House of Lords

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

Thursday 1 May 2025

11:00

Prayers—read by the Lord Bishop of Derby.

Dementia and Alzheimer’s Treatments

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

Question

11:07

Asked by

[Lord Evans of Rainow]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what steps they are taking to advance the development of dementia and Alzheimer’s treatments.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Health and Social Care (Baroness Merron) (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government are committed to advancing the development of dementia treatments having invested £496.4 million over the past five years through the National Institute for Health and Care Research and UK Research and Innovation. Additionally, the Dame Barbara Windsor Dementia Goals programme, with up to £150 million of associated funding, aims to speed up the development of new treatments for dementia by accelerating innovation in biomarkers, clinical trials and implementation.

[Lord Evans of Rainow (Con)]

I thank the Minister for that helpful response. Finding a cure for dementia is the challenge of our time. Some drugs now available delay the onset of dementia. They are available privately, but not on the NHS. The NHS says that the assumed costs of administering the drugs are too high. Can the Minister look into this matter to see whether she can clear any barriers to making the new drug lecanemab accessible to everybody on the NHS?

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

I understand the point the noble Lord is making; I was glad to have the chance of a discussion with him yesterday. I also thank him for his campaigning on such an important matter. I share his view about the need to ensure speed and efficacy. To that point, I say to him that since March this year, as part of the regulation action plan, NICE and the MHRA have been building on the systems we already have in place to make sure that there is rapid access. To prepare for a new generation of dementia treatments, NHS England is working closely with regulators to ensure that arrangements are in place to support the adoption of any new licensed and NICE-recommended treatments as soon as possible. As the noble Lord will understand, it is important that we have the right treatments that do the job and are available. On some of the more recent ones, I understand the disappointment, but the fact is that no disease-modifying treatments are currently available. However, science is developing, and I am sure we will discuss this further.

[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, more than 150 treatments are in the Alzheimer’s medicine pipeline. Can I encourage the Minister, along with her ministerial colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care, to take all steps to ensure that the UK remains globally competitive as a centre for dementia clinical trials?

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

My noble friend raises a very important point. In terms of trials, I will certainly be signing up—and I encourage noble Lords and their friends and families to do likewise—to Join Dementia Research, which is a collaboration between NIHR and a number of excellent charities, including the Alzheimer’s Society and Alzheimer’s Scotland, to take part in trials. There is no need to be a particular age or to have a diagnosis of dementia. I hope that noble Lords will join me in supporting this endeavour.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, the commission on palliative care that I am currently involved in has found that by integrating services for patients with dementia, such as in the York Frailty Hub, the number of admissions to hospital can be decreased. People can stay at home with families supported and they can carry on living well within limited capabilities while we wait for new treatments and, hopefully, prevention to come along. Will the Minister meet me and Professor Mike Richards to go through some of the details of our findings? They have huge implications in saving finances for the NHS and improving care of patients.

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

That is a very helpful offer which I will be pleased to accept. I compliment York on its initiatives, which set a very high standard. I will also discuss the points that the noble Baroness has raised with Minister Kinnock, who is the responsible Minister in this area.

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

The previous question shows how the rollout and co-ordination of good practice are really important. Therefore, in light of the 50% staffing cuts to NHS England, can the Minister clarify the plan for the national dementia team which sits within NHS England? Will its core funding and capacity be protected or cut?

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

We are abolishing NHSE. It is the biggest quango, and we are finding immense duplication. At this stage, I cannot comment on the exact matter to do with the team, but I can say that dementia work continues to be a very high priority, as I hope the noble Lord heard from my commitment to the noble Lord, Lord Evans. Indeed, we are keen to support not just those at risk of dementia but those who care for them. This is an expanding area of work. We have much good practice to draw on and we are extremely active, as the noble Lord has heard, in developing research to move further forwards more quickly.

[Lord Kamall (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Evans for raising this issue. We know that, often when a new drug is developed, even though some patients may benefit, it may initially be too expensive for NICE to recommend, based partly on a cost-benefit analysis. We know that eventually the price falls to a level which the NHS can afford and which can then be seen as good value for taxpayers. Given that this happens with many new drugs, have the Government considered convening a group of philanthropists, foundations, charities and other civil society organisations that might be willing to fund treatment for some, if not all, patients when new but expensive breakthrough drugs such as those my noble friend Lord Evans referred to are available but are considered too expensive initially?

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

We are very open to all sorts of creative ways of dealing with the matter, but it is important to say on the drugs that we are discussing that lecanemab and donanemab can only slow the progression of the disease by between four and six months. The challenge is not just whether it is available on the NHS but how helpful it is. We have a lot of progress to make, and that is why we are committed to ensuring that new treatments can quickly become available and that prevention is key.

[Lord Turnberg (Lab)]

My Lords, I have of course signed up for the dementia survey and I recommend it. One of the commonest forms of dementia is vascular dementia and we can do quite a lot to prevent it and treat it when it is caused by high blood pressure and diabetes. It requires quite a bit of surveying the population. How far have we got with that?

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

I am glad that I will be joining my noble friend in signing up as a volunteer. Certainly, the Lancet commission of last year said that some 45% of dementia cases are estimated to be preventable or delayable. That report is going to inform our actions as we look to the future. Perhaps it is helpful to clarify to your Lordships’ House—I am sure that many of us have experience of this—that the NHS health check for adults in England aged 45 to 74 is designed to do exactly as my noble friend says and identify early signs of various conditions which are contributory factors.

[Lord Markham (Con)]

A lot of the challenges in testing the efficacy of some medicines lie in measuring the progression of the disease. That is mainly done verbally and, as we all know, people have good days and other not-so-good days, so measuring the progression and impact of the treatment is hard. As the Minister will be aware, things such as retina scans are showing quite promising measurements in terms of the onset and progression. What are we doing in research in that area?

[Baroness Merron (Lab)]

I will be pleased to write to the noble Lord on that specific point, but it might be helpful if I say on the point raised earlier by the noble Lord, Lord Kamall, that investment in discovery science by the UK Dementia Research Institute, for example, included the recently announced Shingrix study in partnership with GSK and Health Data Research UK, and we are also working via the Dementia Translational Research Collaboration. I am sure that the noble Lord will be aware of the NIHR dementia trials network, which offers people with dementia the opportunity to take part in early clinical trials irrespective of where they live. The summary of all this is that we have some way to go, but we have made considerable progress in investment and plans for the future. I will take into account the noble Lord’s point.

Inheritance Tax: Impact on Rural Businesses

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

Question

11:18

Asked by

[Baroness Rock]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of changes to inheritance tax rules on rural businesses and economic growth.

[Baroness Rock (Con)]

My Lords, I beg leave to ask the Question standing in my name on the Order Paper and draw attention to my interests as set out in the register.

[The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Lord Livermore) (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government have taken difficult decisions on welfare spending and on tax necessary to repair the public finances and rebuild public services. This includes measures to better target agricultural property relief and business property relief. These measures mean that, despite the difficult fiscal context, we are maintaining significant levels of relief from inheritance tax beyond what is available to others, and that almost three-quarters of estates claiming agricultural property relief and business property relief will not pay more inheritance tax. The independent Office for Budget Responsibility does not expect the reforms to have a significant macroeconomic impact.

[Baroness Rock (Con)]

I thank the Minister for his Answer, but these changes are already stifling investment. A Farmers Guardian and Tenant Farmers Association joint survey reports that 55% of tenant farmers will invest less in their farms and 25% of tenant farmers expect their landlords to take back land for non-farming purposes and reduce their investment. Furthermore, over half say their mental health is suffering. They fear eviction. I have had many heartbreaking messages from farmers who fear they just cannot go on. Is the solution not to follow the recommendation in the Rock review to allow landlords letting land for eight years or more to be able to include the value of that land as part of the zero-rate threshold for inheritance tax?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her question. I fully recognise that she has a great deal of expertise in this area and I pay tribute to the work that she has done, particularly on behalf of tenant farmers. I do not accept the premise of her question. I fully respect the commitment that has gone into the survey that she spoke of but do not necessarily accept its conclusions. Our commitment to tenant farmers remains steadfast, which is why we are investing £5 billion in farming over two years, the largest budget for sustainable food production in our country’s history.

I take seriously what the noble Baroness says about mental health. Mental health is of course an issue that the Government take extremely seriously, which is why we are working to improve mental health services across the country, including through plans to recruit an additional 8,500 mental health workers. We fully understand the strength of feeling on this issue, and we urge people to make sure they use the correct data to prevent further inflaming the debate.

[Baroness Foster of Aghadrumsee (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the nature of farming across the UK varies greatly. For example, in Northern Ireland the size of family farms is smaller but the price of land is a lot higher per acre. Given that that is the case, and given that families in Northern Ireland are concerned about the incoming changes, will the Minister commit to looking at an impact assessment not of the macro situation in the UK but of the different regional variations?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Baroness for her question. As she may know, as is standard practice, we will publish a tax information impact note alongside the draft legislation before the relevant Finance Bill. My honourable friend the Exchequer Secretary has engaged extensively with stakeholders in this area, including with the Ulster Farmers’ Union. We have fully listened to the issues that the noble Baroness raises. However, it is worth saying that individuals will still benefit from 100% relief for the first £1 million of combined business and agricultural assets, and above that amount there will be 50% relief, meaning that inheritance tax will be paid at a reduced effective rate of up to 20%. That is considerably more generous than in any other part of the economy.

[Baroness Kramer (LD)]

My Lords, the problem is not just the damaging inheritance tax changes but delinked payment reductions, as we debated yesterday, sky-high energy bills, a botched trade deal and extreme weather. Defra anticipates that 7% or 8% of farms will not survive, and most people accept that that is on the optimistic end of the scale, and the sale will be to corporates that have no real link with, and put very little into, the local economy. In the analysis that the Minister says is coming, will there be a broader analysis of the state of the rural economy—not just macro-level analysis, and not even regional analysis, but something that genuinely focuses on the rural economy because it needs different solutions?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

It is worth saying that the Government are investing £5 billion across this year and next year to support the transition to a more sustainable and productive sector, including the biggest budget for sustainable food production and nature recovery in our history. I do not necessarily accept the characterisation that the noble Baroness seeks to put forward of what is going on and what this Government are doing. As I say, there will be a full impact assessment at the time when the legislation is published, and I am sure it will cover many of the things that the noble Baroness asks about.

[The Lord Bishop of St Albans]

My Lords, there is no doubt that there is some sort of mismatch between the assurances being given and the experiences of some of our smaller farmers, who are deeply concerned at what is going on. What consideration have His Majesty’s Government given to having some sort of clawback clause? If assets were disposed of within, say, seven years after a death, that would deal with the problem of the tax loophole whereby some people are using land simply to get out of paying tax.

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate for his question and I pay tribute to the work that he is doing with the communities that he is discussing. The Government believe that introducing a clawback mechanism such as he describes could still result in some of the wealthiest estates paying less inheritance tax than under the proposed reforms. That would raise considerably less money, and therefore would not go towards repairing the public finances and supporting the public services in the way that we seek.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I own a farmhouse in Devon, which, like Northern Ireland, has very small farms. My house is worth over £1 million as a farmhouse, and all the farmhouses around me, with small farms of 100 or 150 acres, are worth at least £1 million. Does the Minister appreciate that? You are at the £1 million situation even before you look at the cost of the land.

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble and learned Baroness for her question. As I say, individuals will benefit from 100% relief for the first £1 million of combined business and agricultural assets, but that £1 million sits on top of the existing reliefs and all other spousal exemptions and nil-rate bands. Full exemptions for transfers between spouses and civil partners will continue to apply; therefore a couple with agricultural or business assets can typically pass on up to £3 million-worth of assets without paying any inheritance tax at all. That is considerably more generous than in any other part of the tax system.

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

My Lords, did my noble friend notice that, when the farmers blocked Whitehall with their tractors—sparkling, new, expensive tractors—they did not look very poor? Has he noticed that, when the Tories talk about tax, they always want to make the rich even richer?

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Foulkes of Cumnock (Lab Co-op)]

They do. Will my noble friend confirm that, when poor people get tax deductions, they spend money on food and other essentials, and that helps growth?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

It is incredibly important that the decisions we take make the tax system fairer and more sustainable, and I believe that is absolutely what we are doing. Despite a very tough fiscal context, we are maintaining considerably more generous reliefs in this sector than exist anywhere else in the tax system.

[Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)]

The Government claim that family farms are safe from the changes to IHT. However, they have set the threshold too low, as subsequent examination has clearly demonstrated. It was also chilling to see the CBI’s economic analysis, which showed a net fiscal loss from the changes to business property relief of £1.26 billion over five years, with the tax revenue of £1.4 billion trumped by the loss of tax on production, spending, income and NICs. Has the dismay across the countryside at this mistaken policy been reflected in the responses to the very narrow HMRC consultation of 27 February? Will the Government think again before the changes take place next April?

[Lord Livermore (Lab)]

No. The analysis undertaken by CBI Economics is not robust nor representative. It is based on a self-selecting survey from members of groups campaigning against these reforms. The independent Office for Budget Responsibility certified the costing at the Budget in October. The reforms to agricultural property relief and business property relief are forecast to raise a combined £520 million in 2029-30. If the noble Baroness would like to tell me where she would get the £520 million that she would like to remove, I would be very interested to hear it.

Arm’s-length Bodies

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

Question

11:28

Asked by

[Lord Booth]

To ask His Majesty’s Government, following the announced abolition of NHS England, whether they propose to abolish any other arm’s-length bodies and if so which ones.

[Baroness in Waiting/Government Whip (Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent) (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government are reviewing all arm’s-length bodies, with a presumption that they will be closed or merged or have functions returned to government departments unless justified. The review supports the Government’s plan to create a more productive and agile state, exemplified by NHS England’s abolition. The review on ALBs is ongoing and will determine which bodies will undergo closure or merging or be reintegrated into their sponsoring department.

[Lord Booth (Con)]

I thank the Minister for her Answer. I am somewhat confused because the Government have already committed to establishing, or are in the process of establishing, 26 new arm’s-length bodies. I have been trying to ascertain from the Government by Written Answer the exact cost of those 26 bodies but have been unable to do so. Will the Government commit to giving me the cost of these 26 bodies and putting a record in the House Library? It is, after all, taxpayers’ money that is being spent.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

This Government, unlike the last one, are very aware that every penny we spend is taxpayers’ money. That is why we are reviewing every arm’s-length body and will be the first Government in history to ask the Civil Service to look at our manifesto to see which of our commitments for arm’s-length bodies should be delivered directly by government departments rather than by an individual entity. With regard to the costing, we are at a very early stage—only nine months into this Government—for the creation of some of these bodies. As each body is established, the figures will be released in the normal way.

