The Committee was provided with case studies of child protection, some of which I found rather wanting. There was an example of a woman in Gloucestershire—I think she was a foster mother—who was prosecuted for cruelty to children. If I have understood it correctly, the education services had annual contact to monitor the education at home. Having visited that home on an annual basis, the education service came to the conclusion that things were generally satisfactory and that no child protection concerns were noted, although perhaps that says something about whether the service was looking correctly. However, I could not see how anything in the Bill’s proposals would have made any difference in that case.

Another example was of a young person who sadly died. The serious case review stated categorically that the mother

“complied with all statutory requirements in relation to children in elective home education. She co-operated with visits from the London Borough of Enfield Education Department”

twice in one year. The following year, it was identified that

“The visiting officer had no concerns about the family or their circumstances, and was satisfied”.

What seems to have come out of those various examples linked to child protection is that, even in such circumstances, those on the ground have responded to the Government by saying, “We need something bigger. We need something more overarching to deal with these issues across the piece.”

I am not sure whether the Bill strikes the right balance. Finding a way through this matter is important, as is the language used. We have heard valid points about whether something is seen as a registration or an application.

The law is also called into question. We have received numerous submissions highlighting the role of the local authority in providing those services that it is required to provide, including such things as the national curriculum, child protection and Every Child Matters. However, whether we like it or not, as far as I understand it, the law is different when it comes to provision provided by parents. The locus for the local authority in that case is very different, and I wonder whether—presumably the legal opinion in my hon. Friend the Minister’s Department has given views on this—it might be open to legal challenge by other quarters in relation to the state’s role in providing education, and the ways in which it expects education to be provided when parents choose to do that.

I do not think we will resolve the matter today, but I hope that my hon. Friend will show a willingness to listen—I am sure she will—and engage in trying to find a better way forward. Another approach might be to make an offer that opens up dialogue between those in the community who home educate and local authorities. If there was money available to do that—money seems to be available to train local authority officers to inspect and understand what they need to inspect—it would be better used when linked to some sort of notification system with better co-operation.

During the evidence sessions—I think that Mr. Badman referred to this—we heard positive examples of forums involving home educators that already worked with a local authority. I do not want anyone to misinterpret this, but some of those in the home-educating community might be better gatekeepers for information about possible legitimate concerns.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

The right hon. Lady is giving a thoughtful speech. She is sending a much-needed message from this place that the voices of home educators have at least been listened to, because many of them feel that Members are deaf to what they say. Her fellow Labour members of the Select Committee came to precisely the same conclusion about improving the provision—that was Badman’s No. 1 identified need—and then seeing what happens. We should work on a voluntary basis with families before imposing such draconian legislation. If there was a need, and if there was no other way of tackling it, civil liberties and other issues could be put aside. Initially, however, the offer should be to work with families. I hope that the right hon. Lady’s words will influence the Minister.

Caroline Flint (Labour, Don Valley)

I believe that my hon. Friend the Minister and the Government want to take aspects of what Mr. Badman has looked at, and what the Select Committee has said, and try to make them work. My worry for the Government is that, for a number of different reasons, there has been a breakdown in confidence and trust on the issue. I am therefore worried about whether we will be able to bring various parties together to discuss the issue productively. I think that the Government have the best intentions. Part of the challenge, to be fair to them, arises because they are being lobbied by a number of other organisations and individuals to do something about the matter, but this is about getting the balance right. We have heard about taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but there are different ways to resolve the issue and address the problems that have caused concern.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

I take the point that the Government are being lobbied—I am sure that that is one of the burdens of office—but the Badman report’s original terms of reference imply that the Government were originally being lobbied to look into safeguarding, rather than the education issues. It now seems that the issue has been turned on its head and that the education issue is the Government’s focus. Who is lobbying the Government from that angle?

Caroline Flint (Labour, Don Valley)

I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister will answer that question. There is an issue about how safeguarding and education have somehow merged into each other. Part of the problem might be that some of the civil servants are trying to find a way to argue the issue out by bringing that into the debate. I do not know the answer.

There must be a way forward that can bring the relevant communities together, whether they are parents, local government or the Department. I hope that we can find a way forward, because I am concerned that we will otherwise end up with something that cannot be delivered on the ground and that will create division when people should be coming together, and I am sure that that is not what this Committee or the House want to achieve.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate. I am glad that we have arrived at clause 26 and schedule 1. We have had three outstanding and thoughtful contributions to the subject so far, and it is a pleasure for me to follow them.

I begin with the positive aspects of the Badman review. It arguably pays more attention to the problems of poor support for home-educating families and the segmented nature of the home-educating population than to registration and monitoring, which have rightly attracted far greater attention and controversy. The major recommendations of the Badman report on support and access to services for home-educating families include help in finding appropriate examination centres and the provision of free examination entries for home-educated candidates. The Children, Schools and Families Committee received evidence that it cost £1,000 for one family to enter their children for their GCSEs.

Members across the Committee will notice that there are no firm provisions on this matter in the Bill, even though central to it is the proposal of parental guarantees and the idea that parents, as citizens, should be able to demand from the school, the local authority and the state certain rights, standards and access to ensure that their children get a fair deal and a good start in life. It is extraordinary that there are no such provisions in the Bill for home-educating families. If the Bill gave such entitlements, we would find the kind of positive engagement that the right hon. Member for Don Valley spoke about.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

It is clear to me that such requirements are not for this Bill. The Government have accepted the need for the recommended provisions to support home-educating families.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

It is always pleasing to hear a Minister make a promise, albeit with no figures, no timetable and no guarantee. What would be the point of the Bill if Ministers could just do that? Ministers accepted the need to provide a decent education and for local authorities and schools to be accountable to parents prior to the introduction of the Bill. None the less, the Government have introduced it, presumably because they believe that it will help parents to get those things, rather than just for political window dressing.

Parents of children in school have far more power and far more ability to receive what they deserve from the state and a far greater record of receiving it than home-educating parents, yet the Bill carries no such guarantees for them. I would be delighted if the Minister told us what guarantees for parents and what figures have been pencilled into the Government plans.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

I am conscious that we will come shortly to another group of proposals that contains a series of new clauses tabled by the hon. Gentleman that deal with the specific recommendations of Graham Badman for each area of support. I am happy to deal with these issues at that stage, which would be the appropriate way to proceed. I will take guidance from you, Mrs. Anderson, but it seems that we are straying into that group of proposals.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

Given the time left to the Committee, I think we will struggle to make much progress. With your permission, Mrs. Anderson, I will take this opportunity to discuss the whole Bill, as well as the proposals under consideration, as I hope will other hon. Members. I hope that in the next hour and 28 minutes, the Minister ensures that she tells us what the Government will do.

