Home Education (Duty of Local Authorities) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2018-04-27
Topic: Education
Ralph Matthew Palmer (Conservative, Centre-right): My Lords, assessment is a serious problem if it is overemphasised in this context. Of the population of children who are home educated, those who have been taken out of school are, almost by definition, divergent. If they were ordinary mainstream children behaving in a mainstream way, there would probably have never arisen any impetus to get them out of school. They come out of school because some problem has arisen; it usually means that there is something—it can be any of a whole range of things—about the child that puts them at the fringes of the national distribution. Those who have come out into home education or are in it for philosophical reasons develop divergence, because they are no longer constrained by the needs of a curriculum that is designed to make schooling possible. There are all sorts of things about the way we choose to school children that are dictated by the need to have schools that can run with a curriculum that broadly keeps pace with itself across different schools and with a way of doing things that enables a school to understand where it is supposed to be and for us to judge whether it is doing well. There are all sorts of restrictions that do not need to apply to a home-educated child. You will often find children who are streets ahead in some particular area of interests—at age nine or 10 they are doing an Open University course in astrophysics, or whatever it might be. You will also find children who have entirely neglected some aspect of their education until they find a need for it and then they catch up. It becomes a very divergent, varied pattern of achievement There is not any sensible way to assess this in a light-touch way by some sort of standard assessment. Assessments are designed to evaluate what is happening in school, where there are a lot of children and statistics are in your favour; the oddities even out and you get some sort of pattern emerging that tells you how the school is doing as a whole. Even then, there are problems, as we have with Progress 8 at the moment, where the system means that the outliers have far too much influence on the average. If you draw Progress 8 out as a bell graph, however, you can see where the weight of a school is and can make a reasonable judgment on the quality of education being provided there. You cannot do that when looking at an individual child, not simply and not just by putting them through a SATs test. You need far more information. If a parent gets to a point where they are arguing with a local authority about a school attendance order and getting the independent advice needed to establish where their child is and what they have achieved, that could cost a couple of thousand quid. This is an immense resource to apply just to check where a child is. It is entirely pointless and destructive to emphasise assessment carried out by those sorts of means The assessment to aim for is of professionals having contact with the child—a good school teacher or someone with a decent level of experience who can say, "Yes, I can see how this child is getting on; I can see that they are well educated and that their attitudes are right. I don’t have any problem". Much the most effective way of organising assessment is to promote contact between professionals and the home-educated children, and to do that by offering all sorts of support so that home-educating parents will find a need for at least some of it. That way, you do not incur much additional cost on assessment; you are providing money for education. To run this sort of assessment process in a way that is fair to the children and the parents would cost a vast amount of money and all it would be spent on is assessment. To run an assessment system that costs much less risks, because you are dealing with children who are way off centre, a vast amount of unfairness for children and parents. It really does not work as a standard assessment system, and I do not think that we should pretend that it does. Good local authorities employ professional people and trust their judgment; that is what we should be looking at. Local authorities that perform less well hire inexperienced people who do not feel confident in their own judgment and therefore run standard forms of assessment. They have no business drawing conclusions from it, but do anyway and then harry the parents as a result. We have to be really careful about what we are asking for by way of assessment There is a quite a good exposition of this in the draft guidance that the Government have produced. They do not require any detailed form of assessment. We need to move to a position, however, where we are quite clearly, and in words that local authorities can trust, supporting their professional judgment. Yes, they will get it wrong sometimes—everybody does, including all professionals. But that is fundamentally the best and most sensible thing we can do, and we should make that level of support the default in everything we do In assessment we should provide the means to deal with children who have been traumatised by school or who are otherwise emotionally damaged. One should not just take it as read; if it is said that a child will be scarred by meeting a stranger from the local authority, that is not satisfactory evidence on its own. However, we ought to recognise that there are such children, and there ought to be an easy mechanism for a parent to establish that theirs is one such. Frankly, it ought to be part of the support given to them by the National Health Service; if a child has got itself into that sort of position, there ought to be professionals who can back up that judgment. It certainly should not be a local authority’s unfettered right to send some relatively untrained person—certainly untrained in mental health—barging into a delicate situation. However, we need to provide for such situations in what we do We ought to take into account in assessment specific respect for parents’ wishes, not as an absolute but as a matter of ordinary courtesy. There are different ways of doing these things, and we ought to adapt to the parents’ way of doing things if we can. The attitude ought to be that it is a collaborative effort, not an imposed effort. We should recognise that assessment is a reflection of the duties imposed on parents by the founding Act and that we ought to tie things into that explicitly and directly. We ought to make sure that where parents are subject to assessment by other agencies, particularly with regard to things like special needs, that assessment can serve both purposes, and should make sure that it is not duplicated We also need to understand that in making an assessment, the local authority may need access to information which is sensitive in the family context. There may be absent parents who still have rights of care and access, who should not be able to see things that fall outside their rights and responsibilities. They should not automatically have rights to see all the data that is accumulated as a result of an assessment. This needs to be handled within context I feel that we need to look at assessment carefully and that we should not, as the Bill does at the moment, say that you should have "supervised instruction" in numeracy and literacy. Things do not work that way in home education, and they do not have to. What matters is the outcome and not the process, and that we should base our assessments on professional judgment, obtained in the best possible circumstances, and reserving methods of compulsion and intrusion for instances where the local authority has got to the point where it has real concerns. I beg to move.