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, in creating new arm’s-length bodies, are the Government looking to utilise the skill sets and experience of civil servants and others who are currently on arm’s-length bodies that are due to be disbanded?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My noble friend raises an excellent point. This Government are about making sure that we have the right people in the right place to deliver on our plan for change and our mission-driven Government. Delivery is key. Where people have the right skill sets, we will deploy them to make sure we are delivering for the people of the United Kingdom.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister recognise that arm’s-length bodies and executive agencies are as old as the British state? Regular reviews of those bodies are desirable, but repeated restructuring is like ministerial turnover; it damages efficient administration. Would it not be better to make sure that ministerial changes in all these were overseen by parliamentary committees rather more actively, so that if they are supposed to be semi-independent of Ministers they are able to choose to have the support of Parliament either for ministerial change or for continuity?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble Lord makes a very important point about the independence of these bodies. The Infected Blood Compensation Authority, for example, has been established outside government to ensure that people accessing the compensation have trust and faith in the service that they may not have in the Government. Independence is key and is one of our core criteria. The ongoing scrutiny is part of your Lordships’ day-to-day work, but there is also a responsibility on the sponsoring department to make sure that work is done effectively and delivers the objectives. I look forward to discussing this in more detail with the noble Lord.

[Baroness Deech (CB)]

My Lords, will the Government tell the House whether there is a deliberate policy of pausing the process for filling public appointments without any particular reason? I have seen in my own experience, having worked hard on a panel and considered CVs, that the process is halted without any good reason, leaving vacancies on important committees.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble Baroness raises an interesting point. It is not something that has been brought to my attention before, and I will speak to officials and come back to her. As far as I am aware, this Government want to make sure we have the right people in the right places to deliver what we need. If there has been a slight pause because of the change of Government, that may be one thing, but there is no official policy that I am aware of.

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friend asked which arm’s-length bodies might be abolished. I am not sure I have heard the Minister answer. Maybe I could suggest one or two off the top of my head. What about Natural England? What about the Arts Council? What about the independent football regulator before it beds down and starts doing damage to our great export trade? How about the big one, the Climate Change Committee?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble Lord will not be surprised that I may have anticipated that that question might come from him. Given that he has given me the opportunity to raise the football regulator, I just want to put on record my congratulations to Port Vale on their promotion at the weekend. Many of us support clubs that are not in the Premier League, and there is huge support for the football regulator from grass-roots organisations.

With regard to which arm’s-length bodies will come next, we are asking every government department to review. Given that the Prime Minister made his speech announcing this policy only on 13 March this year, I am delighted that we have already announced the end of NHS England and, this week, the Valuation Office Agency. We are moving faster than the previous Government did and will continue to make sure that we have best value for money.

[Baroness Andrews (Lab)]

My Lords, can the Minister give the House an assurance that the review will be done with greater care, greater discrimination and greater consultation than the disastrous review of 2010 by the coalition Government? Then, a random, comprehensive list of arm’s-length bodies was put in a schedule to a Bill. This then had to be rescued by this House in all the work we did to mitigate damage and save that Government from themselves. Can the Minister give me an assurance that the essential work of public bodies will be recognised and contained?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My noble friend makes an excellent point. I assure your Lordships’ House that there is no way we will engage in this process with that approach. We want to make sure that we can deliver an agile Government, fit for purpose in the 21st century, with the people in the right places and the appropriate accountability to government departments. We want to do this in a way that respects and values the people who deliver our public services day in, day out. I put on record my thanks to the civil servants and public services doing everything to deliver for our country.

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, the abolition of NHS England was a rare decisive move from this Government, but the Government’s actions on quangos do not match the rhetoric. The Government have admitted to being in the process of setting up 29 new bodies, as per the last Written Question, and these are the ones the Government are currently admitting to. Can the Minister explain how this is in line with the so-called bonfire of the quangos?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble Baroness knows how fond I am of her, but I am going to have to disagree hugely with the premise of her question. We are very clear on making sure that we can deliver. The noble Baroness’s previous Government announced a review. They evaluated 125 public bodies over a three-year period, with 104 reviews within their review, and saved £104 million. Given that the budget for arm’s-length bodies is £353 billion, it is an accounting error in terms of savings. That is not the approach of this Government. We are moving forward and delivering for the people of the United Kingdom.

[Baroness Hayman (CB)]

My Lords, following on from the question from the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, I can well understand the Government’s concern not to have duplication, not to waste money and not to have unnecessary bodies. But does the Minister agree that it will require careful and nuanced work during the transition to make sure that in doing away with duplication we do not open up chasms into which important areas of policy and delivery fall?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

The noble Baroness raises the most important of points. I assure her that the Cabinet Office is working closely with sponsoring departments to make sure that, while we recognise and want to eliminate duplication, we are not doing so by deleting both functions in one go. We will be very sensitive about how we approach this.

[Lord Brennan of Canton (Lab)]

My Lords, listening to the other side on this is sometimes reminiscent of the infamous episode of the soap opera “Dallas” in which Bobby Ewing, supposedly dead in a previous series, emerges from the shower because the previous series had all been a dream. When the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, was Prime Minister he created 184 new quangos, and between 2018 and 2023 the May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak Governments created 17 more. Is it not nonsense for the other side to criticise this Government, who are making a real effort to abolish these bodies?

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I thank my noble friend for his question and obviously agree with him. I just want to touch on one of the new bodies criticised by noble Lords opposite. Your Lordships have discussed Great British Railways on many occasions. It is going to replace Network Rail and a DfT operator. It will save £150 million a year in fees paid to the private sector. There is a purpose to what we are doing: to make sure that we have the right arm’s-length bodies where necessary but that we also have appropriate responsibilities and accountability to your Lordships’ House.

For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers: Interim Update

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

Question

11:38

Asked by

[Baroness Levitt]

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the Interim Update on the practical implications of the UK Supreme Court judgment in For Women Scotland v The Scottish Ministers, issued by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) on 25 April; and whether the EHRC consulted the Government before issuing that Interim Update.

[The Minister of State, Office for Equality and Opportunity (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, the Government did not receive advance sight or notice of this interim update from the EHRC. The Government had requested a meeting with the chair to discuss its approach to developing an updated statutory code of practice, which will reflect the implications of the ruling and support service providers. This meeting will take place soon. The EHRC will consult relevant parties on its revised code, and we expect it to do so widely and broadly, listening to diverse voices. We will then consider the EHRC’s updated draft code once it has submitted it.

[Baroness Levitt (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her Answer. I speak today primarily as a lawyer but also as the parent of a trans child, in the belief that these matters should and can be discussed in a non-partisan way, with respect and care for the rights of all involved. Does my noble friend agree that it would be wise of the EHRC to consult the Attorney-General about its intended revised legal guidance, given that the update issued last Friday evening contained legal inaccuracies that have caused consternation to real people living real lives?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The approach that my noble friend set out is precisely the one I outlined last week in responding to the statement. The Government have set out our expectation that service providers follow the clarity that the ruling provides. The EHRC’s interim update provides a perspective on how the judgment and Equality Act are practically applied in some areas; it is a snapshot reflection, rather than full guidance. The EHRC has announced that it will update its code of practice and has committed to seeking views from affected stakeholders; I am sure that it will consult widely on this. I add that the application of the Supreme Court ruling to different services and settings is complex. It requires careful work to ensure that we provide clarity for a wide range of varied service providers of different kinds and sizes so that they have confidence in how they apply the Equality Act on a day-to-day basis.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as chair of the EHRC. I hope I might be able to illuminate to the House what happened. I appreciate the Minister’s response. Does she agree with section 2.2 of the framework document that we have with the Government that the ECHR does not

“perform its functions on behalf of Government, and it is to operate independently of the Government”?

Moreover, she has to ensure

“that the Commission is under as few constraints as reasonably possible in determining its activities, timetables, and priorities”.

Having listened to her response, I know that she will agree with me that our priority is to explain the law to the public, which we have done in the interim statement, and to undertake a consultation on the practical implications of the judgment. We will seek views from as many affected stakeholders as we possibly can. This is profoundly important for the trans community. It is right that we published a brief statement of the law, and we will consult extensively as we go forward.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is right that the EHRC is the Government’s independent regulator of the Equality Act in this case. I welcome her commitment to both producing the statutory code of practice and the consultation to which she alluded.

[Lord Herbert of South Downs (Con)]

My Lords, the advance of equality for lesbian and gay people over the course of the last half century has largely become settled because it was achieved without diminishing the rights of others. But, in seeking protections for transgender people, there is often a perceived or actual clash with the rights of others—namely, women—and therein lie the difficulties we are discussing. In helping us to navigate these issues, would there be merit in an overall independent review of these matters, as I proposed three years ago? At the moment, we have piecemeal approach, with a Supreme Court decision, EHRC rulings, the Cass review, other governmental decisions and, in all this, a culture war being fought that is immensely damaging to the individuals concerned. Is it not time to look at these issues dispassionately and carefully, to detoxify the debate and put the interests of all those concerned on the right footing?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The Supreme Court did look at the issues dispassionately, but the point is that there is now the requirement to consider the implications of the judgment and to do so in a way that provides assurance to service providers and others. That is the role of the code of practice and the EHRC, in the way that I have just outlined. I agree with the noble Lord—let us be clear that the Supreme Court was clear about this as well—that this not about winners and losers; it is about ensuring that there is both clarity in the law and broad respect for the rights of all people in this country. As the Supreme Court made clear, there is nothing in the ruling that undermines the protections for trans people put into Labour’s Equality Act in 2010.

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, I accept the Supreme Court’s judgment, but the need for the interim statement illustrates to me the extent of the anxiety, confusion and disruption surrounding how the ruling will be interpreted. While the guidance is only interim, it shows that there are still a lot of unanswered questions about how this will work in practice. Will the Government please take a lead, calm the situation and begin to work cross-party to find a way forward that allows everyone to feel safe and protected by the Equality Act?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I hope that in the Government’s response we have been calm; we have been clear but calm. We are committed to ensuring that all groups feel supported by the actions we take as a Government. The responsibility for laying down the code of practice rests with the EHRC. I am sure that it will have heard the noble Baroness’s call and, as we have already heard, it is committed to making sure that that code is developed on the basis of wide consultation.

[Baroness Williams of Trafford (Con)]

My Lords, I endorse the comments of my noble friend. Before statutory guidance is issued, how will the Government meet their legal obligations across all public services, in compliance with the judgment?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

In terms of the clarity of the judgment, as we discussed last week in response to the statement, work is already going on across the health service and other parts of government service. But, as with other judgments, the important clarity around some of the complexities in the application of this judgment will be provided through the statutory code that the EHRC is producing. I look forward to that.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, notwithstanding what the chair of the EHRC has just said to the House, it is quite clear from businesses, the hospitality industry and, today, the Football Association, that its interim guidance has created huge confusion, so I would like my noble friend the Minister to confirm for the House that the EHRC interim update is just an update: it is not legally binding. Can that please be made clear by the EHRC?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I think I have been clear to this House, both today and last week, that the statutory code of practice that the EHRC is responsible for producing will be the legal basis on which there will be interpretation of the judgment. I welcome the noble Baroness the chair of the EHRC’s commitment to ensuring that there will be wide consultation on that.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, the EHRC has come under the most extraordinary and ill-informed abuse, as has its chair, personally. What more do the Government believe they can do to ensure that the independence and functions of the EHRC are properly understood?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I hope that I have demonstrated today that the Government does properly understand them. As I said last week, it is important that this whole debate is carried out in a spirit of understanding the complexities of the application of some of these provisions and recognition that all groups need to be able to access services, but with welcome clarity on the areas covered by the Supreme Court judgment.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

Second Reading

11:51

Moved by

[Baroness Smith of Malvern]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

Relevant document: 21st Report of the Delegated Powers Committee. Welsh Legislative Consent sought.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, while I might have felt offended by the exodus of so many people at the end of Oral Questions, I am reassured by the large number of people who want to contribute to this debate today. It is an honour to move the Second Reading of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, for there are few topics that unite Members of both Houses more deeply than the well-being of children. The numbers of contributors demonstrate that today.

This Bill has been ably steered through the other House by my ministerial colleagues, and I want to acknowledge those across political parties and from key external organisations who have spoken so passionately and sensitively in support of child safeguarding and ensuring that every child has the opportunity to thrive. Their voices have been invaluable in shaping this debate, and their commitment to protecting children’s present and future is deeply appreciated. I am also particularly pleased to be working alongside my noble friend Lady Blake, whose expertise and dedication in social care and education is invaluable. I am grateful for her support as we take this Bill forward together in this House.

This Bill represents an enormously important opportunity to improve our children’s social care and school systems. The chance to make meaningful change to the lives of children and families through legislation of this kind is rare, and I look forward to the thoughtful, impactful debate ahead. It also delivers on manifesto commitments to drive high and rising standards in our schools, ensuring that every child has the opportunity to achieve and to thrive.

I know that all Members of this House share the fundamental belief that our children deserve more, but, currently, children’s life chances are limited by systemic obstacles. Children at risk of abuse are falling through the cracks of our safeguarding systems. At the same time, while the best schools and trusts have shown how collaboration, strong leadership and innovation can transform education, many schools are still held back by a system that simply does not work well enough.

The Bill will strengthen protections for vulnerable children and ensure that those in care have the security and stability they need to thrive. But it also goes beyond these essential safeguarding reforms and ensures that opportunity is encouraged in every school. Every child deserves access to excellent teaching and a school system that gives them the foundations to succeed, no matter where they live or their circumstances. The Bill sets out a comprehensive package of support to advance significant improvements across the education and care systems, encouraging innovation and excellence, while ensuring fair and accountable systems that work for every child.

For too many children today, their background has a decisive negative impact on the life they are able to build. Ensuring that every child starts their school day nourished, focused and ready to learn is fundamental to our commitment to breaking down barriers to success. That is why this Bill delivers on the manifesto pledge to place a duty on every state-funded primary school to introduce free breakfast, making them accessible to all children, regardless of background.

Breakfast clubs have proven benefits: they boost attendance, improve academic attainment and enhance children’s social and emotional well-being. However, access remains fragmented; despite the good work of the national school breakfast programme, it reaches only around 2,000 primary schools, covering only a fraction of those in need, and funds only 75% of the cost of food and delivery, leaving schools to cover staff wages and other expenses. This Bill goes further than simply expanding the existing programme; it makes a fundamental shift in how we support children’s education and well-being.

From April, 750 schools across all nine regions, including 45 special schools, have led the way in free, daily breakfast clubs, saving parents up to £450 a year. Early adopters will be part of a test-and-learn phase to strengthen delivery of national rollout. We will learn what works and develop the programme, and this Bill will ensure that the opportunities provided by free, universal breakfast clubs reach all primary children.

In a country where 3.5 million children are growing up in absolute poverty, we must ensure that no child’s future is determined by their family’s financial circumstances. And breaking down barriers to opportunity goes beyond just the classroom. This Bill will also help by limiting the number of branded items of school uniform and PE kit that schools can require, reducing unnecessary costs and putting money back in parents’ pockets.