Annette Brooke (Liberal Democrat, Mid Dorset and North Poole)

I share the hon. Gentleman’s concerns about the provision of this much-needed support. The former Schools Minister wrote letters to our constituents saying that there would be no support for home education and that school was the Government’s preferred option.

Mr. Stuartrose—

Janet Anderson (Labour, Rossendale and Darwen)

Order. In view of the shortage of time, I am happy, if it is the will of the Committee, for us to consider with this batch of amendments the subsequent groups of amendments and new clauses relating to schedule 1. Therefore, it will also be convenient to discuss the following: amendment 273, in schedule 1, page 41, line 26, leave out ‘A local authority in England’ and insert

‘Where a local authority in England has reasonable grounds for suspecting that the education provided to a child whose details are entered on their home education register may not be suitable or that it would be harmful for the child’s welfare for the child to continue to be home educated, the authority’.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

I am grateful for that, Mrs. Anderson. If the Minister can find her place in her papers, she is free to intervene on me at any point to provide the assurances that have been sought by Committee members.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

It is very lengthy.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

If the Minister can assure us that she will specify the support, the numbers and the timelines, she may do so in her speech if it would be too lengthy to do so now. However, if she wants to intervene, I am happy to give way.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

I will be happy in my remarks to deal with the new clauses in the second group on the support that Graham Badman suggested home-educating families should have.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

I am grateful to the Minister, and I look forward to the specific details. I believe that action is urgently needed to clarify the existing responsibilities of local authorities in relation to home-educated children, particularly those with special educational needs, and to improve practice in line with those responsibilities. I am concerned that Badman’s recommendations and the Bill give local authorities more power over home-educating parents with children who have special educational needs, without ensuring that the professionals working with those children have a strong understanding of those needs. We heard about that in the oral evidence-taking sessions, and it is a particularly important point.

I was talking about inspectors, and I will take the opportunity to focus for a moment on that issue. The need for the proper training of inspectors has been raised several times, yet no provision in the Bill will require inspectors to be properly trained to do that job. Will the Government ensure that there is a standard of training of local authority inspectors to which home-educating parents can hold their local authority to account? If people are going to arrive and will have these powers, given that the state should be the citizen and not the other way round—I know that it can get confused, particularly over the past 12 years—we need to ensure that the home-educating parent can check that inspectors have had the proper training. The proposal would give a massive increase in powers to those inspectors and allow them to impose school attendance orders based on their own judgment, which, as we have heard, may not always be impartial.

What assessment has the Minister made of the increase in the number of inspectors that will be required? This morning, I heard from two large counties, which expect to go from having one person who currently works in that area to needing 10 or more. Where will those people come from? Will they be provided by April next year? Will they have the astonishing array of talents and skills that they need? They will need to be trained up to ensure that they can look out for the welfare of the children in the home. They must be able to understand the variety of approaches that home-educating parents use to educate their children and provide them with autonomous education.

The Children, Schools and Families Committee heard from senior academics about just how long it can take to learn and understand the processes and procedures that are involved in those approaches. Inspectors must also be able to support children with special educational needs. If they make judgments, we hope that they will not do so on the basis of prejudice or any snobbery towards someone—perhaps a parent—who was not that well educated, but on a proper, sound and fair basis. They get to sit in judgment and, if the Bill goes through, decide whether to remove the right of the parent to home-educate. We need answers on that.

Edward Timpson (Conservative, Crewe and Nantwich)

Does my hon. Friend share my concern about the local authority officers who will go into people’s homes? If they do not have the proper training, expertise and experience in dealing with that situation—probably one of most delicate situations that could be faced when dealing with a child’s education and welfare, as the Bill suggests—they might fall back on some sort of framework or mechanism devised by the local authority to meet the requirements of the monitoring process. That ends up looking something like the common assessment framework, which in itself becomes a tick-box exercise, rather than a proper analysis of that child’s home education.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

My hon. Friend makes a fair point, which I hope resonates with hon. Members across the Committee. We know that existing inspectors vary enormously in their understanding and approach. Some, I must say, are excellent and one cannot find a home educator in the country who would not speak highly of them. However, those dedicated professionals are among those with the greatest doubts about the Bill.

There will be a huge increase in inspectors. As my hon. Friend said, if we already have unsuitable inspectors, how much more likely are we to have them if we increase their numbers pretty much overnight, before sending them out to make extremely sensitive judgments? On that issue alone, consideration of the reality of the inspectors’ role and the skill set that they will need should give the Minister pause before unleashing a new group of inspectors freshly out on the streets in April.

Of course, within a further three months—by July 2011—assessments will have been made and parents will have had to register; I think that parents have three months in which to register and send in to these people for evaluation the philosophy and all the other requirements laid out by the hon. Member for Yeovil. So I ask the Minister not only what reassurances can she give us about the training of inspectors, but what evaluation process will be used ensure that the inspectors themselves are kept up to standard.

Of course, we heard earlier in our proceedings my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton ask, “Who guards the guardians?” He regretted the fact that he did not know the Latin for that phrase. I then asked the Minister for Schools and Learners the question in Latin, which was:

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”——[Official Report, Children, Schools and Families Public Bill Committee, 26 January 2010; c. 193.]

I thought that my asking the question in Latin was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, but the Minister did not know what I meant. Of course, many home-educated children who autonomously pursue Latin would have known. That is a critical question.

It seems to me that the Bill is predicated on thinking the worst of parents; it is all about the worst parents doing the worst job, and what we can do about that. That is what the Bill is based on, while it is assumed that local authority inspectors are marvellous. The only thing that I have ever heard the Minister for Schools and Learners say about local authority inspectors is that they will be marvellous: “Oh no, we understand the importance of training, and they will be trained up to the highest standard—oh, it’s going to be marvellous.”

The Government view all parents as suspicious and possible failures, but they view local authorities as paradigms of excellence. Surely, we should be considering how the average home-educating family will be treated by this process and what the average local authority inspector will be like. If we understand those things, we will start to have a more practical approach to these issues.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

My hon. Friend is making a very interesting speech. He will be aware that Chloe Watson, who gave evidence to our Committee, studied Latin at home. Indeed, not only did she get a GCSE in Latin, but she is now a tutor in Latin. However, my intervention is really about the revised impact assessment, which estimates that all home-educated children will receive one eight-hour visit at the end of the year and that half of home-educating families will receive an additional eight-hour visit. It is upon that assumption that the £500 million cost is based. Therefore, does my hon. Friend think that those eight hours, which are meant to include planning, preparation, travel and writing up of reports, will be all the time that these inspectors spend when they do their monitoring?

