Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Tuesday 18th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[2nd Allocated Day]

Further consideration of Bill, as amended in the Public Bill Committee

[Relevant documents: Second Report of the Education Committee, Scrutiny of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, HC732]

New Clause 17

Establishment of new schools: data protection

“After section 30 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 insert—

“30A Data protection

(1) None of the provisions in or made by virtue of this Part (including Schedule 2) are to be read as requiring or authorising the processing of information which would contravene the data protection legislation (but in determining whether the processing would do so, take into account the duty imposed or the power conferred by the provision in question).

(2) In this section, “the data protection legislation” and “processing” have the same meaning as in the Data Protection Act 2018 (see section 3 of that Act).””—(Catherine McKinnell.)

This amendment ensures that the provisions in or made under Part 2 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006 (including provisions inserted into that Part by clauses 52 to 55 and Schedule 3) do not override the provisions in the data protection legislation.

Brought up, and read the First time.

14:47

[The Minister for School Standards (Catherine McKinnell)]

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

New clause 1—Free school meals: automatic enrolment of eligible children—

“In section 512ZB of the Education Act 1996 (provision of free school lunches and milk), omit subsection (2)(b).”

This new clause would remove the requirement in the Education Act 1996 for eligible children to request free school meals of their local authority.

New clause 6—Establishment of national school food monitoring scheme—

“(1) Within 12 months of the passing of this Act, the Secretary of State must institute a scheme for monitoring school food standards in England (‘the national school food monitoring scheme’).

(2) The purpose of the national school food monitoring scheme will be to determine whether applicable food standards duties are being met in the provision of all food in schools in England.

(3) The national school food monitoring scheme may from time to time publish reports containing such information as it sees fit relating to school food standards in England.”

This new clause would establish a national school food monitoring scheme, to ensure that the breakfast club provision included within this bill, along with all other school food, follows school food standards.

New clause 7—Registration of children for free school meals—

“After section 512ZA of the Education Act 1996 (power to charge for meals etc.), insert—

“512ZAA Registration of children for free school meals

The Secretary of State must ensure that free school meals are provided to—

(a) all children in England who are eligible to receive free school meals; and

(b) all children whose household income is less than £20,000 per year.””

New clause 9—Duty of school governing bodies regarding mental health provision—

“(1) Subject to subsection (3), the governing body of a maintained or academy school in England has a duty to make arrangements for provision in the school of a dedicated mental health practitioner.

(2) In subsection (1), “education mental health practitioner” means a person with a graduate-level or postgraduate-level qualification of that name earned through a course commissioned by NHS England.

(3) Where a school has 100 or fewer pupils, the duty under subsection (1) may be satisfied through collaborative provision between several schools.

(4) The Secretary of State must provide, or make arrangements for the provision of, appropriate financial and other support to school governing bodies for their purposes of facilitating the fulfilling of the duty in subsection (1).”

New clause 10—Establishment of a National Body for SEND—

“(1) The Secretary of State must, within 12 months of the passing of this Act, establish a National Body for SEND.

(2) The functions of the National Body for SEND will include, but not be limited to—

(a) national coordination of SEND provision;

(b) supporting the delivery of SEND support for children with very high needs; and

(c) advising on funding needed by local authorities for SEND provision.

(3) Any mechanism used by the National Body for SEND in advising on funding under subsection (2)(c) should be based on current need and may disregard historic spend.”

New clause 11—National Tutoring Guarantee—

“(1) The Secretary of State must, within six months of the passing of this Act, publish a report outlining the steps necessary to introduce a National Tutoring Guarantee.

(2) A “National Tutoring Guarantee” means a statutory requirement on the Secretary of State to ensure access to small group academic tutoring for all disadvantaged children who require academic support.

(3) A report published under this section must include an assessment of how best to deliver targeted academic support from qualified tutors to children—

(a) from low-income backgrounds,

(b) with low prior attainment,

(c) with additional needs, or

(d) who are young carers.

(4) In preparing a report under this section, the Secretary of State must consult with—

(a) headteachers,

(b) teachers,

(c) school leaders,

(d) parents of children from low-income backgrounds,

(e) children from low-income backgrounds, and

(f) other individuals or organisations as the Secretary of State considers appropriate.

(5) A report under this section must be laid before Parliament.

(6) Within three months of a report under this section being laid before Parliament, the Secretary of State must take steps to implement the recommendations contained in the report.”

New clause 12—VAT zero-rating for certain items of school uniform—

“(1) The Secretary of State must, within 6 months of the passing of this Act, make provision for certain items of school uniform to be zero-rated for the purposes of VAT.

(2) For the purposes of this section, “certain items of school uniform” means items of school uniform for pupils up to the age of 16.”

New clause 16—Spiritual, moral, social and cultural education in assemblies—

“(1) The School Standards and Framework Act 1998 is amended as follows.

(2) In section 70 (requirements relating to collective worship)—

(a) for subsection (1) substitute—

“(1) Subject to section 71, each pupil in attendance at—

(a) a community, foundation or voluntary school in Wales,

(b) a foundation or voluntary school in England which is designated with a religious character, or

(c) an Academy in England which is designated with a religious character,

must on each school day take part in an act of collective worship.”

(b) in subsection (2), for “community, foundation or voluntary school”, substitute “school to which subsection (1) applies”.

(3) After section 70, insert—

“70A Requirements relating to assemblies

(1) This section applies to schools in England that are—

(a) maintained schools without a religious character;

(b) non-maintained special schools;

(c) City Technology Colleges; and

(d) Academies without a religious character.

(2) Each pupil in attendance at a school to which this section applies must, at least once during the school week, take part in an assembly which is principally directed towards furthering the spiritual, moral, social and cultural education of the pupils, regardless of religion or belief.

(3) In relation to any school to which this section applies—

(a) the local authority responsible for education (in the case of maintained schools) and the governing body must exercise their functions with a view to securing, and

(b) the head teacher must secure,

that subsection (2) is complied with.””

This new clause would remove the requirement for daily collective worship in England for maintained schools and academies without a religious character, non-maintained special schools, and city technology colleges, and introduce a requirement for a weekly assembly furthering spiritual, moral, social and cultural education.

New clause 23—Provision of relationships and sex education and PSHE to persons who have not attained the age of 18 at further education providers—

“(1) The Children and Social Work Act 2017 is amended as follows.

(2) In section 34 (Education relating to relationships and sex)—

(a) at the end of subsection (1)(b) insert “and

(c) relationships and sex education to be provided to persons who have not attained the age of eighteen and who are receiving education at post-16 education institutions in England”;

(b) in subsection (2)(a), after “schools” insert “and further education providers”;

(c) in subsection (2)(b), after “schools” insert “and further education providers”;

(d) in subsection (2)(b), after “schools” insert “and further education providers”.

(3) In section 35 (Other personal, social, health and economic education)—

(a) at the end of subsection (1)(b) insert “and

(c) to persons who have not attained the age of eighteen and who are receiving education at post-16 education institutions in England”;

(b) in subsection (2)(a), after “schools” insert “and further education providers”;

(c) in subsection (2)(b), after “schools” insert “and further education providers”;

(d) in subsection (2)(b), after “schools” insert “and further education providers”.”

This new clause would extend the existing provision of relationships and sex education and PSHE under the Children and Social Work Act 2017 to people under the age of 18 who are receiving education at post-16 education institutions in England.

New clause 24—Cap on new faith schools’ admissions—

“(1) Any school or academy established more than two months after the passing of this Act which—

(a) is of a religious character, and

(b) is selective on the basis of faith,

must adopt admissions criteria which provide that, where the school is oversubscribed, at least 50% of the places available each year are allocated without reference to faith-based criteria.

(2) Subsection (1) does not apply to an academy established as a result of a maintained school being converted into an academy under section 4 of the Academies Act 2010, except where the converted maintained school was—

(a) of a religious character, and

(b) selective on the basis of faith prior to conversion.”

This new clause would require new schools with faith-based admissions (other than those which were maintained schools that have converted to being academies) to apply a 50% cap on faith-based admissions places when oversubscribed, in line with the cap for new academies and free schools.

New clause 31—Guidance on the admission of summer-born children with EHC plans—

“(1) The Secretary of State must, within 12 months of the passing of this Act, publish guidance for local authorities and school admissions authorities on the admission of summer-born children with education, health and care plans.

(2) Guidance published under this section must—

(a) detail the factors which must be taken into account when considering a request for a summer born child with an EHC plan to be placed outside of their normal age group;

(b) include a presumption that requests relating to the placement or admission of summer-born children with EHC plans should be considered on no less favourable terms than requests relating to summer-born children without EHC plans; and

(c) outline circumstances when it may, or may not, be appropriate for a child who has been placed outside of their normal age group to be moved to join their normal age group , with a presumption that such a placement should be no less favourable terms than placements relating to summer-born children without EHC plans;

(d) detail how parents may object to the placing of their child with their normal age group, and the process by which such objections will be considered.

(3) In developing guidance under this section, the Secretary of State must consult with—

(a) groups representing the interests of parents;

(b) individuals and organisations with expertise in supporting children with special educational needs and the parents of such children;

(c) other such parties as the Secretary of State considers appropriate.

(4) For the purposes of this section, “summer-born children” means children born between 1 April and 31 August.”

New clause 32—Collection and publication of data relating to summer-born children—

“(1) A local authority must collect and publish data on—

(a) the number and proportion of summer-born children who started school in the local authority’s area outside of their normal age group—

(i) with EHC plans, and

(ii) without EHC plans

(b) the number and proportion of summer-born children—

(i) with EHC plans, and

(ii) without EHC plans

who started school in the local authority’s area outside of their normal age group and who have been required to join their normal age group;

(c) the number and proportion of summer-born children with EHC plans who started school in the local authority’s area outside of their normal age group and who have been required to join their normal age group in a—

(i) special school;

(ii) mainstream school.

(2) The Secretary of State must annually—

(a) conduct a statistical analysis of, and

(b) publish a report on the data collected by local authorities under subsection (1).”

New clause 34—Provision of free school lunches to all primary school children—

“(1) Section 512ZB of the Education Act 1996 (provision of free school lunches and milk) is amended as follows.

(2) In paragraph (4A)(b), after "year 2," insert "year 3, year 4, year 5, year 6".

(3) In subsection (4C), after “age of 7;" insert—

“Year 3” means a year group in which the majority of children will, in the school year, attain the age of 8;

“Year 4” means a year group in which the majority of children will, in the school year, attain the age of 9;

“Year 5” means a year group in which the majority of children will, in the school year, attain the age of 10;

“Year 6” means a year group in which the majority of children will, in the school year, attain the age of 11;”

This new clause would extend free school lunches to all primary school age children in state funded schools.

New clause 38—Power to prescribe pay and conditions for teachers—

“The Secretary of State must, within three months of the passing of this Act—

(a) make provision for the power of the governing bodies of maintained schools to set the pay and working conditions of school teachers to be made equivalent with the relevant powers of academies;

(b) provide guidance to all applicable schools that—

(i) pay levels given in the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document are to be treated as the minimum pay of relevant teachers;

(ii) teachers may be paid above the pay levels given in the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document;

(iii) they must have regard to the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document but may vary from it.”

This new clause would make the pay set out in the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document a floor, and extend freedoms over pay and conditions to local authority maintained schools.

New clause 39—Approved free schools and university training colleges in pre-opening—

“The Secretary of State must make provision for the opening of all free schools and university training colleges whose applications were approved prior to October 2024.”

This new clause would require the Secretary of State to proceed with the opening of free schools whose opening was paused in October 2024.

New clause 40—Duty for schools to report acts of violence against staff to the police—

“(1) Where an act listed in subsection (2) takes place which involves the use or threat of force against a member of a school’s staff, the school must report the incident to the police.

(2) An act must be reported to the police where—

(a) it is directed towards a member of school staff or their property; and

(b) it takes place—

(i) on school property; or

(ii) because of the victim’s status as a member of a school’s staff.

(3) The provisions of this section do not require or imply a duty on the police to take specific actions in response to such reports.”

This new clause would create a duty for all schools to report acts or threats of violence against their staff to the police. It would not create a requirement for the police to charge the perpetrator.

New clause 41—Right to review school curriculum material—

“Where requested by the parent or carer of a child on the school’s pupil roll, a school must allow such persons to view all materials used in the teaching of the school curriculum, including those provided by external, third-party, charitable or commercial providers.”

This new clause would ensure that parents can view materials used in the teaching of the school curriculum.

New clause 48—Review of Impact on Home Educators and Reduction of Unnecessary Reporting—

“(1) The Secretary of State must, within six months of the day on which this Act is passed, conduct a review and report of the impact of clause 26 on home educators in England.

(2) The review must include an assessment of

(a) the administrative and reporting requirements placed on home educators as a result of clause 26;

(b) the administrative and reporting requirements placed on local authorities as a result of clause 26;

(c) the extent to which such requirements are necessary for safeguarding purposes; and

(d) any data or reporting obligations that can be reduced or removed for home educators where they are not essential for safeguarding.

(3) The Secretary of State must lay a report before Parliament setting out the findings of the review, including—

(a) an analysis of the impact of clause 26 on home educators;

(b) a clear outline of any data or reporting obligations that will no longer be required from home educators; and

(c) a timeline for the removal of unnecessary reporting obligations, which must not exceed 12 months from the publication of the report.

(4) In conducting the review, the Secretary of State must consult with representatives of home educators and relevant stakeholders.

(5) The report must be made publicly available.

(6) The Secretary of State must ensure that any reporting obligations identified as unnecessary under subsection (3)(b) are removed within the timeframe specified in subsection (3)(c).”

New clause 49—Provision of free meals and activities during school holidays—

“(1) A local authority must—

(a) provide; or

(b) coordinate the provision of programmes which provide,

free meals and activities to relevant children during school holidays.

(2) For the purposes of this section, “relevant children” means children in receipt of free school meals.

(3) The Secretary of State may, by regulations made by statutory instrument—

(a) specify minimum standards for meals and activities during school holidays;

(b) specify criteria that organisations involved in the delivery of meals and activities during school holidays must meet.”

This new clause would place a duty on local authorities to provide or coordinate free meals and activities for children eligible for free school meals during school holidays.

New clause 51—Flexibility to take into account local circumstances when following the National Curriculum—

“In section 87 of the Education Act 2002 (establishment of the National Curriculum for England by order), after subsection (1) insert—

“(1A) In any revision to the National Curriculum for England, the Secretary of State must ensure that the National Curriculum shall consist of—

(a) a core framework; and

(b) subjects or areas of learning outside the core framework that allow flexibility for each school to take account of their specific circumstances.””

This new clause would clarify that, when revised, the National Curriculum for England will provide a core framework as well as flexibility for schools to take account of their own specific circumstances.

New clause 52—Parliamentary approval of revisions of the National Curriculum—

“In section 87 of the Education Act 2002 (establishment of the National Curriculum for England by order), after subsection (3) insert—

“(3A) An order made under this section revising the National Curriculum for England shall be subject to the affirmative procedure.””

This new clause would make revisions to the National Curriculum subject to parliamentary approval by the affirmative procedure.

New clause 53—Arrangements for national examinations for children not in school—

“After section 436G of the Education Act 1996, as inserted by section 25 of this Act, insert—

“436GA Arrangements for national examinations for children not in school

Where a child is eligible to be registered by the authority under section 436B, the authority must—

(a) provide for the child to be able to sit any relevant national examination; and

(b) provide financial assistance to enable the child to sit any relevant national examination; where requested by the parent or carer of the child.””

New clause 54—Review of Free School Meal eligibility and Pupil Premium registration—

“(1) The Secretary of State must, within six months of the day on which this Act is passed, conduct a review of—

(a) the number of children in England who are eligible for free school meals but are not claiming them,

(b) the number of children who are eligible for free school meals but are not registered for the purposes of pupil premium funding,

(c) the number of additional children who would be eligible for free school meals if the income thresholds had been uprated in line with inflation since 2018, and

(d) the number of additional children who would be eligible for free school meals if the income thresholds were set at £20,000 per annum after tax.

(2) A review under subsection (1) must include an assessment of—

(a) barriers preventing eligible children from claiming free school meals;

(b) disparities in take-up rates across different regions and demographics; and

(c) the financial and educational impact of under-registration on schools and local authorities.

(3) The Secretary of State must lay a report before Parliament setting out the findings of the review, including any recommendations for improving registration for and take-up of free school meals and pupil premium funding.

(4) The review and report required under this section must be repeated annually.”

Amendment 219, in clause 22, page 41, line 23, at end insert—

“and for all pupils attending special schools”.

This amendment would require the delivery of school breakfast provision to all pupils in special schools, regardless of their age.

Amendment 2, page 41, line 23, at end insert—

“(1A) The appropriate authority must, in securing breakfast club provision, make provision for the needs of qualifying children listed on the school’s Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Register.”

This amendment would require the providers of breakfast clubs to make particular provision for the needs of children on schools’ Special Educational Needs and Disabilities Registers.

Amendment 220, page 42, line 23, at end insert—

““special schools” has the meaning set out in section 337 of the Education Act 1996.”

This amendment defines special schools and is consequential on amendment 219.

Amendment 214, page 43, line 11, at end insert—

“(2A) Before making an application under subsection (1), the appropriate authority of a relevant school must consider whether the duty might be met by other forms of breakfast provision including—

(a) classroom-based provision, or

(b) takeaway provision, either at school or at a proximate site.”

This amendment would require schools to consider other models of breakfast provision before seeking an exemption from the duty to provide breakfast clubs.

Amendment 215, page 43, line 21, at end insert—

“and if the condition in subsection (4A) is met.

(4A) The condition in this subsection is that the Secretary of State is satisfied that the appropriate authority of a relevant school has fully considered other forms of breakfast provision in accordance with subsection (2A).”

This amendment would require the Secretary of State to be satisfied that a school had considered other models of breakfast provision before granting an exemption from the duty to provide breakfast clubs.

Amendment 217, page 43, line 29, at end insert—

“551CA Promotion of supplementary models of provision

The Secretary of State must seek to promote and support the development of supplementary models of provision where appropriate, including

(a) classroom based provision.

(b) takeaway provision, and

(c) nurture group services.”

This amendment would require the Secretary of State to promote supplementary models of provision.

Amendment 218, page 43, line 37, at end insert—

“(d) matters arising from the Secretary of State’s duty under section 551CA.”

This amendment would require the Secretary of State to develop guidance in connection with the duty to promote supplementary models of provision.

Amendment 216, page 43, line 38, leave out “have regard to” and insert “comply with”.

This amendment would require schools to comply with guidance under section 551D.

Amendment 212, page 44, line 5, at end insert—

“551E Publication of data

The Secretary of State must acquire and regularly publish data on breakfast club provision in schools, including data on—

(a) the characteristics of those receiving breakfast in schools, including their eligibility for free school meals;

(b) uptake levels;

(c) satisfaction levels amongst pupils and parents; and

(d) any assessment of the impact of provision on attendance, behaviour, health and wellbeing.”

This amendment would require the Secretary of State to acquire and regularly publish data on breakfast club provision in schools.

Amendment 213, page 44, line 5, at end insert—

“551E Advice and support

(1) The Secretary of State must provide to any school to which the duty under section 551B applies advice and support services when requested by the appropriate authority of the school.

(2) Services provided by the Secretary of State in accordance with subsection (1) should include advice and support from individuals with specialist knowledge of the delivery of school breakfast provision.”

This amendment would require the Secretary of State to make available to schools advice and support services delivered by people with specialist knowledge of the delivery of school breakfast provision.

Government amendments 132 and 133.

Amendment 1, in clause 24, page 44, leave out lines 22 to 29 and insert—

“(1) The appropriate authority of a relevant school may not require a pupil at the school to have to buy branded items of school uniform for use during a school year which cost more in total to purchase than a specified monetary amount, to be reviewed annually.

(1A) The Secretary of State may by regulations specify the monetary amount that may apply to—

(a) a primary pupil; and

(b) a secondary pupil.”

Amendment 191, page 45, line 6, at end insert—

“(2A) Where the appropriate authority of a relevant school provides second hand items which—

(a) comply with the school’s uniform requirements,

(b) are in an acceptable condition, and

(c) can be purchased for significantly less than the cost of buying the item,

the appropriate authority may require a pupil to have more than three branded items of uniform.

(2B) Where the appropriate authority provides new items which—

(a) comply with the school’s uniform requirements,

(b) are new, and

(c) can be purchased for significantly less than the cost of buying the item non-branded,

the appropriate authority may require a pupil to have more than three branded items of uniform.”

This amendment would allow schools to require more than three branded items of uniform if they are making them available, whether new or second hand, at a lower cost than buying non-branded items.

Amendment 190, page 45, line 15, after “school” insert

“except items of kit required when representing the school in sporting activities”.

This amendment would exclude items of PE kit required when representing the school in sporting activities from the limit on branded items of school uniform.

Government amendments 134 and 135.

Amendment 200, page 47, line 29, at end insert—

“(8A) Where a local authority refuses consent in respect of a child who meets the criteria for Condition A, the local authority must provide the parents or carers of the relevant child with a statement of reasons for the decision.

(8B) A statement of reasons provided under subsection (8A) must include an assessment of the costs and benefits to the child.”

This amendment would require a local authority to submit a statement of reasons when they do not agree for a child who meets Condition A to be home educated.

Government amendment 20.

Amendment 202, in clause 25, page 46, line 22, leave out “condition A”.

Amendment 201, page 46, leave out lines 23 to 28.

Amendment 224, page 46, line 23, leave out subsection (3).

Government amendments 21 to 24.

Amendment 22, in clause 25, page 46, line 25, leave out “337(1)” and insert “337”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 173, page 46, line 32, after “action” insert—

“, or has previously taken action”.

This amendment would widen the definition of “relevant child” to include children in relation to whom a local authority has previously taken action under section 47 of the Children Act 1989 to safeguard and promote their welfare.

Amendment 192, page 46, line 37, at end insert—

“(c) providing services to the child or their family under section 17 of the Children Act 1989, or

(d) a local authority which has ever provided services to the child or their family under section 47 of the Children Act 1989.”

This amendment would ensure local authorities had to consent to withdrawing children from school if there is a child protection plan in place or if a child is a ‘child in need’, or if there has ever been a child protection plan in place, in relation to the relevant child or their family.

Amendment 4, page 47, line 19, at end insert—

“(6A) For the purposes of subsection (6), “suitable arrangements” in relation to the education of the child otherwise than at school mean arrangements appropriate to the age, ability and aptitude of the child and the existence of any special educational needs.”

This amendment would clarify the meaning of suitable arrangements for the education of a child outside of school, which the local authority must consider when deciding whether to grant consent for withdrawal from school.

Government amendments 25 to 31, 136 to 138, 32, 139, 33 and 140.

Amendment 5, in clause 26, page 49, line 40, leave out “each” and insert “the”.

This amendment would remove the obligation on parents to provide information on the second parent.

Amendment 6, page 49, line 41, leave out “each” and insert “any”.

See explanatory statement for Amendment 5.

Amendment 193, page 50, leave out lines 1 and 2.

This amendment would remove a requirement for the register of children not in school to include details of how much time a child spends being educated by parents.

Amendment 7, page 50, line 2, leave out

“each parent of the child”

and insert “a parent”.

See explanatory statement for Amendment 5.

Amendment 194, page 50, line 4, after “parent” insert—

“, in respect of each individual or organisation which provides such education for more than six hours a week”.

This amendment would ensure that information relating to short activities such as those operated by museums, libraries, companies and charities, as well as individual private tutoring activities, would only need to be recorded on the register of children not in school if they are provided for more than six hours a week.

Amendment 175, page 50, line 17, at end insert—

“(1A) The requirement to provide information under subsection (1)(b) does not apply where a safeguarding concern in respect of either parent has been identified.”

Amendment 195, page 50, line 17, at end insert—

“(1A) The requirements of subsection (1)(e) do not apply to provision provided on weekends or during school holidays.”

Government amendments 34 to 39.

Amendment 196, in clause 26, page 51, line 18, at end insert—

“(2A) The Secretary of State may only require further information about children to be included on the register by introducing regulations subject to the affirmative procedure.”

This amendment would require the Secretary of State to introduce regulations, subject to agreement in Parliament, when seeking to require additional information to be included in the register of children not in school.

Government amendments 40 to 45.

Amendment 197, in clause 26, page 53, line 14, after “436B)” insert—

“but does not include any person or provider that is providing out-of-school education to home-educated children on weekends or during school holidays.”

This amendment would mean that providers of out-of-school education would not be required to provide information to local authorities in respect of education they provide on weekends or during school holidays to home-schooled children.

Amendment 198, page 53, line 21, after “way” insert—

“, but may not refer to an amount of time that is less than or equal to six hours a week.”

This amendment would mean that providers of out-of-school education would not be required to provide information to local authorities where they provide education for fewer than six hours a week.

Amendment 221, page 53, line 21, at end insert—

“, but may not refer to an amount of time that is less than or equal to six hours a week.”

Government amendments 46 to 59.

Amendment 199, in clause 26, page 55, line 22, at end insert—

“(9) The Secretary of State shall publish annually the GCSE results of children listed on the register.

(10) The Secretary of State shall ensure that the GCSE results of children on the register are included for each set of outcome data published by the Government.”

This amendment would require the Secretary of State to record outcome data for children on the register as a subsection of each set of performance data published by the Department for Education.

Government amendments 60 to 67.

Amendment 8, in clause 27, page 58, leave out lines 22 to 24.

This amendment, along with Amendments 9, 10, 11 and 12, would mean that preliminary notices would not be served on a child’s parent for not providing certain information.

Government amendment 68.

Amendment 9, in clause 27, page 58, line 27, leave out “, C or D”.

This amendment is related to Amendment 8.

Amendment 13, page 58, line 32, at end insert—

“(4A) For the purposes of subsection (4), “suitable education”, in relation to a child, means education appropriate to the age, ability and aptitude of the child and the existence of any special educational needs.”

This amendment would clarify the meaning of suitable education which the local authority must consider when serving a preliminary notice for a school attendance order.

Amendment 10, page 59, leave out lines 9 to 22.

This amendment is related to Amendment 8.

Amendment 11, page 59, line 24, leave out “to D” and insert “or B”.

This amendment is related to Amendment 8.

Government amendment 69.

Amendment 12, page 59, line 41, leave out “, C or D”.

This amendment is related to Amendment 8.

Government amendment 141.

Amendment 14, in clause 27, page 60, line 5, at end insert—

“(1A) For the purposes of subsection (1)(b)(i), “suitable education”, in relation to a child, means education appropriate to the age, ability and aptitude of the child and the existence of any special educational needs.”

This amendment would clarify the meaning of suitable education which the local authority must consider when serving a school attendance order.

Amendment 15, page 60, line 8, leave out from beginning to end of line 9 and insert—

“may consider—

(i) any of the settings outside the home where the child is being educated, and

(ii) where the child lives”.

This amendment would give local authorities the discretion to consider settings where a child is educated when determining whether a school attendance order should be served.

Amendment 16, page 60, line 10, leave out from “consider” to “so” and insert—

“whether the child is being educated in a way which is appropriate to their age, ability, aptitude and any special educational needs they may have”.