Our responsibility is greatest to those children who most need our protection and safeguarding. We must learn from the tragic cases of children failed by the system, so this Bill delivers on important recommendations from significant recent reviews, including the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, the child protection review published by the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel and a study into children’s social care placements published by the Competition and Markets Authority. Our measures are also informed by evidence from effective local practice.

Our priority is to keep children and families together wherever it is safe to do so. By helping more families to stay together, we can improve outcomes for children and reduce the number of children who need to enter the care system. This Bill strengthens early support, ensuring that those at risk of family breakdown can create a plan that prioritises their child’s needs. It places a duty on local authorities to offer a family group decision-making meeting before an application for a care or supervision order is made, potentially preventing many children from going into care and instead allowing them to remain safely with their families.

To support more children staying with relatives, friends or other connected persons, this Bill will require all local authorities to publish a kinship local offer. Every child deserves a stable, loving and permanent home, and this Bill takes meaningful steps to make that a reality. To strengthen safeguarding, we are placing a duty on safeguarding partners to fully include education and childcare settings in their arrangements, ensuring no opportunity to protect children is missed. We are also requiring local safeguarding partners to establish multi-agency child protection teams in every area to take decisive action when necessary.

For too long, poor information sharing has contributed to serious child safeguarding incidents, including in reviews following the death of, or serious injury to, a child. To ensure that no child goes unseen or unsupported, the Bill sets the foundation for the introduction of a unique identifier for children and strengthens the regulatory regime in place for independent educational institutions. Parents have the right to have their wishes regarding their child’s education respected, but that education must be suitable and that child must be safe. The Bill stablishes mandatory registers for children not in school full-time, so that we know where children are and that their education is safe and suitable.

When care is necessary, it must work for children and not for profit. In 2022, the Competition and Markets Authority and the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care found that levels of profit in the care placement market were well above those that would be expected in a well-functioning market. To prevent children’s social care placement providers from profiting at the expense of vulnerable children, we are introducing a new power to enable the Secretary of State to cap profits if profiteering is not brought under control through our other interventions. Because care does not end at 18, we will require all local authorities to provide eligible care leavers with “staying close” support where their welfare requires it, ensuring that young people leaving care have stability and the right help to build a bright future.

Every child is entitled to a high-quality state education. While there has been progress over the years, our system is simply not working well enough for everybody. Standards vary widely, with a stark contrast between the experiences of children in the best and worst schools. The gap in average key stage 4 attainment between the best-performing and worst-performing schools is now equivalent to more than two GCSE grades per subject. Too many schools are stuck—trapped in cycles of underperformance without the capacity or momentum to improve—and children with additional needs are not getting the support they need. The attainment gap for disadvantaged children at key stage 2 and key stage 4 has remained persistently high and has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels. There are large and persistent attainment gaps at all stages of education; currently, 39% of children are not meeting expected standards in all of reading, writing and maths as they leave primary school.

Further, we have an absence crisis, with approximately one in five children missing a day of school each fortnight. That needs to change. High and rising standards in every classroom must be the right of every child, delivered through a broad, high-quality curriculum taught by skilled and dedicated teachers. That is why we have established the independent, expert-led curriculum and assessment review, which will deliver a broad, rich and innovative curriculum to ensure that all children and young people have the essential knowledge and skills to set them up for work and life. Teaching quality is the most important in-school determinant of pupil outcomes. That is why this Government are committed to recruiting 6,500 new expert teachers across our mainstream secondary and specialist schools, and our colleges, over the course of this Parliament.

This Bill is a charter of common sense, providing a core guarantee of quality education in every school, no matter where you live. The Bill will establish a pay floor by requiring all schools to adhere to a minimum pay level. This will help ensure a competitive pay structure, supporting the recruitment and retention of the best educators. Additionally, academy trusts will be required to consider the School Teachers’ Pay and Conditions Document when setting staff conditions, further promoting fairness and consistency across the education system.

The Bill will ensure that when the national curriculum is reformed, it will be an entitlement for all children in all schools, and that new teachers either have or are working towards qualified teacher status, followed by a period of statutory induction. To provide greater certainty for families, the Bill strengthens collaboration between schools and local authorities on admissions and place planning.

It also introduces more flexibility in how we support struggling schools. When academies were introduced—by the last Labour Government—they were the disruptors in the system, challenging and supporting the schools that most needed it to improve. Now they are the system: over 80% of our secondary schools are academies. We need new challenge, new urgency and new tools to drive improvement where schools just are not doing well enough for our children.

That is why this Bill enables a range of interventions to address underperformance. While academisation will remain a key tool for tackling failing schools, the Bill gives the Government more discretion to apply the most appropriate solutions to individual cases, including supporting the deployment of our RISE teams. These teams are made up of proven leaders with a track record of improving schools and delivering for children. As we announced on Tuesday, an additional 45 advisers joined last month, tripling the total number to 65. This will enable us to expand our reach from an initial 32 schools to more than 200, reaching over 120,000 children and putting us on track to engage with up to 600 schools by March 2026. Through these reforms, we aim to ensure that every child can attend a high-quality local school and receive the education they deserve.

This Bill makes vital, practical changes to our children’s social care and education systems, and there will be tangible improvements for every young person as a result. This Government have been clear in setting out their mission to ensure that a child’s future should not be determined by their circumstances. I know that this principle is widely shared across the House. By addressing the systemic barriers that too often hold our children back, we have a unique opportunity through this Bill to create a more equitable and successful environment, where all young people have the chance to achieve and thrive. I beg to move.

12:07

[The Earl of Effingham (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the comprehensive way in which she has set out the purpose of this key legislation. His Majesty’s Official Opposition welcome the Government’s ambition to protect children and ensure that they have the best opportunities in life, regardless of any challenges they may have faced during their childhood.

As your Lordships’ House is aware, this Bill comprises two halves. While both parts focus on the well-being and future of children across the country, there are some real and distinct differences between them. The former seeks to improve the children’s social care system. Noble Lords know that outcomes for children in the care system remain stubbornly poor, despite efforts from repeated Governments to improve them. Part 1 includes many elements that were recommended by the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care, commissioned by the last Government and published in 2022. As noble Lords are aware, it was ably led by the now honourable Member for Whitehaven.

There are areas in Part 1 where we will seek to probe, develop and clarify the practical implementation of the Bill, but, in the round, the importance of this part is recognised and the need for legislation is understood. It is a huge responsibility to do one’s collective best to represent the interests of children and young people who have been so disadvantaged through no fault of their own.

In doing so, we will focus on areas where we think the Bill could be strengthened, including support for kinship carers in particular and foster carers more broadly. We are keen to see support for care leavers be as effective as possible. We will encourage the Government to consider what support can be given to mothers who have already had one or more children removed from them by the local authority. We will press the Government to improve the protections for children deprived of their liberty—some as young as seven; a truly chilling thought. We will press for greater clarity on the implementation on family group conferencing and seek an explanation for the approach the Government are adopting to the introduction of a unique child identifier.

More broadly, we remain sceptical about the Government’s approach to the regulation of children’s homes and fostering agencies. We fear that this will result in more bureaucracy and no change in the supply picture. Given that research by Ofsted showed that up to 50% of children in children’s homes had a foster placement specified on their care plan, there is a pressing need to address the fundamental issues which limit the number of foster carers. We are aware that many organisations, including the Children’s Commissioner, have called for childcare and education agencies to be full partners in local safeguarding arrangements. We anticipate that, on many of these issues, we will be probing the Government, alongside noble Lords from all sides of the House.

It would be fair to say that we cannot share the same enthusiasm and support for the second part of the Bill, which relates to schools. We believe that the measures in this part of the Bill simply will not provide the best possible education for our children. If passed, these elements of the Bill will override years of cross-party support and will reverse the very system that has seen English children move up the PISA rankings across the board in reading, science and maths. This Bill risks undermining the overwhelming consensus of the last 20 years on the benefits that come from giving greater autonomy to local schools and trusts, while having high standards of transparency and accountability. It is this system that has seen English schoolchildren become the best in the western world at both reading and maths. To change this without clear evidence to justify it is both serious and risky.

We foresee far-reaching and negative consequences arising from some of the provisions in the second half of the Bill, and we are not alone in this view. The Confederation of School Trusts is very concerned about the provisions which seek to remove the academy freedoms that have so greatly improved our education system. One only need look at the contrast with Scotland and Wales, which have not adopted the English reforms, to see the evidence in stark relief. As His Majesty’s Government themselves did when in opposition, we will respectfully explore, question and, in some cases, challenge outright.

Let me begin with the area about which we have the greatest concerns: the clauses relating to academies. These are the most significant, as they seek to undo the progress made during the last two decades. In 2024, academies represented 80% of secondary schools and nearly 43% of primary schools. For His Majesty’s Government to introduce such wide-ranging and radical changes without support from the sector does not make sense. We respectfully urge the Government to listen to the voices from all around your Lordships’ House, as they did in the other place, to make improvements to the Bill on the pay and conditions of academy teachers.

Academies have been at the forefront of fostering innovation in our school system; they have led the turnaround of some of the most challenging schools in this country. I know that the noble Lords, Lord Harris of Peckham, Lord Agnew of Oulton, Lord Fink and Lord Nash, have all been involved in doing this difficult and crucial work, as has the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, in relation to innovation in opening new free schools. The Children’s Commissioner has also raised concerns about the restriction of academy freedoms. We hope that your Lordships’ scrutiny of His Majesty’s Government will allow the time needed to consider the importance of these expert voices. None of this is to suggest that improvements could not be made to the current system of regulation of our schools, but a forward-looking, positive and aspirational vision for all our schools appears to be lacking in this Bill.

The Bill also fails to introduce a ban on the use of smartphones in schools. Although the previous Government’s guidance to schools on banning smartphones was a positive first step, it is not enough. Only 11% of schools have an effective ban in place. Scores of scientific studies have linked both better mental health and school attainment to removing smartphones from classrooms. We recognise that this is not universally welcomed by head teachers, but we are most concerned that, in this case, we should use the precautionary principle when dealing with the mental health of children. I am very much looking forward to the valuable contribution that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, will make today, following the excellent debate she led on this subject last November.

There are also concerns that the breakfast clubs being introduced by the Bill will have practical issues, and we will seek to table probing amendments. Of the 750 schools involved in the early adopter programme, 79 have already dropped out. We understand that some have given a funding shortfall as their reason for leaving. The CEO of the Warrington Primary Academy Trust said that the scheme is in danger of falling flat because of it. There are certainly practical issues which need to be addressed before the scheme can be rolled out nationwide. It would be appreciated if the Minister took the opportunity to explain in her closing remarks the Government’s position on this drop-out rate.

I turn to the proposal in the Bill to introduce laws governing the specific number of school uniform items a school can require a child to have. We worry that this approach could backfire, with children feeling under pressure to wear the latest fashion, which is actually more expensive than their uniform. This blanket approach does not allow schools to provide free uniform, or account for them providing it at a discount. It can be more expensive to buy unbranded items. We will explore this further in Committee.

Protecting the well-being and education of children is essential to the future of the country, to economic growth and to reducing the burden on the NHS. His Majesty’s Official Opposition accept that some parts of the Bill form part of the Government’s manifesto commitments, and we will seek to ensure that these areas work well in practice.

Today’s list of speakers reads like a Who’s Who of education experts. On our Benches alone we have three former Secretaries of State for Education, and the noble Lord, Lord Harris of Peckham, is also present. To quote the media, what earns the noble Lord hero status is that this Conservative Peer

“has done more to help working-class children than any Labour politician since Attlee and Bevan.”

I am also very much looking forward to hearing the maiden speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Biggar and Lord Mohammed of Tinsley.

It would be impossible to get all the speakers today in a room together at the same time were it not for your Lordships’ House. There are aspects of this Bill on which we hope the Government will listen to the collective experts sitting all around your Lordships’ House—including on their own Benches—who have been involved in the leadership of multi-academy trusts. We hope that the Government will think again, because surely, children deserve no less.

12:19

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I agree with a couple of things the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, said, including that we have the great and the good of education gathered in this House today. There are many here who have been involved in education, and in the current education system’s construction, for a long time, and I look forward to hearing what they have to say. I have worked against some of them and I have worked successfully with others; they may have cursed me or praised me, but we have striven forward.

Part 1 of the Bill reads like the Government dealing with the hardy perennials of the care system. There is much in there that has already provided us with debate after debate, many of which were quite depressing. I thank the Government for bringing this forward so that we can all have a look at them. There are many issues which we have heard about in an untold number of debates, and they have not gone that well. The way that the Government choose to implement the passing on of information might be one of the most interesting issues, because often mistakes have arisen due to a lack of co-ordination. I look forward to seeing how we can advance and check that, as far as we can by debate, to make sure it is going to work properly. This is not an easy topic, as most people involved in it would accept. There may not be perfect answers, but improvement is certainly possible. We should have had a cohesive look at this, together, a while ago, so I thank the Government for bringing it forward.

Many of my noble friends, including my noble friend Lady Tyler, are going to weigh in on a lot of the Bill. Looking round at these Benches, I see others who I cannot imagine will be quiet. We have discussed this a lot, and I hope we can have an open mind, given the experience here in the House, as we go through the Bill.

I will be spending more of my time and consideration on Part 2 of the Bill. Before I go into that, I will say something about a matter that is not included. Anybody who has been in this House for any length of time would be very surprised if I do not mention special educational needs in a speech on education. Let us face it, at the moment, that area is a hideous mess. The primary beneficiaries of the system are lawyers and those who give expensive diagnoses. That is the definition of failure. My honourable friends in another place moved amendments on this matter; we should look at those again, and possibly propose more. We have got to see if, through the Bill, we can at least set the grounds for easier intervention.

We must look across the education system, at all its aspects. Academisation has not helped, as a school can now be a failing school because of low academic standards. I start with a declaration of interests. I am dyslexic and I am president of the British Dyslexia Association, and I am chairman of a firm for assisted tech, some of which is used in education. If we do not make it easy for structure and help to be given to schools, we are always going to have problems in this area. To a dyslexic, the emphasis on passing English felt, at times, almost like a personal assault. Pupils have to learn synthetic phonics—if I have got that right—but a bad short-term memory can mean that you sometimes get it wrong. The system does not work well for those with a bad short-term memory, but that is the way teachers are supposed to teach. A greater degree of flexibility in teaching methods, which will be a great strength, is important. If we can get guidance on the way that the national curriculum and the special educational needs structure is envisaged as changing under the Bill, I will be very grateful.

The system is almost certainly a contributing factor to the high number of pupils not in school. We will talk a lot about home education in the Bill, and the biggest group of home-educated pupils I first met were those whose special educational needs provisions were not being met. Those parents, often reluctantly, took their children out of school. It has now become a more acceptable way forward, but I remember papers on off-rolling, and the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, getting passionate about the fact that it was breaking the spirit of academies. If the system is one in which your career, your school and your status can be destroyed by not having the correct pass rates, I might think about getting rid of undiagnosed or improperly diagnosed dyslexics and other neurodiverse groups if I was in that situation. A better identification process would be massively helpful, and we must make sure there is space for it.