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

That is a fair question, given the assessment that the inspectors have to make, because it is suddenly up to them—however poorly or excellently trained they are—to make that judgment, and as my hon. Friend suggests, they have to do so even if they have been off work sick for a while, so doubtless those hours will be crunched up.

At the moment, local authorities hire in a great number of the people who support home education. If inspectors have to go into homes and spend that amount of time, local authorities may need more of those people. Whatever the arrangement, with eight-hour visits and 50 per cent. of families receiving an additional eight-hour visit, I suggest that that is hardly a light-touch approach.

On the subject of quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, I would like to share with the Committee the story of Ian Knight. I do not know whether the Committee is aware of Ian Knight. Sadly, Ian Knight was grooming young girls on internet chatrooms by posing as a man decades younger than his real age of 50. Apparently, he used the innocuous moniker of “Reg” when he preyed on girls as young as 13, using instant messaging to contact them. All his messages had a sexual theme. He systematically asked the children questions about their age, sexual experiences and so on, while engaging—I hate to share this with the Committee—in sexual activity in front of a live webcam. However, the interesting thing about Mr. Ian Knight is that he was an Ofsted inspector. [Interruption.] The last thing that I would suggest is that all Ofsted inspectors are to be viewed suspiciously, but then again I do not want all parents to be viewed suspiciously.

Janet Anderson (Labour, Rossendale and Darwen)

Order. May I remind the hon. Gentleman that we are running very short of time? I urge him not to stray too far from the subject in hand.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

Thank you, Mrs. Anderson.

This goes to the nub of a lot of fears. People from local authorities, perhaps poorly trained, will have this role. Ofsted inspectors are subject to far more rigorous scrutiny than, according to what we have so far heard from the Minister, local authority inspectors will be. People representing the state will arrive at home-educating parents’ doors and say that they want to come in and insist on co-operation from the family; otherwise, they can remove the licence to educate.

The East Riding Mailhas a story this week telling the tale of the

“Pupil sex shame of teaching assistant”

at a Bridlington school. He took over from another teacher who had been struck off because of inappropriate contact with a pupil. The point I am trying to make, Mrs. Anderson, is that professionals who work in this area may themselves have issues. What horrifies many parents is that people carrying badges saying that they represent the local authority have, under the Bill, the right to insist on co-operation from families. We should think carefully before we assume the worst of parents and always assume the best of local authority inspectors. We should not stigmatise either group. It is regrettable that home educators have been stigmatised by Ministers, including Baroness Morgan, in public utterances.

The Government need to answer questions about the suitability of education. Local authorities will have to make judgments about the suitability of education provided, as the hon. Member for Yeovil mentioned. The Government commissioned research from York Consulting and published “The Prevalence of Home Education in England—a feasibility study” in February 2007, which made three recommendations. The first was:

“Action should be taken to more effectively define what constitutes an efficient and suitable education for the purposes of LA monitoring.”

That was exactly three years ago. Has the Department done any such work? It appears it has not. Instead, it is leaving the work to later this year, after the Bill has become an Act. Perhaps the Minister will tell us about that.

A key question we need to ask about the direction of travel is whether the Minister intends to extend the licensing principle further. It has always been the statutory duty of parents to educate their children, yet now they are to be licensed to do it. They have to apply for permission to do what was their legal duty. Some deprived areas of London have life-expectancy rates of five or more years lower than those of better-off parts. People are dying because their parents did not teach them to eat properly from an early age. Surely, a re-elected Labour Government should identify obese parents and make them apply to a compulsory register with proof of eating plans, annual inspections—or more if thought necessary by the inspector—and withdrawal of the right to feed their children at home if they lose their registration. After all, Minister, if one life is saved, that would be appropriate. This is as fundamental: the right and duty to ensure the education of one’s children is as fundamental as eating to a family. I suggest the Minister draws back from such a thing.

I wonder whether the Minister read the article by Jonathan Sacks in The Times,in which he compared the French and the English systems of rights. I mentioned it to the Minister earlier. He wrote:

“The French approach was to see rights as an ideal description of humanity that it is the task of politics to enforce. Politics is about the transformation of society by the force of law. English liberty sets limits to the State. French liberty is imposed by the State. That is the difference.”

This is yet another example of this Government deciding to impose their standards on families rather than restrict the powers of the state to intervene.

The inspection system, as the Minister should know, is not neutral—it will have an effect on families. We heard from Autism in Mind, for instance, about the impact on children with autism when a stranger such as an inspector comes into the house. I hope that we will hear from the Minister why the equalities assessment that accompanied the Bill did not touch on that in any way. As Carole Rutherford, the co-founder of AIM, put it:

“Children with autism find change very difficult and often hold fixed and rigid views about people and the places where they are used to coming into contact with that person. If a child is used to seeing a professional/teacher therapist in school then bringing that person into their home places that person out of context in their minds, and they can find it very difficult to interact with that person even though they are well used to doing so in school.”

That is someone the child knows, but someone the child does not know coming into the home will have a strong impact, and that is not even mentioned in the consultation process.

The right hon. Member for Don Valley spoke about putting the cart before the horse. I go back to what “suitable” looks like, because the policy statement says:

“We intend to commission work to examine whether we can develop a set of principles describing good quality learning in home education”.

“Whether we can develop”? Surely we as legislators need to know the answer to that question before we legislate. We are giving blanket powers to local authorities to intervene and disrupt settled home education arrangements on the basis of an undefined offence. We might as well pass a law allowing the police to arrest people for an offence yet to be defined. Why not legislate so that courts can send someone to prison for two years for unsuitable behaviour in a public place, definition of “unsuitable” to follow—but do not worry, we plan to commission work to find out whether we can come up with a set of principles to describe it.

Would we pass such a law? Would we allow such a power to be left to guidance and ministerial whim? I hope we would not, and neither should we allow this proposed law to pass. It will allow some jumped-up, half-trained, school-fixated bureaucrat—in some cases—to take away from families their right to determine the education of their children on the basis of a report whose outcome was described by the Church of England education division as predetermined.

The whole process has been flawed, starting with a consultation that ignored Cabinet Office guidelines, to which the Department is a signatory. The Minister frowns as if to suggest that that was not the case. The criteria and code of practice on consultation, to which the Department is a signatory, states:

“Formal consultation should take place at a stage when there is scope to influence the policy outcome.”