This amendment would require the authority to have regard to section 7 of the Education Act 1996 in respect of parents’ duty towards their child’s education.

Amendment 17, page 60, line 15, leave out from “visit” to end of line 16 and insert “meet the child”.

This amendment would remove the requirement for the child to be seen in the home.

Amendment 18, page 60, line 17, after “refused” insert “without reasonable grounds”.

This amendment, along with Amendment 19, would, where a request to meet a child has been refused by a parent without reasonable grounds, enable an authority to consider that to be a relevant factor when considering whether to make a school attendance order.

Amendment 19, page 60, line 18, leave out “must” and insert “may”.

Government amendments 70 to 78, 142 to 144, 79 to 81, 145 to 148, 82, 149, 83 to 89, 150, 90, 151 to 153, 91 and 92, and 154 and 155.

Amendment 203, in clause 32, page 72, line 16, at end insert—

“(1B) Powers under subsection (1) may not be exercised in relation to an academy.”

This amendment specifies that the Secretary of State should rely on the provisions in Funding Agreements as regards to academies.

Government amendments 156 to 158.

Amendment 204, in clause 34, page 87, line 5, at end insert—

“(2D) The Secretary of State must issue guidance for relevant institutions on how subsection (2)(g) is to be understood.”

This amendment to allow independent schools not to have to notify the Secretary of State about change of use for buildings.

Government amendments 159 to 167.

Amendment 205, page 99, line 33, leave out clause 41.

Amendment 222, in clause 41, page 99, line 34, at end insert—

“(1A) In section 133 (requirement to be qualified), after subsection (5) insert—

“(5A) Regulations made by the Secretary of State under this section must have regard to—

(a) the availability of qualified teachers in each school subject, and

(b) the necessity or desirability of specific sectoral expertise for teachers in each school subject””

This amendment would require the Secretary of State to take account of the availability of qualified teachers in each subject, and the desirability of specific sectoral expertise when making regulations under clause 40.

Amendment 206, page 100, line 6, leave out clause 42.

Amendment 207, page 103, line 1, leave out clause 44.

Amendment 208, in clause 44, page 103, line 9, leave out from “directions” to the end of line 11 and insert—

“as are necessary to secure compliance with statutory duties, the requirements of the Funding Agreement, or charity law.”

This amendment would limit the Secretary of State’s power of direction should an Academy breach, or act unreasonably in respect of, the performance of a relevant duty.

Government amendment 168.

Amendment 209, page 103, line 36, leave out clause 45.

Amendment 225, in clause 45, page 104, line 2, at end insert—

“(c) after subsection (1A) insert—

“(1B) Before deciding whether to issue an Academy order in respect of a maintained school, the Secretary of State must issue an invitation for expressions of interest for suitable sponsors.

(1C) The Secretary of State must make an assessment of whether or not to issue an Academy order based on the established track record of parties who responded to the invitation issued under subsection (1B) with an expression of interest in raising school standards.””

Amendment 223, page 104, line 21, at end insert—

“(10) Before the amendments made by this section come into force, the Secretary of State must lay before Parliament a report detailing—

(a) the mechanisms, including Academy Orders, by which improvement of school standards can be achieved, and

(b) guidance on the appropriate usage of these mechanisms.”

Amendment 210, page 107, line 32, leave out clause 51.

Amendment 211, page 109, line 5, leave out clause 52.

Government amendments 169, 170 and 93.

Amendment 3, in clause 60, page 113, line 25, at end insert—

“(2A) Section [Abolition of common law defence of reasonable punishment] comes into force at the end of the period of twelve months beginning with the day on which this Act is passed.”

This amendment is consequential on Abolition of common law defence of reasonable punishment.

Government amendments 94 to 110.

New clause 2—Review of the Act—

“(1) The Secretary of State must from time to time—

(a) carry out a review of the impact of the provisions of this Act; and

(b) publish a report setting out the conclusions of the review.

(2) A first report under subsection (1) must be published within 12 months of the passing of this Act, with subsequent reports published at intervals not exceeding 5 years.

(3) A report published under this section must, in particular—

(a) set out the objectives intended to be achieved by the provisions of this Act;

(b) assess the extent to which those objectives are achieved; and

(c) assess whether those objectives remain appropriate.”

This new clause would require the Secretary of State to conduct regular reviews of the impact of this Act and publish reports.

[Catherine McKinnell]

I start by thanking hon. Members in all parts of the House for their valuable contribution to the debate so far.

The Bill is for children—the clue is in the name. It is for their safety, their education and their future that we bring it forward. This Government are on a mission to break down barriers to opportunity for each and every child, and the Bill is a significant step on that path. I welcome the debate that the Bill has sparked. After a decade in which education was left on the sidelines, Labour is once again bringing it to the fore, and to the centre of national life—the place it always occupies under a Labour Government. Education is at the heart of how we ensure opportunities for the next generation.

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

On the Minister’s point about the last 10, 12 or even 14 years, would she join me in acknowledging that the schools in Walsall borough—a very diverse borough, with areas of real deprivation—outperformed national figures for the first time at the end of last year, with 91% of Walsall schools being graded good or better? That figure has steadily increased under not just a Conservative Government, but a fantastic Conservative-led council.

[Catherine McKinnell]

I will always share in the celebration of schools that are doing well, and the right hon. Lady is absolutely right to celebrate the schools in her area. I do question, however, the shameless pride we sometimes see in the record of her Government; when they left office, England’s schools were getting worse, standards in reading, maths and science were down, roofs were crumbling, children were struggling, and a generation of children were absent from school. We are determined to tackle those challenges head-on. The education that we provide for our children is not just for their future, but for all of our futures. It shapes society today and the society that we want for tomorrow.

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

It is good of the Minister, for whom I have a great deal of respect, to give way. As I know her to be an honest person, will she at least share with the House the fact that schools in England are better today than they were in 2010? Picking some tiny subset of time to make out that schools are deprived is not a fair assessment. Schools are demonstrably better in England today than they were in 2010. Please, Minister, at least acknowledge that.

[Catherine McKinnell]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his kind words and his assumption of my honesty. The fact is that one in three children starting school is not school ready. More than a third of children leave primary school without a firm foundation in reading, writing and maths. The disadvantage gap is widening. I will come on to what we want to achieve as a Government, but we are not satisfied, as Conservative Members appear to be, with leaving some of our children without the start in life that they deserve. We want the best for all our children, and that is what our changes will achieve.

[Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister give way?

[Catherine McKinnell]

I have given way to the right hon. Member. I will do so again later.

It is essential that every child and family has certainty that they can access a good local school—a school that will set high expectations and standards for all our children, enabling them to achieve and thrive. We are bringing forward legislation to achieve our reforms, but there are reforms that we can make for which no legislation is required. We are designing a school system that supports and challenges all schools to deliver for our children. We want a rich and broad curriculum, delivered by expertly trained teachers, who have a good pay and conditions offer that attracts and retains the staff that our children need.

[Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)]

In that spirit, will the Minister look at my new clause 30, which calls on the Government to review the effectiveness and value of outdoor education and learning for young people in both primary and secondary schools? We have a mental ill health pandemic in this country and are trying to put that right. Will she acknowledge that building young people’s resilience through outdoor education is good not just for dealing with that, but for building young people’s ability to rely on others and themselves? That helps them in situations in which they are not comfortable, and when they go back to the classroom, they are more willing to learn. Does she see this as a moment in which to invest in outdoor education, in every part of the country?

[Catherine McKinnell]

The hon. Gentleman is incredibly committed to that cause—understandably so, as he comes from a part of the country that boasts incredible outdoor scenery, and activities that many of us, I am sure, have taken part in. He is right to want that for all our children. That forms part of the changes that we are introducing today, which will unlock opportunity for all children up and down the country. We want to create a floor, but no ceiling, for what schools can offer, and to enable healthy competition and innovation beyond a core set of frameworks and standards, so that we can improve all schools, and give them the freedom and ability to deliver the enrichment programme for which he so rightly advocates. We want high and rising standards for all children.

[Wendy Morton]

Does the Minister not understand that freedom and flexibility can come from allowing a school flexibility over its curriculum?

[Catherine McKinnell]

Try as the Opposition might to make their straw man argument, this Labour Government will demand high and rising standards for all our children. Recent polls of the profession show that, despite all the scaremongering, trust chief executive officers agree that there is nothing to fear from our sensible, pragmatic and common-sense measures, which will drive standards up in every school. Academies have grown from a Government-backed insurgency in our schools, and now make up well over 50% of our school system. That is not about to change. The shadow Minister will be pleased to hear that conversions to academy status are progressing faster under Labour Ministers than at any time since she joined this House, but it is right to look forward and consider how we will build a system fit for the next 20 years. The Bill is a step on that path. It recognises, in the words of one multi-academy trust leader, that parents deserve clarity and confidence in the standards that their children’s school upholds, and that is what this Government will secure.

The Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan), led yesterday’s debate on part 1 of the Bill. I will use my opening remarks to speak to the Government’s amendments to parts 2 and 3. Members commented yesterday on the number of amendments, but the number of substantive amendments is small, and I shall focus on them today.

Many Members have a great interest in city technology colleges and city colleges for the technology of the arts, and they have raised with me the excellent practice supported by those institutions. The Government amendments ensure that these schools can be named on school admission orders, and make it clear that families with children attending those schools will benefit from other measures in the Bill, such as those tackling the cost of school uniform.

Just as we are committed to working with all our schools, so too are this Government determined to work with the devolved Governments to deliver higher standards of education and care in all parts of the UK. The majority of today’s amendments concern the extension of the “children not in school” provisions to Wales. The Minister spoke yesterday of our pride in working with the Welsh Government. Labour Governments in both Cardiff and London will deliver our shared ambition for a society where all children receive high-quality education, wherever they grow up. We will build a Britain where children come first. These 91 amendments will extend all the “children not in school” measures to Wales. There is a legislative consent motion on this change, on which we are working very closely with the Welsh Government.

Amendment 140 will include the Scottish definition of schools in the definition of “relevant schools” for the “children not in school” register clause. This amendment ensures that only those children who are intended to be captured by “children not in school” registers are eligible for registration. Without the amendment, a child who lives in England, but who attends school full time in Scotland, would be required to be registered on their English local authority’s “children not in school” register, despite being in school full time.

The previous Government said that there was no space in their King’s Speech to ensure our children’s safety and education, but for this Labour Government, our children are a priority across the whole of the United Kingdom. Amendments 189 and 170 will ensure that the amendments made on corporate parenting extend to the whole of the United Kingdom. Education is an essential protective factor, which can shield our most vulnerable children from harm. The “children not in school” measures include the new requirement for parents of children subject to child protection plans or inquiries to seek local authority consent. However, not every child subject to these inquires will be at risk indefinitely, so it would not be appropriate or proportionate for those home-educated children who are not at risk and who are receiving suitable education to be placed in a school if it is not their parents’ preference. This Government will respect parents’ rights to opt for home education, while keeping children safe from harm and securing their right to education. Amendments 141 to 148 will ensure that this intention is reflected through the school attendance order measures in the Bill.

[Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister reassure home-educating parents that the requirements in the Bill will not be overly onerous? For instance, there is a requirement to record the time that each parent spends educating their child. Is that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year? How exactly would that work? Can she give us some reassurance that this measure can be made manageable and sensible, and will not be disproportionate?

[Catherine McKinnell]

Parents who are doing the right thing—home-educating their children and providing a suitable education in a safe environment—have nothing to be concerned about in relation to these measures. They are intended to ensure that no child falls through the cracks, and that is what we are delivering.

[Graham Stuart]

I am sure that the Minister intends to ensure that this does not happen, but would someone have to record all the hours and places in a week? I do not know how much the Minister knows about home education, but children are educated in all sorts of places. She has an opportunity at the Dispatch Box to say that she will come forward with regulations to ensure that they do not have to write down every time that they stop at an ice cream shop for some education about the vanilla flavour.

15:00

[Catherine McKinnell]

The amendments that I am addressing relate particularly to information sharing, which clearly the right hon. Gentleman has concerns about. Members on both sides of the House will be all too aware of the succession of tragedies that we have seen when children have fallen between the cracks in services that should be there to support them. The changes in the Bill are a reflection of this Government’s determination to bring that era of state failure to a close.

New clause 17 relates to the measures on opening new schools. Part 2 of the Education and Inspections Act 2006, which the Bill is amending, includes a number of relevant duties and powers where personal data might be processed—for example, where a proposal for a new school includes details of the relevant experience of the individual proposers. It makes clear that these powers and duties to give or publish information do not give anyone the right to give or publish personal data in a way that would breach data protection legislation. It applies a data protection override to the whole of part 2 and schedule 2 to the 2006 Act to cover all the information-related powers and duties in relation to opening, closing and altering schools.

Amendments 166 and 167 will ensure that restrictions on the sharing of data, obligations of confidence and other restrictions do not prevent the sharing of information where it is done to protect the welfare of children at registered independent educational institutions or in accommodation provided by schools or colleges. They empower Ofsted to disclose information to other inspectorates of independent educational institutions or of accommodation in schools or colleges, to enable their inspections and ensure high-quality services for our children. We anticipate that information to be shared for those purposes may include that which is given in confidence—for instance, concerns shared with Ofsted by whistleblowers. However, it is essential that information sharing that would help to protect a child’s wellbeing is not hampered. This imperative should override concerns about breaking confidence.

Amendments 90 and 151 are essential because of the Bill’s new powers for local authorities to share data from their “children not in school” registers with the agencies listed in section 11 of the Children Act 2004 and with Ofsted, in line with well-established practices, and to share information to protect and promote the wellbeing of children. The amendments will ensure that local authorities can have confidence that they are acting in the children’s best interest when doing so. There are well-established processes and existing expectations on these agencies to share information to protect and promote the wellbeing of children. Without these amendments, local authorities and these agencies may be concerned that they will be restricted in the information that they can share or receive from the “not in school” register. This information is relevant to help local authorities undertaking safeguarding, welfare and education relating to children, so it is crucial that it can be shared when appropriate.

These amendments serve to strengthen the Bill and ensure that it works as intended to keep children safe, to secure their education and to ensure that each and every family can access a brilliant local school, which is the cornerstone of opportunity for every child. I thank right hon. and hon. Members again for their scrutiny and challenge to the Bill so far. I look forward to listening to the debate, because there is no subject on which the House feels so passionately as the future of our children, and the steps that we must take to ensure thatsb each and every one of them can achieve and thrive.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the shadow Minister.

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

The Bill does not set out any kind of clear plan or vision for our schools. It does not address the big challenges that need addressing. It is silent on discipline and behaviour—one of the biggest issues. It comes after the Government scrapped simple Ofsted judgments and will be followed by moves to dumb down the curriculum and lower standards further.

The Secretary of State has no positive vision. She has axed programmes for advanced maths, physics, Latin and computing because she thinks that they are elitist. She has axed behaviour hubs with no replacement, even though schools that went through the scheme were twice as likely to be good or outstanding. Yet, somehow, she is able to find £90 million for advertising. The Bill is the worst of all. We have tabled numerous amendments to it. It takes a wrecking ball to 40 years of cross-party reform of England’s schools. Those reforms worked. There is much more to do, but England has risen up the international league tables even as Labour-run Wales has slumped down.

Under successive Governments of all colours, England’s schools have been improved by the magic formula of freedom plus accountability. The Bill attacks both parts of that formula. On the one hand, it strips academy schools of freedoms over recruitment and curriculum and reimposes incredible levels of micromanagement, taking away academy freedoms now enjoyed by 82% of secondary schools. On the other hand, it strikes at accountability and parental choice, ending the automatic transfer of failing schools to new management, reversing the reforms of the late 1980s, which allowed good schools to expand without permission from their local authority—a reform that ushered in parental choice.

Let me unpack this. First, the Bill takes away academy schools’ freedoms over the curriculum. We have tabled amendments to that. As Sir Dan Moynihan, who leads the incredibly successful Harris schools, explained:

“We have taken over failing schools in very disadvantaged places in London, and we have found youngsters in the lower years of secondary schools unable to read and write. We varied the curriculum in the short term and narrowed the number of subjects in key stage 3 in order to maximise the amount of time given for literacy and numeracy, because the children were not able to access the other subjects… why take away the flexibility to do what is needed locally?”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 71, Q154.]

Likewise, Luke Sparkes from Dixons argued:

“we…need the ability to enact the curriculum in a responsive and flexible way at a local level…there needs to be a consistency without stifling innovation.”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 79, Q167.]

Katharine Birbalsingh, the head of Michaela school, which has been top in the country three years in a row, wrote to the Secretary of State:

“Do you have any idea of the work required from teachers and school leaders to change their curriculum? You will force heads to divert precious resources from helping struggling families to fulfil a bureaucratic whim coming from Whitehall. Why are you changing things? What is the problem you are trying to solve?”

[Graham Stuart]

Like me, my hon. Friend finds these proposals tragic because of the removal of the curriculum freedoms that have allowed schools such as Michaela and Petchey and others all over the country to tailor their curriculum specifically to reach disadvantaged pupils so that they can engage better with their learning and have an achievement that previously they did not have. That door is being closed. I hope that Government Members reflect on this and seek a change of policy, if not in this House, then at least in the House of Lords.

[Neil O’Brien]

My right hon. Friend is completely correct. Some Government Members have reflected on this: the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh) said that the proposal to make it compulsory for academies to teach the national curriculum was of particular concern to her, and she is right. Ministers have never explained what they are trying to solve with this change, but the unions like it, so into the Bill it goes.

We have tabled further amendments on qualified teacher status. The Government are getting rid of academy freedoms over recruitment and the freedom to employ non-QTS teachers. Sir Martyn Oliver from Ofsted gave us a good example of how these freedoms are used. He said:

“In the past, I have brought in professional sportspeople to teach alongside PE teachers, and they have run sessions. Because I was in Wakefield, it was rugby league: I had rugby league professionals working with about a quarter of the schools in Wakefield at one point..”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 49, Q108.]

Brilliant. The Government’s own impact assessment to the Bill says of this change:

“some schools may struggle to find the teachers that they need.”

Rebecca Leek from the Suffolk Association of Headteachers gave a good example of how this freedom is currently used. She said that she urgently needed an early years lead, and was able to take on someone who had run an outstanding nursery, even though they did not have QTS and nor did they plan to get it. But in future, she would not be able to do that. Former headteacher David Thomas told us in Committee that this freedom allows them to recruit people who may be at the end of their career, who have a huge amount of experience that they want to give back to the community. They do not want to go through the bureaucracy, and if we put up barriers, they will not end up in the state sector.

Ministers have not produced a single shred of evidence that teachers without QTS are of lower quality, or for why they cannot be a good supplement to QTS teachers. Ministers have never explained why they, sitting in Whitehall, think that they are in a better position to judge who to employ than headteachers on the frontline. Ministers claim that is vital, but a footnote at the bottom of page 24 of the impact assessment reveals it would, in fact, not be applied to lots of different types of schools, including 14 to 19 academies, 16 to 19 academies, university technical colleges, studio schools, further education colleges and non-maintained school early years settings. It is supposedly vital but is not being applied to loads of different types of school. Yet Ministers are imposing it on loads of other schools. As the former head of Ofsted pointed out this week, taking that flexibility out of the system feels like a retrograde step, and she is right.

Under the Bill, Whitehall micromanagement is back, too. Clause 44 allows the Secretary of State to direct academy schools to do pretty much anything. The Confederation of School Trusts is really worried about that and has suggested a way to bring such unlimited power under some limits. They say:

“We do have concerns about the power to direct…It is too broad and it is too wide. We would like to work with Government to restrict it to create some greater limits. Those limits should be around statutory duties…statutory guidance, the provisions in the funding agreement”.––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 81, Q169.]

Yet Ministers voted down our amendment to put that suggestion from schools into effect.

Likewise, as we discovered in Committee, clause 34(5)(2) will require academy schools to get permission from the Secretary of State to make any change to the buildings they occupy. That includes any change to

“(ii) either part of the building, or

(iii) permanent outdoor structure”.

Literally, if an academy school wants to build a bike shed, it will have to go to the Secretary of State. It was clear in Committee that Ministers had not even realised that that would apply to academy schools. Those are just two of the many, many centralising measures in the Bill.

While freedom is being taken away on the one hand, accountability on the other side of the ledger is being watered down too. The Government already got rid of single-word Ofsted judgments and replaced them with something much more complicated that does not seem to have left anybody very happy. Then, clause 45 ends the automatic conversion of failing schools into academies. The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden has said,

“The current system, in which failing schools automatically become academies, provides clarity and de-politicisation, and ensures a rapid transition. I fear that making that process discretionary would result in a large increase in judicial reviews, pressure on councils and prolonged uncertainty, which is in nobody’s interests.”—[Official Report, 8 January 2025; Vol. 759, c. 902.]

She also said,

“the DfE will find itself mired in the high court in judicial review. When we tried to transfer our first failing school to a Harris academy we spent two years in court, and children…don’t have that time to waste.”

She is so right.

Rob Tarn, the chief executive of the Northern Education Trust, has made the same point:

“If there’s no longer a known, blanket reality…There is a risk that, where it’s been determined a school needs to join a strong trust, it will take much longer and we will go back to the early days of academisation when people went to court.”

The Children’s Commissioner makes that point too. She says that she is

“deeply concerned that we are legislating against the things we know work in schools, and that we risk children spending longer in failing schools by slowing down the pace of school improvement.”

She is right.

The Confederation of School Trusts has said that the current system offers struggling schools “clarity” as they

“will join a trust, and that process can begin immediately”.

In contrast, they warn,

“We are not clear on how commissioning part-time support through the RISE arrangements makes that any easier.”

The former national schools commissioner, Sir David Carter, has warned that the

“arguments and legal actions that will arise if a school in Cumbria is told to join a trust while a school in Cornwall just gets arm’s length support will only add delay to delivering a fairer and better offer to children.”

Worse still is clause 51, which attacks school choice and the freedom to go to good schools. It was in 1987 that Mrs Thatcher announced that

“we will allow popular schools to take in as many children as space will permit. And this will stop local authorities from putting artificially low limits on entry to good schools.”

That agenda became known as local management of schools and of it the former Labour Minister Lord Adonis wrote,

“Local Management of Schools was an unalloyed and almost immediate success…school budgets under LMS were based largely on pupil numbers, so parental choice came to matter as never before.”

In contrast, the Government’s impact assessment of the Bill says:

“We want the local authority to have more influence over the PANs for schools in their area”.

It goes on to say:

“It could also limit the ability of popular schools to grow…If a school is required to lower their PAN, some pupils who would have otherwise been admitted will be unable to attend the school. This will negatively impact on parental preference”.

Michael Johnson, the leader of the very successful Chulmleigh trust, warns that that “could be disastrous for successful schools…The Government are not better placed than parents to decide which school a child attends.”

[Graham Stuart]

Does my hon. Friend, like me, reflect on the irony that the success from 2010 to 2024, which we on the Conservative Benches would naturally celebrate, was only possible because of the Labour visionaries who drove the academies programme forward, made changes, developed the argument, rolled the pitch and allowed us to lift our schools to much higher levels of performance and our children from deprived backgrounds to much better results. Labour Members were the creators of that, and now this Government are disowning it.

[Neil O’Brien]

It is tragic. It is not us criticising the Bill; it is the professionals—the people who have given their lives to education. I will give another example. Gareth Stevens, leader of Inspiration Trust, another high-performing trust, gives the example of his local council wanting to halve places at an outstanding school to prop up other schools. He says that

“the idea that we could have the rug pulled out from under us and the number of places in our high performing school cut is the most worrying thing…It will mean fewer places at high performing good or outstanding schools”.

15:15

The Bill allows a local authority to object to the current admission numbers of any school anywhere in the country; that became apparent in Committee. There will therefore be border disputes with local authorities trying to push down numbers in neighbouring authorities. I suspect that faith and selective schools will be particularly in the crosshairs of some of the more ideological left-wing authorities. There is nothing in the Bill to prevent the schools adjudicator from setting a published admission number to zero, to shut a school or to stop one from opening. We tried to amend the Bill to require school performance to be taken into account when decisions are made on pupil numbers, but amazingly, the Government voted even that down.

When there are dramatic falls in pupil numbers, it is true that schools will shut or shrink, whatever the rules are. Under parental choice, however, the places that shrink will be determined by parents voting with their feet. In contrast, under this schools Bill, it will depend on the ideological and political views of local councillors. The Bill is moving power from parents to politicians.

Even this week, we have seen further criticisms of the Bill from people who have devoted their whole lives to improving education. The former head of Ofsted has said that this Bill is levelling down, and called on the Secretary of State to

“think again before the damage is done.”

The chief executive of Advantage Schools says:

“I think it would be a show of strength to pass the wellbeing parts of the schools bill and consider the rest for a *much* longer period.”

That is a good idea. Lord Harris, who backed Labour at the last election, says:

“We want better schools for everybody and the Schools Bill will do the opposite of this, harming the most disadvantaged families. I hope that Labour will think again.”

We also hope that they will think again. We will fight on to stop this misguided, destructive and, ultimately, just very, very depressing Bill.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I call the Chair of the Education Committee.

[Helen Hayes (Dulwich and West Norwood) (Lab)]

I rise to speak in support of new clause 1, new clause 2 and amendment 2, all in my name. The amount of time afforded to the Education Select Committee to undertake detailed scrutiny of the Bill was very limited. We were able to undertake just one evidence session on part 2, and we deliberately sought not to duplicate the evidence taken by the Public Bill Committee. We therefore took limited evidence on the changes to the role of local authorities in school place planning and admissions.

I speak, however, as an MP whose constituents have suffered the consequences of the fragmentation of admissions policies and place planning over the past 14 years. That has resulted in school places sometimes being delivered in areas where they were not needed, undermining other local schools; our councils struggling to ensure the delivery of school places that were needed, particularly for children with special educational needs and disabilities; and local places at a very popular local school being allocated not to local families but to children across a wide area of south-east London. I therefore wholeheartedly support the attempts in the Bill to restore coherence to admissions and place planning through the role of local authorities.

I also support the measures to reduce the cost of school uniform for families by limiting the number of branded items, which are a really significant cost of living pressure for families. However, I encourage the Government to keep a careful watch on how this requirement is being complied with, particularly in relation to the cost of blazers, having heard of one appalling example in my constituency of a very vulnerable child who had been allocated a place at a good school but was told she could not attend until she was wearing a blazer, the cost of which was over £100—way beyond the means of her family. I know the Minister will agree that no child should be shut out of the classroom because their family cannot afford the right clothes for them to wear, and that that is the intention of the Bill, but the monitoring of the detail will be important.

I also welcome the measures in the Bill to introduce a register of home-educated children. While home education is the right option for some children who are well supported to receive education at home, the number of children going missing from the education radar, out of sight and without any regulation of the quality of the education they are receiving, and sometimes coming to harm, as in the horrific recent case of Sara Sharif, is deeply concerning. The measures in the Bill will help to address this.

The Education Committee welcomes the introduction of breakfast clubs in the Bill, which will help to ensure that no child has to start the school day hungry, but we also heard compelling evidence of the importance of school lunches for the poorest children. Around one in 10 children who are eligible for free school meals do not claim them because their parents or carers do not complete the administrative process. This can be because of difficulties with the administrative process itself, lack of awareness about the entitlement, or language barriers. Children from non-white backgrounds are more likely to be unregistered.