Whatever the strengths of academies, they have to work with local authorities. We must look at moving this forward and getting it right. Academies are now the dominant group. Acceptance that we do not need wholesale change was reached when the previous Government decided that they would not go for compulsory academisation, as there were local authority schools that were doing a good job. The consensus now is that the converted academies—those that were forced to change—are the weakest group, if I remember correctly, although there is not too much in it. I welcome the fact that we are going to get them working together on matters such as the allocation of school places.

On school uniforms, specifying a few items is a little silly. Why not put a maximum budget on what you can charge for school uniforms? Encouraging second-hand school uniforms might be one solution.

When it comes to the much-vaunted breakfast clubs, I can say only this: the bus is occasionally late. In rural areas, making sure that the bus gets to school on time will be a challenge. How the Government propose to interfere with local transport systems will be an interesting discussion. We think that the extra calories should be given at lunchtime. There might be a compromise solution, such as school brunch—though I fear that sounds like a daytime TV programme. We applaud making sure that people are properly fed, but we think this is a difficult way to do it.

There is not much to say about the rest of the Bill, other than on the joys of Clause 63. Henry VIII has raised his head again. The last time we had a big education Bill, when the previous Government were in charge, the Henry VIII powers were up front; this time, they are tucked away at the back. If I am wrong about this, I look forward to the Minister telling me why I am wrong. Changes can be made by regulation, but we know how difficult it is to change regulations because we cannot amend them, only reject them all—and we are told it is a constitutional crisis every time we try to get rid of an order. Can the Minister explain how this will work, so that it will not be a case of the Secretary of State saying, “Thou wilt change”, with virtually no element of parliamentary oversight? I look forward to working through the Bill. There is no shortage of expertise to dig down into it. I hope we will come to a better conclusion.

I will make one final point—as I see the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, looking at me. Would it not be a good idea if we could find one little section in the Bill that encourages outside bodies such as sports clubs to enhance the activity of school sport, with same being done for drama and music? It would be a nice idea if we took the opportunity to correct that bit of the education system, because we all know—and it is proven—that if you do it only at school, you stop when you leave school. Maybe we can change that in this Bill.

12:30

[Lord Bichard (CB)]

My Lords, by any measure, this is a landmark Bill and I welcome very many of its provisions. However, in the very short time available today, I will focus only on the part of the Bill that concerns child protection and safeguarding, in particular in Clauses 2 to 4. I will do that because child safety remains the first priority of schools, the education system and the Government, and we should never forget that.

Schools themselves are safer places than they were back in the days when I chaired the Soham inquiry. The vetting and barring scheme, more rigorous staff interviews, designated safeguarding leads and better training for all staff have played their part in that. But, as the Children’s Commissioner said recently, schools also play a wider and

“fundamental role in keeping children safe and protecting them from harm”.

Children simply trust schools; they trust teachers and they trust teachers’ assistants, and those teachers are often the first to know if children are facing challenges in their lives. So it is important that we ensure that the knowledge that schools have is available to all who are tasked with protecting children. That is why the Bill places a duty on safeguarding partners—local authorities, the police and health—to secure the participation of education settings in multiagency safeguarding to ensure that the education view is heard.

That is a step forward, but I agree with the Children’s Commissioner and others that schools should not just be participants; they should be equal partners to properly underline their status and responsibility in the safeguarding process. I also think that the Bill should recognise and reference faith-based and community organisations in the safeguarding process to avoid gaps in oversight, especially of marginalised children. Well-being and safeguarding are not the sole responsibility of the statutory organisations; they are also the responsibility of community organisations that play such an important part but at the moment are overlooked in the Bill in the way that they can sometimes be overlooked on the ground.

As has already been said, the common thread in the findings of every child abuse inquiry since the case of Maria Colwell more than 50 years ago has been the failure of agencies involved to share information. Your Lordships’ own Public Services Select Committee, which I sat on at the time, concluded in 2021 that data sharing between government departments and between local agencies was a long-standing problem that

“endangered vulnerable children and their families”.

Currently, social care services are not always told when the police arrest a child or when a pupil is on a waiting list for mental health services.

I am delighted that the Bill seeks to address data sharing, and I am especially pleased to see the very long-overdue proposal to introduce a consistent, unique identifier for children. That should make it easier to create a comprehensive profile for a child and achieve smooth transitions when children change schools or move local authority areas. The question for me—one which we should be asking ourselves in Committee—is whether the changes proposed even now go far enough to reverse decades of learned behaviour. I have long argued that our society has prioritised the protection of data ahead of the protection of children. That has to change. This is the chance to change it, and we should take it.

12:34

[The Lord Bishop of Manchester]

My Lords, I begin by expressing my thanks to all noble Lords who have reached out to me following the announcement that I will be taking up the role of Convenor of the Lords Spiritual next month. I look forward to working with all noble Lords. I also look forward to hearing today the maiden speeches from the noble Lords, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley and Lord Biggar, the latter a fellow clergyman and a theological mind of some high repute.

Debate during the recent passage of my own Private Member’s Bill through this House highlighted the severe disadvantages faced by many care leavers. Research by Barnardo’s showed that 39% of care leavers aged 19 to 21 are not in education, employment or training, compared with 13% of young people in general. We are failing almost two in five of those who have care experience. Moreover, care leavers I met through the charity Become highlighted how much depends on the whim of their particular local authority. Young people who move away for work or further education are especially prone to losing support. We need a universal offer for young people leaving care that local authorities are obliged to meet.

At a later stage, I will be seeking to explore the shape of such an offer, potentially including free prescriptions, bus travel, help with rent deposits and guarantees, eligibility for the over-25 rates of universal credit and greater support for those who go on to apprenticeships or university. Moreover, as care-experienced people are disproportionately represented in almost every area of disadvantage, from homelessness, unemployment and poverty to poor health, low educational attainment and involvement in the justice system, I have been looking at amendments to embed care experience in equality assessments so that public bodies put care leavers at the heart of decision-making. I am grateful for the comments from the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, regarding foster parents, who provide such a vital service in helping children flourish and thrive. I would hope to join him in testing how the Bill can be strengthened to better support them.

Moving briefly to other areas, I have received some very concerning representations regarding the impact of the Bill on the yeshivas that supplement home schooling for many of my Jewish neighbours in Salford, especially in the Haredi communities. The Government’s own human rights memorandum notes that

“institutions which are likely to be predominantly affected are yeshivas”.

If this goes ahead unamended, yeshivas will be forced to close. They cannot, and indeed will not, register as educational institutions—that is not what they are. I hope that the Minister in responding will be able to assure us that there will be some comprehensive consultation with faith communities regarding the regulatory framework that is to be applied under Clause 36.

Finally, children who have a parent in prison are at particular risk of going into the care system. The Bill could represent a step forward for the provision of support for such families. Church of England schools, along with colleagues at the Catholic Education Service, are passionate about how we improve the lives of children with incarcerated parents. I know that my right reverend friend the Bishop of Gloucester, who cannot be in her place today, will be looking at how the Bill can be strengthened in this regard. We on these Benches take very seriously our ministry with and among children in our churches, our many church schools—I have almost 200 in my own diocese—and wider society. We welcome the Bill, and we look forward to engaging positively with it as it progresses.

12:37

[Baroness Morgan of Huyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my interests as set out in the register. I just want to talk very briefly about schools today. I say clearly that I have seen at first hand the transformative power of academies to deliver excellent education where there has been failure. When academies were introduced—and I was involved enthusiast—they were a tool for the urgent improvement of schools, not an ideological symbol. The idea was simple but radical: open up to new energy and expertise, allow great leaders the freedoms to create enthusiastic teams and raise standards and, crucially, to make sure there was accountability so that schools that were failing children, particularly from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, could not carry on failing the next cohort. It worked, and many of us around this House were involved in that mission.

I fear that we have lost sight of the original purpose. The debate in recent times has shifted from standards to structures, outcomes to ideology. Today, over 80% of secondary schools are academies—the landscape has fundamentally changed. Academisation alone cannot be the answer when it is already the dominant model. In some cases it has delivered hugely, but it is not a panacea. What we need now, again, is to refocus relentlessly on standards and outcomes for every child in every school, whatever its structure and whatever the badge on the school gate. We should remember what has worked and replicate that, including earned freedoms.

We should be totally and utterly impatient and relentless about poor quality in any school, whether academy, maintained, free school or faith. Any school that is failing its pupils should be given a short, focused period to improve dramatically. If it cannot, leadership must change. Handing over a school to a poorly performing provider of whatever label is not acceptable, ever. Quality and rigour are what matters. Every year a child spends in a failing school is a year of potential lost, and the disadvantage gap and regional disparities persist.

What frustrates all of us is that we know we have the tools to address this, but sometimes we lack the will to use them consistently. The current rebrokering process for academies can take years, during which children continue to be failed, and that has to change. We need to recapture the original spirit of academy reform: clear standards, strong accountability and swift intervention when those standards are not met for all schools.

Accountability is more than data measurements and inspection regimes; it is also about nous. It is about having the courage to act decisively when children are being let down. I used to say when I was there that Ofsted had to be an agent for improvement. Its reports have to lead to change. I remember talking to pupils in some of the very first academies we created. They were so excited about the tangible evidence of investment in their future, the ambition embodied in every aspect of a school. We must not lose that sense of possibility and drive for excellence.

The evidence from strong academy chains and networks shows what works: strong leadership, great teachers, curriculum expertise, behaviour policies that create calm learning environments and, crucially, the willingness to share what works across schools. The goal remains what it always was: to ensure that every child, regardless of background, has access to excellent education. Academies can and do play a crucial role in this mission, but they are a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

The Bill has clauses that I know will lead to heated debate, and I believe we will improve it as we go along. I will not go there on these details today. Today, my plea to all of us around this House is simple: please let us return to first principles, high standards, strong accountability and swift action where these standards are not met. Let us avoid excuses, justifications, compromises. Let us judge schools by their outcomes and let us act with the urgency that our children deserve.

12:41

[Baroness Shephard of Northwold (Con)]

My Lords, there is much to commend in the Bill, not least because it seeks—as did the last Government—to strengthen collaboration between education and social services for the benefit of the life chances of all our children.

However, it is regrettable that, while the Government claim their enthusiasm for driving up school standards, the Bill attacks the very freedoms of academies which have achieved just that since their introduction. In that time, as has already been said, the UK has moved from 21st to seventh in international league tables in maths, and in science from ninth to seventh. In the many cases where academies have replaced failing schools, they have given fresh hope to children, often in disadvantaged areas.

I also question the wisdom of loading local authorities with so many obligations to set up new bodies and practices at this very moment when they themselves are facing massive change and uncertainty through the Government’s plans for devolution. Those changes will of course be necessary; it is just the timing that seems to be a bit questionable, especially as some of them are due to come into force within two months after the Act is passed, according to the Library. Will devolution be fully in place in two months? Will we know which local authorities still exist in their present form and which do not in a completely different framework? I do not think so, and it would be helpful if the Minister could comment on this point in her wind-up. It seems to me that there is something of a mismatch of expectation at this stage.

I welcome the planned involvement of Ofsted in unregistered and therefore illegal independent schools, and, importantly, private providers, including those for SEND pupils. I also welcome—very guardedly, because it is an extremely sensitive area—the introduction of a register of children not in school. Many of those educating their children at home, which can include SEND pupils, understandably regard the measure as intolerable intrusion. Perhaps it might be better if it applied only to children already known to social services, but views on this will emerge as the Bill goes through this House.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, has done very important work on this with his Private Member’s Bill and his concern about the case of Sara Sharif. I have been marked for life by the story I will recount to this House, in my time as an MP, of an egregious case in 2001 which ended in the manslaughter of Lauren Wright, aged eight, at the hands of her father and stepmother. If the Norfolk education and social services had visited the family home, the death of Lauren would have been prevented. The Labour Government of the time refused a public inquiry.

The introduction of school attendance orders should be helpful, especially in the wake of the pandemic and the new world of working from home. Amid worrying reports of school heads feeling powerless to insist on attendance, heads and teachers should be able to feel that they are supported by the provisions of the law and also of the Bill.

A flippant point: I have noticed in my lifelong involvement in education that many, including politicians, frequently pronounce on what should and should not be achieved in the classroom, while all too frequently forgetting that they are not in the classroom and heads and teachers are. Those heads and teachers need the confidence and support of a legal framework within which to work.

Many have commented on the expertise within this House. I believe that these issues can be debated robustly and knowledgeably, with national expertise, to the benefit of all our children, and I look forward to the debates that are to come.

12:46

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, my remarks will focus primarily on technology in school, but I want to take this opportunity to say that, over the time I have spent in your Lordships’ House, I find myself increasingly in situations where children’s needs are being now balanced with the proportionality principle of others’ adult freedoms, with no recognition of the broad swathe of rights that we are obligated to give them. I start by saying that the well-being Bill should represent that broad swathe of children’s rights and meet their needs in that sense.

It strikes me that one of the easiest and cheapest things we could do is to give them a break from the well-documented intrusions of digital tech while at school, which, as a 15 year-old earlier this week said to me,

“gives us brain rot, prevents us sleeping and stops us talking to each other”.

Ministers cite excessive device use at home as the greater culprit, rather than the smartphone disruption at school, for the decline in children’s well-being and attainment, but that logic normalises smartphones’ constant presence in a child’s life and actually does nothing at all to tackle phone use at home.

Evidence that I will bring to Committee shows that restrictions are helpful to school communities, not only for learning but for peace in the school community and for friendship and human flourishing. The current guidance—which is excellent—puts pressure on teachers that statutory rules could relieve.

While Ministers are slow on smartphones, they are increasingly evangelical about bringing edtech into the classroom. I recognise that there is very good evidence that those with disabilities or special needs benefit from such tech, but for most children there is no such evidence at all. There is no oversight, no pedagogical criteria, no understanding of its efficacy and no proof of learning outcomes. In a similar vein, I have now sat down with four Ministers of Education and explained the risks of uncertified safety tech, yet we still do not have minimum standards. It is another—not the first—accident waiting to happen.

Some tech is wonderful, some is benign and some is in our schools stealing children’s data and their opportunity to learn. Yet we are rapidly wrapping pupils in a world of digital products which isolate them and normalise the screen over the human, with no proof of the benefits. I would say the same thing about early years. Who has not seen a child in a pram with a device strapped to it? At nursery, children are arriving with inhibited social skills and language, yet all my attempts to get mandatory training for early years professionals in technology have been rebuffed by both sides of the House. Government and Parliament must recalibrate that the Covid time-bomb, in which children are developmentally stunted and isolated, is increasingly the new norm of childhood—children are socialised by those brightly lit screens which are focused on the attention economy and ad revenue, not on human flourishing.

In Committee, I will join others in putting forward amendments on these issues. I will also seek to understand the scope of the promised edtech code being produced by the ICO and the Government’s plans to give a data-mining exception to AI companies for all our children’s work and behaviour at school. There are many wonderful uses of technology, but we have to make sure that school is a place of privacy, safety and learning for our children.