As we know, the response from the Government did not come out until the day before Second Reading, so the people who took part felt that they were not influencing the legislation. And we know, once a Bill has been drafted and enters this place, how reluctant the Government are to give way, sometimes even on new clauses or amendments with which they agree. Therefore, what we had in the consultation was a complete failure to ensure that proper guidance was followed and that people had the ability to influence and change the process.

Home educators are overwhelmingly opposed to the proposals in schedule 1. The Department, when it did consult, found that it was rejected by 4,497 to 230. Ministers can gloss over that, but it is a fact. We can argue about nuances in the report of the Labour-dominated Select Committee, but, as I said, it rejected the central tenet of the Bill: that registration and monitoring should be compulsory. It stated:

“In view of the concerns expressed by home educators about compulsory registration, we suggest that registration should be voluntary.”

Yet the Minister has made out on several occasions that the Select Committee report was favourable to the Government’s position. It was anything but.

There is widespread public concern about schedule 1, and, as colleagues have said, I imagine that most Members of Parliament have been inundated by correspondence from home educators. A record number of petitions—244 from across the country and from all parties’ seats—have been submitted to the House in opposition to the measures. We have, as the right hon. Member for Don Valley said, a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The numbers that were used by Badman and now underlie the impact assessment are deeply flawed. Every effort by home educators and me to get clarification from the Department has failed to deal with the central issues, even though I am grateful for its responses. The impact assessment is based on the figure that 20 per cent. of home-educated children are not receiving a suitable education. Yet, that is not what Graham Badman’s inquiry found. It found that the numbers were a fraction of that. Will the Minister address why, with children for whom the local authority did not know whether their education was suitable, it was automatically assumed to be unsuitable? Regarding benefits, the Government then assumed a large percentage of the 20 per cent.—itself a false figure—would, by being monitored and possibly sent back to school, immediately move back to the national average of outcomes and get five good GCSEs.

The numbers of people not in employment, education or training were equally flawed. When queried by home educators, local authorities that were part of the Badman response said that they could not rely on the data. Yet, we have heard in Committee again and again that there is a high number of NEETs. We do not know that—we have no firm number to give us any idea what the truth is.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

Chloe Watson, who is highly educated and capable, is technically regarded as a NEET, because of the strange way in which some of the measurements are taken.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

Yes, and there are many other cases. It would be welcome if the Minister were to confirm that the NEET numbers are not robust, cannot be relied on and are not an excuse for legislation that further invades the right of families to home educate.

It is important to remember the context. We talk about difficulties with home education, but, in 2009, 19 per cent. of school pupils did not achieve a single GCSE at the end of key stage 4. In 2007-08, 35 per cent. of all pupils at the end of key stage 4 did not achieve five good GCSEs or their equivalent, and over 52 per cent. of all school pupils failed to achieve five good GCSEs including English and mathematics. Therefore, we are not talking about a perfect system in schools. Yet the impact assessment assumes that any child who is picked up and driven back to school will automatically achieve the average outcome.

Given, as we have heard in evidence, that the number of children who are home educated and who have special needs is higher in proportion than that of the average population—they may be autistic—the likelihood of their achieving the national average outcome is extremely unlikely.

The hon. Member for Keighley, who is no longer in her place, said that in certain parts of this country, we must be careful about where children are attending at a given time. However, schedule 1 will do nothing to bring to light children below the radar or taken out of school for forced marriage or other purposes. There is no obligation on parents to register their children—as before, it will be for local authorities to find them and catch up with mobile families. That is what makes the policy so problematic. Some of the people in the home-educating community about whom many local authorities doubt and worry have specific qualities. The legislation will not allow local authorities to pick up on them, and therefore will not make any difference.

The right hon. Member for Don Valley said that this is an opportunity to try to improve things in terms of notification and support. It is important to remember what Beth Reid of the National Autistic Society told the Committee:

“Currently, it looks like a very one-sided system. Without that support, the proposals will not make a difference to children with special educational needs.”——[Official Report, Children, Schools and Families Public Bill Committee, 19 January 2010; c. 68, Q104.]

Schedule 1 has no guarantee of support to home-educating families, no provision for ending the postcode lottery of support from local authorities and no voice for consultative forums as recommended by the Badman report.

Schedule 1 is a solution without a proven problem. It will take the institutional bias against home education and give it statutory backing. Home educators should not have to sacrifice their liberties simply to make life easier for local authorities; government should work for us, not the other way round. Elsewhere in the Bill, there are pages dedicated to guarantees for parents of children educated at school, yet there are no such guarantees for home-educating parents. All the power is given to local authorities. This is a sledgehammer to crack a nut. The hon. Member for Yeovil talked about putting the cart before the horse and he is dead right on that.

Paragraph 12 of the Department’s policy statement says:

“The regulations and guidance on registration and monitoring...will recognise that the interests of the child are of paramount importance.”

And yet, nowhere does that appear in schedule 1. We have Ministers saying that the system will be light-touch, but when we look at it, we find that it is anything but. We have Ministers saying that the interests of the child should be paramount, but when we look at the legislation, we find that the interests of the child are not mentioned.

I will now move on to the amendments. Amendments 254, 255, 256, 263, 264, 266, 269, 270 and 285 reflect a desire to shift from registration to notification for the purposes of support. This should be a voluntary notification system. The Government have again and again stressed the importance of knowing where children are and of local authorities knowing those who are not in school. The hon. Member for Yeovil has used that as a reason why he and his party support the illiberal measure of compulsory notification. I put it to him, as I have before—I hope that he may yet change his mind—that compulsory notification, albeit with no penalty, is unlikely to provide a full picture.

As I mentioned in an earlier intervention, we will see many parents deliberately hiding themselves from the local authority. For local authority purposes, I believe that it is good for them to ascertain to the best of their ability, without imposing on parents, all the children in their areas who are not at school. If they interrogated child benefit, NHS and other records, they would find a far higher percentage of the children in their areas than they ever would hope to achieve through registration, even if it was nominally compulsory.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

That is the point on which we disagree. The Children, Schools and Families Committee’s review of elective home education came up with a voluntary scheme, which I suspect was something of a compromise among its members. It also concluded at paragraph 62 of its report that it considers it:

“unacceptable that local authorities do not know accurately how many children of school age in their area are in school, are being home educated”

I assume that he signed up to that part of the report, so is he really confident that the mechanisms that he is suggesting can deliver that outcome efficiently and economically?