This under-registration has impacts on schools too, since the ability of schools to draw down pupil premium funding is linked directly to the registration of eligible children for free school meals. I am talking about the existing entitlement, not a new spending commitment. The benefits of free school meals for children’s health and wellbeing and their ability to learn are clear, and are being seen in local authorities that are already auto-enrolling eligible children, including Middlesbrough, Redcar and Cleveland and some London boroughs. In London, the benefits are pupil premium receipts for schools because the Mayor of London is already funding universal free school meals.

Research from the Food Foundation found that, while local authorities were successful in their mission to reduce the number of eligible children missing out on free school meals, it was a difficult and resource-intensive task, and the data sharing between relevant authorities necessary to register children automatically was not straightforward. The local authorities piloting auto-enrolment have called for central Government to step in and help. The Committee has recommended that the Government introduce auto-enrolment for children already eligible for free school meals. This recommendation would ensure that between 200,000 and 250,000 additional families with the poorest children in our country, who are already eligible, will receive the meals to which they are entitled. That recommendation is reflected in new clause 1, and I hope the Government will choose to support it today.

I turn to amendment 2. The Committee took evidence on breakfast clubs. We heard about the benefits of them both in ensuring that children do not start the school day hungry, and in relation to the opportunity afforded a child to settle gently into the school day and play with their friends. We also heard about the need for breakfast to be provided on a flexible basis, so that children whose families are unable to get them to school early. who may be among the most vulnerable children, do not miss out on this vital meal.

The Committee has heard extensive evidence in our inquiry on special educational needs and disability about the difficulties that families of disabled children have in finding childcare and accessing extracurricular activities. To that end, it is vital that children with SEND can access breakfast clubs on an equal footing with their peers. This may involve additional costs, particularly in relation to home-to-school transport and the need to have specialist staff on site at the time of the breakfast club. I welcome the fact that the early adopters programme includes about 50 specialist schools, but the inclusion of children with SEND in breakfast clubs in mainstream schools is also essential, and I hope the Government are looking closely at the early adopters and at any additional support that may be needed to ensure that. Amendment 2 would ensure that children with SEND were able to access breakfast clubs, and I hope the Government will support it.

Finally, I turn to new clause 2. This is a very large Bill covering many areas of policy, and it is being taken through this House very quickly and was not subject to any pre-legislative scrutiny. There have been a large number of Government amendments at a late stage, and a number of measures in the Bill will be contingent on Government policies that are not in the Bill for their success, including the curriculum and assessment review, the reforms to the Ofsted assessment framework and the work of the child poverty taskforce.

New clause 2 would require the Secretary of State to conduct regular reviews of the impact of this Act and to publish reports. I would anticipate that such reviews would show a positive impact of this legislation. Having a clear monitoring and reporting mechanism is good practice, particularly for a Bill of this size that has been delivered so quickly. I welcome the intention behind this Bill and the measures it contains. I look forward to supporting it this evening, and my Committee looks forward to playing a constructive role in scrutinising its impact in the months and years to come.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

A number of measures in part 2 of this Bill are to be welcomed. However, after a decade of neglect by the Conservatives, I want to ask Ministers this: when our schools are crumbling, when we cannot find specialist teachers, when special needs provision is in crisis and when we have a huge persistent absence problem, why have the Government chosen to tinker with academies and governance arrangements as their priority education policy? The one strong message coming through from education leaders, including those who have no ideological axe to grind, is that the way that the Government have gone about part 2 of the Bill shows a lack of coherent vision for the school system, with no White Paper and no consultation with those on the frontline or in leadership positions across the sector.

I turn to some of the new clauses tabled in my name. With all the pressures on family finances, new clause 7 would ensure that free school meals were available to children from households earning less than £20,000 per year and automatically enrol eligible children into this provision. Liberal Democrats have long believed that this is an effective, targeted intervention that would help children in poverty at both primary and secondary school to concentrate, to learn and to thrive.

New clause 54 would require the Secretary of State to find out exactly how many children were eligible for, but not claiming, free school meals or were not registered for pupil premium funding. It beggars belief that, as spelled out in recent answers to parliamentary questions that I have submitted, the Government are flying blind on this issue, with the last proper study of uptake dating back to 2013. New clause 54 would require regular reviews of free school meal uptake.

As we discussed at length this morning in Westminster Hall, and as the Chair of the Education Committee pointed out, an estimated 230,000 eligible children are missing out on a free school meal. Where local authorities auto-enrol children into free school meals, it makes a real difference. In Liberal Democrat-led Durham, 2,500 additional children now benefit from a hot lunch, and their schools benefit from an additional £3 million in pupil premium funding.

In Committee, the Minister confirmed the Government’s intention to improve uptake by looking at auto-enrolment and data sharing between Departments. However, his suggestion that locally led efforts were more likely to meet the needs of local communities risks patchy action across the country. We believe that this requires a national response, and we therefore strongly urge the Government to look at auto-enrolment as well as increasing the eligibility threshold, to ensure that we are feeding some of our poorest pupils, whether they are at primary or secondary school.

Staying on the theme of the cost of living pressures on families, we on the Liberal Democrat Benches strongly support the objective of bringing down the cost of school uniforms for hard-pressed families up and down the country. However, we remain concerned that the Bill as drafted, in setting a maximum number of branded uniform items, is highly prescriptive for schools and will not actually rein in the costs of those items. As the Chair of the Select Committee has just pointed out, there is nothing to prevent items costing £100 or more each. Furthermore, an answer to a parliamentary question that I tabled stated that, on average, girls’ uniforms cost £25 to £30 more than boys’ uniforms. If we want to tackle these inequalities, the best thing to do is to support our amendment 1.

I want to put on record my thanks to the Clerks, because we picked up a drafting error in our amendment 1. The online version is correct, but the printed version is incorrect. Our amendment 1 actually amends clause 24 and proposes a monetary cap, rather than a cap on the number of items. That would be reviewed and updated in line with inflation through secondary legislation every year. It would also drive down costs as suppliers would have to compete for school contracts.

[Damian Hinds (East Hampshire) (Con)]

The hon. Member mentions answers to written parliamentary questions. Would she have been as surprised as I was to see the answer to a written PQ of mine saying that if a school specified that a badge be sewed on to an otherwise generic blazer, that badge would count as an item of branded uniform?

15:29

[Munira Wilson]

I am shocked, because I was about to come to that as a possible solution to staying within the price cap. Apparently that will not be allowed either—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. If the statement that the hon. Lady has made about a potential drafting error is indeed the case, has she made arrangements to ensure that the correct version of the amendment has been published?

[Munira Wilson]

Yes, we have been in touch with the Clerks, who have corrected the amendment online. The printed version is incorrect, but in the online version amendment 1 amends clause 24 instead of clause 23.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

We will ensure that that process has indeed taken place.

[Munira Wilson]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

In Committee, the Minister said that a cost cap, rather than an item cap, would be too complex and risked reducing choice for parents by increasing schools’ reliance on specific suppliers. She also suggested that there would be regional variation in uniform pricing. Again, having tabled a PQ, it is clear that there has been no analysis by the Government to show regional variation in uniform prices.

I was going to suggest that schools that wanted more branding on items under a cost cap could sew or stick logos on plain jumpers and other items bought cheaply in supermarkets. I believe the Government want parents to have choice. My suggestion would give parents the choice of going to a well-known supermarket brand and then applying the school logo. I am shocked to hear about the answer to the PQ tabled by the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), and I will have a look at it afterwards. Our amendment 1 would put pounds and pennies back into parents’ pockets and avoid top-down meddling from Whitehall on school uniform policy.

Also on school uniforms, new clause 12 concerns a simple matter of fairness. The zero rate of VAT applies only on clothing for children up to the age of 14, and parents have to pay VAT on school uniforms for children who are larger or over the age of 14. In Committee, the Minister cited the cost to the Exchequer of making the change, but if the Government’s stated aim is to bring down uniform prices, I humbly suggest that she presses the Chancellor to look at this amendment, because it is a simple change to make.

Turning to special needs, as I said at the outset, this is probably the biggest burning priority for the school leaders I speak to up and down the country. It certainly is across this House, given the number of Members involved in SEND debates. New clause 10 in my name would establish a new dedicated national body for SEND, which would fund high-needs provision and ensure that children with particularly complex needs receive tailored support. With high-needs spending having tripled since 2015 and, as the Minister herself pointed out, educational outcomes for SEND pupils remaining stagnant, we need to reform the system. I know she is busy working on this, but a national body would help reduce the postcode lottery for those with the highest needs. Indeed, a growing body of experts in the sector are starting to suggest that a national body could gather evidence on the efficacy of various SEND interventions.

Yesterday I said it was surprising that a Bill so entitled had little content on wellbeing. Given the huge and growing mental health crisis among our children and young people, new clause 9 in my name would place a duty on school governing bodies to ensure that every school in England, whether primary or secondary, has a dedicated mental health practitioner on site. The Government have repeatedly said they are committed to providing mental health support in every school, but it was clear when I pressed the Minister in the Chamber during a debate last Thursday that the support the Government are committed to providing will certainly not be the equivalent of a full-time person in every school. Mental health support teams, which the Government are looking to expand, do great work but are spread far too thinly. Our children and our schools are crying out for more dedicated mental health professional time.

Let me turn to the issue of academy schools. I fear that the Government are mostly trying to fix a problem that does not really exist, rather than focusing on the real challenges in education. My biggest concern here is that Ministers are putting the cart before the horse by writing into legislation that all schools must follow a curriculum of which we do not yet know the content because it is under review. New clause 51 in my name would ensure that we have a core common curriculum with local flexibility built in. New clause 52 would ensure parliamentary oversight, given that we do not know the results of the ongoing review. Although we Liberal Democrats have always maintained that the automatic academy order is not a silver bullet for turning around failing schools, until such a time as Ofsted and Government have settled on a swift and robust new accountability and inspection regime to ensure high standards in all our schools, removing the automatic academy order for schools that are causing concern is certainly very risky. Amendments 223 and 225 in my name would ensure parliamentary oversight and attempt to mitigate some of those risks.

Let me turn to home education. On Second Reading, I stated that we Liberal Democrats strongly support a register of children not in school to ensure that vulnerable children do not disappear from the system. We also strongly support the right of parents to choose to home educate where that is the best option for their child. However, in evidence to the Bill Committee, even the Association of Directors of Children’s Services was circumspect about the amount of information that parents will be expected to supply, as set out in clause 26. That level of detail risks becoming intrusive and unnecessary. Ministers must think again.

New clause 48 calls for, at the very least, a review of the register’s impact on home educators to be carried out within six months, to ensure that only reporting requirements that are strictly necessary for safeguarding purposes are retained. Amendment 224 would remove the requirement for carers of children in special schools to secure local authority consent to be home educated. New clause 53 would ensure that home-educated children are not excluded from national examinations because of financial or capacity constraints.

[Bradley Thomas (Bromsgrove) (Con)]

On home education, does the hon. Lady agree that not only is it a case of getting the balance right between privacy and the right to educate at home, but it is important that home educators do not feel stigmatised by the ability of the state to enter private property under less-than-forthcoming means that enable it subsequently to make an assessment of home education that is completely contrary to the reality experienced by the child in their own home?

[Munira Wilson]

The hon. Gentleman expresses concerns that those of us on the Bill Committee found in the written evidence we received from families who home educate. My inbox certainly has such correspondence from home educators in my constituency.

There is a real fear that this legislation, which is seeking to safeguard children who go missing from education, will over-police home educators, most of whom are doing a great job. In fact, a lot of them home educate their children not because they want to but because they feel forced to. That comes back to what I was saying about the crisis in our special needs system, and the fact that so much special needs provision just does not meet the needs of children, so parents give up work to be able to home educate their child. By virtue of their children’s needs, parents tend to be much more flexible in how they home educate. The very onerous reporting mechanisms will interfere with the flexibility that parents need to provide to their children.

In conclusion, I say respectfully to Ministers that part 2 of the Bill is a bit of a muddle, because the second half of it was bolted on to some well-trailed measures that largely have cross-party support. I hope Ministers have heard the strength of concern from school leaders about the unintended consequences of some of their measures. If they are serious about helping families with the cost pressures they face, I trust they will listen to cross-party calls on free school meals, whether that is introducing auto-enrolment or raising the eligibility threshold, as well as to the more effective approach to managing the cost of school uniforms that I have set out.

[Several hon. Members rose—]

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. Before I call the next speaker, I refer back to the point made by Munira Wilson about the corrected online version of her amendment 1, for the benefit of Members who are in the Chamber. In case there is any confusion, the correct version should begin:

“Clause 24, page 44, leave out lines 34 to line 4 on page 45 and insert”.

[Steve Witherden (Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate and express my support for the Bill. For far too long, school children have borne the brunt of academisation. Fortunately, the Labour Government in Wales rejected this model, but, having been a teacher on the border for most of my working life and a national executive member of the NASUWT, I have seen at first hand the negative impact of academies becoming the default model, while local authorities have been sidelined.

Since the introduction of the Academies Act 2010, the freedom for academies and free schools to set their own pay, terms and conditions has led to the exploitation of teachers. For example, teachers at Ark schools are expected to work 1,657 hours more annually than a maintained school teacher, while earning £7 less per hour. The lack of national consistency not only allows these schools to undervalue and overwork staff but undermines basic rights such as pension schemes, maternity and sick pay. Our Bill will tackle those disparities by extending the statutory pay and conditions framework to all teachers in academies, ensuring greater consistency and fairness between academies and maintained schools.

There is also the issue of admission policies. Too many schools misuse their control over admissions to break with inclusive local authority policies, selecting what they consider to be a more favourable intake of students. The Bill’s extension of the power to direct admissions to academies will ensure that local authorities can secure places for hard-to-place and vulnerable students, rather than allowing academies to exercise shameful selective admissions. Furthermore, by ending academy presumption, the Bill takes a significant step towards increasing academy accountability, empowering local authorities to better serve the needs of their communities, particularly helping SEND students and reducing reliance on unaffordable independent providers.

I hope to see the severe disparity between teachers’ pay and the high salaries of academy CEOs reviewed and addressed in future education legislation. We must ensure that funding is directed where it is most needed: to teaching and learning. This Bill marks an historic first step towards creating an accountable and fair education system that will benefit all our children.

[Graham Stuart]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate and to follow the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr (Steve Witherden), who has done us and the nation a great service with the clarity of his speech. The Labour party is often accused of working to serve the producer interest rather than the consumer interest, looking after the needs of the trade unions and not those of the ordinary citizen or, in this case, the child. But rarely does any Labour Member make it quite so explicit as the hon. Gentleman just did, with a total betrayal of the child and a total focus on the needs of the professional, their interests, their pay, their disparities and their conditions. There was nothing about the child, nothing about the standards of education. Never have I seen a Labour Member speak up so honestly about what this Bill is really about. We should be enormously grateful to him for doing that, and for doing it so clearly—and in not many words.

This Bill contains 38 policy proposals all linked by a troubling theme: the misguided notion that the bureaucrat knows best. In advocating for new schools to be opened and controlled by local authorities, the Government choose to ignore the evidence that competition and innovation are what drive up standards, and instead they consolidate power in the hands of bureaucrats.

15:45

This Bill also undermines the rights of parents to determine what is best for their children’s education, whether it be attending school or being home educated. Far from empowering schools, which until the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr came along Ministers have tried to pretend this Bill does, the Bill imposes a centralised, outdated version of education that stifles choice and which will reverse 14 years of progress.

Actually, it is more than that. It is 25 years of progress because, as I referred to earlier in an intervention, it was 2000 when the then Labour Prime Minister announced the academies programme, and I think it was in 2002 that the first city academy opened. That is a quarter of a century of progress in which time demonstrably, by every known measure of performance, schools in Wales have fallen behind schools in England practising these supposedly appalling academy policies which have led to such an improvement for the child. The hon. Gentleman’s speech was quite remarkable. but I would hope there are Members opposite who are not so tied up in their trade union engagement—their producer-interest capture—that they can instead focus on the interests of young people.

When my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) and I and Members opposite served on the Education Committee which I chaired, we were horribly aware that the policies that we were helping to scrutinise and influence would have an impact on lives for decades to come. Education policies are in many ways more fundamental than the economic policies pursued by a Government at any time, which are at least more easily altered. But if we close down the opportunities for disadvantaged children, that will be having a negative impact on them, on their families, on their community and indeed on this country for decades to come. That is why this is such a bad idea.

[Sarah Smith (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

Under the current system, a third of our children leave school without the basic qualifications to succeed in life, so does the right hon. Gentleman not agree that that shows that the current system is failing and needs change? Furthermore, in the communities with the most disadvantaged—I mean those outside of London—the academisation approach has not made an impact and has not turned around the life chances of children growing up in the most deprived wards. I have worked in those communities and with those schools and seen the impact of trust after trust failing those children. I will not accept that. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that that is unacceptable and that we have to move forward from this day to make greater improvements to make sure that the most disadvantaged students genuinely get the opportunities they deserve?

[Graham Stuart]

I thank the hon. Lady for her speech, if not intervention, and I certainly applaud her passion for the interests of children, disadvantaged children in particular, and her rage at failings in the system and her desire to see improvements, which might need to be radical, but we have not heard how the mechanics of the changes proposed in this Bill will raise standards. They will in fact dismantle them. The hon. Lady’s intervention comes in the context of my following the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr talking about Wales, and it is clear that the system being created by this Bill is much more akin to that in Wales, exactly as the hon. Gentleman so honestly said. Does the hon. Lady suggest that deprived children in Wales have better outcomes than they do in England? [Interruption.] She moved to stand up but then thought better of it, which was wise because she knows that the situation in Wales—which, as the hon. Gentleman said, is exactly what this Bill is trying to create—is infinitely worse than it is in England. Whatever the failings of the system in England, it is demonstrably better than it was 15 or indeed 25 years ago, and it is demonstrably better than it is in Wales.

[Sarah Smith]

rose—

[Graham Stuart]

I happily give way to the hon. Lady again.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. I remind hon. Members that interventions should be short.

[Sarah Smith]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for giving way once again. In my most recent conversation with a group of my headteachers, not one of them raised concerns about this section of the Bill and the reforms. For them, the question of academisation and how the amendments have been made will not limit them in their capabilities to do the best for their children. They are concerned about issues that will come forward as a result of the Bill around SEND, which have been mentioned by hon. Members from across the House, and other things that are restricting them from making progress.

[Graham Stuart]

I thank the hon. Lady, but she again could not explain anything about the Bill. Her passion for improvement is great—we would all applaud that—but her linkage to anything in the Bill that will improve matters was distinctly missing.

Many people, including Sir Jon Coles of United Learning, have criticised the proposals in the Bill; he said they will effectively destroy the academy system. I could not tell where the hon. Lady is on that, but the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr spoke with great clarity. Where once Labour promised us “education, education, education,” it now promises us bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy. Tragically, it is our children who will bear the consequences.

The outcomes of the last Labour Government serve as a stark warning of where the Bill will lead. In 2010, notwithstanding the nascent academy movement, we inherited a country where our children ranked 27th globally in reading. We spent more on education than Germany, yet achieved results that lagged behind nations like Poland. By the time we left office, England’s students were ranked as the best readers in the western world. In 2010, just 68% of schools were rated good or outstanding, but today that figure is 90%. These dramatic improvements did not happen by accident; they are the result of a system that puts freedom, competition and accountability at the centre of education, and equally importantly leaves mediocrity with nowhere to hide.

If the Conservative education reforms were great, it was only because we were standing on the shoulders of giants.

“Academies were introduced in the areas of greatest challenge, harnessing the drive of external sponsors and strong school leadership to bring new hope to our most disadvantaged areas.”

Not my words, but those of the longest serving Labour Prime Minister, Sir Tony Blair, in 2005. To his credit, he recognised the failings of our country’s overly centralised education system and started the reforms that paved the way to make our schools great again.

From tiny acorns do mighty oaks grow, and that is what the Conservatives delivered. In 14 years, the number of children attending academies skyrocketed from 192,000 to 4.9 million. That was transformative for pupils across England, particularly those living in deprived communities. One example is Harris Academy Battersea. Formerly known as Battersea Park school, it was considered inadequate before joining the Harris Federation in 2014. At that time, 68% of students achieved five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C. By 2017, that figure had risen to 83%, and in 2018 Ofsted rated the academy as outstanding, noting that teachers were proud to work there, morale was high, and pupils of all abilities made very strong progress. By putting a strong emphasis on cultural enrichment and academic excellence, the life chances of the working-class pupils that academies predominantly teach and who Labour claims to represent were transformed.

I am pleased that the Government have seen sense on one issue—I congratulate the Minister on that—and have amended the Bill to stop the extension of national pay rules to academies, and only require academies to have due regard to the school teachers’ pay and conditions document, rather than impose a ceiling on pay. That would have undermined the remarkable progress made by these institutions in raising standards, particularly for disadvantaged pupils.

New clause 38 goes one step further, making the pay set out in the school teachers’ pay and conditions document a floor and extending freedoms over pay and conditions to maintained schools. One of the strengths of academies is their ability to respond flexibly to local needs, including offering competitive salaries to attract and retain the best teachers in challenging areas. Limiting that flexibility would ignore the realities of teacher recruitment and retention, especially in communities where the need for high-quality education is greatest, because people respond to incentives. If academies cannot pay the best maths or physics teacher more, the children who would benefit from their skills the most will be left behind.

Building on the need for greater freedom and flexibility to raise standards, we introduced free schools, an initiative that helped to spark a renaissance in English education. Walking hand in hand with its union paymasters, who decry those schools as unaccountable and underfunded, as we heard set out in the previous speech, Labour wants these engines of social mobility to be destroyed. Its proposal to allow local authorities to open new schools, along with its planned review of the free school programme, would shift control of our children’s education away from communities and teachers and back into the hands of bureaucrats.

Unfortunately, the process has already started. In October, Ministers paused plans to open 44 new state schools in England, putting parents who planned to send their children there in limbo, so I am pleased to support new clause 39, which would reverse that pause and allow those schools to open as planned. Let us be clear: in 2024, 21% of GCSE entries from free schools achieved a grade 7 or above compared with 19% in comprehensive schools. Labour may not want to face the facts, but the reality is that sometimes the bureaucrat and the trade union shop steward do not know best. The Secretary of State is Labour’s Miss Trunchbull, putting our teachers in the chokey to satisfy her union paymasters.

This Government are so certain in their belief that they know best that they will not even allow parents the freedom to educate their own children without state interference. Buried within this Bill is a new legal requirement for local authorities to maintain a register of children not in school—a policy that I recognise was in the Conservative party’s manifesto, but which has the potential to be not just unhelpful, but actively harmful to children.

Our country has long upheld the primacy of parents, not the state, in determining the best education for their children, and this proposal seeks to undermine that fundamental covenant. That is why I support amendment 200, which would require a local authority to submit a statement of reasons when it does not agree for a child to be taken out of school to be home educated. It should at least have to account for itself. Compulsory enrolment could have serious consequences, as families may simply refuse to comply and potentially disengage from state involvement altogether because of this overreach, leading to negative unintended consequences that could impact on the child’s wellbeing.

The state thinks that it has a divine right to infringe on every aspect of the child’s life—or, at least, this Government do. They want to know what home-educated children do at the weekends and during the holidays. If that information is not required for children who attend mainstream schools, what is the justification for demanding it for children who are home-schooled? Why, in response to my repeated interventions, could the Minister not provide any reassurance that some sensible and proportionate rules would be put in place? I therefore support amendment 197, which would remove that requirement.

It was John Maynard Keynes who said:

“When the facts change, I change my mind”.

In the same spirit, I ask colleagues across the Chamber what they do. The evidence is clear: freedom and flexibility in education drive up standards and deliver better outcomes for children. In government, we followed the evidence and built on the previous Labour Government’s body of work, and the results speak for themselves. England now has the best readers in the western world, a record number of schools rated “good” or “outstanding” and greater opportunities for working-class children, albeit never at the level we would like, which is why that needs to be built on, not knocked to the ground.

As proud as I am of our record, this debate is not about party politics. At its heart, it is about ensuring that every child, regardless of their background, has access to the highest-quality education that we can provide. I urge the Secretary of State to follow the evidence, not ideology. I will vote against this Bill, but given the Government’s majority, we accept that however misguided these policies are, they will probably pass. All I can do is finish by appealing to colleagues across the Chamber to show courage, stand up for the poorest in society, stop the wreckers and support our amendments this evening when we come to vote.

[Abtisam Mohamed (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I commend the Minister on all the excellent work that has taken place so far on the Bill. My representations will be on home education. I recognise the importance of safeguarding and making sure that vulnerable children do not fall through the net; however, the home-educating community is growing, diverse and caring, and those involved are fiercely passionate about their children’s education and learning.

Amendments 4, 13 and 14, which stand in my name, would add to the Bill the definition of “suitable education” that already appears in section 7 of the Education Act 1996. Without these amendments, it would be left to individual local authority officers to decide what they think is suitable education.

15:59

Amendments 5 and 7, also in my name, are about registration and the contents of the register. They would make it no longer compulsory to provide the second parent’s name if it is not relevant to the child’s education. If the second parent’s name is not mandatory, the lone parent cannot be sanctioned for failing to supply it. The requirement to provide two parents’ names disproportionately impacts single parents, who may have to make an impossible choice between provoking their ex-partner and seeing their child forced back into school. Failure to comply may result in the lone parent having to choose between sending their child to school, which may not be the best place for them, and fines and imprisonment.

Amendments 8 to 12, which I tabled, deal with the school attendance order process. They would remove conditions C and D, which, if met, allow a notice to be served for a school attendance order. Conditions C and D are conditions in which a parent is unable or unwilling to provide information for the register.

Amendments 15 to 19, in my name, relate to home visits. Home visits are part of the school attendance order process, and my amendments would put it in the Bill that there must be reasonable grounds for refusal. A child may be extremely anxious about having strangers in their safe space—their home—who are there to scrutinise how much the child is learning, and who have the power to send the child back to school if they deem what they are learning to be insufficient. A parent may therefore feel compelled to refuse a home visit. That should not be a reason to fail their home education, so it should be put in the Bill that there may be reasonable grounds for a refusal. That cannot be left to guidance at a later date. Furthermore, it would be using a sledgehammer to crack a nut if the local authority had a statutory duty to consider all the settings in which a child is being educated, since those venues and activities will constantly be evolving. Instead, the Bill should say that the local authority may consider some of those settings.

Amendments 15 to 19 allow home visits to be refused on reasonable grounds. That would also mitigate the use of school attendance orders to deal with discrepancies in registrations. Conditions C and D in subsections (6) and (7) of proposed new section 436H of the Education Act 1996 would otherwise have a disproportionate impact on lone-parent households, which are mostly headed by mothers. Under proposed new section 436C, details of both parents would be required for the register, while proposed new section 436D imposes a legal duty on parents to supply that information. Without my amendments, proposed new section 436I could create a situation in which a lone parent who is scared to supply information about an absent parent or former partner is put at risk of reprisals from the non-resident parent, whose address will also be visited, as one of the homes in which the child lives.