12:51

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness. I offer a very warm welcome to and look forward to the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley. I know that he will remind me of just how old I am by reflecting on his childhood when I was leader of Sheffield.

Over the last four months, there has been the most misleading rhetoric about Part 2 of this Bill. It is our job in the House of Lords to lower the temperature and get to the reality. If there are amendments to be made to clarify it, we should do so. That is our role, and I hope we can do that in the spirit of coming together in the interests of children.

I take up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, that what goes on in the school and in the classroom is what really matters. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Baker, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Shephard, Lady Morris and Lady Morgan—I will not pay tribute to myself—but I think they would accept immediately that we did not transform the ability of children to succeed or develop their talent, or their ability to shine through. It was the world-class leadership in schools and the first-class teaching and support staff who did that job. That is what we must build on.

Let us set aside the disagreements about whether multi-academy trusts or maintained schools have done better. The stats from the House of Lords Library are very interesting, but I have not got time to go into them. I can pay tribute to the sponsors and leaders of multi-academy trusts, because I was the Secretary of State who floated the academies in the first place. Let us get it right. We have put the record straight about minimum rather than maximum pay and conditions. We can put the record straight on what happens with schools that are failing their children and the interventions that are needed. We can put the record straight on misleading comments about admissions, where the drop in pupil numbers will be catastrophic and there will need to be co-ordination if massive resources are not to be wasted.

I hope we can also clarify issues around the basic entitlement to a national curriculum brought in by the noble Lord, Lord Baker, in 1988. He will speak next, and I pay tribute to him. I ought to declare an interest—I have two grandchildren at Sheffield University Technical College and one going there in September. I know we will be able to clarify during the course of this Bill that the basic entitlement to a national curriculum will not interfere with the innovation and creativity of UTCs.

Let us get it right. There is so much to be done, because absence is up. I feel so strongly about this. Exclusions are up, off-rolling is up and one million children leaving school between the ages of 16 and 24 are not in education, employment or training. In the PISA surveys on life satisfaction, we are second from bottom. There is so much to do, which we can do together if we put the rhetoric behind us and put children first.

12:55

[Lord Baker of Dorking (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow my friend, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. He was an outstanding Education Secretary who enormously improved literacy and numeracy in primary schools, but what endears him to me is that his two grandsons are going to the University Technical College that I established in Sheffield for a high-quality technical education. We now have another one on the outskirts. This Bill threatens the existence of UTCs, but I will come on to that in a moment.

Clause 47 is very radical. It would mean a major change of power in this country. The clause makes this a constitutional Bill, because it gives powers to the Secretary of State and the department that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and I never had and never wanted. It moves all the power from local areas to the centre. There has been no consultation on this. There have been no research papers. It has just been plucked out of the air and added to this Bill. I think it is very harmful indeed.

Schools have done very well by being academies. I established the first early ones in the 1980s. When I introduced the national curriculum in the 1980s, my Permanent Secretary said to me, “You can’t instruct schools to follow it and you can’t tell them to do it. You can make suggestions and recommendations”. This was because, since 1870, schools have been run by elected local school boards, by local authorities and now by multi-academy trusts. All the powers of those trusts are now being transferred by Clause 47 and other clauses to the department and the Secretary of State, giving them powers that I never had and which never existed.

When there is a huge change like that, with no checks and balances, there is usually consultation. There should be, but there has been no consultation on this. I do not believe this measure was in the manifesto of the Labour Party. It is a major constitutional change and we have to think very carefully about it. The schools that I promoted do not follow a national curriculum—or a Gove curriculum. We recruit a lot of 14 year-olds. In the first week, they spend two days a week learning with their hands, learning how to use tools and machinery or going to the computer room to get their data skills or to the design studio to improve their communication and learn about laser printers and 3D printers—the greatest invention since the 19th century. They are not following the national curriculum or a Gove curriculum. They have their own curriculum, and they are very successful. If we have to follow the national curriculum, we will have to become bog-standard comprehensives. That is simply not acceptable. I will certainly ask the Government to think again about this.

When you have such a huge constitutional change as that, there is usually consultation. People are asked about it. There has been no consultation at all on this enormous change of power, so there should certainly be consultation. I am reasonably confident that the Government will be sympathetic, because we are exempt at the moment from both the Gove curriculum and the national curriculum. When our students start at 14—most of them do—they spend two days a week in a workshop learning to control tools and machines. Some, as I have already said, go on to data or design skills. But this is not going to be allowed if the Bill goes through as it is.

I have some optimism, if I may say so, because although we have not discussed curriculums for 14 years, the Secretary of State herself has visited one of the best UTCs, in Durham—it is one of the best schools in the north-east of England—and the Minister who is replying today has visited the Aston UTC. The head of the Aston UTC was actually taught by the Minister, and she inspired him to go into education and be a head, so it was a very moving meeting. It was also interesting that she was given an eye test by the school. Although the school concentrates on the motor industry, last September it introduced optometry, and it was able to give her an eye test. She passed it. We now have lots of other students who want to study that.

I am saying to the Minister that there should be flexibility. We have had exemption from the national curriculum and from the Gove curriculum, and I very much hope that she will be able to ensure that we will still have exemption. She will not remember—she was not in the House when it happened—but the last Conservative Government brought in a Bill, which the noble Lord, Lord Addington, just mentioned, to give huge powers to the Secretary of State in the Department for Education. There was an unusual alliance between the noble Lords, Lord Addington and Lord Storey, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, who then headed the Cross-Benchers, and they defeated the Bill. This is the Department for Education trying to do it in a different way.

In fact, I am optimistic that the Government will realise that the exemptions we have enjoyed in the past will have to be enjoyed in the future.

13:01

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, so much to say, so little time to say it. I welcome this Bill and many of its measures, but there is plenty of scope for further strengthening and improvement. I am also very much looking forward to hearing the two maiden speeches.

Although my main interest is in Part 1, I want to emphasise the interrelated nature of the two parts of the Bill. In order to attend, attain and thrive at school, a child needs to feel safe, secure and well supported and have good mental health and emotional well-being. Despite having the word “well-being” in its title, in my view, the Bill currently lacks measures that will improve the mental health and well-being of children. It is of real concern that, according to the latest PISA data, England’s young people have the lowest level of well-being in Europe. Evidence increasingly shows the link between school absences and poor mental health. There is also growing recognition of a gap in mental health support for children and young people who need a greater level of support than is currently available in school mental health teams, but do not require or are not eligible for specialist treatment from CAMHS. I intend to press to rectify this gap, based on my current Private Member’s Bill requiring a suitably qualified mental health professional in all schools, primary and secondary. Linked to this, I strongly support the introduction of a national well-being measurement programme for children throughout England, and I pay tribute to both Be Well and Pro Bono Economics for all their work in this area.

Data on children’s well-being and mental health is currently fragmented across the NHS, schools and local authorities. We should take the opportunity to introduce a national well-being measurement to focus efforts and provide a measurable standard from which we can mark progress. This will give all children a voice on the issues that matter to their well-being, allow regular tracking of national progress, support detailed cross-agency service planning at local level and provide new evidence on what works for improving well-being. It will also provide a framework to understand and enhance the Bill’s impact. Without this, we will never move forward.

There is more to do to strengthen the voice of the child throughout this Bill and ensure that their wishes and feelings are known and fed into decisions about them. As the noble Lord, Lord Bichard, reminded us, serious case reviews have repeatedly shown that a lack of information-sharing, duplicate record-keeping and conflicting information systems have resulted in missed opportunities to identify children and protect them from serious harm. The worst cases hit the headlines, and have been harrowing and heartbreaking. Having a unique consistent identifier for individual children will allow professionals working with them to share information easily and prevent them falling through the gaps, so I welcome its inclusion in Clause 4, but will the Minister commit to the full implementation of a single unique identifier by the next election? If so, can she confirm the use of the NHS number?

Early intervention plays a vital role in providing support to children and young people and giving them the help they need to thrive before problems escalate and families reach crisis point. I intend to bring forward some amendments in this area.

I end by asking the Minister what assessment the department has made of the impact of reductions in early intervention funding on rising demand for child protection services and care placements. There were so many other areas I wanted to talk about, particularly children in care, excessive profiteering, the national offer for carers’ leave, et cetera, et cetera. Time precludes me doing so, but I will certainly be returning to these issues in Committee.

13:05

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall restrict my comments to the clauses in the Bill on schools. By my reckoning, we are probably entering our third decade of discussing the structure of schools in England. Interesting and important though that may be, it has not been the easiest of discussions. There have been a lot of piecemeal changes. Two government Bills on this subject have been completely withdrawn because of differences of opinion within the Conservative Party. Throughout all that time, teachers have managed to keep the school system going and raise standards.

I hope most of all that this can be a turning point when we put behind us this debate on the structure of schools and begin to focus on what makes the real difference: what happens in the classrooms. We have got to learn from those decades of discussion and years of change, and without doubt, there are more good schools than there were before. Without doubt, the birth and growth of academies has contributed to that. Academies have brought something new to the system. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, referred to them as a disruptor. They brought outside expertise that it was not always easy to get into schools, they have brought an energy, and they have helped to raise standards. But there is no evidence that I can find that shows that they should be the universal model—that only within that model can excellence be achieved. There is often, among some people in the Chamber, a lack of generosity of spirit in acknowledging that that excellence, that innovation, that improvement, exists in maintained schools as well. Academies do not have the monopoly of excellence, nor of innovation, nor of turning round failing schools.

My conclusion is that both types of schools should be allowed to flourish as part of a strong school system. If you want a choice on governance—because that is what it is about—if you want to leave the partnership of the local authority and the partnership of schools, if you want to take on those extra responsibilities, choose to be an academy; but if you want to retain that relationship with a local authority and that local family of schools, choose to be a maintained school.

Frankly, policymakers should be able to learn to live with that, rather than offering a bribe or incentive to change. If we can live with that choice and focus on other things, more schools will improve. If we want every school to be a good school, we must not only ensure that, as policymakers, we give each school the best possible chance of succeeding; we have to make sure that they do not achieve this by behaving in a way that makes it more difficult for other schools to succeed. We need a policy framework for individual schools to succeed that determines how schools relate to the wider school system. It is not a market that should govern whether schools succeed or not; it should be the strength of that partnership and the acknowledgement of the school system.

I welcome the parts of the Bill that make that more likely to happen. I welcome co-ordinated admissions. I welcome the power of local authorities to direct academies to accept particular children, often in challenging circumstances. I welcome the removal of the ability of academies to set their own admission numbers, not because I want to take away the freedoms, but because those can be exercised in a way that makes it impossible for the school down the road to flourish and succeed, and that cannot be right.

I welcome the measure on the national curriculum, as well, not because I want to tie the hands of teachers and heads, but because I have never, ever understood why it is a privilege afforded to academies but not maintained schools. It is a national curriculum: the clue is in the title.

When I look back through all my years in both politics and education, I cannot remember a time when flexibility within the national curriculum was not allowed. If the Minister could reassure us that it is a national curriculum and there are exceptions, I think it would put a lot of minds at rest. The decisions, in terms of the national curriculum, should centre on the needs of the child and not the structural status of the school. If a child has the need to do something other than the national curriculum in the maintained sector, why on earth should they not have that same freedom as in an academy?

I hope that the Bill gives us a strong framework for strong schools within a strong school system.

13:10

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I support much of the Bill but will raise some issues about the schools part of it. We rightly emphasise the need for a broad and balanced curriculum, but we also need a broad and balanced education policy. It is clearly important to ensure that every school meets certain minimum standards. The report of the Education for 11-16 Year Olds Committee, on which I sat, speaks positively of a

“mandatory national curriculum that ensures a common entitlement for all pupils”.

At the same time, there needs to be scope for teachers to bring their own passions and predilections to their teaching if they are to inspire pupils with a love of learning in a spirit of discovery and enjoyment which all too often seems to be lacking.

Many of us will recall teachers who made the most positive impact on our own learning. I was lucky enough to be taught by three remarkable classics teachers, from whom I gained, and have retained, an enduring love of classical languages, art and civilisation, which affect our lives in so many ways. I continue to attempt the Times’s Latin crossword on Saturdays.

I also learned that, often, the most inspiring teachers are those who seem least constrained within rigid rules, syllabuses or teaching methods. The pendulum seems to be swinging too far towards the need to meet fixed minimum standards and away from inspirational and mind-expanding teaching. I worry that the Bill may take it even further in this direction by imposing a degree of rigidity and conformity well beyond the requirement of a common entitlement for all pupils—for example, by imposing a standard curriculum on all schools, by reducing or removing academy freedoms and through the proposed restrictions on required qualifications and payment arrangements for teachers.

The education committee also highlighted a lack of balance between academic and technical or vocational subjects in the current curriculum. Again, the Bill looks as though it may exacerbate this. Skills-based subjects require greater flexibility in the curriculum, in methods of assessment and in the teaching skills and experience required. The committee heard examples of successful schools which pursue different approaches to teaching and learning, such as the XP Trust, whose schools teach the curriculum through expedition-based projects, and the Bohunt Education Trust, which has outdoor learning at the centre of its curriculum. Other similar examples include specialist music and arts schools and, as we have heard, university technical colleges, which provide a more work-focused balance between academic knowledge and marketable, job-related skills. It is a pity that too many schools do not recognise apprenticeships as an equally positive destination as higher education.

I shall be anxious to ensure that the Bill when it leaves this House allows sufficient flexibility for schools to provide relevant knowledge and skills for all pupils—whatever their talents and aspirations—and to attract a wider range of people to become inspiring and memorable teachers, across the curriculum and beyond. Through this Bill, we should aim for a system that is not one-size-fits-all but one that fits all sizes.

13:14

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate on such important topics. I declare my interest as chair of the national Careers & Enterprise Company. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord; I agreed with his comments and those made by all the speakers so far. Unsurprisingly, I will start with Clauses 47 and 50, in relation to academies.

I entirely agree with the sentiments expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and my namesake, the other Baroness Morgan, who exhorted us to remember that we should look for a debate about quality, rigour and standards in our schools. I think we are going to have a good debate in your Lordships’ House. With the expertise here, I hope the House is going to help to improve the Bill and ask the right questions of the Government in relation to both academies and maintained schools.

In my experience, the challenges of maintaining two systems are in relation to both funding and accountability. One of the questions we will explore as part of Clause 50 and school improvement is: if academisation is not the answer in particular situations, then what is? How is school improvement, which has, after all, been the holy grail of Governments over many decades, going to be achieved and who does that most affectively? As the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, has just said, we should want freedoms and for the national curriculum to be a minimum standard, but as, we have also heard, a number of specialist schools feel strongly that the national curriculum is not right for them.

As the Minister said at the beginning, we have the curriculum review at the moment. Former Education Secretaries and Ministers are very good at speculating about what goes on in the classroom. Even better than that, we love talking about what is happening in the curriculum and what should be taught; we all have views on that. We await the forthcoming review with great interest. That will be relevant to the curriculum that we want all our schools to follow.