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

We have a system, which he highlighted the costs of, proposed in the Bill. If the Secretary of State is right about the number of home-educated children he mentioned on Second Reading—70,000—the costs of the monitoring and licensing system will be around £500 million over the next 10 years. The child benefit records already exist; the claimant rate for child benefit is astonishingly high. If that database was interrogated, along with others, the cost would be a fraction of the cost of setting up a registration system. Therefore, unless the hon. Gentleman has reason to believe that that is not true, I do not understand why he would think that setting up yet another database was a better and more economical way of finding out what we both desire local authorities to know.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

I am not sure whether the evidence that the Select Committee received justifies the view that it is possible to prepare confidently an estimate of those young people in home education by working back from the indicators that he has mentioned. The cost he cites is the cost of this hugely bureaucratic mechanism for oversight which he knows we strongly oppose.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

That is a fair point. When the Select Committee heard from our clerks that the Government had intimated that they did not think existing databases could be used I wondered why that could possibly be. Why could we not use existing data? If we need to give local authorities the right to access that data, we could do so simply and easily in this Bill. I cannot see any blockage to using existing information. This Bill is far more invasive than simply looking at existing figures. The hon. Gentleman knows that as from last September we have ContactPoint, which provides a list of all children in the area.

David Laws (Liberal Democrat, Yeovil)

The hon. Gentleman raises some interesting issues. He knows that both our parties are committed to abolishing ContactPoint, so there is a limit to the extent to which we can fall back on that solution. He has raised an interesting point. I hope that the Minister will take that on directly.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

We are opposed to ContactPoint precisely because, like the Bill, it is universal rather than something that targets limited resources on those with greatest need. The compulsory notification system proposed by the h M for Yeovil would force parents to notify the state of how they were educating their children only if they were home educating. Although I am sure that there are other ways of notifying the state, I am not aware that parents who send their children to independent schools have to fill out a form and register the fact that they are doing so.

Annette Brooke (Liberal Democrat, Mid Dorset and North Poole)

Is the hon. Gentleman not concerned that even if we could get all the information from the other data sources, we would merely establish the total number of children not at school? We would not establish which children were being home educated. We would be including in that children who have gone missing, children who have totally disappeared—a whole host of children. That is why we feel that the notification scheme must have a firm basis.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

That is a fair point. The Select Committee said that there should be visibility. If it interrogates existing databases, it will have that. It can then go out and try to ascertain within the powers that it currently has what the situation of those children is. The big point that people have made is that we need to narrow it down. We need to find the children below the radar. If all the children below the radar are identified it will be possible for the local authority to make inquiries. I do not know whether parents who send their children to independent schools have to register in some way. That itself is an interesting question. Parents who educate at home would have to go through registration, even under the Liberal Democrats’ proposal, and yet those at independent schools do not.

Annette Brooke (Liberal Democrat, Mid Dorset and North Poole)

Does the hon. Gentleman not feel that there is an inconsistency in that he wants to send inspectors to every single family where there is a child who is not at a main school?

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

I think we all agreed that it would be best if local authorities had that data and could then make judgments on how to act on that. It would be a different Bill from this that looked at what they did. This takes me on to another interesting aspect of this whole notification argument. The serious case review information with which we have been provided, and the information that the hon. Lady and I get on the Select Committee, show that the most vulnerable children in this country are not of school age. They are under five. That is one of the most peculiar things about this. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham, who is an expert on these matters, knows full well, children under five are subject to the greatest level of abuse and are the most vulnerable to abuse. Are the Government coming forward with any form of registration system for them? No they are not. They are doing it for school age children, who would be in school for only 9 or 10 per cent. of the year—that is the average amount of time that a child in a maintained school spends at school. We are setting up this vast panoply of registration just in case there might be a problem, even though we know from international research, from New Zealand and around the world, that home-educated children do not have those problems.

New Zealand has a very similar jurisdiction to ours, and it introduced a system very similar to the one proposed by the Minister. What has it done with it? Last year it decided to stop operating it because it was a waste of time and money. It found that incidents of poor education were sufficiently small—just around 5 per cent.; so much less than the educational failure found in its own school system—that it could not justify the monitoring and inspection regime for a system that produced much better outcomes and a far lower level of failure than state schools. Of course, we call home education a system, but it is not—it is diverse and varied. New Zealand decided that, if it was to take an additional sum of money to improve education, it was best spent on an area where there were known problems—failing schools would spring to mind immediately—rather than on pursuing the families of home-educated children, with 95 per cent. of whom the local authorities could see no problems.

The right hon. Member for Don Valley gave a very thoughtful speech. The question that I am sure she would be asking the Minister is why are we doing this if those who have done it elsewhere have found it to be a waste of time and found that there were no problems with home education. Do we have any special reasons? I am sure that she could be convinced to bring in this kind of draconian system, as indeed could I, if we saw that there was a serious problem that needed to be tackled. No such serious problem has been established. The Badman report came up with the pre-determined outcome, as the Church of England put it.

I will talk a little more about the international context, because the Minister may have seen the memorandum from Kelly L. Green, a parent from British Columbia who home educates. My heart sank when I first read it, which must show a certain errant prejudice on my part, but I read her submission and found it to be excellent. Canada has large heavily populated jurisdictions with excellent regulatory models including the provinces of Ontario and British Columbia.

In the United States, 10 states make no legislative demands of home educators—none. They include the heavily populated states of Texas, Illinois and Michigan. Some 14 states require notification only of intent to educate at home. They include California, Wisconsin and Delaware, so at least they are with the Liberal Democrats. Some 20 states have moderate regulation, meaning that parents may be asked to submit materials in a portfolio, test scores or evaluation. Only six states have what is considered to be heavy regulation. Even the heavily regulated states make no demands on home-educating families who home educate akin to those proposed in schedule 1. Kelly L. Green says:

“To the best of my knowledge, no state demands home visits, and no state requests to interview home-educated children.”

The vast laboratory of the United States, where there are far more home-educated children than in any other part of the world and they must know the subject better than anyone else, has no state demands for home visits and no state requests to interview home-educated children. Yet here we are with the Government pressing ahead with something that has no base.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

I wonder, while we are touring around the world, whether we might just go back to New Zealand, where I understand that parents must receive approval for home-based schooling from its Ministry of Education. It is a complicated registration process and they are given an annual grant to help with the cost of learning materials. I understand that in Ireland and France there is a registration scheme. Some countries are highly regulated and in the US, Pennsylvania has a highly regulated scheme in place for those families who wish to home educate. We need to have some balance when we look at what happens around the world.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

I was seeking to provide that balance, because in Badman’s report he mentions New Zealand a great deal and did not mention that it had just given up the very proposal for monitoring and registration that he was suggesting.