Finally, I would like to give the House a message from many of my constituents who are home educators. There are some who say, “Home educators do a good job, but”. A whole community is dismissed in seven words. Just for once, can we acknowledge the thousands of families who are taking responsibility for their children’s education, often as a result of shortcomings in the school system, as was rightly said by the right hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart)? Their work, and that of their children, should be appreciated and valued. We should not stigmatise home education; if child protection laws and systems fail, it is they that should require scrutiny.

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

The debate on this Bill has been comprehensive. I rise to support a number of amendments to this Bill that hon. Friends have tabled, but I open on a point that has already been much debated, not only yesterday but during the Bill’s earlier stages. The Minister has said from the Dispatch Box that she regards the safety of children as being the Government’s highest priority, but the Government’s absolute refusal to countenance the amendments and proposals on equal protection demonstrates a lack of will to follow most other countries in implementing laws that provide that level of protection to children. That remains enormously disappointing, and will be an outstanding issue, in terms of child protection, for the foreseeable future.

The measures before the House are primarily concerned with schools. I would like to back up a number of colleagues who have set out the long-standing cross-party nature of the measures that underpin the success of the education system in England. I was a governor at one of the first schools to ever become an academy. It was sponsored by a significant Labour party donor, who came forward to support a Conservative local authority that engaged with that programme.

I also pay tribute to the work done by the Liberal Democrat Minister David Laws. He attended Cabinet as the Minister for school standards when the Academies Act 2010, which underpins everything structural that has driven forward academy standards, was implemented under the coalition Government. I was surprised to hear the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) disowning the contribution that the Liberal Democrats made, on a cross-party basis, to driving up school standards in England over the years.

[Munira Wilson]

I chose my words carefully. I talked about the past decade, during which the Liberal Democrats were not in government. The Conservatives had seven or eight Education Secretaries in that period. That carousel of constant change demonstrates how little those Education Secretaries valued education. The state of our school buildings, and of our special educational needs and disabilities system, tells us all we need to know about how much the Tories value education.

[David Simmonds]

It is important that we pay tribute to the work that David Laws did. As a key part of that coalition, he shaped the legislation that underpinned all the actions that followed, by the coalition and by Conservative Education Secretaries in majority Conservative Governments. We all need to recognise not only that education is a shared priority, but that all parties contributed to driving things forward and creating these structures over the years.

I have a degree of sympathy with the Government on an issue that they are trying to address. It has always been a legal conundrum that successive education Acts have place detailed, specific legal obligations on local authorities regarding the provision of school places in general, and the provision of education to individual children to whom they owe a duty, but there are times when that is in conflict with the fact that academy schools are their own admissions authorities. That is not new; it has been true of faith schools for many years.

Most of us in this House will have had casework arising from parents being frustrated about the difficulties in their relationship with their child’s school. However, a number of my hon. Friends have made the point that most of the measures in this Bill are not about relieving those issues that can be burdensome for families and children, but are about imposing much more centralised control over what goes on in the education system in England, where school standards have powered ahead of those that we see in other parts of the United Kingdom, particularly in Labour-run Wales.

The outset of my journey on this issue was in the dying days of the last Labour Government, when I was a member of, and then chair of, the National Employers’ Organisation for School Teachers. That body, as an employer, provides evidence to determine pay and conditions for school teachers. We might generally conjecture, as members of the public or as members of the political establishment, that that would be a fairly light-touch responsibility—that we would take a strategic interest in the workforce, and occasionally give advice and guidance. I was surprised to discover that we were to attend, with 17 unions, a weekly meeting with the then Secretary of State, Ed Balls, and his deputy Jim Knight, at the then Department for Children, Schools and Families, in which those unions would provide Ministers with a detailed list of their expectations for how every aspect of education policy would be micromanaged. Those regular weekly meetings came to an end with the election of the coalition Government, but I am aware that they have resumed since the election last year.

We have heard admissions from Ministers about how rarely they have engaged with school leaders, and have noted a great reluctance to say how often they engage with those who represent the union interests.

[Damian Hinds]

Intervene and tell us!

[David Simmonds]

I invite the Minister to say how often she has been meeting those school leaders.

We have also seen a move to re-establish the school support staff negotiating body. I had the privilege of chairing the employers’ side of that body. Its purpose was not only to give the teaching unions a voice on every aspect of education, but to support staff. One of the big challenges for the last Labour Government was the fact that the teaching unions hated the idea that school support staff would have that voice when it came to what went on in the classroom. It is, again, a cause for concern that the priority for the new Government is not to ask themselves, “How can we build on the progress that we have made with policies that we established and principles that we introduced?”, but to ask themselves, “How can we revert to giving control to those with a vested interest in how much money is spent, rather than those with a vested interest in the attainment of the children in all our schools?”

That is why it is so important for us to support new clause 38. In government, we should have taken the opportunity to

“extend freedoms over pay and conditions to…maintained schools”,

but the present Government, who say that they regard education as a priority, now have that opportunity. They have the opportunity to create a genuinely level playing field, so that, appropriately, the maintained schools that have been some of the main drivers of the progress in reading and mathematics among the youngest children, which is one of the proudest achievements of the past decade, can also secure teachers of the highest quality.

I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed that the unions’ demand that no one should teach in a classroom without qualified teacher status will not apply to university technical colleges. We know that UTCs have sometimes struggled in the current educational landscape. UTC Heathrow in my constituency, for instance, introduced an educational offer for a group of young people who might otherwise find it difficult to gain access to the type of education that would give them the start in life that they need. That is an example of success and an opportunity on which we could build, but instead it is being overlooked and potentially undermined by measures on the national curriculum.

It is hard to understand how an aviation-focused UTC closely connected with Heathrow airport, providing employment opportunities and a chance to access apprenticeships, gain technical skills and learn about catering and retail, would be well served by our prohibiting the people who know about those matters from doing their work unless they have qualified teacher status. We must ensure that we retain that element of diversity and opportunity in our education system—that diversity of provision and style that was always intended to underpin academisation, but which is now at serious risk of being lost.

There is clearly a need to reconcile the legal impositions on local authorities—for example, the need to balance the local education budget, which is legally part of the council tax, though we are yet to see a solution that would not have an unacceptable impact on local residents, and the legal obligation on local authorities to provide places—with the lack of any legal obligation on the Government to ensure that those elements are properly funded. However, on the substance of the Bill, even with the very sound amendments that we are seeking to pass, it is, essentially, a shopping list of union demands. What the Minister describes as a mission is a mission without a purpose. There is no sense in the Bill of how we are to take forward the progress we have made, what we want to achieve for our disadvantaged children, what targets we might set and how we might go about meeting them, and how we might unleash the sense of aspiration that exists in so many of our communities.

People ask what developments we could be proud of when we left office. When we left office, youth unemployment was half what it had been under the last Labour Government, and there were 4 million more people in work than there were when they left office. Much of that is down to the brilliant progress that was made by so many of our schools in transforming education standards. This Government should hang their heads in shame, because all they can do is come forward with a shopping list of union demands and not for a moment put forward the needs of the children of this country.

[David Baines (St Helens North) (Lab)]

I rise to support this Bill in its entirety, and I will speak about part 2 in particular. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), who spoke about people hanging their heads in shame. It is not in scope of the Bill, but I could talk about the fact that more children are coming to school not ready to learn. I could talk about the SEND crisis, the rise in child poverty or the number of young people who are not in education, employment or training. We could talk about the Conservatives’ legacy and hanging our heads in shame, but I do not think he would want to hear that.

16:14

I was a member of the Public Bill Committee. There was a large amount of agreement about much of the Bill, but there were also some significant divisions; they are rightly being debated in a lively fashion today, and I am sure that will continue. The child protection measures debated yesterday, which were broadly supported, are clearly significant, but I believe that the measures in part 2 will also make a real difference to the lives of many children and their families.

As many colleagues in the House know, I was a primary school teacher and a council leader before entering Parliament. In both those roles, I took the wellbeing of children extremely seriously. I can assure Opposition Members, who might be concerned about my motives for speaking, that my interest lies in what is best for children and their families. Given my experience, and as a dad of two young children, I cannot welcome this Bill enough, and the conversations that I have had with families, governors and school staff in St Helens North suggest that I am not alone.

The Bill introduces a floor, not a ceiling, in standards. Ensuring that every classroom has a qualified teacher at the front of it, and making sure that all schools teach the same core curriculum, are common sense to most parents and carers. Despite a bit of scaremongering, it was reported last month that a Schools Week survey found that the majority of academy leaders envisaged little to no negative impact from the Bill. From speaking to school leaders in maintained and academy schools in St Helens North, I know that is the general consensus.

One of the measures in the Bill that has gained the most attention is the introduction of free breakfast clubs at every primary school. I sympathise with amendment 2, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), which would require schools to make particular provision for children on the SEND register, and I hope that this will be monitored throughout the pilot process and going forward. We have recently had the announcement of the first 750 schools to pilot the scheme, and I have previously welcomed the news that PACE, Garswood primary and Ashurst primary in St Helens North are among the first cohort. I visited Ashurst last week and spoke to the headteacher, Lisa Houghton, and the chair of governors, Chris Forrest. Their ambition for their school, and their excitement about this opportunity, was clear. It is a fantastic school, and I have no doubt that they and many others are ready to make a success of the free breakfast club programme. We just have to give them the funding and the tools to make it work.

When I was a teacher and a council leader, I often watched previous Governments talk about education, state schools in general and children from communities like mine as if they were foreign—that is, if they talked about us at all—so I was thrilled to hear the Secretary of State refer to Carr Mill primary school in my constituency when she announced the first 750 breakfast clubs. Carr Mill provides a model for others to follow, and having spoken to headteacher Andrew Maley at an event in my constituency on Friday, I know that he is determined to take it further and will do so with our support.

Every single parent or carer is ambitious for their children. The vast majority are currently working every hour that God sends, just to make ends meet, and they will welcome the breakfast clubs and help with the cost of uniforms, not to mention the Employment Rights Bill and other things that Opposition parties continue to vote against. This Bill does a lot, and I will vote for it with enthusiasm, but there is still a lot more to do. I have a huge amount of sympathy with some of the tabled amendments, particularly those that would increase the take-up and availability of free school meals. For example, the use of auto-enrolment is a no-brainer, and I hope the Government will look at that. More generally, if we are to improve children’s wellbeing, we will have to end child poverty. That will need a whole-of-Government and national effort that is much bigger than this single Bill or any other, so I look forward to the report of the child poverty taskforce in due course—hopefully, sooner rather than later.

I am determined to use my time in this place to do all I can to help give every child the best possible start in life. No child should be left behind, and if we are going to achieve that, voting for this Bill is a good place to start.

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

There are good elements in this Bill. In line with Professor Jay’s recommendation, I agree that the House must urgently make it a duty to report abuse. As new clause 50 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) sets out, we also want a new authority established to deliver national and local inquiries into rape gang culture and the like. I fully support breakfast clubs, especially following the invention of free school meals—a few years ago—by a Liberal Government.

These are good measures because they put the interests of the child at the centre of everything, and the Bill goes wrong where it puts ideology ahead of the interests of the child and loses sight of those interests. I do not support adding taxes to education, which is outside the scope of the Bill, and I am concerned about the effects on academies as well.

Any conflation of children being educated other than at a traditional school with safeguarding concerns is not borne out by the evidence. It is also an ideological position that is an insult to the parents and families of the 110,000 children—our constituents up and down the country—who are doing a great job in ensuring that their children are educated, whether they are home tutored or educated otherwise. In fact, according to local authority data published in academic research that has been submitted to the Education Committee, only 11% of section 47 child protection inquiries into home-educated children result in a child protection plan. That rises to 26%—more than double—for the average of all predominantly school-educated children. Child for child, those educated at home are the safest and least in need of protection, so the overwhelming weight of new bureaucracy and legislation tackling home education as a sector is not justified. My hon. Friend’s new clause 48 is therefore quite right, because we should remove the burdensome and highly intrusive sanctions on such families.

Unless amendment 221 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) is agreed to, the Bill will enable grandparents reading to their grandchildren at weekends or in the evenings on a regular basis to be served with a notice, demanding a response on pain of a monetary penalty, by a council officer who chooses to issue one. These powers are really extreme and extraordinary. Instead, we should be supporting the interests of the child.

We should be supporting home-educated children and allowing them to sit exams without charging them hundreds and hundreds of pounds for the privilege. New clause 53, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham, would do exactly that. Without such a provision, can Ministers conceive of anything in the Bill that supports home-educated children? There is plenty to regulate them, control them and expose them to rigorous inspection, but there is not a single clause in the whole Bill that supports children being educated at home. Why the parsimonious Treasury cannot be persuaded to simply allow them to sit exams without paying hundreds of pounds is beyond me. Forgive me, but I cannot fathom why a Government would not want to provide for children to sit examinations.

In Somerset, our council has much a much better and proportionate approach, and it has developed a protocol in partnership with home-educated families. I am worried that that constructive approach will be swept away by the more confrontational approach that this Bill ushers in. At worst, there is the prospect of a disabled child being forced back to school by a local authority officer when they have good reason to be frightened of going back to that school, which really cannot be right.

Turning to my Taunton and Wellington constituency, I pay tribute to state schools such as those my children attended, and the independent ones in Somerset, where, as I have said, the local authority has a more constructive and positive approach to working with schools and families. I particularly pay tribute to the pupils at West Monkton primary school, who have written to me about their amazing plastics pollution campaign. I completely support their bid to ban single-use plastics, which they have written to me about. For those schools and the 5,254 children with an education, health and care plan who cannot get a school place, such as the family who came to my surgery on Friday, may I urge the Government to do more to help families with children with special educational needs? It is crazy that the system is preventing them from attending school when they want to. We need more projects like the great special educational needs centre being developed at Hatch Beauchamp school, which I visited recently. We need to be driven by the interests of the child, not ideology.

Finally, until the Government address the fact that £2 out of every £3 of council tax in places like Somerset is going on care—a national responsibility, in my opinion—then local services, schools and communities will see less and less investment. Social care funding must be tackled. It affects the whole of local government finance, including schools. That is not good for our environment, not good for jobs and not good for the growth of our economy.

[Sarah Smith]

It is a privilege to stand again in support of the Bill. If we are to improve our school system for the benefit of all children, regardless of their background or educational needs, their welfare and interests need to be at the heart of any reform. Opposition Members’ suggestions that that cannot be done without sacrificing standards in education could not be further from the truth. It is because the Government are ambitious for all children that the commitment to excellence in education is the driving force behind the measures in the Bill. Labour knows that when standards in schools drop, it is working-class children and those whose attainment levels may already be lower on paper but who are no less impressive due to overcoming additional learning challenges, who will suffer.

The Bill represents a cultural shift in how Government approach educational reform through delivering change in the sector through partnership and child-centred policy. The prioritisation of a child’s wellbeing and a focus on inclusion are not woolly concepts, but the bedrock of stability that will enable all children to thrive educationally.

It is not contentious to say that we currently have a fragmented school system that is letting down far too many children. That needs to change. Children need to feel like they belong in their school. Every setting, regardless of type, must be given the freedom to drive up standards in a way that meets the needs of its pupils and communities. The Bill goes back to the original purpose of academies, which was to share best practice and encourage collaboration in the best interests of our children. Allowing councils to open new schools will ensure not just that more school places are available, but that the places are the best ones for local families and where they are needed. This is a very positive step forward. A focus on school structures alone will not help families, children or teachers.

I support the roll-out of breakfast clubs, which will lead to every child having access to a healthy meal to start the day. As the impact assessment states, clubs will help to boost children’s attendance, attainment, behaviour, wellbeing and their readiness to learn. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) for highlighting, through amendment 2, the need for any provision to take into consideration the needs of all children, particularly those with special educational and disability needs. Inclusion is at the heart of this policy, so adjustments will need to be made to provide the food, transport and staffing for pupils in both mainstream and specialist provision. I also support new clause 1 and the auto-enrolment of children for free school meals. The two amendments support the Government’s mission to tackle child poverty.

Unfortunately, special schools fall behind mainstream ones in the offer to parents and pupils outside the conventional school day. Recently, a school close to Hyndburn and Haslingden that serves many of my parents and families has shortened the school day by a whole hour against the wishes of parents. In all honesty, I found the reasoning quite unconvincing. It will cause chaos for families and it would not have been tolerated in a mainstream school. We must do better with SEND schools to ensure that their children get the same school standards and excellent provision that the Government are working to achieve.

[Ms Julie Minns (Carlisle) (Lab)]

One point that headteachers in my constituency report is that, sadly, too many children with SEND are being offered access rather than inclusion in mainstream settings. Does my hon. Friend agree that we need to get to grips with the SEND crisis that, sadly, we inherited from those on the Opposition Benches?

[Sarah Smith]

I absolutely agree. We look forward to what is going to happen on that, and particularly to what we will do to tackle those challenges and ensure that we offer truly inclusive settings and that the needs of every child are at the centre of all the decisions that we take. I look forward to working with colleagues and discussing with Ministers how we can continue to drive high and rising standards in all our schools.

16:30

The Secretary of State recently spoke about a subject I am really passionate about: the sense of belonging in the classroom, so that a child knows they have the potential to achieve great things because they are valued, and that their learning—however it is facilitated to accommodate their needs—is seen as important. As Ministers deeply understand, nowhere is the need for that approach greater than for children living with special educational needs and disabilities.

I thank the Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan), who is currently on the Front Bench, for his encouraging words in Committee on the value of understanding wellbeing. How we chart national wellbeing in the future could help to embed this key data into policy making and commissioning going forward, both locally and nationally, to ensure that schools can drive further improvements for young people and help to reverse the low levels of life satisfaction that, sadly, far too many of our children report experiencing. Brilliant work is being undertaken on this subject by the BeeWell project with Manchester University, and I urge the Minister to engage with the project, if he is not already, on what is being learned and how that data can inform and improve provision for children and young people.

As the Labour champion for the Government’s mission to break down barriers to opportunity, I have had the privilege of visiting many schools across Hyndburn and Haslingden to reflect on this priority area and see the amazing work of our teachers. I am proud on their behalf to support a Bill that puts education back at the heart of national life. If we are to break the link between a young person’s background and their future success, we must deliver a core guarantee of high standards with space for innovation in every child’s education, so that they can thrive and achieve beyond any expectation that may have been placed on them.

[Adrian Ramsay (Waveney Valley) (Green)]

Today, I will concentrate on the important arguments for new clause 34 and amendment 173. New clause 34 would extend the provision of free school lunches to all primary school children. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Stroud (Dr Opher), who tabled this important new clause for consideration in Committee, with the backing of 42 hon. Members, and to my hon. Friend the Member for North Herefordshire (Ellie Chowns), who moved it.

To set the context for new clause 34, the children’s charity Barnardo’s is clear that we are seeing epidemic levels of poverty among children in the UK. Across the country, families are facing a desperate struggle to put food on the table, keep the lights on and heat their homes. Nationally, 4.3 million children are in poverty; in my constituency, 3,920 children are growing up in poverty—that is 21% of children. This shocking state of affairs was a political choice made by the previous Government and those who backed austerity, and we should not repeat it. The No Child Left Behind campaign, which underpins new clause 34, is backed by more than 250 civil society leaders, from unions to charities, medical bodies to faith leaders and mayors to councils. This widespread backing is unsurprising because the case for universal free school meals is overwhelming.

The need for free school meals is acute. We all remember Marcus Rashford igniting the campaign during the pandemic, pointing out that we could fill 27 Wembley stadiums with the 2.5 million children who did not know where their next meal might come from. The shameful legacy of child poverty continues. Poverty is embedded, with research from the University of Bristol showing that one in five schools run a food bank—a figure that is, I am told, even higher than the number of community food banks operated outside schools by the Trussell Trust and the Independent Food Aid Network combined.

The National Education Union has explained that its members see the struggles of children in poverty every day, with 80% of teachers asked saying that they have provided food for hungry children out of their own pockets. One NEU member said:

“So many of our children arrive tired and hungry. I find the issue with food so awful. I stock my school kitchen every week with fruit, cereal, milk, biscuits….the number of children who pop in to see me and then ask for food has grown over the last 2 years. It is heart breaking.”

A universal approach is the best policy for three key reasons. First, it is good for children. Universal provision helps children learn, grow and thrive in school. For example, research published in November 2024 evaluating London’s roll-out of free school meal provision to all children attending primary state schools found that the policy helped children’s readiness to learn and ability to concentrate. The Department for Education’s evaluation of the pilot undertaken by the last Labour Government found that pupils in schools where all children received free school meals were found to have made four to eight weeks’ more progress in maths and English over two years. In that pilot, the poorest children made the most progress, reducing the attainment gap. In areas with means-tested provision, the effect on the attainment gap was negligible.

On the health benefits, research published by the British Medical Journal found that less than 2% of packed lunches met school food standards, so this policy is a major opportunity to increase healthy eating. It would also reduce stigma and shame, giving pupils a better sense of belonging in schools. Means-tested provision leads to children feeling singled out and labelled as poor, impacting on their enjoyment of and engagement with school.

Secondly, providing free school meals for all is an effective investment. The evidence shows that universal systems reduce inequality and deliver economic prosperity beyond the classroom. A cost-benefit analysis of expanding free school meals by PricewaterhouseCoopers shows that for every £1 invested in universal free school meals, £1.71 is generated in core benefits, such as increased savings for the NHS and schools and increased lifetime earnings and contributions for young people.

Other expert research shows that the provision of universal free school meals increases pupils’ lifetime earnings, with the biggest increase being for the most disadvantaged children, thereby reducing inequalities for a generation beyond school. Work by the Food for Life partnership demonstrates that when food is sourced sustainably, more than £3 in social, economic and environmental value can be created for every £1 spent, mostly in the form of new jobs in the local economy.

Thirdly, universal provision is more efficient. We know that providing free school meals helps end a situation where children fall through the gaps. Means-testing will always miss some children and families. In England, the draconian eligibility criteria mean that one in three children living in poverty are considered too well off to access free school meals. Restrictive eligibility, complicated registration processes and stigma also block countless families from accessing support.

Universal systems are also more efficient, because they massively reduce administration. By putting an end to means-testing children for food, schools get back administration time, as all children’s meals will be funded together via one mechanism. Free school meals for all also eradicate problems of school lunch debts. Universal policies are also easier to defend and protect from erosion by future Governments who may seek to freeze thresholds or restrict eligibility.

In the UK, Wales and London are leading the way in providing free, universal, healthy meals at lunchtime for every child in primary school as a means of reducing inequality—not just in school but for entire lifetimes. England needs to catch up. I sincerely hope that the Minister will consider building on the excellent progress on breakfast clubs contained in the Bill.

New clause 34 makes the case for free school meals for all primary school children, but I want to be clear that I and my party support the extension of this policy to all children in school, because hunger does not stop at the age of 11. I hope to divide the House on this vital new clause, which builds on the excellent breakfast club provision. I urge all hon. Members to vote for the new clause, because we know that children cannot learn when they are hungry and that free school dinners for all is a winning policy for the economy, for families and for children.

I turn briefly to amendment 173, on local authority consent for the withdrawal of certain children from school. Home education is an option that works extremely well for some families, and indeed many children thrive in this environment. Nevertheless, for vulnerable children, there can be real dangers in dropping out of sight of public agencies. The Bill already rightly mandates that if a local authority has live child protection concerns about a child, because they are suffering or are likely to suffer significant harm, then their parent must obtain the consent of the local authority to withdraw the child from school. Our amendment would extend that mandate to children for whom the local authority has previously had concerns and taken action under section 47 of the Children Act 1989 in order to safeguard and promote their welfare. The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, supported by the Children’s Charities Coalition, has called for this strengthening of the Bill’s protections to safeguard the most vulnerable children, for whom withdrawing from school poses a risk to their safety and welfare.

Last year, the child safeguarding practice review panel published its analysis of serious case reviews involving children who have died or suffered serious harm because of abuse and neglect. Those children were not in school at the time, under the proviso of receiving an education at home. Of the 41 serious case reviews, 23 of the children —over half—were previously known to children’s social care, including being subject to a child protection plan prior to the incident. Under clause 25 as it stands, such children would not be safeguarded, which I am sure is not the Government’s intention. I therefore urge the Minister to seriously consider amendment 173 as a proportionate and necessary safeguarding measure.

[Lizzi Collinge (Morecambe and Lunesdale) (Lab)]

As a member of the Bill Committee, I have had detailed oversight of the measures in the Bill. They are vital for safeguarding children across the country, as well as supporting children and families with measures such as free breakfast clubs, reduced school uniform costs and extra support for kinship carers. I am thrilled that three schools in my constituency have been chosen to pilot free school breakfast clubs. They will put more money back in parents’ pockets and ensure that all children start the day right with a healthy meal.

The Bill has been subject to healthy debate, both in this place and in Committee. It is a strong piece of legislation and one that has been strengthened through the parliamentary process. Looking through the amendment paper, I was interested to read new clause 1, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), on auto-enrolment for free school meals. Parents have contacted me who are eligible for free school meals but are finding the application process difficult and are being passed between the school and the council. Auto-enrolment would help those children and families get the support that they are entitled to from day one.

It is important that children from all backgrounds have the same opportunities in life. I welcome measures aimed at tackling inequalities. I have spoken about the inequalities that arise from faith-based admissions to schools, where children are allocated school places based on the professed faith of their parents. I am pleased that the Government have confirmed the 50% cap on faith-based selection criteria for new academies and free schools. Faith-based schools are shown to be less diverse than their peers on a range of measures, including deprivation levels—measured by free school meals—the number of children with special educational needs and disabilities, and diversity of race and ethnicity compared with their local areas.

The evidence shows clearly that faith selection is social selection by proxy. In my opinion, selection by faith has no place in taxpayer-funded schools at all. The 50% cap on faith selection was brought in the previous Labour Government to address inequality, and at least ensures some regulation of that. However, I am still concerned that new schools opened by local authorities are not subject to the same cap. In cases of oversubscription, they could allow 100% faith-based admission. I have raised concerns about this directly with the Minister, and I thank her for taking the time to discuss it with me.

I am pleased that the Bill takes long-overdue action to tackle illegal schools. At least 7,000 children attend illegal settings—for obvious reasons, that is an estimate. Ofsted has been raising this problem for many years, because it does not have sufficient powers of entry and investigation into illegal schools. The Bill fixes that, granting Ofsted increased powers of entry and providing more powers to bring criminal cases against those schools and the people who run them.

Members may not be aware of illegal schools. They tend to be concentrated in specific local authority areas. Usually, they are run by religious groups, which tend to be fundamentalist, extreme, highly controlling or isolationist in their outlook. We know from former pupils of these schools that in many cases they only study religious texts and receive no other form of education. Instead of having a broad and balanced education, children are subjected to indoctrination. Children attending illegal schools have also been subjected to abuse, both physical and sexual. That is unacceptable and such settings must be regulated. If they are unwilling to be regulated and offer a proper education, they must be shut down.