On specialist schools, I and, I think, a number of noble Lords have been written to by various specialist school providers. One is Aldridge Education, which said in relation to UTCs and studio schools:

“In offering choice, they bring relevance to education for thousands more students than we would otherwise succeed with. It isn’t lowering educational ambition; it is offering breadth and depth in a way that would not otherwise be available to learners in this country”.


I will move on, given the time available.

In relation to schools inspections, I would be very interested to explore the continuing role of the Independent Schools Inspectorate, having had recent experience of it where it completely failed to interrogate properly the governance of a school. Governance is often overlooked when we debate education policy. It is hugely important. I wonder whether its time has perhaps come, whether it is to work ever more closely with Ofsted or even to merge with it, and perhaps we will debate that.

In relation to home education, I really support the provisions in the Bill. Frankly, when we were in government, we should have done more to know exactly which children were home-educated and who had chosen to opt out of the school system. We heard of the tragic case in Norfolk that the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, talked about, and sadly there will be others. Of course, the difficulty with this will be that difficult examples—often some religious schools—mean that the option of reform is not taken when it should be. I really welcome the Government’s proposals.

Finally, in relation to well-being, I am glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, is back in her seat. We worked well together on the Online Safety Act. One of the greatest dangers, as she outlined, to our children’s well-being is undoubtedly the online world and the internet. I remain slightly unconvinced by banning phones in schools—there is guidance available and schools can do it—but I am absolutely willing to listen to the evidence the noble Baroness will bring to this debate. Honestly, if we feel this strongly about it, then we need to ban a lot of apps and smartphones for under-16s—luckily, my son is 17, so I will not be having any opposition at home. One of the great challenges in relation to teachers and safety in the classrooms—and I would be interested to hear other noble Lords’ views on this—is misogyny, much of it fuelled online. That is where the opportunity to limit exposure to phones and what is on them is very important. We are going to have a set of good debates, and I hope the Minister will welcome them.

13:18

[Baroness Longfield (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a huge pleasure to take part in this important debate, and I draw attention to my interests in the register. All of us in this Chamber want the children of our country to succeed, but I think we also know that many will not do so without extra help. If we are in any doubt about that, we should look at what has happened in recent years since and during the pandemic, when it was revealed that systems consistently failed vulnerable children. I have been arguing for decades that we need to have bold reform from the top to the bottom, and we need to close those gaps in systems that have leaned away and continue to lean away from vulnerable children, and put those children at the very centre of our systems, protecting them from harm and boosting their life chances.

This Bill is a commitment and an opportunity to do just that. The measures to improve our safeguarding and education systems are very welcome. I really welcome the conversations we have already started in this Chamber today about the importance of putting children and children’s outcomes at the centre of these debates—not the structures or the systems, which are all means to an end that we need to make work. It has to be about the children’s outcomes.

A good education, of course, is a crucial foundation for all children, but we know that hundreds of thousands of children are missing school, either through poor attendance or because they are being home-schooled through elective home education. I have heard thousands of parents telling me that they feel they and their children are pushed out and ignored by the system. They are left with no other option than to home-educate, despite often not feeling that they are well equipped to do so. We also know that there are children who have been taken out of school deliberately so that the harms they are coming to are not seen. There are children who are not in school and go off the radar, falling into the hands of those who want to groom and exploit them, so I strongly welcome the new register of children in schools and the new powers for local authorities.

I also welcome measures in the Bill that support councils to provide better, improved early support for families and to ensure that public agencies work together better to protect and support children. I know that Members of this House have been talking about that for a long time. With that, early intervention and support for families are very important too. The single unique identifier for children gives an opportunity to see that through. We need to see better investment in early intervention and prevention. That is also critical as part of these reforms.

While the ambitions of the Bill are absolutely clear, there will be things that we all want to discuss and sections we want to strengthen, as we have already heard today. The things that I am keen to talk more about include a greater focus on the early years that would strengthen and drive a move to prevention. The Government’s commitment to universal breakfast clubs is essential and very welcome, but let us capitalise on it and make sure that food in those breakfast clubs is nourishing and healthy, which is especially important given the worsening obesity crisis.

Similarly, I welcome measures to require local authorities to offer family group decision-making. I think we could sharpen up on that and particularly look at increasing the chances of reducing the number of children going into care in this way. I also support calls for the Bill to include measures of well-being to provide a strong evidence base for current and future policies.

Finally, as Children’s Commissioner I called for the removal of reasonable chastisement as a defence for physical punishment, and I continue to support that. The change has happened in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and the world has not fallen in, so it is probably time we caught up. Most of our children are happy and have opportunities to thrive in their childhoods, but a significant number are not. We must be ambitious for those children too. This vital Bill gives us a welcome opportunity to do exactly that.

13:23

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, it is with profound humility and sincere gratitude that I rise to make my maiden speech in your Lordships’ House. Never did I imagine, as a child born in Kashmir to parents from a humble farming background, that I would stand here among your Lordships, not as an observer but as an equal, entrusted with responsibilities to speak up for communities like the ones that raised me.

I arrived in the United Kingdom in 1977 at the age of four with my mother, Khadija Bi, to join our family in Tinsley, Sheffield—a proud community, poor in material wealth but rich in spirit. The contrast could not have been greater: from the clear, ice-cold streams of the valleys of Kashmir to the smoky steel mills of the Lower Don Valley. Yet it was here that I learned resilience, solidarity and the value of opportunity.

My journey here has not followed the traditional path that one might expect of a Member of this House. My father, Mohammed Saddique, grew up working small pieces of land with his siblings. They all lived in a simple, fragile house made of mud, straw, rock and wood. Life was harsh—often, food would consist of a chapatti and a raw onion—while they harvested the wheat by hand in the gruelling, searing midday sun. When the opportunity arose to work in Britain’s steel industry, he grasped it, bringing with him the dreams of a better life for the generations to come.

The steel mills of Sheffield gave my family hope, but their decline in the early 1980s took much of that security away. Like many others, my father lost his job, and like many others, we relied upon the state for support. I grew up receiving free school meals and free clothing from Sheffield City Council, which at the time was led by a very youthful leader. I emphasise the word “youthful” because he was known as David Blunkett. I wonder what happened to him.

Although I excelled at school, particularly in mathematics, family necessities meant that at the age of 16 I entered the world of work through the youth training scheme—or YTS, as it was known—earning £27.50 for a 40-hour week unloading lorries at the Sheffield Co-op superstore in Hillsborough. It was a tough start but not without its blessings. I was supported by my manager, Mr Bryan Richardson, who gave me Wednesdays off—not to go and watch my beloved Sheffield Wednesday but actually to attend Loxley College to do my A-levels. This small act of faith helped secure a place for me at Sheffield University to study business as a mature student. I was the first in my family to go to university.

After graduating, I dedicated myself to youth work in the city of Sheffield, supporting young people like me who needed a second chance. That passion led me to be elected to Sheffield City Council in 2004, followed by a spell in the European Parliament, where I championed young people, women’s rights, human rights and international development. I see my arrival as a mark of this House’s enduring commitment to represent all walks of life and to recognise the importance of lived experiences alongside legal, academic and business expertise.

I have also served as a lay magistrate in Sheffield. I cannot resist sharing with your Lordships a moment from my very first day on the Sheffield bench. I arrived early but was mistakenly directed through the public entrance. I spent an anxious 10 minutes or so mingling unknowingly with defendants who were due to appear before me, before an eagle-eyed receptionist realised the error and swiftly had me escorted to the appropriate floor. I am pleased to report that no such confusion accompanied my first day here in this House, thanks to the exceptional support from Black Rod and her team, the clerks, the doorkeepers, the security staff, the police officers, the catering staff, the wonderful attendants in the Library and my supporters, my noble friends Lady Benjamin and Lord Allan of Hallam.

Turning to the important business before us today— the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill—I wish to speak briefly on the issue of home education. During my time as a youth worker, I worked with many post-16 NEETs: young people not in employment, education or training. I often encountered those who had been educated at home or had suffered disrupted schooling. Without structured support and oversight, these young people can easily slip through the net, falling far behind their peers and missing opportunities that would enable them to thrive.

This is why I welcome the provisions in the Bill for local authorities to maintain contact with home-educated children, not as a heavy-handed intrusion but as a vital safeguard to ensure that no young person is left behind. Supporting young people is not merely a moral imperative, it is a national investment. When we help young person realise their potential, we strengthen the fabric of our society for generations to come.

I owe everything I have achieved to the resilience of my parents, the kindness of strangers who believed in me and the opportunities afforded by this great country. It is now my privilege to give back—to serve your Lordships’ House with the same spirit of duty and hope that has brought me here.

13:30

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, it is truly with joy and pleasure that I follow the speech of my noble friend Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, someone whom I have known for over half a century and whom I am proud to call not just a political colleague but a personal friend. It is not often that the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and I find ourselves in agreement—in fact, it usually signals that something truly extraordinary has happened in Sheffield. So I say to my noble friend, “You have really raised the bar on who you can bring together in your first speech, so I look forward to you solving the Ukraine crisis in your second”.

I met my noble friend back in the early 2000s, when he was standing for what can only be described—I am being generous here—as a no-hope council seat. I was dispatched to give him a bit of morale boosting, which is always a delicate task when you know full well that the poor soul is likely to come a very distant runner-up. Even then, his spark was obvious—his passion, persistence and, most of all, the principles that have stayed with him throughout his remarkable career.

As it turned out, our political journeys have continued in tandem. My noble friend was eventually elected as a councillor for Broomhill—the same ward I represented. He later served as a vital member of my cabinet in Sheffield and, if we are claiming for political sides the university technical college of Sheffield, I am pleased to say that that was during our administration. When he was in my cabinet, he was always driven by a fierce commitment to tackling inequality, and was endlessly constructive and an immensely valued colleague.

My noble friend’s journey from unloading lorries for £27.50 a week to his youth work—I point out with a sense of irony that we now have within your Lordships’ House our own resident youth worker, who I am sure we can use at our disposal if we require his diversionary tactics and services—to representing Yorkshire in the European Parliament, and now to these red Benches, reminds us of the very best of Britain: a country where opportunity, public service and determination can take someone from the YTS scheme to the House of Lords.

If there were ever a voice needed in this Chamber to speak for youth, fairness and equal opportunity with that no-nonsense, straight-talking Sheffield spirit, it is his. I, for one, am really glad that he now sits behind me, or rather beside me—

[Noble Lords]

Oh!

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

I am used to having him behind me, heckling, but now he sits beside me in your Lordships’ House. I wish him well in his endeavours and I am sure he will add to our work here in this Parliament.

Turning to the Bill, I want to talk about the provisions that address the issue of illegal, unregistered schools. A liberal society can and must accommodate a wide range of educational settings, including independent schools and properly regulated home education as well as, of course, state schools. However, in accommodating such education, the wishes of parents and religious groups need to be balanced against the rights of the child. I therefore broadly welcome the measures within the Bill that are aimed at ensuring that all children can have their right to a broad education, adequately protected.

Although no precise figures are known for the number of children currently in unregistered schools, the former chief inspector of Ofsted, Amanda Spielman, estimated it was likely to be in the “tens of thousands”. She described conditions in some that

“you wouldn’t want to put a dog in, let alone a child”.

Earlier this year, a report from the Jewish Policy Research Institute found that over 6,600 children in ultra-orthodox Jewish communities were not attending registered schools, suggesting that many are being sent to unregistered faith schools, which represents the same pattern in other religious faith groups. These are concerning figures, given the repeated findings that many unregistered religious schools fail to deliver tuition in subjects outside religious instruction, denying students skills vital to a successful and fulfilling life, with some pupils even left unable to write English. Moreover, the existence of unregistered schools poses a significant safeguarding risk. Evidence has documented children being taught in deplorable conditions, alongside instances of physical and sexual abuse and an alarming absence of safeguarding procedures.

The kind of religious education offered in these settings typically lacks a broad and balanced perspective on a range of beliefs. Instead, it tends to indoctrinate children and young people with a narrow religious worldview. These limited perspectives undermine the ability of pupils to engage with communities outside those in which they are being educated—an important aspect of life in modern Britain. I take this opportunity to acknowledge the work of the National Secular Society—I refer to my interests in the register—which was one of the first organisations to raise awareness of the plight of pupils languishing in such unregistered schools.

Every child, irrespective of their parents’ religious outlook, deserves access to a safe and nurturing learning environment that fosters critical thinking and respect for a diverse set of beliefs. Every child, regardless of their background, should have their independent right to a safe, broad and balanced education respected.

Finally, I note that the Bill removes the existing presumption that a new school will automatically be an academy. This change means that new faith-based schools will not necessarily be subject to the 50% cap that limits religious selection in newly established, faith-based free schools’ admissions arrangements—a measure introduced to promote diversity, inclusion and fairness. It is my sincere hope that this House will ensure that a Bill intended to eliminate barriers to educational opportunities does not inadvertently create new barriers in the form of more faith schools applying 100% religious selection. Such an outcome would undermine equality and freedoms, and the choice of families within communities that do not share the same religious beliefs as the school.

13:37

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, on his excellent and inspiring maiden speech, and I greatly look forward to that from the noble Lord, Lord Biggar. As ever, I declare my interest as a teacher in an academy in Hackney. I am an unpaid trustee of the Elephant Group education charity, a kinship carer of twin 13 year-olds and a parent of two teenagers. I am also a hereditary Peer and this could well be my last major piece of legislation in your Lordships’ House. So, as you might say, I am quite invested in this Bill.

What a Bill it is: 137 pages, 67 clauses and four minutes to talk about it. As everyone has said, it is a Bill of two halves. On well-being, there are many things to like—the Bill needs a lot of amendments, but basically there is a lot to like. Sadly, it misses out on the ending of the defence of reasonable punishment—what better place to put that in than a Bill that talks about children’s well-being? The evidence from Wales is pretty conclusive on that one.

However, if we are to describe the “schools” part as a curate’s egg, if I were the curate, I would just eat the toast. Head teachers should be the best people to make decisions about their schools, whether they are academies or maintained. The Bill does not deal with the lack of respect of parents for schools. It decreases innovation. It takes away the autonomy and entrepreneurial spirit that has made the outstanding academies flourish, such as the UTCs already mentioned, which provide practical technical education alongside industry to get students into skilled work.

At the school where I teach, Mossbourne Community Academy, students can choose public speaking, film and media, and yoga among other mainstream subjects. How are these trailblazing schools going to continue to innovate if they have to follow slavishly the rigid and, dare I say it, rather uninspiring national curriculum? I know that charities such as Tender are worried about the lack of a national PSHE strategy, and we wait to see what the review has to say about that.