Greater regulation of home education does not produce better results. A peer-reviewed academic article on that topic in “Academic Leadership”, called “State Regulation of Homeschooling and Homeschoolers’ SAT Scores” and dated 11 August 2009, made the following observation:

“The authors of this study find no evidence from their analysis that supports the claim that states should exercise more regulation of homeschool families and students in order to assure better academic success”.

They looked at all the different states—they had all the laboratories, as states in the United States are often referred to—and compared outcomes to find out whether they were better in more heavily regulated states. What a fantastic opportunity to do that in respect of so many different jurisdictions and approaches. That article found no link at all between the level of regulation and the outcomes. So we are talking about bringing in legislation that could cost £500 million, even though the only evidence that we have from international studies suggests that it will bring no educational benefits at all. That is not reassuring when we are considering giving this measure the okay.

The article continues:

“On the contrary, the findings of this study are consistent with other research findings that homeschool students perform well academically—typically above national averages on standardized achievement tests and at least on par with others on college-admissions tests — and do so regardless of whether they live in a state that applies low, moderate, or high governmental regulation of homeschooling.

I have mentioned previously another particularly interesting bit of research that I ask Government members of the Committee to think on. It states:

“Research conducted on home-based education indicates that, unlike traditionally schooled students, home-educated students whose parents have less formal education achieve similar academic results to those whose parents have more academic credentials.”

In other words, home education levels the playing field between the more educated and the less educated parent.

A 1999 study by Dr. Lawrence Rudner, vice-president of the Graduate Management Admission Council, which is the testing company that runs the GMAT test in the United States—the primary test used there—observed:

“Home schooling’s one-on-one tutorial method seemed to equalize the influence of parents’ educational background on their children’s academic performance. Home educated students’ test scores remained between the 80th and 90th percentiles, whether their mothers had a college degree or did not finish high school.”

I would have hoped that hon. Members throughout the House would be excited at that prospect. Home education could have a transformational effect on the chance of children from the poorest homes getting a good education—if the parents had the commitment and the desire to do it—even if their parents did not have a good education themselves. He continued:

“Students taught at home by mothers who never finished high school scored a full 55 percentage points higher than public school students from families of comparable educational backgrounds.”

In other words, although that cannot be guaranteed for all by any means, not least because of the economic realities, parents who are not well educated and who live in a deprived community and are prepared to show such commitment will none the less make a huge difference to the outcomes for their children, who are of course most likely to fail at school.

We should support home education rather than using measures that suggest that the only way we are going to improve it is by forcing children back to school.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

The hon. Gentleman is quoting some research, but it is clear that there is a lack of good research in this area about home education versus schooling. From the analysis done of the limited research that is available, the problem seems to be that often the groups of parents who nominate their children to be put into such studies have some of the brightest children, and they are self-selecting, so those studies do not give a full, accurate picture of home education across the piece. Does he accept that?

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

Any academic exercise—I want to be rude and say, “unless it was dreamed up by the DCSF”—would seek to ensure that it took out all those biases: that is what academics do. However, former local authority officers who are asked to come to a predetermined outcome do not get rid of the biases. When they contact local authorities and get 74 of the 152 respond, it seems that they do not ask themselves the question that the Minister asked me. The Minister’s impact assessment is based on the responses of the 74 self-selecting local authorities that replied to Graham Badman’s request. Why would a local authority choose to reply? Perhaps because it is a local authority that has a problem with home education. Perhaps because it is a local authority that has not got it right and does not understand the existing legislative guidelines, and has therefore decided to fill in the forms and send them back. Where is that self-selecting bias represented in any of the Government’s views? It is absolutely absent.

The Minister sits there, dismissing serious academic research from all over the world—as did Graham Badman, because it did not fit with the outcomes that he had predetermined for him by the Department, and that he duly delivered. Yet his own efforts at gathering data were subject to no such rigorous academic scrutiny and, in fact, every time anyone has questioned them, they have been shown to be false. When the Minister gets a chance to respond—when I sit down—I am particularly looking forward to hearing her defence of the numbers, such as the 20 per cent. of young people not getting a suitable education.

I hope that the Minister will also help us with the contradictions that seem to be so frequent. We were told that the regime would be light touch, but then we read about it and it is the opposite. We heard that the whole purpose, from the Government’s point of view, was to give more help to home-educating parents, yet Ministers have successively said that there is no money to support home education—the right hon. Member for South Dorset (Jim Knight), when he was Minister with responsibility for schools, wrote saying that to the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole. A few weeks ago, when looking on the DCSF website, we found the programme that allows children to have a home computer—I forget its name—in the small print at the bottom of the page, and it said specifically, “but not if you are home-educated”. No access to IT then. The website said that on the very day the Minister told us how the Government wanted to change things.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

That point presents an interesting issue. The reason why the home access scheme is not being made available to families who home educate is because we do not know who those families are. We have no accurate register to look to. Some families have put themselves forward and notified their local authority, but there is no accurate record. That is the problem, and the nub of the issue. We do not have an accurate record of families who are home educating.

Janet Anderson (Labour, Rossendale and Darwen)

Order. As I have decided to broaden the debate to cover all the amendments to schedule 1, the hon. Gentleman may wish to refer to his later amendments, and hon. Members who have already spoken may wish to speak again, briefly. However, we want to allow time for the Minister to respond, so I urge hon. Members to be as brief as possible.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

Thank you, Mrs. Anderson.

The Minister’s intervention was extraordinary. Time and again we get the circular argument that we need registration before we can provide support. We have 20,000 home-educated children who are known to be registered with their local authority. Has that led to any provision for them? It has not. That is extraordinary. People have registered even when there is nothing in it for them, but why, when something comes along that they could be given, do the Government put in the small print at the bottom of the website, “But not for you, I’m afraid, even if you are registered”? Why should those people have any trust or belief?

It gets worse. On 12 November, in a written answer, the Minister said:

“So far as local authority support for the education of home educated pupils is concerned, we plan to strengthen the school census guidance for the January 2010 return to ensure that all local authorities are aware that they can already include in the Alternative Provision Return for Dedicated Schools Grant (DSG) home educated pupils whom they support financially and who have a statement, or have significant special educational needs that have not been formally recognised through a statement”—

they can already include that—

“and pupils whom they fund to attend college for post-14 qualifications including GCSEs and Diplomas. These pupils will then count as a unit for DSG purposes.”.—[Official Report, 12 November 2009; Vol. 499, c. 988W.]