I refer members to the contribution made by my hon. Friend the Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Sam Carling) in last week’s Crime and Policing Bill debate for a flavour of the attitude of high-control religious groups towards reporting abuse within their own communities. I also lay on record my thanks to Humanists UK for its work exposing the dreadful practices in illegal schools over the past decade. I welcome this Labour Government’s recognition of the severity of those problems and the swift action taken to safeguard those vulnerable children. I also welcome future discussions on how to manage the problem of part-time settings.

16:46

Another key safeguarding measure in the Bill is the advancement of the regulation of home education. I have been contacted by some constituents who are concerned about the new regulations regarding home education. The vast majority are parents who have chosen to home-educate their children due to failings within the school system, particularly for children with special educational needs. I sympathise with those parents, and I have spoken before about how delays in getting education, health and care plans, alongside failures to implement those EHCPs, mean that our children with SEND are suffering. I completely understand why some parents have taken the decision to withdraw their child from a school where their needs are not being met. Unfortunately, though, not all parents who remove their child from school are motivated in the same way or are providing a decent education.

Sadly, there are too many cases where children who are classed as home-educated are actually attending the illegal settings that I set out earlier, or are simply not receiving any education at all. In the worst cases, like that of Sara Sharif, we have seen children removed from school in order to prevent detection of abuse. It is only with this Bill that that can be tackled. The introduction of registers for children not in school is crucial in ensuring that children do not fall through the net.

[Gideon Amos]

Does the hon. Lady accept that, in the tragic case of Sara Sharif, which my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr Forster) has been pursuing, the murder happened in the school holidays and Sara was already known to social services? There is not much evidence that the parents said they were going to home-educate in the first place. Given all those facts, does the hon. Lady accept that there is actually no correlation in the data between home-educated children and children who are ultimately judged to need a care plan?

[Lizzi Collinge]

I acknowledge the complexity of that case and that the absolutely unacceptable failings before Sara’s death were abject across many organisations. However, she was removed from school partly so that her parents could prevent the detection of the abuse. I have recognised, and will continue to recognise, that that obviously does not speak to the vast majority of people who home-educate their children. However, as parliamentarians, we have a duty to protect the most vulnerable, and sometimes that includes regulating the majority, who are decent, honest people.

I want to reassure parents that the new regulations, such as registers for children not in school and the capacity to compel school attendance in certain cases, are not aimed at limiting home education as a whole or about policing how people choose to educate.

[Graham Stuart]

The intention is not the thing; it is the actual impact that counts. Let us take the example of someone who has taken their child out of school for the reasons that the hon. Lady has mentioned. Perhaps they have an autistic child who is miserable every day, and after letters to the headteacher and the local authority and failure after failure, they are forced to go into home education. Can she understand why parents are fearful of a representative of—as far as the parents are concerned—that failing local authority having the right to enter their home and sit in judgment over the child that they have been forced to home-educate? Can she understand why they would be fearful of the imposition a hard, top-down register, especially after so many years of successive Governments failing to provide any proper support for home educators?

[Lizzi Collinge]

I accept wholeheartedly the amount of parents of children, particularly with SEND, who have been absolutely failed by our system and by 14 years of Conservative Government. What I do not accept is that the proposal is somehow a major imposition. I do not believe that checking that children are receiving a decent education and are safe and well cared for is a major imposition on parents, and I think all good parents would welcome that.

These measures are being put in place to protect and safeguard vulnerable children. Having no oversight of children not in school is an unacceptable risk to children’s welfare. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is crucial, and cannot come too soon to protect our most vulnerable children and to support families up and down the country with rising costs. It has the welfare of children at its heart, and I am proud to have served on the Bill Committee and to have played a role in shaping this vital legislation.

[Gregory Stafford (Farnham and Bordon) (Con)]

Like VAT on independent schools and putting up costs through national insurance contributions, this Bill is yet another example of Labour turning children’s education into an ideological battleground. I have said it before, but I will say it again: Labour clearly hates any form of education that is not state-controlled, local authority-run schooling, and this Bill is another example of that. Under the Conservatives, pupils soared up international league tables, ensuring that every child, regardless of postcode—except if they lived in Wales—received the best start in life. Labour is intent on reversing that progress, attacking academic freedoms and dismantling a system that has delivered demonstrable results for young people. Indeed, it was a system that Labour used to champion, but now it has come back to power and is looking to dismantle it.

Most of this Bill is trying to solve a problem that does not exist. Like the Employment Rights Bill last week, it is bodged and being rushed through without proper scrutiny, and behind it all is the cold, dead hand of the union paymasters that fund Labour. I commented on it during debate on the Employment Rights Bill, and we have heard again today—I am afraid the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr (Steve Witherden) has just left his place—that the “Jurassic Park” of the unions is back. Like last week, it is not Jeff Goldblum—

[Lizzi Collinge]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Gregory Stafford]

I will finish my analogy. It is not Jeff Goldblum who is going to be savaged by the dinosaurs; it is our children.

[Lizzi Collinge]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that my hon. Friend the Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr, to whom he referred and who has actually worked in schools as a teacher, might have a really good grasp of what happens in schools?

[Gregory Stafford]

It would be totally wrong of me to cast any aspersions on the hon. Gentleman’s teaching ability. I have not sat through one of his classes, but if it was anything like his speech an hour ago, I would perhaps be looking to find some other educational outlet for myself or my child.

While I acknowledge that some of the child protection aspects of this Bill are important, much of it represents a dangerous and unnecessary centralisation of power that will harm schools, teachers and, most importantly, pupils. In recent meetings I have had with the Last Wednesday SEND group, as well as with home education groups across Surrey and Hampshire, there has been overwhelming concern about the proposed legislation. Many of those I have spoken to feel vilified for choosing to remove their children from mainstream education in favour of alternative specialised provision tailored to the individual needs of their children.

I will take this opportunity to highlight five key amendments that I think are particularly important; I urge Members to give them their full consideration. The first is amendment 206, which would remove the requirement for all academies to follow the national curriculum. Clearly, a national curriculum can provide a broad and balanced education, but education is not a one-size-fits-all issue. The Bill seeks to stifle innovation, which is a dangerous and regressive move. It is particularly concerning for faith schools and alternative provision settings such as Pathways school, a SEND provision school in my constituency. Pathways school plays an invaluable role in educating vulnerable children and providing trauma-informed strategies alongside a high-quality, project-based curriculum. Excellent spaces such as those would struggle to continue under state-imposed education strictures.

As a parent, I draw attention to new clause 41, which would give parents the right to review school curriculum materials to ensure their children are fairly exposed to material appropriate for their age group. It is not controversial to say that parents have a unique and intimate understanding of their children’s needs, and it is only right that they have an active role in ensuring the quality and suitability of their children’s education.

Moving on to amendments 200 and 202 regarding home education, a key group in my constituency that have ardently opposed state-controlled education are the home educators. Home education is a provision used by many parents across Farnham, Bordon, Haslemere and Liphook, because it provides a more personalised approach to learning, which in some cases benefits certain children. Amendment 200 would mandate local authorities to submit a statement of reasons when they do not agree that a child can be home-educated. Families are deeply concerned that the Government’s proposals impose excessive state control over home education, failing to recognise the dedication and care that home-educating parents provide. The hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Lizzi Collinge) said— I think I am quoting her correctly—that “all good parents would welcome” this imposition on education. That is deeply unfair to all the good home-educating parents who have contacted me. They do not feel that this is a proportionate measure; they think it is a deep imposition, and they are good home-educators.

Amendment 200 is a more proportionate way to address concerns while ensuring the accountability that the hon. Lady wanted. That is especially important for families with SEND children awaiting education, health and care plans—a process that can take up to two years. In my local area, 17% of independent school pupils receive SEND support, yet only 6% have a formal EHCP. Therefore, home education, especially in that interim gap between realising a child needs SEND support and receiving an EHCP, is often the best option for them. Amendment 202 would remove the requirement for local authorities to approve and consent to the home education of children with special educational needs. Removing those bureaucratic hurdles would empower parents to make the best decisions for their children and would ensure inclusivity and equity in education.

I want to touch on amendment 192 on neglect and abuse of children that is related to home education. Although I strongly support home education as a valid choice, safeguarding must remain a priority. However, home-educating parents feel vilified by this Government, who treat them as if they were inherently suspect, as the hon. Lady did, rather than recognising their commitment to their children’s education. Amendment 192 would ensure that local authorities may withhold consent for withdrawal from school where there are concerns about neglect or abuse. The entire House was horrified by the tragic case of Sara Sharif, and the amendment is a necessary, balanced and proportionate response—far more so than the Government’s broader proposals, which unfairly target responsible home-educating parents. Instead of a sweeping punitive approach, the amendment focuses directly on children who are genuinely at risk, ensuring that they remain in a monitored environment where safeguarding concerns can be identified and addressed.

The Bill is an ideological attack on academic freedoms which will hurt the very children who Labour claims to support. It imposes unnecessary constraints on schools, weakens parental choice and undermines educational innovation. The poorest pupils will suffer the most. Academic freedoms have driven up standards, allowing schools to tailor their curricula to meet the needs of pupils. Labour’s insistence on enforcing a rigid national curriculum will stifle progress and limit opportunities. Its move to weaken the academy system will leave struggling schools in limbo, harming the very children who need urgent intervention.

The Bill tears down 25 years of progress—progress that has had a demonstrable impact on children, improving their educational outcomes, life chances and business and employment opportunities, and benefiting the country as a whole. I urge the House to reject this damaging Bill and to stand up for the best interests of our children. Let us protect parental rights, uphold educational freedoms and ensure that every child has access to safe, high-quality and inspirational education.

17:00

[Zarah Sultana (Coventry South) (Ind)]

I rise in support of new clause 23, tabled in my name, which seeks to extend mandatory relationships, sex and health education to all young people aged 16 to 18 in further education, sixth form and apprenticeship settings. RSHE is currently compulsory only to the end of key stage 4, when students are 16 years old, but young people remain in education or training until the age of 18. That creates a dangerous gap, in which thousands of young people are left without the vital education they need to stay safe and informed during a crucial and vulnerable period of their lives.

Government data paints a stark picture. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show that 16 to 19-year-olds experience the highest rates of domestic abuse of any age group, with 8% reporting incidents in the past year. That is precisely the age when young people are beginning to explore intimate relationships—a time when they need guidance on recognising coercive control, domestic abuse and harmful behaviours.

We all know the tragic consequences of ignoring that gap. The recent case of Kyle Clifford, who murdered Carol, Louise and Hannah Hunt after reportedly being influenced by the misogynistic views of Andrew Tate, reminds us that toxic narratives can take root when young people are unable to access to reliable and positive education about healthy relationships and respect. That topic has also been powerfully explored in the new Netflix series “Adolescence” by Stephen Graham, which addresses the impact of misogynistic and harmful ideologies, particularly among vulnerable young people. The series, which I recommend to everyone, highlights how a lack of proper education in relationships and self-worth can leave young people susceptible to dangerous and controlling behaviour.

Put simply, we cannot allow harmful voices to fill the vacuum that education should occupy. Education is not just important; it is lifesaving. Providing young people with clear lessons on consent, coercive control and domestic abuse would give them the tools to identify harmful behaviour and seek help when they need it. Without that, we leave young people across the country vulnerable to manipulation, abuse and harm.

Survivors have bravely shared their stories, illustrating the tragic cost of inaction. Faustine Petron, a survivor who founded the “Make It Mandatory” campaign, has spoken powerfully about how education could have changed her life. Having experienced domestic abuse at just 16, she said:

“If I had received mandatory education on healthy relationships and coercive control in sixth form, I truly believe I would have recognised the signs of abuse earlier and sought support—before it escalated into four years of serious violence. Those are years I can never get back. Years when I should have just been a child.”

Another parent who supported the 100,000-strong online petition shared their heartbreak:

“My daughter ended her life in January 2022, aged 21, because she was in a coercive and controlling relationship and was abused on every level. The perpetrator was the boy she met at school and had known since she was 12 years old.”

And another signatory said:

“I wish I’d known about coercive control at 16 when I entered an abusive relationship and stayed in it for 9 years. I thought that because there was no physical violence, it couldn’t be abuse. Teenagers need educating about this.”

Those stories are not isolated. Reports from the “Everyone’s Invited” platform highlighted that 142 further education and sixth-form colleges in England were named in testimonies of sexual violence. Those shocking accounts demand urgent action.

New clause 23 has broad support. The Women and Equalities Committee recommended such a change in 2023. The chief medical officer, the Children’s Commissioner and organisations such as Brook, the End Violence Against Women Coalition and the Sex Education Forum have all called for RSHE to be extended to 16-to-18 education providers. Ultimately, the new clause is a matter of prevention and protection. It is about giving young people the tools to identify unhealthy relationships, to know where to turn for help, and to foster respect and understanding in their personal lives. By extending RSHE to all young people in education until the age of 18, we can save lives, prevent harm and build a safer society for everyone. That is not just the right thing to do; it is the necessary thing to do.

I urge Members from across the House to support my new clause, as well as new clause 34 in the name of the hon. Member for Waveney Valley (Adrian Ramsay), which would extend free school meals to all primary school pupils—a campaign that I, alongside other Labour Members, have proudly supported for a long time. It is up to us to ensure that no young person is left behind without the necessary education and food that they need to stay safe, healthy and empowered.

[Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)]

I must confess I am worried about the Education Secretary and her future employment prospects. She may share the confusion of the public and wonder whether the Prime Minister is a socialist or a pragmatist, a tax-and-spend lefty or a quango cutter, a human rights lawyer or a war leader, but Education Ministers seem to have missed the latest McSweeney memo.

While the reformer in the Department for Work and Pensions says she wants to get people off welfare and into work, and the reformer in the Department of Health and Social Care holds up school reform and academies as the model for his changes to the NHS, the luddites in the Education Department are taking a hammer to the machinery that has made English schools the best in the west. This Bill—along with the curriculum review, a weakened Ofsted, the threat to SATs in primary schools, the end of free schools and weaker discipline policies—undoes decades of hard-won reform and higher standards.

It should be obvious that the objective for our school system is higher standards. Of course, Ministers pay lip service to that idea, but their actions belie their words, not just with this Bill but with the appointment of an academic to run the curriculum review who has criticised past Governments’ “obsession with academic achievement.” Standards improved through the years of school reform because Governments put their trust in heads and teachers, parents, and the philanthropists and public servants who sponsored free schools and academies. We followed what we understood from neurological science and research about how children learn, from work on cultural literacy to the knowledge that higher-level skills are dependent on the automatic mastery of lower-level activity. We turned to synthetic phonics, maths mastery, a knowledge-rich curriculum, teacher-led instruction and traditional academic subjects, and watched pupils fly.

When I compare my own education with what my children are taught today, the difference is truly staggering, and yet this Government want to go back to the failed policies of the past and the failed policies that continue to this day in Scotland and Wales, where standards are sadly far lower than in England. We know why: this disastrous journey back is what the unions demand, and it is what those on the left, in their hearts, really want. We heard Labour MPs on Second Reading explicitly rejecting the very concept of academies and demand state-run schools.

Some 80% of secondary schools are now academies. Ofsted says that 87% of them are good or outstanding, even though many were previously failing schools that were made academies to turn them around under new leadership. This intervention has been proved to work. Academy freedoms have given heads the space to make bad schools good. According to the fairer schools index, which takes both academic achievement and socioeconomic background into account, the top five state schools in England are all academies: Steiner academy Hereford, Michaela community school, Mercia school, Eden boys’ school, and Eden girls’ leadership academy. Multi-academy trusts have achieved Progress 8 scores far above the national average, with trusts such as the Harris Federation, United Learning, Star Academies, Delta Academies Trust and Ark all performing strongly.

The Government’s disregard for evidence with the Bill has provoked massive anger among school leaders. The Children’s Commissioner has said that the Government are

“legislating against the things we know work in schools”.

Katharine Birbalsingh, the headteacher at Michaela, has called the Bill “catastrophic”. Sir Dan Moynihan, CEO of the Harris Federation, simply asked:

“Why are we doing this?”––[Official Report, Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 75, Q160.]

[Interruption] If the hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) would like to intervene, he may.

I want to say something about the Bill’s most damaging measures, starting with clause 42, which makes the national curriculum compulsory for all academies. Today, the interim report of the curriculum and assessment review has been published. Just as predicted, the review endorses the Education Secretary’s demand for a curriculum that prioritises non-academic subjects over traditional subjects such as the sciences and geography. Indeed the review throws into doubt the future of the EBacc, which ensures a proper focus on core academic subjects. While there is value to non-academic disciplines, of course, there is only so much time in the school day. Teachers will lose the ability to prioritise what they teach, as well as how, and children risk getting less time in which to learn reading, writing and numeracy skills to an advanced level.

Evidence shows that academies, such as the Laurus Trust, have already found a good balance between academic rigour and extracurricular activities. The Education Policy Institute found that the Laurus Trust’s extracurricular programme led to an attainment 8 score being 6.2 points higher among current pupils than for pupils who attended before the programme began. The point is the trust has the freedom to decide the focus of its extracurricular work.

Centralised control over the curriculum will also undermine school ethos and character. For example, Marine Academy Plymouth has tailored its curriculum around the city’s maritime history and relationship with the sea, and we should be encouraging innovation, not conformity—or “consistency” as I hear Ministers euphemistically call it.

Clauses 41, 46 and 47 remove flexibility over teacher qualifications, pay, and conditions, but giving academies freedom over how they recruit, train, and develop staff has led to impressive results. Michaela hires teachers with little or no experience but then gives them training based on its own ethos. Dixons Trinity Academy and King’s Leadership Academy have done similar. And the Government are not extending the requirement in clause 41 to recruit QTS—qualified teacher status—teachers to further education, university technical colleges, studio schools, non-maintained schools, and early years provision, so why impose it on academies?

I share the concerns expressed earlier by my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O’Brien) regarding clause 50. This new amendment will give local authorities the power to overrule headteachers and block school expansion and even mandate the number of pupils attending an academy. This would give local politicians the power to starve academies of pupils and promote their preferred locally controlled schools. This would cut some school budgets and could even lead to closures. Instead of letting parents decide which schools thrive, this is a return to failed command-and-control statism. As roll numbers fall, clause 50 will put huge power into the hands of often very ideological politicians, and for those who doubt this danger, those of us who worked with free school founders know the games councils have played with land hurriedly sold and planning applications refused to stop new schools opening.

A couple of months ago in this House the Prime Minister called academies a Labour achievement. He said:

“Academies are here to stay, and will continue to drive up standards. That is what the Bill is about.”—[Official Report, 22 January 2025; Vol. 760, c. 998.]

But if he really meant that, I honestly wonder whether he has read, or understood, the Bill at all.

I am afraid the Education Secretary and her team, however, know exactly what they are doing. Their ideology blinds them to evidence and leaves them deaf to advice from those who know what they are talking about. This is why Ministers cannot admit the success of English schools in the PISA and TIMSS international rankings.

[Catherine McKinnell]

indicated dissent.

[Nick Timothy]

The Minister gave me a frown but she can intervene and admit the success of English schools in those rankings if she wishes.

It is why, when Michaela was once again selected—[Interruption.] Would the Minister like to intervene? No, apparently not. It is why, when Michaela was once again the best-ranked school in the country for progress, the Secretary of State could not bring herself even to congratulate Katherine Birbalsingh when I invited her to do so from these Benches. It is why the Education Secretary’s special adviser briefed the newspapers that Ms Birbalsingh is a liar, and why he briefed the newspapers against Amanda Spielman, former head of Ofsted, attacking her very personally as a “failure” and a Conservative.

As Margaret Thatcher, not just a former Prime Minister but a former Education Secretary, once said:

“If they attack you personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.”

And this is the truth: the Education Secretary does not have a single political argument for this disgraceful act of policy vandalism, but she is determined to ignore those who know better than her and push on. And the people who lose out, I am afraid, will be the children, from ordinary working families the length and breadth of the country, denied the best we can give them, unaware that a better and brighter future has been stolen from them thanks to nothing more than vindictive left-wing dogma.

[Steve Yemm (Mansfield) (Lab)]

It is an absolute pleasure to speak in support of the Bill, which delivers on the Government’s mission to break down barriers to opportunity. The Bill will drive high and rising standards in school, cut the cost of sending children to school for my constituents and make life easier for families in my area. Its landmark reforms to safeguarding and children’s social care will stop children from falling through the cracks.

17:15

I spoke in favour of the Bill on Second Reading in January, and I am pleased that the elements of the Bill that I spoke about then have not been substantially amended. First, the Bill, as amended, still provides for a profit cap, enabling the Secretary of State to cap the profits of non-local-authority, Ofsted-registered providers of children’s homes, foster agencies and supported accommodation. Secondly, I particularly welcomed the introduction of free breakfast clubs in every primary school. I note that in Committee, the Government proposed amendment 6, but that amendment is technical in nature, and the Bill will effectively make the same provision as the original draft did.

The clause relating to breakfast clubs in the Bill, as amended, has been and will be warmly welcomed by my constituents in Mansfield for many reasons—not just because it will save families up to £450 a year, but because evidence shows that providing a healthy breakfast at the start of the school day can contribute to improved readiness to learn, increased concentration and improved wellbeing and behaviour.

I am pleased that we are wasting no time in rolling out free breakfast clubs in primary schools. Two schools in Mansfield have been chosen to be among the first schools to trial the free breakfast club programme: St Peter’s Church of England primary academy in Mansfield and Holly primary school in Forest Town. I welcome that announcement, and I am pleased that Mansfield schools are part of the trial that will allow the Government to monitor what works and what needs correcting, before wider roll-out across England.

The Government have made it clear that one of our top priorities is investing the in next generation to break down the cycle of poverty that holds our nation’s progress back. The Bill clearly drives home Labour’s mission to break down barriers to opportunity, and I will vote for it proudly, on behalf of all those children and families in Mansfield and across the country who will benefit from its measures.

[Damian Hinds]

I am grateful to be called to speak in the debate. It has been an honour to be a member of the Bill Committee. Over many days, we considered the Bill in detail, providing line-by-line scrutiny. Today, there are many amendments before us, many of which I support, and there are important issues to discuss, including elective home education. My right hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) made some excellent points, and the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) also made important points.

It is important that we discuss the breakfast club provision. In principle, schools providing breakfast to children is a good thing—why not?—but as we get closer to implementation, colleagues on the Labour Benches may find themselves getting more mail from headteachers in their constituencies, noting that the Government say that the pilot scheme will save parents £450 per child, but the amount of money that the Government are giving to schools goes down as low as £114 per child. That is clearly quite a gap for schools to make up, and we will see how they intend to do that.

We had some good debates on uniform in Committee. I gently say to Labour colleagues that if they think the changes in uniform will automatically result in the cost of sending children to school going down—because everybody will go to Asda and get unbranded clothing, so there will be no pester power or fashion competitions when it comes to sportswear, for example—next time they do a school visit, they should go to a PE lesson and look down at the children’s feet. If they cannot make it to a PE lesson, just wait for the end of the school day, stay at the school gate and look at the children’s bags. It is not automatically the case that not having uniform items for sport, for example, makes things cheaper. I also hope that at some point during the passage of this legislation, the Government will get rid of the bizarre anomaly by which they say it is all right to have a school tie as an additional logoed or branded item in a secondary school, but not in a primary school, for some reason.

There are also important new clauses for us to consider—on free school meal auto-enrolment, for example. We had that discussion this morning in Westminster Hall with the Minister for early education, the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan). Historically, there have been barriers to auto-enrolment for free school meals to do with IT systems and the legal basis for such a measure. The IT system issues are melting away as technology improves, and I hope that the Government will look at that seriously.

If I were to comment on every clause with which I have an issue, or every amendment on which I have an opinion, I would stretch even your famed patience, Madam Deputy Speaker. Instead, I propose taking a step back. What we are debating is more than just the 84 pages of parts 2 and 3 of the Bill, or the 62 pages of amendments. This is really about the soul and direction of education in England. As other colleagues have mentioned, this new Government have a very solid base on which to build when it comes to attainment in England; we have the best primary school readers in the western world—yes, that bears repeating. Under the last Government, at secondary school, we went from 27th to 11th in mathematics, and from 25th to 13th in reading. Children on free school meals became 50% more likely to go to university. That is the record of the last 14 years. It is not the record of the 13 years before that, when we went down the international comparison tables.

There were stand-out reformers in new Labour, and I pay tribute to them, starting with Sir Tony Blair and his famous epizeuxis, “Education, education, education.” There was also the noble Lord Blunkett, Lord Adonis and others, but they were always swimming against the tide from the left of politics and the Labour party to push through reforms. We should not exaggerate how much was achieved by the end of the last Labour Government. There were a couple of hundred academies, as opposed to many thousands today.

What happened between 2010 and 2024 was not all about academies—far from it. It was really about brilliant teachers—that is always where it starts and finishes in education—in an ecosystem that valued high standards and high quality. Crucially, it was about the combination of autonomy and accountability for schools, a knowledge-rich curriculum, and proven methods, such as synthetic phonics and maths mastery. It was about schools learning from each other, both in the hub-and-spoke network across the country and in academy trusts, which became the primary vehicle for school improvement.

That improvement also needed diversity and parental choice, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness, who is on my left—spatially—pointed out. That starts with clear information and knowing how children are doing at school. There was a time, for many decades in this country—going back way before the new Labour reforms, by the way—when nobody knew how many children were just being let down by schools. We took that provision of clear information further, of course—as did the Blair reforms—with clear Ofsted judgments that anybody could access readily, but also much longer judgments that could be read by anybody who could read.

We do not talk nearly enough about Progress 8—it is so much better than the measures that we used to have—either on raw GCSE attainment or the contextual value-added measures of the Labour years. We also knew that if we were to have choice, there needed to be spare capacity in the system. Remarkably, in spite of the fact that there was a known demographic need, in the years up to 2010, the previous Labour Government cut school places by a six-figure number; we added 1.2 million more. We also made the diversity of academies and free schools happen, and welcomed it.

[Joe Robertson (Isle of Wight East) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend has referred not only to the previous Government, but to the new Labour Government before that. Does he share my concern, and perhaps my confusion? I thought there was consensus on the huge benefits of academies, which were brought in by new Labour and advanced by the previous Conservative Government, but this Government seem to be ripping up that consensus through this Bill.

[Damian Hinds]

My hon. Friend is certainly right that over the years, there have been many brilliant, far-sighted people in the Labour party who have overlooked their political tradition and said, “We must just do what is best for the children.” I do not think there has ever been a universally accepted consensus on academies; until very recently, there have been groups actively organising against schools becoming academies, with leading members of the Labour party involved in those movements. There has always been a strand, which turns out to be wider than we realised, of the Labour party that believes that unless there is control from the top, through councils, and unless schools are told what to do, the system is inconsistent. Some consistency in education is very important, but that is not the same as uniformity, and certainly not the same as top-down control.

It turns out that Government Ministers do not want transparency and choice. They do not want diversity. In particular, they seem to want to curtail the improvement in school performance that has been made possible through academy trusts. The Government have already stopped new free schools. This Bill can not only stop academies growing in size, but can stop them staying the same size, even if they are popular with parents.