On school uniform, the noble Lord, Lord Addington, will be pleased to know that, in our school, you can buy an almost-new blazer for a tenner that could potentially last a child their entire school career. The average mark-up on school uniforms is 7%, according to the Schoolwear Association. If the school uniform cap is to be on sports kit as well, then a school sports shirt will be considerably cheaper than a Premiership football shirt and will not have to be changed once a year or need to have an away shirt as well. I taught a 14 year-old girl who was pregnant, and you would never have known she was because of the blazer. Children, especially girls, change shape throughout their school time, something that a blazer hides very effectively. School uniforms can also be used, as we have heard recently, instead of suits for children to go to university interviews, thereby driving up social mobility.

We are going to be very busy in Committee, and I am afraid noble Lords have not heard the last of me.

13:41

[Lord Layard (Lab)]

My Lords, children’s well-being is referenced in the title of this Bill, and so it should be. Obviously, children’s well-being matters, but it is also the best predictor of how happy the child will be in their subsequent life, predicting it far better than the qualifications which they obtain. However, the only outcome of education which we measure is those qualifications—and, of course, what you measure becomes what you treasure. Exam results have become the only touchstone of a school’s success, which is a catastrophe. There is only one way to change this, and that is to measure well-being as well, to put something else into the balance.

That is what happens in many countries. It happens in the Netherlands and in South Australia, and in England it now happens in Manchester, as has been mentioned, and in Hampshire. The system is quite simple, and I think it is what we need. The Government design the questionnaire and hold it on a central platform. If a school wants to participate, it arranges once a year for the students in the school to complete the questionnaire, which takes about 20 minutes. The results are analysed centrally, and the findings are sent back from the centre to the school. From this, the school gets vital information about how well it is doing on progressing the well-being of its students. It is left up to the school how it uses its information. Participation in the survey is voluntary for both the school and the individual, and the individual responses are totally confidential to the individual.

This is a change which could transform what happens in our schools. It would give them the incentive to do more for the well-being of their children, and the justification, which most of them want, for paying more attention to it. There is no conflict between doing more for well-being and improving academic performance. All the evidence shows that extra time devoted to life skills improves not only well-being but academic performance—or certainly does it no harm. Our children are subject now to all kinds of new pressures, and their mental health has demonstrably suffered, so we have to do something about well-being. That is the reason why a cross-party group of us will be moving an amendment to state that the Government should introduce a measurement system of the type that I have been describing. It might be said, and it is true, that it is already possible for a school or schools to measure well-being—it happens in Manchester, However, it is a huge effort to make it happen, and if we want this to become the norm, we have to make it as easy as possible. That is what we owe our children, and that is what the system that I have described would do.

Finally, I turn to our greatest educational failure, which is how we treat people after school who do not go to university. One-third of our young people get no education or training beyond the age of 17. It is really shocking. The number of apprenticeships for young people has more than halved in the past 10 years. To rectify this, the Government need to take on for these young people the same obligation that they take on for young people wanting to go to university; namely, ensuring that there are enough places for qualified applicants. In 2009, the apprenticeship Act put that obligation on the statute book. It was repealed by the coalition Government, and I believe it should be reinstated in this Bill.

13:45

[Lord Biggar (Con) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I begin with the customary round of thanks, which I give with my whole heart. Black Rod, the doorkeepers and all the administrative and service staff I have encountered in this House have been extraordinarily helpful and patient. Mr Thomas there just brought me a glass of water without me asking for it, and I thank him very much. I thank my noble friend Lord Griffiths of Fforestfach and the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, who are long-term mentors of mine, who introduced me to this House at the end of January. I hope that, in due course, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, will forgive me for having chosen to sit on the Conservative Benches.

When I tell the House that I am a retired professor of Christian ethics, I imagine some of your Lordships may mutter to yourselves, “That’s nice, but what’s he doing here?” If so, I would sympathise since I think that intellectuals, especially from the arts and humanities, are best kept well clear of politics, since we tend to suffer grievously from the virus of wishful thinking. Being conservative, however, I have long sought to educate my moral ideals with reality.

In 1998, the year of the Belfast or Good Friday agreement, I ran a conference in Oxford under the title, “Burying the Past After Civil Conflict”. At the beginning of the conference, I started to talk without embarrassment about healing and reconciliation until up stood Ulrike Poppe, twice imprisoned by the communist authorities of East Germany because of her political dissidence, who said, “I now live on the same street as the man who informed on me. I didn’t know him then and I certainly don’t want to know him now. So, what exactly do you mean by healing and reconciliation?” I look forward to being further educated by the vast array of practical experience that this House, being unelected, contains.

In recent years, I have been preoccupied with colonial history for political reasons. As an Anglo-Scot, I had a dog in the fight that was the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence and, although an instinctive opponent, I felt morally obliged to consider nationalist arguments. One argument I came across was this: Britain equals Empire equals evil; therefore, the Scots should decolonise, disintegrate the UK, and sail off into a bright, new, shiny, sin-free future. But having read British imperial history for nigh on 20 years, I knew that the equation “Empire equals evil” is not historically or morally tenable. I call in aid two facts. First, the British Empire spent the second half of its life suppressing slavery from Brazil to New Zealand. Secondly, from May 1940 for 12 months, the Empire offered the genocidally racist Nazi regime in Berlin the only military opposition, with the sole exception of Greece. Empire cannot be identified with evil.

None the less, 45% of Scots voted to disintegrate the UK in 2014, which, according to our representative at the UN, would have delighted the Kremlin and damaged the international standing of this country much more than Brexit ever could. And the 45% voted in spite of being told by the London Treasury that they would each be £500 the poorer for it. If Lord Stupid were a Member of this House—which of course he is not—I would say to him, “No, my noble Lord, Lord Stupid, it’s not just the economy; it’s also the story”. The national story is politically potent, and a false story is politically destructive.

That brings me, very briefly, to Clause 47 of the Bill we are considering. Teachers’ unions are clamouring for decolonisation to be embedded in the curriculum, and decolonisation involves the story that 400 years of Britain’s global imperial engagement was nothing but a litany of racism and slavery. If the curriculum were to be decolonised and if the state were to impose that curriculum on academies, academies could no longer serve as centres of intellectual diversity and dissidence. The national story matters politically and having liberal schools that are free to challenge dominant ideologies and to tell the whole story—not just the lamentable failures and wrongs but also the heroic achievements of our country—is important too, and I hope the Government will agree.

13:51

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, what a privilege and a pleasure to follow two such outstanding maiden speeches, one from my former Euro colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, and one from my former college chaplain, the noble Lord, Lord Biggar. Even 35 years ago, as an undergraduate and prey to the slight self-absorption that we have when we are teenagers, I was able to recognise the qualities that will so enrich our counsels here—his humility, his intellectual curiosity and above all that generosity of spirit, that largeness of soul that makes him consider other arguments and other people on their own merits.

It was not obvious that he had such intellectual diversity and future controversy inside him. I remember when I first came across him, he looked like any other scruffy academic—he read the Guardian, had a short little beard and dressed like every other academic—and I would have been surprised had I been told then that out of him was going to come this extraordinary ethical balance sheet of colonialism. I think it surprised a lot of his colleagues too, and because he brought to bear that empiricism and that calm curiosity, which should be valued, above all in academic settings, it triggered, as sadly these things do in our rather deranged culture war, a very negative reaction. His book was initially denied a publisher and then it was howled down by people who plainly had not read it when all he was doing was trying to be balanced, in a way that I am sure he will in all our debates here.

The reason why he does this, and the reason why he can be so indifferent to public opinion, is that he has a genuine faith in something bigger than public opinion. Not everyone has the gift of religious faith, but all of us, I hope, can at least exercise the self-respect that allows us to be honest and true to ourselves in difficult times.

I sincerely thank all the former Secretaries of State for education, not just for having been Secretaries of State but—on both sides—for having presided over a rise in standards that, until recently, would have been unimaginable. I think that happened for reasons hinted at by my noble friend Lady Morris: it was the beginning of diversity and freedom in education that allowed people to pilot new ideas to trial new schemes, and that raised standards across the board. She is quite right to say it was not just in academies; it was happening in maintained schools as well. One could make a case that this was the single greatest achievement of the last Labour Government in terms of the impact it had on people’s lives. A measure of its merit is that the new Government adopted it and claimed it as their own. People talk about Cameron and Gove reforms when they were really reforms pioneered by some of the Members opposite—and they worked.

We heard at the beginning from my noble friend Lord Effingham a measure of how they worked, because the reforms in England drove English schools up according to PISA and indeed all the other measures—there are two or three international measures of academic success—but there was a control in that experiment. In Scotland and in Wales there were no such reforms, and those schools more or less stayed where they were or slightly drifted down in those academic rankings. I hope that, by applying a bit of empiricism, we can all agree that those were successful reforms, and, from what Ministers have been saying today and in previous debates, they do not want to undo the successful parts of them.

The specific issue I want to raise—this point was flagged up by my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking—is the future of the 44 university technical colleges. They are the schools that are set up by local businesses and universities to fill identified skills gaps. They have an extraordinary success rate by any definition; 86% of them are rated good or excellent by Ofsted. There is demand for more of them: new ones are planned in Southampton and, I think, Doncaster, because there is local demand for them.

It is not always appreciated that, because these schools start typically with kids of 13 or 14, by a lot of the academic measures at that age those kids are not at the top of their cohort—a lot of secondary schools really fight to hang on to the kids who are going to push up their standards—and children who have perhaps not done well, sitting in rows and having a classroom-based education, suddenly come into their own. What is extraordinary about these schools is not that they turn out great engineers, which you would kind of expect, but how much better those children then start performing in their English A-levels and the like, because they are responding to a different kind of teaching. They are being treated as if they were already in the workplace, divided into groups and set tasks, and they flourish. It is not for everyone, but they flourish.

That is the real point about the diversity that comes from the freedom to apply the curriculum flexibly or to derogate from parts of it. I think people sometimes have the idea that these technical schools are teaching lots of metalwork. Yes, they do, but they are also teaching 3D printing, advanced electronics, procurement and logistics, and the only way they can fit all that into the school day is by not having as much of that day taken up with modern languages, history, music and so on. There are plenty of other options for children who want a humanities-based education, and I hope we can retain a measure of diversity.

I was encouraged to hear the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, say we should be prepared to amend the Bill to put these things beyond doubt, as has happened on the question of teachers’ pay and some of the other scare stories about the Bill. I was privileged once to spend a day at something that is not quite a UTC but is almost the same thing: the JCB Academy in Rocester. It is housed in one of Richard Arkwright’s earliest mills, and as the children come in they walk past one of his turbines, which has now been repurposed to be a turbine once again.

Arkwright and the other men who made the Industrial Revolution were not academic kids. Almost all of them dropped out of education in their early or mid-teens because they wanted to get into the workshop and start tinkering. Where is the next Richard Arkwright or Matthew Boulton? For goodness’ sake, let us make sure that they are capable of getting the kind of education that will help them and will help our employers and our economy.

13:58

[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, I draw noble Lords’ attention to my entry in the register of interests: I am president of the LGA, chair of Sport Wales, chair of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards and a trustee of the Foundation of Light. I thank ALLFIE, the Alliance for Inclusive Education, for its briefing and for its commitment to improving education for disabled children.

The Bill before us presents a valuable opportunity to enhance the well-being of our children and ensure that no child falls through the gaps—sadly, too many do. However, there are many missed opportunities in the Bill and an ongoing failure to address deep-rooted barriers for disabled children. If the Government are serious about getting disabled people into work, education is a key part of that. In 2024, 55% of children cited school failings as a reason for starting home-schooling. It works for many but should not be a last resort due to incorrect provision or used in a way that further segregates disabled children.

The National Audit Office has revealed that funding for SEND support has risen by 58% over the past decade to £10.7 billion. It is not sustainable and needs urgent reform. In the same report, published in October 2024, the NAO called for education to become more inclusive.

Parents have to be experts in every part of their disabled child’s life. I was lucky. I was in mainstream junior school when I became paralysed and my parents used the work of Baroness Warnock and, citing my right to be educated in the best environment for me, threatened to sue the Secretary of State for Wales over my right to go to mainstream school. It was a long, protracted battle. My parents won and I received an amazing education, but my life would be very different now if it were not for my parents.

What has changed in the last four decades? Not enough. Parents of disabled children are still fighting, and I receive numerous emails about disabled children not receiving the education they need. One parent wrote to me this week and said that the provision they are being offered is not even physically accessible for their child, would exclude their child from the beginning of their education and will negatively impact them for the rest of their lives. I will forward the details to the Minister.

Schools currently have little incentive to support disabled pupils, and there is little lived experience in the system. I spoke to a teacher who became a wheelchair user. I was told they knew they had kept their job only because they had been at the school a long time and knew the law. This is not acceptable. They provide a positive role model for all. The Government should commit to including more disabled people while employing more teachers in the system. The Bill does not recognise the systemic ableism of things such as off-rolling, school excursions and the unmet needs that push children out of school.

I welcome breakfast clubs but they must be accessible to disabled children, both physically and by ensuring that transport arrangements enable them to get there. Feeding children is so important, but the social connections matter too.

There are other gaps in the Bill, and I look forward to hearing from the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, later. We need a fit and healthy nation and need to think about physical activity in a different way throughout the whole school day. Physical literacy and its measurement should be an integral part of the day. There is so much research on the benefit of activity on learning outcomes and well-being if taught well. Sport England found that a child who is active is happier, more resilient and more trusting of others, yet in 2023-24 over 41,000 fewer hours of PE were taught in schools than nearly a decade ago. We need to establish a more holistic approach to improving the health and well-being of our children.

Tess Howard, the GB hockey player, has done amazing work on the uniforms that children wear to school and how they can increase engagement for girls. The Government should consider consulting her.

In Wales we are lucky that we have the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act—a lens we can use to assess the impact of all legislation on our children. Is it not time that we consider that as well? I look forward to Committee.

14:02

[Lord Harris of Peckham (Con)]

I thank the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, for his kind words, but it is not about me. It is because of our principals, teachers, support staff and children that we are so successful. We have many academy groups that really do well and get fantastic results such as good GCSE results. They are run well because they have the freedom to run schools how they should be run.

Since 26 November, five months ago, we have had 11 schools rated outstanding; four more might be outstanding, but the rule is now that if you are good you cannot become outstanding until the inspectors come back a second time; and two schools were rated good. On Friday this week we got another outstanding, which I cannot mention, and yesterday we had another outstanding—so the record is pretty good, with over 85% of our schools rated outstanding. We are grateful to all our staff and what they do.

I would like to talk about one school. I come from Peckham, which has a school that in 75 years has never been rated outstanding. It takes in the bottom 3% of the country. On the last inspection, four weeks ago, it was awarded outstanding by Ofsted. The inspectors said:

“The education provided by this school is transformational for many of its pupils … A large proportion of pupils join after Year 7, with many coming from overseas … Despite this, pupils go on to achieve consistently above national averages by the end of Year 11”.


This is because it can move the curriculum around. If somebody comes from abroad and cannot speak English, there is no point trying to teach them other subjects. That is one thing we should look at. I hope we look at it to see that we do not stick to a standard for every school.