The Minister said on 12 November that in January local authorities would be urged to register home-educated children known to them, for whom they were providing support, so that funding could be provided. However, DCSF guidance notes for alternative provision, dated 28 January 2010—a few days ago—state:

“Pupils taught at home only includes those pupils who are receiving LA funding (i.e. this excludes those educated at home by parental choice)”.

We have complete doublespeak. The Minister tells us that local authorities can register, but then, in the guidance given in January—precisely when the Minister said—there are explicit instructions that authorities cannot register someone who is home educated.

A helpful table on page 17 of the guidance sets out the criteria for inclusion in the census return. It says:

“Pupil whose parents have elected to educate at home (EHE)”.

Under “Include?” is a helpful answer for anyone filling it in:

“Include? No. Category: Not applicable”.

That is where home-educated children find themselves now. As Fiona Nicholson, a trustee of Education Otherwise, said,

“The Department will only consider refunding home educated children who are already funded by the local authority”—

it is a Catch-22—

“yet the guidance notes specifically instruct local authorities not to include home educated children in any funding applications.”

Authorities can only fund those whom they are funding, but they cannot add anyone who comes to them for funding. Perhaps the Minister can spell out why that is not an extraordinary set of contradictions.

I am aware of your strictures, Mrs. Anderson. The first set of amendments would make the shift from registration to notification. In the second group, which is now grouped with the first, amendment 273 suggests that, as in New Zealand and Ontario, visits should take place only where there are reasonable grounds for concern about home-educated children. Having heard the debate this afternoon, I hope that all Committee members will see that that is entirely reasonable. Home visits should not take place if there are no grounds for concern. I hope that we will have the chance to push the amendment to a vote.

On the new clauses, I have tried—

Janet Anderson (Labour, Rossendale and Darwen)

Order. May I ask you to repeat for the benefit of the Chair and the Committee which clause or amendment you wanted to press to a vote?

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

Amendment 273 in the second group.

The new clauses would put into law Graham Badman’s positive recommendations, which, despite all the talk and policy guidance, are not to be found in the legislation. I hope that Members will consider supporting the new clauses.

In the final group of amendments, amendments 115 and 279 would do essentially the same thing. They suggest that refusal to co-operate—assuming, of course, that the Government press ahead with the measures—should be grounds for refusal of continued registration only if the refusal to co-operate is unreasonable. As it stands, the local authority does not even need to show that a parent is being unreasonable. I hope that Ministers will see fit to include my amendments, as our direction of travel is the same, but my amendments ameliorate some possibly draconian impacts. Amendments 287, 303 and 304 are an attempt to ensure that the Bill will do what Ministers say it is supposed to do, which is to put the interests of the child first. I would like to push amendment 287 to a vote, if I may.

Finally, the current bias against home education in schedule 1, which deals with school attendance order proceedings, must be removed. It is absurd that our law says that if someone home educates without being registered, the quality of the education, the needs of the child and so on are to be disregarded. If a parent tried to challenge that and went to court, the court would be told that it must disregard the quality of the education and the interests of the child, because the law says so. I therefore hope that the Committee can support the amendments if, as I fear, the Bill is to continue on its merry way out of Committee. Having spoken for long enough, I will sit down.

Annette Brooke (Liberal Democrat, Mid Dorset and North Poole)

I will be relatively brief, covering the rest of the amendments. Our starting point must be a recognition of the diversity of the home education community. The biggest category seems to be parents who are so committed that they devote themselves to home educating their children. I have only admiration for that, because it means that at least one parent does not take the opportunity to work and instead supports and provides hour after hour of education, in whatever form it takes. That is an enormous commitment, and it makes me understand how angry those parents feel about what is a real attack on them.

A second category is parents who withdraw their children from school because the school is not serving them well, and often that is when the child or young person has special educational needs that the school just cannot meet. I have also come across many instances where that has been done, possibly for those with special educational needs, because of bullying. I presume that there is a category of children about whom we know little. The Select Committee on Children, Schools and Families discovered that some local authorities have been colluding to keep down the exclusion figures, and that ought to be tackled firmly. It is absolutely clear that that complex situation has been dealt with in a rushed and flawed process, which can only lead to bad legislation in its current form.

With regard to the quality of education that might be provided, I would like to submit some DCSF evidence to the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness. The extension of the “effective provision of pre-school education” study has shown that children with parents who have lesser qualifications and who spend large amounts of quality time with them will perform better that children with parents who have higher qualifications but do not. That is interesting, and in some ways it supports what he has said. The research was carried out by the Institute of Education, based at the university of London.

The provision is such a pig’s ear that the best thing would probably be to vote against it, but we have tried to be constructive and have set out a series of amendments that hang together to scrap the idea of a registration process. I had originally thought that a simple registration process would work, but as soon as we look at the Government’s suggestions, we see that there seems to be no such thing as a simple registration process. We therefore propose a notification scheme. That must, of course, be backed up by other measures in time, but immediately it could be backed up with the supportive measures. Supportive measures should be in the Bill and there should be a guarantee.

We have tabled two amendments pertaining to special educational needs in particular. Although there is support as far as children’s statements are concerned, there are many concerns about parents withdrawing their children from school because they are not getting the extra support that they need there, probably because they are not statemented. If we were assured today that that support would be offered as soon as possible, we would feel much better about the situation.

To give a fair summary, the rest of our amendments try to reduce the prescriptiveness of the Government’s approach throughout. In amendment 225 and new clause 5, we suggest that we should start again with a proper, independent inquiry that people trust so that we can define what we mean by “efficient and suitable” and, equally, establish fully all the support that is needed. We need to do that properly with a full, independent inquiry, and that must be done before we establish the sort of registration scheme that the Government propose.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

Was the Badman review not meant to be a full, independent inquiry? It was certainly an independent review.

Annette Brooke (Liberal Democrat, Mid Dorset and North Poole)

I covered that earlier when I said that the process was rushed, as everyone would agree, so I do not think that it could be counted as a proper inquiry. The fact that the Badman review did not include examples of good practice for home education shows that it was not balanced. That was totally lacking in the report. We are looking for an independent inquiry.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

It is worth putting on the record that not one of the people on the Badman review had expertise in home education. It was quite extraordinary. One member of the expert panel described the whole process as the most slapdash in which he had been involved in 30 years of academic life.

Annette Brooke (Liberal Democrat, Mid Dorset and North Poole)

I thank the hon. Gentleman. I go back to where I started: we should not have legislation based on that process. It can only end up as bad legislation of which no Government would be proud.

Janet Anderson (Labour, Rossendale and Darwen)

As we have broadened the debate to all the amendments to schedule 1, do you want to make a further contribution, Mr. Gibb?