We all know that the Bill erodes freedoms, starting with the qualified teacher status requirement. It is not as if schools are going around willy-nilly, recruiting people without qualifications off the streets. They are not putting cards up in Tesco saying, “Apply now to teach, no prior experience or qualifications required”—of course they are not. Equally, though, a headteacher who is trying to do the best for his or her school and its children might have a reason to bring in somebody from a profession. They might want to bring in somebody with a sports background, somebody from the private sector, or somebody from another country to help with their school’s language programme, but no, we do not trust headteachers to make those decisions. We have to write something into legislation to stop them doing that.

Turning to the national curriculum, again, it is not as if schools are going around willy-nilly saying, “We’re not going to teach children English, maths, geography and history. We’re just going to make it all up.” In fact, Ofsted-inspected schools—which all state schools are—cannot do that, because they are judged on having a broad and balanced curriculum. The quickest way to achieve that is to follow the national curriculum, but there are schools that want to innovate and to deviate somewhat from the national curriculum. We see no harm in that, so long as those schools maintain that breadth and balance.

It has been said by a few colleagues that it seems to put the cart before the horse to say that all schools must follow the national curriculum rigidly before we have the outcome of the review. Just a few hours ago, we had a publication connected to the review, but not the final report. It is beside the point, however, because whatever the review comes up with—on which we must wait and see—the Government are not obliged to adopt it and could adopt something else. Even if they do adopt it, this Government or any subsequent Government could decide to do something different. Having the ability for schools to deviate somewhat gives us a safety valve against the over-politicisation of schools and what is taught in the curriculum. It also gives some reassurance to faith schools and parents.

17:30

[Graham Stuart]

Has my right hon. Friend seen Tim Leunig’s article in Schools Week talking about Ofsted’s new report card system following the Labour manifesto commitment? One danger is that, if my right hon. Friend is right and we see a reduction in standards, the Bill could switch off the light that allows us to see that, because

“reliability and validity are in tension”,

as Tim Leunig puts it. Does my right hon. Friend share my concern that Ofsted must ensure that it continues to put a bright and reliable light on the education system, so that we can see whether the policies in this Bill work?

[Damian Hinds]

I do, and my right hon. Friend gives me two valuable opportunities. The first is to pay tribute to the great Tim Leunig. We do not often talk about him in this House. He has friends here, and he is a perceptive thinker. I will look up his article.

The other opportunity that my right hon. Friend gives me is to highlight the discrepancy we can get when things appear to be getting better, when in fact they are not. That is what happened under the last Labour Government when, in spite of us falling down the international comparisons, they managed to find 11 different ways in the system to make it look like our GCSE results were improving year after year. We do not want that to happen again. There were those champions in the new Labour years who made these great reforms happen and would want to continue them now, so I say to those on the Government Benches: where are the champions today? Where are those in the modern Labour party who will say, “No, we will not be bound by ideology. We are going to do what is in the best interests of the children”? I hope there will be some of those champions in the other place.

To be fair, I was mildly encouraged this morning to hear the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, when questioned on the radio about the fate of this Bill, appearing to be somewhat open-minded, shall we say, about what might happen. To be fair, I have even been slightly encouraged listening to the Secretary of State for Education in recent days and weeks. She has sounded like she might be a little bit open to rowing back from some of the worst excesses of this legislation. There is still time. There will be weeks of this legislation being considered in the other place, so I just ask the Government to please take that time to think carefully about the legacy they will be leaving and to turn those words into deeds.

[Chris Vince (Harlow) (Lab/Co-op)]

I thank the Ministers for their contributions. It is an honour to have an opportunity to speak on behalf of my constituents and my former colleagues in the teaching profession on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. Quality of teaching is the single biggest driver of standards in schools. The Bill will ensure that all teachers have or are working towards qualified teacher status. As a former teacher, I welcome that.

It is fair to say from the chuntering I have been doing from this Bench that I feel passionately about education. I find it difficult, listening to Opposition Members—I recognise that they generally care passionately about education, but sadly my experience of teaching under their Government was different from how they describe it. I once again ask the Minister to recognise that she is inheriting a workforce in the education system that is absolutely at rock bottom.

Let me stress, however—I want to make this clear to Conservative Members—that I put the wellbeing and education of children above any politics. When I talk about the education of young people, I talk not just about examinations but what is described in the teaching profession as the hidden curriculum: important life skills. Indeed, I became quite animated when a month ago, on this very spot, I spoke in a debate about the importance of financial education.

As I have said, for me a well-qualified teacher is one who still takes a joy in education that has not been sucked out of him by the endless barrage of comments in the press, and, I must add, a revolving door of Conservative Education Secretaries, although I should offer an olive branch to the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds)—[Interruption.] I was about to say something nice about the right hon. Gentleman.

[Damian Hinds]

Carry on, then!

[Chris Vince]

I was going to say that he was probably one of the better ones.

I should also recognise, as should we all, that the young people who are going through the education system now have been impacted negatively by something even worse than a Conservative Government, namely the terrible pandemic. We know that they are less resilient. We also know that more and more young people are having to be carers for their parents and other family members and loved ones. Members will be aware that I am very passionate about this subject, and I thank the Minister and other Members for attending and contributing to my Westminster Hall debate on it last Thursday. On average, young carers are likely to miss more school than their peers, and I welcome the proposal in the Bill to record absences to ensure that no young people fall through the gaps, including those who are home educated.

I said earlier that I did not want to be too political about this. I went through the education process and became a teacher because of Sir Tony Blair’s remark about “education, education, education”. When he said that teaching was a valuable and noble profession, I thought, “He’s right: it is.” The former Member of Parliament for Surrey Heath did not put it in quite the same way when he said that most teachers were letting young people down.

I want to say something about reform, and to move away from the ideological politics of reform. Sometimes reform is good, sometimes it is bad, and sometimes good reform is bad because of the way in which it is implemented. As a former teacher, I can assure the House that telling a student that they are not doing a very good job does not make them do a better job. When we are considering reform in education, it is hugely important that we take educationists, teachers and support staff along with us, and that, I am afraid, is something that I do not think the last Government did. I believe that the Bill returns us to the original purpose of academies: to share best practice and encourage collaboration in the best interests of children.

I was told that I must talk about the amendments and new clauses, so let me briefly speak in support of Government amendment 156, which focuses on the importance of ensuring that every school is run by a “fit and proper person”, which I think we would all agree is a no-brainer. I also want to refer to—I cannot find the right page in my speech—

[Tim Roca (Macclesfield) (Lab)]

Will my hon. Friend accept an intervention?

[Chris Vince]

I will!

[Tim Roca]

At several points today, we have been transported by Conservative Members to the educational nirvana that supposedly existed under the Tory Government. That is not the memory I have, or the memory that many parents and children have. They, I think, remember the real-terms funding cuts that happened for much of the last 14 years, increasing class sizes, the millions of days lost to industrial action by unions who were fed up with the hectoring nature of previous Conservative Governments, and the 11% of children who were going hungry compared with the 8% OECD average. PISA rankings are all very well and good, but PISA scores were going down; they were just not going down as fast as those in other countries.

[Chris Vince]

I thank my hon. Friend for painting a better picture than the one painted by Conservative Members.

Shortly after the election, in August, I met a couple of former teacher colleagues who were still in the profession, and they just looked broken. It was really difficult to see, because they have been maths teachers for a long period of time. When I first became a teacher, they inspired me to persevere, to reflect on the bad days and to have better lessons. To see them so fed up and so disenchanted with being a teacher was really difficult, and we have to change that. I emphasise again to the Minister that it is really important that we ensure that we support teachers’ mental health. I was going to intervene on the right hon. Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) to ask him whether he recognises that happy and supported teachers lead to happy and supported young people, which is really important.

[Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Chris Vince]

I will not.

I will briefly mention Government amendments 166 and 167, which talk about data protection never getting in the way of safeguarding. One of my most difficult days as a teacher—the House will be pleased to know that it has nothing to do with the Conservative Government—was when a young person in my class came to me at the end of a lesson and said those terrible words that every teacher dreads: “I need to tell you something.” Despite my explaining to her that it could not be confidential, she made a disclosure—I will not go into it, obviously—and then begged me not to tell anyone, which is not an option for teachers or anyone in a similar position. It was heartbreaking to see how upset she was, but I reported it in the correct and proper way. Clearly, safeguarding is really important, and all professionals—not just those in education—who work with young people take it very seriously. General data protection regulation, or myths about GDPR and data sharing, should not get in the way of ensuring that our young people are safe in education and outside it.

I will finish on a lighter note, because I appreciate that I have got a little bit deep. The right hon. Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) discussed the educational merits of having an ice cream. I say to him that 1/3πr²h is the volume of a cone.

[Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) for schooling me in maths—I am not very good at that.

I begin by expressing my strong support for the Bill, particularly its efforts to enhance child protection and ensure better collaboration between professionals involved in children’s care. I welcome the measures in part 2 that seek to harmonise admissions and provide cost of living support for families, especially those from deprived backgrounds.

Parents whose children are in state-funded education deserve transparency. They should have access to clear information about their child’s education and be assured that schools and trusts are operating fairly, and I look forward to measures coming forward that are not in the Bill but which will really make a difference for children, such as the child poverty strategy, the SEND review and the curriculum review. However, there is one part of this Bill that I believe needs to be amended: the level of unnecessary scrutiny that is being imposed on parents who choose to home-educate their children. Rather than protecting them, elements of the proposed register risk putting such families in danger.

Let me be clear: I support the principle of the register. As corporate parents, local authorities need to know where children are if they are not attending school. Collecting some information and the reasons for elective home education is important, not only for child protection but so that authorities can plan for the future. We know that some children who are home-educated later return to school, and many parents make this choice because local education provision does not meet their child’s needs, either temporarily or permanently. That presents an opportunity for local authorities and multi-academy trusts to work collaboratively with families to ensure that curricula and school offerings are inclusive of their needs.

However, proposed new section 436C of the Education Act 1996, which governs the content and maintenance of the home education register, contains provisions that could have serious unintended safeguarding consequences, as suggested by the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed). Under proposed new section 434A, in clause 25, the local authority must serve notice to both parents “unless exceptional circumstances apply”—for instance, in cases of domestic abuse or family estrangement. Yet proposed new section 436C, in clause 26, requires the register to include the name and home address of the child, both parents’ names and addresses, and the addresses of all places where education takes place. Crucially, there is no provision for exceptions in cases where sharing this information could put children at risk.

17:45

One of my constituents, whose name I will protect for obvious reasons, told me:

“Since 2018, I have managed to keep my home address private from my ex partner. Throughout the case”—

a court case—

“I was supported in keeping my address private and it was not included in any documents he was given access to...This register would hand him our home address. It would hand him details of my new relationship. The names and address of my new partner’s parents who will be supporting me...It would hand him the address of every activity she”—

her child—

“attends. This proposed register essentially hands him motivation, evidence, licence and opportunity to continue his coercive controlling behaviours”.

She goes on:

“Currently we are safe. She’s known in our home ed community. She is not hidden or missing education. This Bill will put her in danger. It will put me in danger. It will put my baby with my new partner in danger. The current provisions of this bill will not increase our safety and I have no doubt that there are hundreds of other mothers in the same position across the country.”

That is chilling, indeed. To address it, amendment 175 in my name would provide the same safeguarding expectations as are already present in proposed new section 434A, removing the requirement to provide sensitive information where there is a known risk to a child.

I am also concerned about the excessive reporting requirements for the register—other than the reference to ice creams. While basic information is useful for future planning, proposed new section 463C(1)(e) goes much further, requiring the details of all individuals involved and a full list of all activities. That not only places an unrealistic burden on families, but is impractical for local authorities to manage. If we break down what is being asked for, it would mean that parents must report a neighbour who teaches their child to cook or sew and a local farmer who introduces their children to the environment through hands-on experiences, as well as swimming lessons, museum visits and even regular nature outings with other home-educating families.

[Gideon Amos]

In that vein, does my hon. Friend accept that, as I mentioned, grandparents reading to their grandchildren could be considered as providing home education and should be inspected and reported on, and vital home education groups providing services free of charge could be driven out of business by the scale and weight of reporting they will have to provide?

[Vikki Slade]

I think a lot of people who do not know anything about home education miss the fact that there is a whole community of home educators, and home-educated children spend plenty of time with their peers, but they are just different peers—others who prefer to have their education outside a school environment—and there is a risk of such organisations being driven underground or lost altogether.

Under section 7 of the Education Act 1996, parents already have a duty to ensure that their child receives a suitable education, whether through school or otherwise, and local authorities can already conduct informal inquires and issue school attendance orders if they believe a child is not receiving an appropriate education, so this is simply overkill. A formal register would help to ensure accountability, but this is overreach. My amendment 221 proposes a more practical solution of requiring only those who provide more than six hours per week of education or activity to be included in the register. That strikes a reasonable balance by ensuring that key educators are identified without overwhelming families or local authorities.

While there are genuine safeguarding concerns, local authorities already have the power to intervene under section 47 of the Children Act 1989. The Victoria Climbié Foundation stated that the provision proposed in the Bill would have done nothing to help Sara Sharif because the local authority had already decided that the child was not at risk.

[Graham Stuart]

I hope colleagues in the other place will follow up on the hon. Lady’s excellent speech. To focus in on that point, if a register does go ahead—the hon. Lady supports that; I do not—it should start with the minimum requirements, and then it could be expanded if that is needed, rather than be spread out in this way. To reinforce the point she makes, local authorities already have the power to intervene if it appears to them that someone is not having a suitable education, and they have all the powers required if there are concerns about welfare. Conflating welfare and education in the way this Bill does particularly irritates and upsets home educators.

[Vikki Slade]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. In fact, Kathryn from my constituency wrote me a very long email talking about welfare versus education—two totally separate issues. People are really upset and would have been devastated and distraught to hear the hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Lizzi Collinge) effectively make them feel like they were some sort of pariah. I was really upset to hear that, especially as I asked home educators in my constituency to listen to the debate and give me their feedback.

I support amendments 195 and 197, tabled by the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott), which seek clarity that educational activities outside regular school terms should not be subject to this overreach. My children are not subject to them, and children in home education should not be subjected to anything more than the rest of us. Children receiving education out of school should have the same rights to take their public examinations as their peers. It should not be based on a parent’s ability to fund that. After all, the Treasury already saves many thousands of pounds for every home-educated child. New clause 53, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), would provide support for parents by providing for home-educated children to sit any relevant examination and to be fully funded where requested.

I thank the Minister for confirmation on one point: as I sat here this afternoon, I received a letter to say that the challenges faced by summer-born children will now be considered. I would like to pass on the thanks—[Interruption.] Well, I’ll save the rest of it for you.

I was not going to speak about academies, but as I sat here over several hours I received two more emails relating, in particular, to concerns about their governance. I heard the challenge from those on the Conservative Benches about the comments by the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr (Steve Witherden) on teachers, but I cannot tell the House how many times I hear complaints about the way staff and whistleblowers are being treated in multi-academy trusts. While I have sat here today, I have heard of another who has been suspended by a multi-academy trust. This is not about them getting better treatment; it is about them getting worse treatment. If teachers are treated badly and leave the sector, that has an impact on our children. It is about the children, not just the teachers.

In summary, I support the principles of the Bill, but I urge the Government to consider the amendments on excessive and potentially harmful requirements imposed on home-educated children. They are common sense amendments that would allow children to be protected without placing undue burdens on families.

[Kim Johnson (Liverpool Riverside) (Lab)]

I rise in support of the Bill and in support of the amendments that seek to increase access to free school meals, a policy that would make a world of difference to the one in two children living in poverty in my constituency, the most deprived in the country. I also want to pay tribute to the amazing teachers in all the schools in Liverpool Riverside who go above and beyond every single day, not only for the children but for their parents.

Research last summer showed that nearly one in five households with children were suffering from food insecurity. That is made worse by cruel and punitive policies, such as the two-child cap on benefits. Universal free school meals would go a huge way towards immediately alleviating the pressures that these families are facing. In the sixth richest country in the world, no child should go to school hungry and all children should be supported to achieve their full potential.

Some 47% of children in my constituency now live in poverty. If those children lived in London, Scotland or Wales, they would have access to universal free schools meals at primary school. However, because they live in Liverpool, many are forced to learn on an empty stomach. That is indefensible and unfair. The Government should take the opportunity presented by the Bill to put an end to that postcode lottery and extend free school meals for all so that no child goes hungry and no child is left behind.

The evidence is clear: the impact of universal free school meals is life changing. Research has found that they ease the financial burden on families, help children to focus in class, reduce stigma and foster stronger school communities. They far outstrip other policies in all those areas, including breakfast clubs and means-tested free school meal schemes.

Teachers in my constituency have told me about the devastating reality that they see every single day, with children coming to school unable to buy lunch and unable to concentrate or learn properly. No matter how bright a child is or how amazing a teacher is, hungry children cannot learn.

The problem is not just who qualifies for free school meals, but how many eligible children are missing out. Up to 250,000 children who should be receiving free school meals are not, due to a system that is inefficient, overly complex and burdensome for parents and schools alike. Families struggle with complicated registration forms, language barriers and a lack of awareness, with some parents avoiding applying due to stigma or embarrassment. The income threshold of £7,500 is incredibly low and has not risen for many years, and too many families living below the breadline are ineligible to access the support they need.

This desperately needs to change. Providing free school meals would not only guarantee at least one hot meal per day, but ease the financial burden on struggling families by saving them approximately £500 per child per year. Studies show that fewer than 2% of packed lunches meet school food standards, whereas a hot school meal ensures that children receive the nutrition they need to grow, concentrate and succeed. Research has shown that well-fed children perform better academically. Early findings suggest that children from non-white communities or single-parent households are disproportionately unregistered for free school meals, despite being entitled to them.

We should also see this policy as an investment in our future. Universal free school meals are proven to tackle health and educational inequalities, providing a long-term boost for our economic productivity and alleviating pressures on our healthcare systems. If we choose today to spend the money and roll out universal free school meals to all children at primary school, for every £1 we spend, we will generate £1.71 in core benefit returns—it is a no-brainer. We must put an end to the economically illiterate models of arbitrary fiscal rules and recognise what the evidence shows: investing in our children’s future is a sensible financial choice, as well as a just one.

After 14 years of Tory austerity, skyrocketing inequality and the lasting effects of the pandemic, now is the time for bold action. If this Government are truly committed to raising the healthiest generation of children ever, we must start by funding universal and nutritious free school meals for all. We have an opportunity to end the scandal of child hunger in our schools and give every child the foundation they need to learn and thrive. I call on the Government to get behind these new clauses and amendments today so that no child in this country is left hungry, and no child is left behind.

[Jodie Gosling (Nuneaton) (Lab)]

I rise today in support of amendments 27 and 43 and new clause 1, as proposed by the Chair of the Education Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). I agree with her, because the truth of my experience in education over the past 20 years is far different from the experiences and views that we hear from those on the Opposition Benches. At this point, I must refer to my entry on the Register of Members’ Financial Interests, and to my partner’s interests.

In a previous life, I raised a motion at North Warwickshire borough council to convene a multi-agency meeting to tackle knife crime in our schools. In one school, 17 sharps had been found in a school bag in a search that I am told saw school “bouncers”—large men in black suits and ties—stripping through students’ bags and removing sanitary products from girls’ bags in public corridors. I appreciate that we need strong measures on knives in schools, but what really baffled me, and the reason why we moved a motion at the council, was that there was no police involvement, no oversight and no accountability from school authorities. At that time, the school also had one of the highest rates for exclusion and persistent absenteeism in the country. It is not hard to understand the link.

A friend of mine—I will call her Rosie—went to the school and was thriving. She attended regularly and was getting on well. She was then threatened by a classmate with one of these sharps. The culprit was excluded for three days and then put back in the same class as Rosie. Unsurprisingly, she was quite uncomfortable with the school’s decision. There was no accountability and no changes were made by the school. How on earth can a child be expected to focus on their learning when they are scared for their own safety?

18:00

We teach children from two years of age to listen to their instincts, and that if things feel wrong or unsafe, they probably are. When Rosie became too anxious to attend school, things escalated. Following an attempt to take her own life, a supportive plan was put in place by the school, but the mother was threatened with fines and penalties if Rosie did not engage with the school’s plan. Rosie’s mum was forced into making an impossible choice between potentially putting her daughter in harm or paying a fine that she could ill afford. One day, we managed to get Rosie into school. We had reassured, coaxed, supported, bribed and perhaps even coerced her to go to school that day. An hour later, she was sent home in a taxi for a minor uniform violation. She did not go back to that setting.

As a teacher with 20 years at the chalkface, I welcome many of the moves to improve attendance at our schools, but there are better ways than fines and penalties. In a case where a 14-year-old girl would rather die than attend her school, there are clearly other issues that need to be addressed. The positive impacts of good attendance in our schools have drastic lifelong implications, but our schools must be made safe. They need to be the solution, not part of the problem. They should provide support for children facing challenges. I welcome the phrase, “When it is in their best interest”, but I hope that, in deciding what that is, the voices of the families will be heard. There are a number of families whose children are not in education and remain at home—like Rosie. A considerable number are home-educated and they tell me that that is because the schools cannot meet their needs.

I wish to speak to new clause 1 on auto-enrolment for school meals. This is not just about food, although healthy food is incredibly important, especially in areas such as Camphill in Nuneaton where 40% of children live in poverty. Access to free school meals is a gateway to other support such as uniform grants and holiday hunger programmes, but crucially, it gives additional funding to schools to provide pupil premium activities for children from low-income families. A disadvantaged child in Nuneaton is twice as likely not to achieve national averages in English and maths by the age of 11. Pupil premium funding is designed to be used not only to provide specific interventions, but to give children access to cultural capital that they cannot afford at home.

I have schools in my constituency that have not been rated by Ofsted as “good” or better in more than a decade. I do not judge schools by Ofsted judgments alone, but a 50% or lower pass rate in English and maths at GCSE is a damning indictment. That means that another 50% do not achieve the basic requirements that they need to enter into further education. That is a generation of children delivered to the world of work under-skilled and underprepared.

This Bill is the start of our journey to protect and uplift education for the children in my constituency. The Bill will strengthen the role of families and educators in child protection teams, improve information sharing between partners, provide cheaper, more accessible school uniforms and require academies to make provisions for improving behavioural standards, so that situations such as the one I have explained will never happen again. It should provide safer learning spaces with the ability to step in early when situations are failing to meet our high expectations. The Bill has the potential to transform the educational offer in Nuneaton and truly to give our children their futures back.

[Mrs Emma Lewell-Buck (South Shields) (Lab)]

I rise to speak to new clause 6 tabled by children’s food champion, my hon. Friend the Member for Washington and Gateshead South (Mrs Hodgson), and to amendments 212 to 220 in my name. I also put on record my support for new clause 1 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), new clause 7 tabled by the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) and new clause 49 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool West Derby (Ian Byrne). It will come as no surprise that I am also a fan of new clause 34 because, thanks to the last Government, over 4 million children are in poverty, and I will always support anything that makes their little lives and that of their families more bearable.

New clause 6 would introduce a much-needed national monitoring system for school food. Of course, school food standards already exist, but not all schools are meeting them. There is far too much variance. There are some brilliant examples of heart-healthy, nutritious meals that fuel children for the rest of the school day. Then, there are examples where unhealthy fizzy drinks and fried food are the norm. Some 60% of secondary schools have been found not to follow the school standards at all. A study from Impact on Urban Health shows significant differences between what is mandated by the school standards and what is on menus and what ends up on plates. There is far too much free rein. There is no mechanism for school food standards to be checked against what pupils are being served. The new clause would end the postcode lottery of school food so that standards no longer just exist on paper but are on our children’s plates.

The amendments in my name all relate to strengthening school breakfast club provision. After years of pushing my School Breakfast Bill, no one was happier than me when the Labour Government legislated for school breakfasts. It is great to see that three of the pilots are in schools in my constituency. Some 2.7 million children live in food-insecure households. The previous Government’s national school breakfast programme is missing 86% of those children. Most of them will have arrived at school ready to learn, but with a gnawing hunger in their stomachs. Their day is marked with that persistent worry that comes with hunger—a worry that will permeate their entire school day.

Hunger has a significant impact on children’s learning, because hungry children do not learn, no matter how bright and determined they are and no matter how amazing or dedicated their teachers are. Numerous studies have shown the links between nutrition and cognitive development. Hungry children suffer developmental impairments, language delays and delayed motor skills, not to mention the psychological and emotional impact, which can range from withdrawn and depressive behaviours to irritable and aggressive ones.

I have always believed in the transformational power of education. It is certainly not standard for children from my background to end up in this place, so the power of a good education can never be overestimated. The food that fuels that ability to learn and develop should never be underestimated. These clubs will ensure that socioeconomic status is less of a deciding factor in good educational outcomes. My amendments would help realise the full potential of our breakfast clubs.

There is no provision in the Bill to monitor or measure the success of school breakfast provision. It is difficult to scrutinise the efficacy of any policy if there is never any analysis of it. The pupil premium, free school meals eligibility and the income deprivation affecting children index are good indicators of the very children who will need these clubs the most. Any policy should be measured by its impact on these groups, so that we know that those who are most in need are benefiting.

More worryingly, without proper data to prove the success of the policy, a future Government may decide to scrap it altogether. That is why amendment 212 is so important. Not all staff are nutritional experts, and some will have never delivered school breakfast provision before, so it is right that they have the right advice on hand and why a more mixed model and flexible approach is needed from the Government. Amendments 213 and 216 to 218 would achieve that.

The flexibility shown in the models adopted by Magic Breakfast has resulted in a take-up that is 375% higher than in non-Magic Breakfast schools. Yet the Bill requires only one model be delivered: the traditional breakfast club, held in a canteen for 30 minutes before the start of the school day. Many schools already use different models of breakfast clubs, including ones that suit particular schools, such as classroom breakfasts, grab-and-go takeaway models, nurture groups and late provision. A rigid model of delivery will have less success and schools that cannot fit that model will feel that they have to be exempt from delivery. Amendments 214 and 215 would ensure that if a school were to seek exemption from the Government’s school clubs, other models had been considered.

I know that the Minister knows that SEND schools often cater for primary and secondary pupils on the same site. That means that in those schools some children will be excluded from school breakfast clubs. I know from discussions with dedicated teachers and school staff in my constituency that they will not allow their pupils to be disadvantaged in that way, so it is likely they will use their already tight budgets to make sure older pupils also get that nutritious, healthy start to their school day.

Amendment 219 would apply only to approximately 100,000 pupils in England. That would be a modest 2.22% increase in the policy if all those children took up the offer—and we know that that is unlikely, because the children with complex needs do not always require the same food provision accessed by other pupils. For those who do require it, however, it is right that they should have the same nutritious start to their day as other children with whom they share a school site.

I am, of course, pleased that at long last there is legislation for school breakfasts. However, it is essential that we get that right. My amendments will do just that, and I know that the Minister will have carefully considered them. I look forward to her comments at the close of the debate.

[Neil O’Brien]

With the leave of the House, we have had an excellent debate this afternoon, as we did in Committee. I will pick out only a few of the contributions. We had important words from the Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), who pointed out how quickly the Bill had been prepared and pushed through. That is why we have so many amendments on Report and, to be honest, one reason that the Bill has run into such trouble.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) gave a great speech, drawing on his experience as the Chair of the Select Committee, and the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) gave an excellent speech, laying out why the provisions on home schooling are an excessive burden and go too far. We all agree that it is about making sure that children are not just “not in school”; however, the provisions really are overly burdensome. The hon. Members for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) and for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) and lots of Conservative colleagues pointed out the same thing.