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

No.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

In response to the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole, I wish to say that Badman contains references to good practice throughout the country where local authorities work alongside home-educating families. I refer the Committee to page 16, which sets out good examples. The debate has been wide-ranging and, clearly, the number of amendments that have been tabled and grouped means that my response will be lengthy. However, I shall try to get through all the issues that have been raised.

On behalf of the Government, I totally refute the idea that we believe that home-educating families are not doing a good job in the majority of cases. The hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton drew attention to three tasks given to Graham Badman, but the fourth task was to look at whether any changes were needed in the current regime for monitoring the standard of home education to meet the needs and support the work of parents, local authorities and other partners to ensure that all children achieve the “Every Child Matters” outcomes. That was clearly put to Graham Badman as one of the issues he needed to address in his report.

Local authorities have lobbied hard on the education point. On several occasions, they have told the Department that they do not have the powers they need to make sure that children in their localities are receiving an education. As for the needs and best interests of a child not being set out in the Bill, that is because local authorities have a general duty under section 175 of the Education Act 2002, which provides that they must carry out all functions conferred on them in their education capacity

“with a view to safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children.”

Having set out the role of a local authority and what it has to do, at the heart of the Bill is ensuring that the interests and needs of children are met, and the basis of our proposals on the registration and monitoring of home education are no different from the basis of other clauses that we have been considering during the past few weeks. Parents have a primary duty to ensure that their child receives a suitable education, and home education is a perfectly valid option. The state is already required to intervene on the child’s behalf when parents fail to fulfil their duty to the child, but the state cannot fulfil its responsibilities towards the child if it does not know that the child is being home educated, and has no means of establishing whether the child is receiving any education, let alone a suitable one. That is the key point that the hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness fails to grasp.

Nick Gibb (Conservative, Bognor Regis and Littlehampton)

I refer to annexe A of the Badman report. First, the fourth bullet point is not mentioned in Graham Badman’s letter to the Secretary of State. Secondly, it does not mention standards of education. It refers to achieving the “Every Child Matters” outcomes, which is more towards the safeguarding side of the issue rather than the quality of education. It seems to be something that Badman introduced as the review was being conducted rather than what was asked of him by the Government.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

At this late hour in our proceedings, I shall be happy to write to the hon. Gentleman and set out matters clearly. I understand that Graham Badman was tasked with looking at home education and what could be done to support local authorities and home-educating families to do their job better.

Over the past year, we have heard repeatedly that the proposals are a massive state intrusion into family life, but the reality is quite different. I do not accept the opening comments of the hon. Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton. We presume that parents opting to home educate are acting in the best interests of their child, which is why there is a presumption they will be registered. I also do not accept that we are maligning families by asking them to go through the process of being registered on the presumption that that will happen.

Registration will be a simple, once-a-year process. The education plan, of which there has been much discussion this afternoon, will be simple and able to accommodate all educational approaches. Monitoring will be light touch and will involve one meeting a year. There will be informal discussions with an emphasis on the work that has taken place over the year, plans for the year ahead and any additional support the local authority can give. Children will not be tested or forced to meet alone with a local authority officer.

The hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness seemed to imply that the consultation was completely meaningless. After that consultation process, the Government thought again about the Badman recommendation that the child be seen alone by a local authority officer. We have removed that provision from the legislation. The officer can ask to see the child, but there is no requirement on the parent or child.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

But if they do not co-operate with that visit, which is specifically set out, they can have their licence from the state revoked. Surely, that is disingenuous.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

The hon. Gentleman fails to grasp the fact that the issue is about moving home education to a new way of working in a spirit of collaboration and co-operation with local authorities. I am not for one moment pretending that everything has been perfect in the past. Clearly, it has not been. In the vast majority of his recommendations, Graham Badman sets out the need for more support for home-educating families and a change in how local authorities work with such families. I see that as a positive way forward that is in the spirit of collaboration and co-operation, rather than the adversarial way in which the hon. Gentleman seems to think the registration and monitoring process should be conducted.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

It is not me who thinks that, but the huge majority of home-educating families. Thousands of them replied to the consultation, even though extraordinarily and against the Cabinet guidelines to which the Department is a signatory, the Department did not ensure that everyone who had already registered with a local authority was told about it. The guidelines specifically state that the people who will be most directly affected must be told. The Department did not do that, but thousands of people replied, and 95 per cent. of them said, “No way.” It is those people who think the proposal will destroy positive relationships, and there is evidence from North Yorkshire and elsewhere that parents who previously co-operated with local authorities are no longer doing so. That is not my assertion—it is the reality on the ground, and it is time the Minister woke up.

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

One of the key problems is that we do not know all the families that are home educating. It is difficult to alert home-educating families to a consultation if we do not know who they are. I am very conscious of the time and feel that we need to move on, but I want to put this clearly on the record: we cannot take it as read that all home-educated children are receiving the education to which they are entitled, when some remain unknown to the local authority. Far from intruding into family life, it would be a failure on the part of the state not to take the action we are proposing. Local authorities must be able to act against parents who wilfully fail to educate their children.

Parents who are struggling to give their children the education they want for them need to be much better supported—I think we all agree on that point—without the fear that their child will automatically be sent back to school if that is not the best place for them. I think we can all agree on that as well. We want to support home-educating families and ensure that they can provide the education their children need. Let us be clear about why the proposals are important.

Graham Stuart (Conservative, Beverley and Holderness)

Will the Minister answer the specific point about the January census. I cannot claim to be an expert, but why does it appear that local authorities cannot register a home-educated child and have the money that the Minister says she is so desperate to get to help them?

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

I am happy to come to that point in a moment, but I want first to talk about the available financial support.

We are taking action because unless we do so, we will not know how many children are home educated, which cannot be right. I think the hon. Member for Yeovil agrees. He made it clear, as did the Select Committee, that it cannot be right for local authorities not to know which children in their area are being home educated. Without the provision, some children will not receive the education they need because the local authority cannot intervene. That cannot be right, and the hon. Member for Yeovil recognised that.

Our proposals are not about state control of home education. They are about acting when a child’s rights are not being met by their parents. The proposals are moderate and proportionate, and they will keep England among the most liberal countries in the world for home education.

Tim Loughton (Conservative, East Worthing and Shoreham)

By the same token, on the criteria set out by the Minister, why have the Government singularly failed to introduce a scheme of compulsory registration of private fosterers?

Diana Johnson (Labour, Kingston upon Hull North)

I am sorry. Will the hon. Gentleman repeat the question?

The rest of the debate is in Hansard.