I have to say that my jaw hit the floor when I first read the Bill and saw the provisions that treat the parents of children in special schools the same as people who are being investigated by social services. Those people are not criminals, they are not doing the wrong thing and sometimes they need to move to look after their vulnerable children. I hope the Government will think again in the other place.

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

I agree with the shadow Minister on the point about special schools. Additionally, in Committee in January, he raised the point about local authority consent for some children to be withdrawn from school, and how that should be extended from children who are subject to a child protection plan to children who are regarded as a child in need. Why are the Opposition not pushing that to a vote today?

[Neil O’Brien]

We have a limited number of things that we can press to a vote, but I hope, as we go to the debate in the other place, that we are in complete agreement on the excessive nature of some of the requirements being made of home schoolers, who we must not treat as illegitimate just because they choose to educate their children in a certain way. My hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) used his huge experience to take us on a rather bleak journey from the reforming agenda of the early Blair years to the regress that we are seeing now. My hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) explained why this was such a mistake and took us through the Bill in bleak detail.

I do not always agree with the hon. Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana), but I do agree with her on Andrew Tate, whom I regard as totally abhorrent. I am glad that my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), the shadow Justice Secretary, is leading the charge to get the Tates deported to this country so that they can face justice here. I find their work utterly, utterly abhorrent.

My brilliant hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) contrasted the reforming rhetoric that we at least see in other Departments with the rather retro agenda in the Department for Education. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), who did so much work in Committee, gave us another brilliant and witty speech. He talked about how Labour reformers had always been swimming against the tide, and I think that is right. He also talked about the free school breakfast numbers that the Government have used and the claim that they are going to save parents £450. This is a mysterious figure, because if we want to give £450 to every primary school child, that will cost north of £2 billion, but the Government are spending £33 million, so they are two orders of magnitude apart. Why will the Government not publish the workings behind this figure? I think the truth is that the source is the back of a spad’s fag packet, to be completely honest.

The hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) gave a good speech, and the thing I absolutely agree with him about is the importance of teaching. It is one of the best and most noble things anyone can do with their life. All of us as MPs do school visits, and we might do an hour of highly energetic chat with people in year 6. We then realise the energy required to be a teacher and to keep that up all day, so I absolutely pay tribute to those who are doing this noble work.

One of the most interesting speeches this afternoon was the one from the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr (Steve Witherden). Various Labour Members said that things under the last Government were not nirvana, and that is right. Various people said that there were more things to fix, and that is right too. We absolutely agree with that. But the hon. Member said that things were so much better in Wales because they had avoided the Blair-era reforming agenda, they had avoided academies, they had got rid of league tables for a time, they were still using other methods such as cueing rather than phonics, and so on and so forth. But let us just have a look at the numbers to see what that has done.

The PISA tables show that, under the last Government, England went from 11th to ninth on science, 19th to ninth on reading and 21st to seventh on maths. That is a huge increase. In Wales, the best bit was on maths, where they went from 29th to 27th. They were flat at 28th on reading and collapsed from 21st to 29th on science. A pretty dismal record, really. I would encourage those who say that things are brilliant in Wales to read the searing report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which is known for its mild-mannered work and cautious judgments. The report states:

“PISA scores declined by more in Wales than in most other countries in 2022, with scores declining by about 20 points (equivalent to about 20% of a standard deviation, which is a big decline). This brought scores in Wales to their lowest ever level, significantly below the average across OECD countries and significantly below those seen across the rest of the UK…Lower scores in Wales cannot be explained by higher levels of poverty. In PISA, disadvantaged children in England score about 30 points higher, on average, than disadvantaged children in Wales. This is a large gap…Even more remarkably, the performance of disadvantaged children in England is either above or similar to the average for all children in Wales.”

Disadvantaged children in England are doing better than all children in Wales, and the IFS also points out that the disadvantage gap is bigger in Wales. It concludes that the explanation for lower educational performance is not ethnicity or deprivation, and that it

“is much more likely to reflect longstanding differences in policy and approach, such as lower levels of external accountability and less use of data.”

That is the damning indictment of the IFS.

As Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things”. We have seen what this agenda does in Wales. It is a disaster, and those who are the most deprived are the ones who lose out the most. That is why this afternoon we are going to be pushing our amendments to protect academy freedoms, to protect the ability of good schools to grow and to protect parental choice. This Bill shifts power from parents to politicians, and we will always resist that. We will be moving to a vote now to stop this destructive agenda, which has failed in Wales and will fail in England too.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the Minister.

[Catherine McKinnell]

I thank all hon. Members for their contributions, some of which have been well considered and delivered powerfully—others less so. This Government’s mission is to break down barriers to opportunity by driving high and rising standards. That has to be the right of every child, delivered through excellent teaching and leadership, a high-quality curriculum, and a system that removes the barriers to learning that hold too many children back, all underpinned by strong and clear accountability. This Bill delivers the legislative elements of the broader vision that we are determined to deliver. As part of that, from next term free breakfast clubs will start being rolled out in early adopter schools across the country, including special schools and alternative provision settings. Members who tabled amendments 2, 219 and 220 are right that it is critical that the new breakfast clubs are accessible for children with special educational needs and disabilities. All pupils, including those with SEND and those in special schools, are already in the existing drafting of the clause. The need to get this right is why we are testing, and learning through, the early adopter programme.

On amendments 214, 215, 217 and 218, it is important to be clear on the distinction between food-only options being “alongside” or “instead of” the breakfast clubs. The club is as important as the breakfast. It gives children a settled start to the day and will secure improvements in attendance and behaviour, so the right approach is to legislate to give schools certainty of the minimum they need to provide and to work with early adopters to see how schools can maximise attendance at these clubs. To promote food-only offers may risk undermining the club element.

Let us be clear: we inherited a shameful legacy from the previous Government. Compared with when Labour last left office, 700,000 more children are growing up with their lives and life chances scarred by poverty. Children cannot achieve or thrive if the stressors and strains of growing up in poverty—of seeing their parents worried about putting food on the table, of being concerned about their younger siblings or whether their friends will judge them for not having the basics—are put on their shoulders. I know my hon. Friends share the Government’s concern for those children and their futures. We have set up the child poverty taskforce chaired by my right hon. Friends the Education Secretary and the Work and Pensions Secretary to look at how we can work across Government to tackle the causes and impacts of poverty on children’s lives.

The support the Government provide through their school food programmes to enable families to access healthy, nutritious food is being considered as part of that work. It is right that these considerable reforms, such as extending universal infant free school meals to all primary pupils, are considered through this route in a holistic way. Alongside the work of the taskforce, we are making progress to make it easier for families to access their entitlements, and I recognise the concern that right hon. and hon. Members have for children missing out.

The Government are pressing ahead with making it quicker and easier for families and local authorities to get children signed up for free school meals with our new eligibility checking system, which allows parents to check their eligibility and supports the local efforts we have seen to ensure that children receive that support. Further, I can confirm that our officials are working with the Government Digital Service in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology to explore options on further data sharing to get more families signed up for their entitlements. We expect to have those provisions in place from next year, well ahead of the academic year beginning in September 2026.

Our officials are working with the Department for Work and Pensions to explore options on supporting enrolment through universal credit. My Department will monitor the impact of those policies and engage with local authorities to assess the impact of the changes on the uptake of free school meals. I would be happy to update the House on that work and write to the Chair of the Education Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), by way of doing so.

[Helen Hayes]

The Minister has set out the Government’s commitment to increasing the take-up of free school meals for children who are already eligible, as well as a number of practical measures the Government are taking to make registration easier. On the basis of what she has said today, I am content not to push my new clause 1 to a vote. However, the Select Committee will continue to closely monitor the take-up of free schools meals. Should the progress that the Minister expects to see be lacking, we will come back and press the issue of auto-enrolment again with her and expect that she looks at it again.

[Catherine McKinnell]

I thank my hon. Friend for her diligence both in her role as Chair of the Select Committee and on this issue in particular. We want children to receive the entitlements that will transform their life chances. Indeed, we will work closely with her Committee to ensure that we communicate well with the House on those important issues.

Our determination to deliver better life chances for our children does not stop there. As well as free breakfast clubs, we are delivering the holiday activities and food programme, enabling disadvantaged children and children identified by their local authorities to access healthy food and enriching activities in the school holidays. We will go further by supporting every child to achieve and thrive, including those with special educational needs and disabilities, and by putting money back in their parents’ pockets.

Another part of that picture is the sad increase in childhood obesity, which, unfortunately, the Conservative party did very little to address. We must ensure that, alongside clubs and activities, the food that children have at school is healthy and balanced, and embeds healthy eating habits. We must ensure compliance with school food standards. With reference to new clause 6, we are working with the Food Standards Agency to take forward the findings of the 2022-23 compliance pilot on how best to tackle the barriers identified. On new clause 54, I can confirm that the Government will continue to publish comprehensive data on free school meals, and on the holiday activities and food programme, to ensure that our approach is informed by the best available evidence.

Tackling child poverty is imperative for the Government and for our society. It goes beyond the provision of food to putting money back in families’ pockets, giving them choice and agency in ensuring that their children are set up for the future. Our action to cut the cost of school uniform is just another part of that picture. We are taking steps to cut the cost for families and put money back in their pockets. I know that hon. Members share the desire to reduce the cost of sending children to school, but a monetary cap, as proposed in amendment 1, would increase burdens and could create new financial penalties for schools.

For schools, that would mean having to review uniform policies annually to ensure that branded items are still within the cost cap, and, as a result, it could mean that they change their uniforms more frequently to remain within the cap. They would also have to review and possibly renegotiate contracts with suppliers more frequently. For parents, more frequent changes in uniform could increase the overall number of branded items that they have to buy while their child is at school. It could affect their ability to pass uniforms down as second-hand, and could increase their reliance on specific suppliers.

Our proposals provide clarity and certainty for schools and will enable parents to have greater choice in where they buy uniforms. Amendment 191 risks undermining that parental choice. Nothing prevents schools from providing branded items at a lower cost than generic alternatives and offering them as optional items. Under current VAT rules, all children’s clothing and footwear designed for children under 14, including school uniforms, already attracts a zero rate of VAT, which covers the intention of new clause 12.

On the point raised by the hon. Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), we encourage schools to use sew-on badges, with a school name or logo, as a cost-effective way to brand uniform items. We want to give parents absolute clarity on what the limit means for them. That is why we have included those items, plus a tie, in the three-item limit for secondary education.

Let me turn to amendments 4, 13 and 14, and 16. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) for her intention to provide clarity on the interpretations of “suitable education” and “suitable arrangements”. It is important that there be consistency across local authorities in how they approach that. However, the amendments are not needed. Section 7 of the Education Act 1996 is already clear that education must be suitable to a child’s age, ability, aptitude and any special educational needs they have. I want to reassure Members that we will make clear in statutory guidance for local authorities everything that they have to consider under section 7 when they are making decisions about the suitability of education.

18:30

I turn to amendments 8 and 12. Local authorities will be able to require parents of eligible children to provide information for registers. This will give them sight of this cohort of children, including those who are home educated, so that they can ensure that they receive a suitable education and are safe. Removing this sanction from local authorities would make the provision less effective. Members will understand that it is considered poor practice for this Government or our predecessors to impose a legal duty on individuals without ensuring any sanction or consequence for failing to comply.

Amendment 203 concerns the application of independent school standards to academies. Academies are independent schools in law and are regulated by the independent school standards, unless expressly exempted. If we took the standards away, we could not hold academies properly to account in critical areas such as safeguarding. Opposition Members should be familiar with this dual regime, as they operated it for 14 years. Successive Governments have operated the regulatory regime on that basis, and this Government will do the same.

It is more than 20 years since the last Labour Government began converting into academies schools that were failing children and showing no signs of turning around. Our party is the proud parent of academies, and of turning around the life chances of children in communities up and down our country. That Labour Government were driven by a simple principle that drives this Labour Government, too: our children—all of them, in every school—deserve the very best education we can provide, and anything that stands in the way of that must be tackled. Parents deserve to know that, wherever they live, their child will be able to attend a good local school, where there is a qualified teacher in front of the class, attracted and retained through strong terms and conditions, teaching a cutting-edge curriculum. Every child deserves a school that gives them the best education our country can offer.

Academies were, are and will continue to be at the heart of that endeavour. In the nearly nine months since the election, more than 420 schools have been turned into academies. We are working with them to drive outcomes for our children. We want to harness and spread throughout our school system the best academies’ innovations in teaching and practice, underpinned by a core of standards that no one can slip below.

We are committed to ensuring that new teachers are set up for a successful teaching career through high-quality teacher training and induction. Amendment 222 is unnecessary because existing exemptions allow schools the flexibility to recruit an unqualified subject expert and then support them in gaining QTS through an employment-based route, or ensure that they are under qualified supervision.

Amendments 209, 223 and 225—[Interruption.] Did the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott) honestly just say, “It costs a load of money to train teachers?” That is what I understood her to say. As set out in Committee, we propose repealing the duty to issue academy orders, in order to broaden the Secretary of State’s flexibility to take the best course of action for any school in a category of concern. We have set out our plans for exercising this flexibility, and the Government will update the House on the progress of the consultation.

Academisation should remain the default position for schools in special measures, and we propose continuing to academise schools as we build the capacity of the new RISE—regional improvement for standards and excellence—service. We are not content to leave schools struggling, as the previous Government did. From September 2026, schools requiring significant improvement will be supported by RISE teams, which will work with responsible bodies to drive forward school improvement. Academisation will remain as a backstop if improvement is not secured.

I turn to amendment 210. Together with changes to regulations, clause 51 provides a route for independent consideration where agreement on the published admission number, or PAN, of a school cannot be reached locally. That will ensure that decisions on a school’s PAN meet the needs of the local community, so that parents have the opportunity to send their child to a school where they can achieve and thrive.

There has been a long-standing expectation that schools and local authorities will work together on place planning. However, where authorities have unilaterally set a PAN that does not work in the interests of children in the area, does not meet local needs, and damages the quality of education that children receive, the Bill will change that. [Interruption.] I can reassure the hon. Member for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston (Neil O'Brien) that it will not prevent good schools from being able to grow, where that is right for local children. Indeed, we expect that it will encourage good schools to offer more places, where there is demand, and where they have the capacity to do so. Our proposals give local authorities powers to set schools’ PANs, and schools will only be able to object to the independent and impartial adjudicator when the adjudicator concludes that a PAN is unlawful, having regard to admissions law. School performance and parental choice will continue to be a key consideration throughout the regulations, and we need to ensure that all published admission numbers are right for schools and local children.

Finally, on the monitoring and evaluation of the Bill, we have already set out our intention to conduct and publish a post-implementation review/impact assessment, and we will consider other post-implementation reviews as necessary, as we do for all measures that regulate business activities.

This Bill represents just the first legislative steps towards what this Government want to achieve in driving up outcomes for all children—and we mean every child. The security of a safe and loving home, the security that comes from families knowing that sending their children to school will not cost the earth, and the security of a good local school with qualified teachers supporting every child to achieve and thrive—after 14 long years, that is not too much to ask, and it is what this Bill will deliver.

Question put and agreed to.

New clause 17 accordingly read a Second time, and added to the Bill.

New Clause 7

Registration of children for free school meals

“After section 512ZA of the Education Act 1996 (power to charge for meals etc.), insert—

“512ZAA Registration of children for free school meals

The Secretary of State must ensure that free school meals are provided to—

(a) all children in England who are eligible to receive free school meals; and

(b) all children whose household income is less than £20,000 per year.””—(Munira Wilson.)

Brought up, and read the First time.

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.

18:37

Division 127

Ayes: 77

Noes: 313

New Clause 34

Provision of free school lunches to all primary school children

“(1) Section 512ZB of the Education Act 1996 (provision of free school lunches and milk) is amended as follows.

(2) In paragraph (4A)(b), after ‘year 2,’ insert ‘year 3, year 4, year 5, year 6’.

(3) In subsection (4C), after ‘age of 7;’ insert—

‘”Year 3” means a year group in which the majority of children will, in the school year, attain the age of 8;

“Year 4” means a year group in which the majority of children will, in the school year, attain the age of 9;

“Year 5” means a year group in which the majority of children will, in the school year, attain the age of 10;

“Year 6” means a year group in which the majority of children will, in the school year, attain the age of 11;’”.—(Adrian Ramsay.)

This new clause would extend free school lunches to all primary school age children in state funded schools.

Brought up and read the First time.

Question put, That the clause be read a Second time.

18:50

Division 128

Ayes: 77

Noes: 315

Clause 23

Food and drink provided at Academies

Amendments made: 132, page 44, line 6, at end insert—

“(1) In section 512B of the Education Act 1996 (provision of school lunches: Academies), after subsection (3) insert—

“(4) Subsections (1) and (3) apply to an agreement under section 482 in relation to a city technology college or a city college for the technology of the arts as they apply to Academy arrangements in relation to an Academy school or an alternative provision Academy.””

This amendment ensures that section 512B of the Education Act 1996 (which imposes requirements relating to the provision of school lunches at Academy schools and alternative provision Academies) also applies to city technology colleges and city colleges for the technology of the arts.

Amendment 133, page 44, line 28, at end insert—

“(4) Subsections (1) and (3) apply to an agreement under section 482 in relation to a city technology college or a city college for the technology of the arts as they apply to Academy arrangements in relation to an Academy school or an alternative provision Academy.” .—(Catherine McKinnell.)

This amendment ensures that the provision made by inserted section 512C of the Education Act 1996 (which applies the school food standards to Academy schools and alternative provision Academies) also applies to city technology colleges and city colleges for the technology of the arts.

Clause 24

School uniforms

Amendments made: 134, page 45, line 24, leave out—

“or a non-maintained special school”

and insert—

“, a non-maintained special school, a city technology college or a city college for the technology of the arts,”

This amendment is consequential on amendment 135.

Amendment 135, page 45, line 33, at end insert—

“, or (f) a city technology college or a city college for the technology of the arts,”. —(Catherine McKinnell.)

This amendment ensures that the definition of “relevant school” in section 551ZA (inserted into the Education Act 1996 by clause 24) includes a city technology college and a city college for the technology of the arts.

Clause 25

Local authority consent for withdrawal of certain children from school

Amendments made: 20, page 46, line 21, leave out “in England”.

This amendment and the amendments in the name of Secretary Bridget Phillipson to clauses 25 to 29 and Schedule 1 ensure that the provisions in the Bill that relate to children not in school, that previously applied only in England, will also apply in Wales.

Amendment 21, page 46, line 24, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 22, page 46, line 25, leave out “337(1)” and insert “337”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 23, page 46, leave out lines 26 to 28 and insert—

“(b) an independent school within the meaning of section 463 which—

(i) in the case of a school in England, is specially organised to make special educational provision for pupils with special educational needs;

(ii) in the case of a school in Wales, is wholly or mainly concerned with providing full-time education to persons for whom an individual development plan is maintained.”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 24 page 46, line 29, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 25, page 47, line 44, leave out “the Secretary of State, and”

and insert “—

(i) the Secretary of State, in relation to a local authority in England, and

(ii) the Welsh Ministers, in relation to a local authority in Wales, and”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 26, page 48, line 1, after “State” insert

“or the Welsh Ministers (as the case may be)”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 27, page 48, line 7, leave out “the Secretary of State, and”

and insert—

“(i) the Secretary of State, in relation to a local authority in England, and

(ii) the Welsh Ministers, in relation to a local authority in Wales, and”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 28, page 48, line 8, after “State” insert—

“or the Welsh Ministers (as the case may be)”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 29, page 48, line 10, after “considers” insert—

“, or the Welsh Ministers consider,”.—(Catherine McKinnell.)

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Clause 26

Registration

Amendments made: 30, page 48, line 35, leave out “: England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 31, page 48, line 37, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 136, page 49, line 6, after “pupil” insert “or a student registered”.

This amendment is a minor drafting change to ensure that the correct label is used in relation to institutions where the children are referred to as students rather than pupils.

Amendment 137, page 49, line 15, after “pupil” insert “or a student registered”.

This amendment is a minor drafting change to ensure that the correct label is used in relation to institutions where the children are referred to as students rather than pupils.

Amendment 138, page 49, leave out lines 28 to 30.

This amendment and amendment 139 ensure that unregistered independent educational institutions do not fall within the definition of “relevant school” for the purposes of determining whether there is a duty to register a child under section 436B of the Education Act 1996, as inserted by clause 26.

Amendment 32, page 49, line 31, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 139, page 49, line 35, after “2008” insert—

“, that is registered under section 95 of that Act (register of independent educational institutions)”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 138.

Amendment 33, page 49, line 35, at end insert—

“(f) a school that is included in the register of independent schools in Wales (kept under section 158 of the Education Act 2002), or”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 140, page 49, line 35, at end insert—

“(g) a school within the meaning of section 135(1) of the Education (Scotland) Act 1980.”

This ensures that section 436B, inserted into the Education Act 1996 by clause 26, does not require a local authority to register a child who attends a school in Scotland.

Amendment 34, page 50, line 24, at beginning insert—

“in the case of a child who is in the area of a local authority in England,”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 35, page 50, line 26, at end insert—

“(ba) in the case of a child who is in the area of a local authority in Wales, whether the child has any additional learning needs, including whether an individual development plan is maintained for the child;”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 36, page 50, line 39, at end insert—

“(da) whether the child has ever been assessed as having needs for care and support for the purposes of Part 4 of the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014 (anaw 4) (see section 32(1) of that Act) and, if so, any actions that a local authority is taking or has taken in relation to the child under that Part (or Part 4 or 5 of the Children Act 1989) and any services that a local authority is providing or has provided to the child in the exercise of functions conferred on the authority by or under that Part (or Part 4 or 5 of the Children Act 1989);”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 37, page 50, line 41, after “authority” insert “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 38, page 50, line 42, after “1989)” insert—

“or in Wales (within the meaning of section 74 of the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014)”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 39, page 51, line 16, after “considers” insert—

“, or the Welsh Ministers consider (as the case may be),”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 40, page 52, line 3, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 41, page 52, line 8, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 42, page 52, line 35, after “19” insert—

“(in England) or section 19A (in Wales)”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 43, page 52, line 38, at beginning insert—

“where the local authority is a local authority in England,”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 44, page 52, line 40, at end insert—

“(ca) where the local authority is a local authority in Wales, arrangements made by the local authority under section 53 of the Additional Learning Needs and Education Tribunal (Wales) Act 2018 (anaw 2) (additional learning provision otherwise than in schools);”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 45, page 53, line 2, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 46, in clause 26, page 54, line 5, leave out “in England”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 47, page 54, line 17, leave out “in England”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 48, page 54, line 17, after “directs” insert—

“in relation to a local authority in England, or the Welsh Ministers so direct in relation to a local authority in Wales,”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 49, page 54, line 18, after “State” insert—

“or the Welsh Ministers (as the case may be)”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 50, page 54, line 21, after “State” insert “or the Welsh Ministers”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 51, page 54, line 22, after “considers” insert—

“or the Welsh Ministers consider (as the case may be)”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 52, page 54, line 27, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 53, page 54, line 35, after “11(1)” insert “or 28(1)”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 54, page 54, line 41, at end insert—

“(c) His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Education and Training in Wales;

(d) the Welsh Ministers.”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 55, page 55, line 1, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 56, page 55, line 3, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 57, page 55, line 10, leave out “Wales,”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 58, page 55, line 12, after first “England” insert “or Wales”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 59, page 55, line 12, leave out second “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 60, page 55, line 24, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 61, page 55, line 38, after “19” insert “or 19A”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 62, page 55, line 41, at end insert “, or

(d) the local authority is required to secure additional learning provision or other provision for the child under section 14(10) or 19(7) of the Additional Learning Needs and Education Tribunal (Wales) Act 2018.”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 63, page 56, line 3, after “regulations” insert

“to be made by the Secretary of State”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 64, page 56, line 16, at end insert—

“(3A) In section 569(2B), (2BA) and (2BB) for “the National Assembly for Wales” (in each place that it occurs) substitute “Senedd Cymru”.

(3B) After section 569(2BB) insert—

“(2BC) A statutory instrument which contains any of the following regulations to be made by the Welsh Ministers is subject to annulment in pursuance of a resolution of Senedd Cymru—

(a) regulations under any of the following provisions, other than the first set of such regulations—

(i) section 436B(6),

(ii) section 436C(4),

(iii) section 436E(9),

(iv) section 436F(1),

(v) paragraph 5 of Schedule 31A, or

(b) regulations under section 436I(5).

(2BD) A statutory instrument which contains (whether alone or with other provision) any of the following regulations to be made by the Welsh Ministers may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before, and approved by resolution of, Senedd Cymru—

(a) the first regulations under section 436B(6),

(b) regulations under section 436C(2),

(c) the first regulations under section 436C(4),

(d) regulations under section 436E(1)(a),

(e) regulations under section 436E(7),

(f) the first regulations under section 436E(9),

(g) the first regulations under section 436F(1),

(h) regulations under section 436F(2), or

(i) the first regulations under paragraph 5 of Schedule 31A.””

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 65, page 56, line 21, leave out “in England”.—(Catherine McKinnell.)

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Clause 27

School attendance orders

Amendments made: 66, page 58, line 15, leave out “: England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 67, page 58, line 17, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 68, page 58, line 22, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 69, page 59, line 34, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 141, page 60, line 5, at end insert—

“(1A) But a local authority must not serve an order under this section on a child’s parent if—

(a) either—

(i) condition B was the only condition cited in the preliminary notice served under section 436H in relation to the child, or

(ii) condition B and another condition were cited in that preliminary notice, but the child’s parent has satisfied the local authority that the child is receiving suitable education,

(b) the local authority is no longer conducting enquiries or taking action in respect of the child as mentioned in section 436H(5)(a), and

(c) the local authority is not aware of any other enquiries being made under section 47 of the Children Act 1989 or of any other action being taken under section 47(8) of that Act in respect of the child.”

This amendment ensures that a school attendance order is not to be given where enquiries or action under section 47 of the Children Act 1989 are no longer ongoing (and in a case where there were also other grounds for the preliminary notice, the local authority is satisfied that the child is receiving suitable education).

Amendment 70, page 61, line 7, at end insert “(England)”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 71, page 61, line 8, after “authority” insert “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 72, page 61, line 25, at end insert—

“(6) Where a school attendance order is in force in respect of a child who subsequently becomes a child for whom the local authority maintain an EHC plan which specifies the name of a school, the local authority must ensure that school is named in the order.”

This amendment ensures that the provisions on school attendance orders for a child with an EHC plan will also cater for children who already have a school attendance order and then get an EHC plan at a later date.

Amendment 73, page 61, line 25, at end insert—

“436JA School attendance order for child with individual development plan (Wales)

(1) Where a local authority in Wales is required to serve a school attendance order under section 436I in respect of a child for whom an individual development plan is maintained in which a particular school is named, that school must be named in the order.

(2) Where—

(a) a school attendance order is in force in respect of a child for whom an individual development plan is maintained in which a particular school is named, and

(b) the name of the school specified in the plan is changed,

the local authority must amend the order accordingly.

(3) Where a school attendance order is in force in respect of a child who subsequently becomes a child for whom an individual development plan is maintained in which a particular school is named, the local authority must ensure that school is named in the order.”

See the explanatory statements to amendments 20 and 72.

Amendment 74, page 61, line 29, after “plan,” insert—

“or a child for whom an individual development plan is maintained in which a particular school is named,”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 75, page 64, line 24, after “State” insert—

“in relation to a school in England, or to the Welsh Ministers in relation to a school in Wales,”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 76, page 64, line 40, after “section” insert—

“in relation to a school in England or the Welsh Ministers give a direction under this section in relation to a school in Wales”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 77, page 65, line 4, at end insert—

“(8) If a local authority in England serves a notice under subsection (2) specifying a school in Wales and an application for a direction is made to the Welsh Ministers under subsection (4) in relation to that notice, the direction under this section may only—

(a) confirm that a school specified in the notice under subsection (2) should be specified in the school nomination notice, or

(b) refer the question of which school or schools should be specified in the school nomination notice back to the local authority to determine.

(9) If a local authority in Wales serves a notice under subsection (2) specifying a school in England, and an application for a direction is made to the Secretary of State under subsection (4) in relation to that notice, the direction under this section may only—

(a) confirm that a school specified in the notice under subsection (2) should be specified in the school nomination notice, or

(b) refer the question of which school or schools should be specified in the school nomination notice back to the local authority to determine.”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 78, page 65, line 8, after “plan” insert—

“or a child for whom an individual development plan is maintained in which a particular school is named”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 142, page 66, line 8, leave out “on request”.

This amendment is consequential on amendment 143.

Amendment 143, page 66, line 10, at end insert—

“(1A) The local authority must revoke the order if—

(a) the order was served following a preliminary notice under section 436H in which the only condition cited was condition B,

(b) the local authority is no longer conducting enquiries or taking action in respect of the child as mentioned in section

436H(5)(a)

, and

(c) the local authority is not aware of any other enquiries being made under section 47 of the Children Act 1989 or of any other action being taken under section 47(8) of that Act in respect of the child.”

This amendment ensures that a local authority must revoke a school attendance order served following a preliminary notice based on enquiries being made or action being taken under section 47 of the Children Act 1989 which are no longer ongoing.

Amendment 144, page 66, line 15, leave out from “served” to the end of line 17 and insert—

“(i) as a result of the person failing to satisfy the local authority that the child is receiving suitable education, or

(ii) as a result of the person failing to satisfy the local authority both that the child is receiving suitable education and that it is in the best interests of the child to receive education otherwise than by regular attendance at school, where subsection (1A)(b) and (c) applies;

(1A)(b)”.

This amendment ensures that a request for a school attendance order to be revoked can be made where arrangements have been made for the child to receive suitable education in a case where enquiries or action under section 47 of the Children Act 1989 are no longer ongoing and the preliminary notice cited condition B and another condition.

Amendment 79, page 66, line 27, leave out “the local authority” and insert—

“a local authority in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 80, page 66, line 31, at end insert—

“(4A) If a person is aggrieved by a refusal of a local authority in Wales to comply with a request under subsection (2)—

(a) the person may refer the question to the Welsh Ministers, and

(b) the Welsh Ministers must give such direction determining the question as the Welsh Ministers consider appropriate.”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 81, page 66, line 40, at end insert—

“(6) Where the child is one for whom the local authority maintains an individual development plan—

(a) if the name of a school or other institution is specified in the plan, subsection (2) does not apply;

(b) if the name of a school or other institution is not specified in the plan, a direction under subsection (4A)(b) may require the authority to make such amendments in the plan as the Welsh Ministers consider necessary or expedient in consequence of the determination.”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 145, page 67, line 5, leave out

“the person proves that arrangements have been made”.

This amendment is consequential on amendment 148.

Amendment 146, page 67, line 7, at beginning insert—

“the person proves that arrangements have been made”.

This amendment is consequential on amendment 148.

Amendment 147, page 67, line 11, at beginning insert—

“the person proves that arrangements have been made”.

This amendment is consequential on amendment 148.

Amendment 148, page 67, line 15, at end insert—

“(c) section 436H(5)(a) is no longer met in respect of the child, where the order was served following a preliminary notice under section 436H which cited only condition B, or 436H(5)(a)

(d) both—

(i) the person proves that arrangements have been made for the child to receive suitable education otherwise than at a school, and

(ii) section 436H(5)(a) is no longer met in respect of the child, where the order was served following a preliminary notice under section 436H which cited condition B and another condition”.

This amendment ensures that a criminal offence is not committed where a person fails to comply with a school attendance order served, or served in part, because of enquiries or action under section 47 of the Children Act 1989 which are no longer ongoing, and the person proves that the child is receiving suitable education.

Amendment 82, page 67, line 21, after “436J” insert “, 436JA”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 149, page 68, line 4, at end insert—

“436R References to “Academy school” and “Academy arrangements”

(1) In sections 436I and 436K to 436N, a reference to an Academy school includes a reference to a city technology college and a city college for the technology of the arts.

(2) The reference in section 436L to Academy arrangements includes a reference to an agreement under section 482.”

This amendment ensures that a reference to an Academy school in the provisions on school attendance orders (inserted into the Education Act 1996 by clause 27) includes a reference to a city technology college or a city college for the technology of the arts.

Amendment 83, page 68, line 4, at end insert—

“436S References to “regulations” and “prescribed”

(1) In sections 436B(6), 436C(4) and 436E(7) “regulations” means—

(a) regulations made by the Secretary of State in relation to England, and

(b) regulations made by the Welsh Ministers in relation to Wales.

(2) In sections 436C, 436E, section 436F, 436I and paragraph 5 of Schedule 31A “prescribed” means—

(a) prescribed by regulations made by the Secretary of State in relation to England, and

(b) prescribed by regulations made by the Welsh Ministers in relation to Wales.”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 84, page 68, line 7, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 85, page 68, line 9, leave out from “units),” to “—” in line 10 and insert “for paragraph 14 substitute”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 86, page 68, line 11, leave out “13A” and insert “14”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 87, page 68, line 12, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 88, page 68, line 22, leave out “in England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 89, page 68, line 36, leave out “in England”.—(Catherine McKinnell.)

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Clause 28

Data protection

Amendments made: 150, page 69, line 2, leave out “436P” and insert “436S”.

This amendment is consequential on amendments, 73, 149 and 83 which insert new provisions into clause 27.

Amendment 90, page 69, line 3, leave out “attendance orders in England: data protection” and insert—

“school attendance orders: processing of information”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20. This amendment is also consequential on amendment 151.

Amendment 151, page 69, leave out lines 4 to 14 and insert—

“436T Processing of information

(1) This section applies to section 434A, sections 436B to 436P and Schedule 31A, and provisions of regulations made under any of those provisions.

(2) Except as provided by subsection (3), a disclosure of information authorised or required under any provision to which this section applies does not breach—

(a) any obligation of confidence owed by the person making the disclosure, or

(b) any other restriction on the disclosure of information (however imposed).

(3) None of the provisions to which this section applies are to be read as requiring or authorising the processing of information which would contravene the data protection legislation (but in determining whether the processing would do so, take into account the duty imposed or the power conferred by the provision in question).

(4) In this section, “the data protection legislation” and “processing” have the same meaning as in the Data Protection Act 2018 (see section 3 of that Act).”

This amendment ensures that powers to disclose information under the provisions mentioned override any obligations of confidence or restrictions on disclosure other than those imposed by the data protection legislation.

Amendment 152, page 69, line 16, leave out “436Q” and insert “436T”.

This amendment is consequential on amendments 73, 149 and 83 which insert new provisions into clause 27.

Amendment 153, page 69, line 19, leave out “436R” and insert “436U”.—(Catherine McKinnell.)

This amendment is consequential on amendments 73, 149 and 83 which insert new provisions into clause 27.

Clause 29

Guidance on children not in school and school attendance order

Amendments made: 91, page 69, line 18, leave out “: England”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 92, page 69, line 21, leave out “any guidance given by the Secretary of State” and insert—

“(a) in the case of a local authority in England, any guidance given by the Secretary of State;

(b) in the case of a local authority in Wales, any guidance given by the Welsh Ministers.”—(Catherine McKinnell.)

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Clause 31

Expanding the scope of regulation

Amendments made: 154, page 69, line 29, leave out from beginning to end of line 20 on page 70 and insert—

“(1) The following are independent educational institutions for the purposes of this Chapter—

(a) independent schools in England;

(b) institutions in England, other than independent schools and excepted institutions, that provide full-time education for—

(i) at least five children of compulsory school age, or

(ii) at least one child of compulsory school age who is looked after by a local authority or has special educational needs.

(2) The following subsections apply for the purposes of subsection (1)(b) (and see section 138(1A) for provision about the meaning of an institution providing education).

(3) Regulations may—

(a) specify that an amount of time is or is not to be treated as “full-time” by reference to a number of hours in, or a proportion of, a week or other period, or in any other way;

(b) provide that time spent on a specified activity or on an activity of a specified description is or is not to be treated as time during which education is being provided;

(c) amend subsection (4) so as to add, remove or amend factors;

(d) amend this section so as to add, remove or amend provision about the interpretation of the factors in subsection (4).

(4) If, or to the extent that, the question of whether an institution provides full-time education for a child is not determined by regulations under subsection (3)(a) or (b), the factors relevant to determining that question include—

(a) the number of hours per week that—

(i) education is provided to children by the institution;

(ii) activities incidental to that education (such as breaks and independent study time) are provided;

(b) the number of weeks in an academic year that education is provided;

(c) the time of day that education is provided.”

This amendment highlights that all independent schools in England still fall within the definition of “independent educational institution”, revises the power to make regulations to reflect how it is intended to be used and revises the factors to be taken into account to determine whether an institution is providing full-time education.

Amendment 155, page 71, leave out lines 31 and 32 and insert—

“(fa) regulations under section 92,”—(Catherine McKinnell.)

This amendment is consequential on amendment 154.

Clause 32

Independent educational institution standards

Amendment made: 156, page 83, line 10, at end insert—

“(6A) After section 127 insert—

“127A Determination by Tribunal of whether persons are fit and proper

(1) This section applies where the question of whether an institution meets, has met or is likely to meet an independent educational institution standard prescribed under section 94(1A)(a)(i) or (b) (fit and proper persons) is relevant to an application or appeal to the Tribunal under this Chapter.

(2) The Tribunal may determine that question for the purposes of the application or appeal, including by finding that a relevant person is, was or would be a fit and proper person to be involved in the running of an independent educational institution even if the Secretary of State is not of that opinion.

(3) “Relevant person” means—

(a) where the proprietor or proposed proprietor of the institution mentioned in subsection (1) is a body of persons, a person having, or proposed to have, general control and management of, or legal responsibility and accountability for, the proprietor or proposed proprietor;

(b) where the proprietor or proposed proprietor of the institution mentioned in subsection (1) is an individual, the individual.””.—(Catherine McKinnell.)

Clause 32(2)(a) amends the Education and Skills Act 2008 to allow for independent educational institution standards to be set that relate to whether, in the Secretary of State’s opinion, persons are fit and proper to be involved in the running of institutions. This amendment allows the First-tier Tribunal to make that finding itself where relevant to an application or appeal.

Clause 34

Material changes

Amendments made: 157, page 85, line 32, after “(3)(g)” insert “or section 101(2)(i)”.

This amendment provides for regulations to be made about what constitutes a type of special educational need for the purposes of new provision inserted by clause 34.

Amendment 158, page 86, line 26, leave out

“(as prescribed under section 98(3A))”.

This amendment removes words to reflect that regulations may not necessarily be made under section 98(3A).

Amendment 159, page 88, line 29, at end insert—

“(11) In section 166 (orders and regulations), in subsection (6)(a), after “circumstances” insert “, purposes”.”—(Catherine McKinnell.)

This amendment allows for regulations to be made for different purposes.

Clause 37

Powers of entry and investigation etc

Amendments made: 160, page 92, line 1, leave out from “this section” to end of line 3 and insert—

“(a) authorises the Chief Inspector to exercise the powers of investigation conferred by section 127D(1)(a), and

(b) may authorise the Chief Inspector to exercise the powers of investigation conferred by section 127D(1)(b) to (k) or particular powers.”

This amendment and amendment 163 provide for powers of investigation that are always exercisable by the Chief Inspector following an entry without warrant also to be exercisable following an entry under warrant.

Amendment 161, page 92, line 17, leave out

“the Chief Inspector’s entry to the premises or”.

Clause 37 allows for the Chief Inspector’s entry to premises and investigation on premises to be assisted by any person accompanying, or thing brought with, the Chief Inspector. This amendment limits this to assistance with investigations on premises.

Amendment 162, page 92, line 21, leave out

“the Chief Inspector’s entry or”.

This amendment is consequential on amendment 161.

Amendment 163, page 93, line 22, leave out “subsection (1)” and insert “subsection (1)(b) to (k)”.

See the explanatory statement for amendment 160.

Amendment 164, page 93, line 25, leave out “subsection (1)(i)” and insert

“subsection (1)(e), (h) or (i)”.

This amendment provides for copies of any document or other information taken by the Chief Inspector, in addition to things seized, to be retained for so long as is necessary in the circumstances.

Amendment 165, page 95, line 32, leave out subsection (5) and insert—

“(5) The Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001 is amended as follows.

(6) In section 57(1) (retention of seized items), after paragraph (v) insert—

“(w) section 127D(3) of the Education and Skills Act 2008.”

(7) In section 65 (meaning of “legal privilege”)—

(a) after subsection (8C) insert—

(8D) An item which is, or is comprised in, property which has been seized in exercise or purported exercise of the power of seizure conferred by section 127D(1)(e), (h) or (i) of the Education and Skills Act 2008 is to be taken for the purposes of this Part to be an item subject to legal privilege if, and only if, the seizure of that item was in contravention of section 127D(7) of that Act.;

(b) in subsection (9)—

(i) at the end of paragraph (e) omit “or”;

(ii) at the end of paragraph (g) insert “, or”;

(iii) after paragraph (g) insert—

‘(h) section 127D(1)(e), (h) or (i) of the Education and Skills Act 2008.’

(8) In Part 1 of Schedule 1 (powers of seizure to which section 50 of the Act applies), after paragraph 73W insert—

“Education and Skills Act 2008”

73X Each of the powers of seizure conferred by section 127D(1)(e), (h) and (i) of the Education and Skills Act 2008.”—(Catherine McKinnell.)

This amendment makes further provision consequential on the powers of seizure inserted into the Education and Skills Act 2008 by clause 37.

Clause 39

Inspectors and inspectorates: reports and information sharing

Amendments made: 166, page 96, line 34, at end insert—

“(1A) Except as provided by subsection (2), a disclosure of information under this section made for the purpose of safeguarding or promoting the welfare of children provided with accommodation by a school or college does not breach—

(a) any obligation of confidence owed by the Chief Inspector for England, or

(b) any other restriction on the disclosure of information (however imposed).”

This amendment provides that, subject to the data protection legislation, disclosures by the Chief Inspector for England to inspectors of schools and colleges do not breach any confidence or restriction if made to protect the welfare of children accommodated by a school or college.

Amendment 167, page 97, line 15, at end insert—

“(1A) Except as provided by subsection (2), a disclosure of information under this section made for the purpose of safeguarding or promoting the welfare of students at a registered independent educational institution does not breach—

(a) any obligation of confidence owed by the Chief Inspector, or

(b) any other restriction on the disclosure of information (however imposed).”—(Catherine McKinnell.)

This amendment provides that, subject to the data protection legislation, disclosures by the Chief Inspector to inspectors of independent educational institutions do not breach any confidence or restriction if made to protect the welfare of students at such an institution.

Clause 44

Academies: power to secure performance of proprietor’s duties etc

Amendment made: 168, page 103, line 35, at end insert—

“(7) In this section, a reference to an Academy includes a reference to a city technology college and a city college for the technology of the arts.”—(Catherine McKinnell.)

This amendment expands the meaning of “Academy” in clause 44 to include the remaining institutions established under pre-Academy arrangements that have not become Academies.

Clause 45

Repeal of duty to make Academy order in relation to school causing concern

Amendment proposed: 209, page 103, line 36, leave out clause 45.—(Laura Trott.)

Question put, That the amendment be made.

19:14

Division 129

Ayes: 107

Noes: 324

Clause 51

Functions of Adjudicator in relation to admission numbers

Amendment proposed: 210, page 107, line 32, leave out clause 51.—(Laura Trott.)

Question put: That the amendment be made.

19:16

Division 130

Ayes: 167

Noes: 324

Clause 59

Extent

Amendments made: 169, page 113, line 5, at end insert—

“(1A) Subject to subsection (1), sections (Corporate parenting responsibilities), (Cases in which duty under section (Corporate parenting responsibilities)(1) does not apply), (Corporate parenting duty: collaborative working), (Duty to have regard to guidance) and (Reports by Secretary of State) and Schedule (Relevant authorities) extend to England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.”

This amendment provides that NC18, NC19, NC20, NC21 and NC22 and NS1 extend to the whole of the United Kingdom.

Amendment 170, page 113, line 6, leave out “subsection (1)” and insert “subsections (1) and (1A)”.—(Catherine McKinnell.)

This amendment is consequential on amendment 169

Clause 60

Commencement

Amendments made: 93, page 113, line 25, at end insert—

“(2A) Subject to subsection (1), sections 25 to 30 and Schedule 1 come into force, in relation to Wales, on such day as the Welsh Ministers may by regulations made by statutory instrument appoint.”

This amendment and the amendments in the name of Secretary Bridget Phillipson to clause 60 ensure that the Welsh Ministers have the powers to commence the provisions relating to children not in school, in relation to Wales. See also the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 94, page 113, line 26, leave out “and (2)” and insert “to (2A)”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 93.

Amendment 95, page 113, line 29, after “appointed” insert “under subsection (2A) or (3)”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 93.

Amendment 96, page 113, line 32, at end insert—

“, except sections 25 to 30 and Schedule 1 in relation to Wales.”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 93.

Amendment 97, page 113, line 32, at end insert—

“(5A) The Welsh Ministers may by regulations made by statutory instrument make transitional or saving provision in connection with the coming into force of sections 25 to 30 (including Schedule 1) in relation to Wales.”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 93.

Amendment 98, page 113, line 33, after “(5)” insert “or (5A)”.—(Catherine McKinnell.)

This amendment is consequential on amendment 97.

Schedule 1

Children not in school: consequential amendments

Amendments made: 99, page 114, line 6, leave out “after “section” insert “436I or”” and insert “for “437” substitute “436I””.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 100, page 114, line 8, leave out “after “section” insert “436I or”” and insert “for “437” substitute “436I””.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 101, page 114, line 10, leave out “after “section” insert “436I or”” and insert “for “437” substitute “436I””.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 102, page 114, line 13, at end insert—

“(1A) Omit sections 437 to 443 (school attendance orders) and the italic headings before sections 437 and 443.”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 103, page 114, line 14, leave out sub-paragraphs (2) to (9).

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 104, page 115, line 25, leave out “, after “under section” insert “436P,”” and insert “and (2)(a), for “443” substitute “436P””.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 105, page 115, line 26, leave out sub-paragraph (13).

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 106, page 115, line 36, leave out from “substitute” to the end of line 37 and insert “section 436I.”

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 107, page 116, line 1, leave out sub-paragraph (16).

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 108, page 116, line 13, leave out “after “section” insert “436K(4), 436N(2),”” and insert “for “438(4) or 440(2)” substitute “436K(4) or 436N(2)””.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 109, page 116, line 17, leave out “or 443”.

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Amendment 110, page 116, line 18, leave out “, 443”.—(Catherine McKinnell.)

See the explanatory statement to amendment 20.

Third Reading

19:28

[The Secretary of State for Education (Bridget Phillipson)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

This is legislation that belongs to children. The clue is in the name—the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. It is for them. It is because this Government are for them. We are on a mission to break down the barriers to opportunity for each and every child, to sever the link between background and success, and this Bill sits at the centre of that mission.

Let me start by thanking Members from across the House for their contributions, especially members of the Bill Committee for their scrutiny. I say a particular thank you to the ministerial team—my hon. Friend the Minister for School Standards and the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan)—for guiding the Bill through its Commons stages.

This debate is valuable. Education is back at the forefront of national life and children are back at the centre of our national conversation. Every child in this country deserves a safe childhood and an excellent education.

The action in the Bill cements in legislation the biggest reform of children’s social care in a generation, keeping children with their families wherever it is safe to do so, supporting them to stay together and strengthening kinship care so that vulnerable children can live with the people they know and trust if they cannot continue to live with their parents. It fixes the broken care market so that when children cannot stay with their family, and kinship or foster care sadly is not an option, children have somewhere to live that is safe, secure and supportive.

After 14 years of inaction and our most vulnerable children being pushed to the sidelines, their voices not heard, the Bill puts their life chances front and centre. We have started that reform already, piloting new financial support for kinship carers and investing over £500 million into family help and child protection in the next financial year alone.

This a Bill that protects children based on data, evidence and expertise, laying the groundwork for a single unique identifier for children, enabling sharing of the right information at the right time, creating multi-agency child protection teams and requiring permission before children subject to child protection inquiries or plans can be home educated. It spots early warning signs and stops vulnerable children falling through the cracks. It starts with safety and it builds from there. The Bill legislates for free breakfast clubs in primary schools, so that our children are ready to learn at the start of the school day. It puts money back in parents’ pockets, with breakfast clubs saving them up to £450 a year. Our new limit on expensive branded uniforms will save some parents over £50 per child in the back-to-school shop. This is a Government who support families, parents and children alike.

It is the right of every child to have every opportunity to succeed, and it is the right of every parent to send their child to a great local school. That is what the Bill will do. It will provide the certainty of an excellent local school for every child. Our best schools and trusts are partners and leaders. They have shown the value of collaboration, and how excellence and innovation can flow from one classroom to another. It is time to bring that to the whole country: excellence in every classroom, science lab, art studio and music room in every type of school. The curriculum and assessment review published its interim report just this afternoon. From that review will come the rich and broad curriculum that our children need and deserve, delivered by expert teachers, raising a floor of high standards below which schools must not slip, and above which they can build and innovate with no ceiling on what they can achieve.

When it comes to our children’s safety and life chances, I am always impatient. I ask Opposition Members to put aside their rhetoric and gimmickry, just for one moment, and consider what their constituents actually want—not their friends in high places, in the commentariat and in the Westminster bubble, but parents up and down this country. Parents want qualified teachers at the front of their children’s classrooms. Parents want to know for sure what their child is being taught. Parents want more teachers in our schools, better trained and supported. Parents want free breakfast clubs in their child’s primary school. Parents want cheaper uniforms that do not set them back at the start of every term. Parents want stronger safeguards for children after the horrific incidents that we have sadly seen in recent years.

If Opposition Members oppose the Bill, that is what they are opposing. They may talk in the vaguest of terms about the supposed horror that the Bill will unleash. We have seen it all before. Just months ago, they told us that Labour’s plans to end tax breaks on private schools would send a flood of children into state schools, who would overrun them—scaremongering. I have lost count of all the doom-laden stories. Do they come to pass? Absolutely not. Once again, the Conservatives are on the wrong side of parents, resisting change and protecting privilege. It speaks to a wider point. The Conservatives are just lost. They are so out of ideas, clinging on to the misguided hope that the public will just forget the past 14 years as if they never happened and that it was not all for nothing. But it was.

Labour is cleaning up the mess that the Conservative party left behind, to ensure that every child has a safe, loving home, to put money back into parents’ pockets, to drive high and rising standards in all our schools and to deliver the brighter future that every child in our country deserves. I commend the Bill to the House.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

I call the shadow Secretary of State.

19:34

[Laura Trott (Sevenoaks) (Con)]

I had hoped that, during the Commons stages of the Bill, the Government would listen to the vast number of respected voices from the education sector who have warned repeatedly that this ill thought through Bill is nothing short of a disaster for education standards in this country. Unfortunately, the Secretary of State failed to listen to the Children’s Commissioner, who warned that children will spend longer in failing schools because of this Bill; or Katharine Birbalsingh, who argued that if passed—[Interruption.] That is how they treat one of the best headteachers in this country. She warned that if passed,

“the impact on our children, especially our most vulnerable, will be seismic.”

The Secretary of State will not listen to the former chief inspector of Ofsted, who described the Bill as a

“many-pronged assault on school standards”,

or to Lord Harris, who supported the party at the last election and said that the Bill will only harm “the most disadvantaged families.” Even some of her own Back Benchers have asked the Secretary of State to think again. Why does she think she knows better?

Instead of engaging constructively with that criticism, the approach from the Secretary of State has been to resort to personal attacks. In response to Amanda Spielman’s suggestion that there should be an analysis of the impacts of autonomy in schools before a legislation abolishing it is forced through the House of Commons, a Government source went on the record to denigrate a former senior public servant in the most personal of terms. Did the Secretary of State sign off that briefing?

In her own opinion piece in the Telegraph today, the Secretary of State told me and the shadow team to get out of London. She appears not to have noticed the work of Star Academies, Delta Academies Trust, United Learning, Trinity and Inspiration Trust, among many others. Those are brilliant trusts that are changing the lives of young people and she so casually dismisses them.

I have a suggestion for the Secretary of State in return: she should visit Wales. Wales, where the Labour Party have been in charge for 26 years; Wales, the blueprint for her reforms; and Wales, which currently finds itself at the bottom of the rankings for the whole of the UK in maths, English and science. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster said today that his party would never do anything to harm social mobility, yet the Bill will be devastating for social mobility.

Labour Members need to understand the consequences of the Bill. The evidence, should they care to read it, is overwhelming. The Institute for Fiscal Studies has said very clearly that the differences in policy and approach have led to the terrible outcomes in Wales for disadvantaged young people. Indeed, disadvantaged young people in England do as well as the average child in Wales. Yet these are the policies that the Government want to implement in England. How on earth can they justify imposing the same policies and approach that have been such a disaster in Wales?

The Bill undermines, at a single stroke, all the work that has been done by successive Governments of all parties, headteachers and trusts over so many years. Academy trust heads have been abused during this debate and attacked by unions in this process because they dared to want better for young people under their care. Former Labour and Conservative Education Secretaries, who have driven through reforms in the face of fierce opposition, are being undermined by the Bill.

I cannot believe that the Government will undo all of that for no reason. There is no evidence whatsoever that their proposals will improve a single school. In fact, the evidence is clear that they will make things worse. The Secretary of State is putting ideology and the interests of union bosses over what is best for children and parents. This is a Bill of two halves. The first is on safeguarding, and we absolutely agree with the principle of that, but the second is the policy equivalent of a wrecking ball. It will destroy the consensus built up over two decades on what improves schools. It is discredited, it is disastrous for school standards, and we will never stop fighting it.

Question put, That the Bill be now read the Third time.

19:40

Division 131

Ayes: 382

Noes: 104

Bill read the Third time and passed.