We have taken over quite a lot of failing schools. Why are we giving them another two years? They have probably been failing for a couple of years and will have another two years of failing. We took over a primary school in Croydon that had failed for five years under the state system and five years under another academy group. It was taken off that group and we got it, and within two years and two terms it was turned into an outstanding school. We are changing the lives of so many children, so why do we need to wait for failing schools to get another two years to try to improve when we have good academy groups that can take them over and improve them quickly?

We talk about untrained teachers. Some 190 unqualified teachers a year start with us, and within a year 95% of them are qualified. They do not work only for our academies; they go to other academies all over the country. We want to continue doing this. Good teachers help pupils to get good results.

I hear that many state secondary schools are level with academies. Of course they are, because they are left with only 25% or 26% of schools, as against the nearly 80% that are academies. The only ways you can get an academy are as either a free school or a failing school. But now we are coming up level and we need more of these failing schools to become academies so that we can give children a better education. This is about giving children a better education, a better chance in life and a better opportunity.

Quite a lot of primary schools are failing. We have 23, and 21 of them are outstanding now. Why do we have to wait two years for children at a failing primary school, at that young age, to go to a proper school, such as an academy? There is not only our group; there are lots of very good groups in the country. Why do we have to wait two years? We should not; we should get on and make sure that every child has a good education.

I am pleased that the Government said they would put more money into education, but the new NI Act is costing us, as an academy group, £1.5 million. We have to find the funding for £1.5 million more; they are not giving us the same amount of funding. Of the 2.8% pay rise for teachers, they are funding only 1.3%. It will be difficult to find this money—not only for our schools but for every school in the country.

We have to look at what is happening and make sure we do better. We have to make sure the Government look at these things; I am sure they will. I am someone who wants to work together to give children the best education possible, because I believe that a child gets only one chance of a good education. All of us here want to give them that chance, and we can make it happen.

14:08

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome this Bill as an important beginning to remedying a number of long-standing problems in childcare and the safeguarding of children, the operation of home-schooling, the registration of illegal schools and the strengthening of Ofsted’s powers in this area. The failure of the previous Government to tackle these issues and their decision to withdraw legislation that would at least have made a start is disappointing.

I do not propose to cover today the second part of the Bill concerning academies and how they compare with local authority schools in the way that they are run, but I will say that local authorities should be able to establish new maintained schools where they can make a well-argued case, particularly on demographic grounds. They are in a position to assess this and to identify appropriate sites where new schools can be established. In some areas where the population is declining, they may need to merge schools to create a new institution where falling rolls have made existing schools unviable. Such decisions are for local authorities.

I turn to Part 1 of the Bill. The fact that many children in care suffer terribly is a scar on our society. As the Minister set out, children in care are likely to have the worst outcomes in terms of educational performance, mental health, being sexually abused and committing crimes. Serious underfunding and the lack of coherent national structures to support them properly have contributed to their neglect. It is horrifying that the number of children in care has increased by 28% since 2010 and it reflects badly on the Opposition when they were in Government. Better prevention is urgent to stop this figure increasing. I therefore welcome the Bill’s aim to keep families together while ensuring children are safe, for example through statutory family group decision-making, as well as a statutory requirement to run multiagency child protection teams.

Whether the Bill goes far enough in providing support for families before the problems escalate out of control for them is doubtful. The provision of family hubs or centres is regarded by many experts as the most effective approach. These hubs have become vulnerable because of the funding crisis in local government, leading authorities to focus on their statutory obligations. I ask the Minister whether the Government might strengthen the Bill by including a special duty on local authorities to provide family centre support, accessible to all families that need it. Such a legal duty must, of course, be accompanied by enough targeted funding to create a national network, instead of the current postcode lottery.

Another concern is just how deprived young people are who have been in the care system when they leave it. Recent figures show that almost 40% are not in education, training or employment between the ages of 19 and 21, as other speakers have mentioned. This is three times more than in the age group as a whole. Around half of them have mental health problems, and around a third become homeless within two years of leaving care.

The Bill goes some way to addressing their problems by, for example, disapplying the “intentionally homeless” classification, extending the duties of local authorities in relation to “staying close” support and publishing information about the services for care leavers, which of course is vital. The Education Select Committee was right in its recent report to recommend a national offer of support and the replacement of the current patchwork system. Would the Minister tell the House whether the Bill might be amended to include this? Could she also comment on what, if any, approaches have been made to the higher and further education sectors on the admission of care leavers to universities and colleges, and what additional help they could provide to improve the retention of such students by helping them to cope with the extra demands of studying at this level?

14:13

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, when I was in the other place, I went round a primary school in Andover whose catchment area was from the less well-off part of the town. The year 1 teacher had been there for 20 years, and she was also a local JP. She told me that, within a few weeks of the beginning of term, she could tell which children were likely to end up in trouble. There are many other primary school teachers like her. So early intervention for children who need support is crucial. That brings me to SEND. The current system is failing too many children, too many parents and too many other children in the class. One statistic makes the case. Councils won just 1.3% of appeals in 2023-24. So, to underpin what is in the Bill, we will need a comprehensive SEND reform plan to give the children who need the support the support when they need it, without all the current delays.

Because of some of the problems with SEND, many families are home-educating. Along with the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Garden, I sit on the Social Mobility Policy Select Committee. Last week, we heard from witnesses that, within the cohort of children educated at home, there are a few for whom it was not an active choice but a decision of last resort—in many cases as a result of bullying, and sometimes after encouragement to deregister. Some of those children may then fall through the various safety nets, so I agree with my noble friend Lady Morgan of Cotes that we need to make sure that we look after those children through this Bill.

On that subject, Clause 30 requires local authorities’ consent for certain children—mainly those who have protection concerns—to be withdrawn from school. I am vice-chairman of the APPG on young carers, and there is concern that some young carers are being withdrawn from school to increase their caring responsibilities at home. That means that they could have even more responsibility foisted on them, and also cuts them off from the support that they would get through the school. An amendment to that bit of the Bill might be needed.

I will say a quick word on fostering. A long time ago, my wife and I were registered foster parents. I welcome what is in the Bill, and what was in the Spring Statement, on fostering. The MacAlister review, which has already been referred to, describes foster carers as the

“bedrock of the social care system”.

However, in the last five years we have lost over 5,000 foster carers, and more than 5,000 extra children are in care. Living with a family, as opposed to being in a children’s home, can provide a child with a more stable environment as they grow up. It also does so at a quarter of the cost. Can the Minister say what is being done to encourage more foster carers to come forward and to address the long delays in the assessment process?

On smartphones, along with other noble Lords, I joined a webinar hosted by Policy Exchange, in which we listened to Damian McBeath, the principal of the John Wallis Academy. He had tried what many schools have tried: a ban on the use of phones during lessons, with progressive penalties for breach. He said that had simply not worked, with one-third of lessons continuing to be disrupted by smartphones. Therefore, 18 months ago, the school went smartphone-free. Truancy was reduced; attendance increased; there were fewer instances of bullying, both in and out of school, which dropped by 80%; children were politer to each other and to their teachers; and teacher well-being improved. Children even started playing chess during the lunch hour. So we need a serious debate about smartphones, led by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron.

The Minister has difficult choices to make. The universities are in trouble as overseas students fall away. Primary and secondary have unfunded pay increases, even before the pay review. So I end where I started: all the evidence I have seen shows that investment in early years—under-five provision, children’s centres, family hubs and Sure Start—has the greatest return, not just for the child but for society as a whole. I hope the Government will safeguard that investment.

14:18

[The Lord Bishop of Derby]

My Lords, I welcome this Bill and the Government’s commitment to improve children’s lives and their outcomes. My faith teaches me that, in this work, we echo Jesus’s commitment to place children at the heart of God’s transforming work—

“of such is the kingdom of God”.

As Nelson Mandela said:

“There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children”.


I declare an interest as the chair of the board of trustees of the Children’s Society. I register my support for the calls for better data sharing to protect children, including with and from faith communities. As we await publication of the child poverty strategy, I commend provisions to reduce the cost of school uniforms and to expand the availability of sustainable, healthy and accessible free school breakfasts.

Poverty is a primary factor in the well-being of children. I am pleased to hear that the noble Lord, Lord Bird, who cannot be in his place today, will be tabling an amendment seeking to introduce a new clause to place a new duty on the Government to set targets for the reduction of child poverty.

I add my voice in support of the Our Wellbeing, Our Voice coalition in its calls for the establishment of a national well-being measurement programme to offer demonstrably, evidenced-based data to shape and track holistic interventions to improve childhood well-being. We know that schools across England are already engaged in excellent anti-poverty, anti-racist and anti-neglect work, for example. As we have heard, some are already benefitting from collecting and monitoring well-being data to inform their interventions. I trust we can agree that there is value in equipping schools with a comprehensive picture of the well-being of their students. I seek reassurance from the Minister that this recommendation will be reviewed.

I welcome the intention of the Bill to cap profits for children’s homes providers and independent fostering agencies. I ask that this oversight be extended to the secure estate, such as secure schools and children’s homes, so that their profit does not replace the best interests of some of our most vulnerable children.

I commend the intention of my right reverend friend the Bishop of Lincoln, who cannot be in his place today, to support the Traveller Movement’s proposal to mandate the reporting and recording of racist incidents in school settings and any subsequent actions taken.

I suggest that children themselves are best placed to advise us of the challenges they face and of what would make life better. I conclude with the words of a care-experienced young person, as quoted in the Love Matters report from the Archbishops’ Commission on Families and Households, published in 2023. They said:

“Give us the right support and help us to help others and we will surprise you and help you do better for children and young people”.

14:22

[Lord Hill of Oareford (Con)]

My Lords, 15 years ago, almost to the day, I had the privilege of standing at that Dispatch Box to introduce the then Academies Bill. I thought it might be helpful, as we think about this new Bill and what it will mean for academies in future, to set out what we were trying to achieve back in 2010.

First, and very much our starting point, we aimed to build on the foundations laid by the previous Government. We could not have been clearer at the time about the debt we owed to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and to many other noble Lords we have heard about today, reaching all the way back in the apostolic succession to my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking. Secondly, we were trying to extend professional independence and give schools more freedom to run their affairs as they thought best. Thirdly, we were seeking to increase parental choice.

For at least 20 years, successive Governments have sought to defend and extend academy freedoms—freedoms that were entrenched in what were supposed to be legally binding funding agreements. By contrast, this Bill breaks that consensus. It sets out explicitly to reduce academy freedoms and professional independence, with less freedom over the hiring of staff, the curriculum and the expansion of popular schools.

That begs the question: why? What is the reason for this change of direction? Have some problems arisen from academy freedoms which the Government, quite properly, need to fix? For example, has the ability of academies to take on non-QTS teachers led to a drop in standards? Has the freedom for academies not to have to follow the national curriculum led to worse results? Have popular academies which chose to increase their numbers let down their pupils in some way? If they had, I feel sure that the Government would have told us. Perhaps I missed it, but I have not seen any explanation of the problems that these measures seek to address. Until we hear a convincing explanation of what the problems were and how removing these freedoms will put them right, doubt will remain as to what the motivation for these changes really is.

After all, whom do they benefit? They certainly do not benefit head teachers of academies or parents. They do not seem to benefit teachers in academies, and I cannot see how they benefit children. I can see only one group that will be pleased by these changes, and that is the unions—and there, perhaps, we find some of the rationale for these changes.

Surely we all agree that the only way to get lasting improvement in any public service is to increase professional independence. But this Bill deliberately sets out to reduce professional independence. Through the constraints on the expansion of popular schools, it will reduce parental choice. It breaks the consensus that many people in this House worked so hard and carefully to build up. After all the progress that we have made in schools in England over the past 20 years, this Bill, sadly, points us not forward but backward.

14:26

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as deputy chair of governors at King’s College London Maths School, which is a high-achieving 16 to 19 academy. We are very grateful to this Government and previous Governments for their support, and we are aware that the school’s existence, and that of other university maths schools, was made possible by academy freedoms.

In that context, while welcoming much of this Bill, I echo concerns raised by other noble Lords about reducing these freedoms. Academies’ funding agreements already give the Secretary of State major powers, so I do not really understand why, for example, the Secretary of State needs major new statutory powers to intervene just because they are satisfied that the proprietor of an academy is “likely” to breach a relevant duty at some unspecified time in the future. I hope very much that we will return to this in depth in Committee and get some clearer understanding of why these powers are being introduced.

My main concern is the Bill’s emphasis on ensuring that teachers are all qualified—which of course does not in any way refer to their mastery of their subject but only to whether they have a teaching qualification. The vast majority of teachers, including in academies, as the noble Lord, Lord Harris, pointed out, and in the independent sector, do have teaching qualifications, and these play a very useful role in preparing people to teach effectively in many contexts. However, I have spent a large part of my life working on skills and vocational education, and I am concerned that this direction of travel is misguided and potentially harmful for vocational and technical subjects. These are, obviously enough, best taught by professionals with first-hand knowledge of their occupation and extensive practical experience. Over decades, I have seen many professionals, craftspeople and experienced practitioners inspire young people and teach them effectively, not only by giving them particular skills but by transforming their attitude to learning and to their futures.

Some people like that will, in mid-life, switch to full-time teaching and do a teaching qualification, typically in further education, but many will teach part-time and for a short period, and we need more of these people. Moreover, the more the labour market demands their skills, the harder and harder it becomes for schools or colleges to hire expert practitioners, and the more important it becomes to find ways of encouraging them to do some teaching and not place barriers between them and our classrooms.

This is not, as the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, reminded us, a Chamber full of people who believe that all education should involve highly academic, non-practical subjects—indeed, rather the opposite. I know that many noble Lords will have memories, as I do, of past educational reforms that set out to make more varied technical options available in schools. All too often these failed and were undermined because of a total lack of expert staff. Drafting in qualified sports teachers to teach leisure and tourism, or qualified biology teachers to deliver engineering, is not where we should be, but all too often it is where we have ended up.

Fourteen years ago, I published a review of vocational education for the Government. At that point, under the Education Act 2002, schools could bring in experts. However, one of my recommendations was that the Government should:

“Clarify and evaluate rules relating to the teaching of vocational content … Many schools believe that it is impossible to bring professionals in to demonstrate … even part of a course without requiring the presence of additional, salaried teaching staff”.


This was not true, but, sadly, many schools thought it was. In recent decades, academy freedoms have made far more schools aware of their freedoms. I really worry that we are pushing in the wrong direction on this one and that we will come to regret it.

14:31

[Lord Nash (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as the chair of Future Academies. I strongly support the child protection measures in the first part of the Bill, and I commend the Government for bringing them forward. The addition to this part that I would like to see is a ban on social media before the age of 16—no measure could enhance our children’s well-being more than this.

I support the measures in Part 2 on home education, but I have one major concern. Ten to 15 years ago, there were probably 20,000 to 30,000 children being home educated, many by parents perfectly capable of doing so—the so-called home education lobby. These are not the children or parents I am concerned about. There are now probably up to another 100,000 children apparently being educated at home, many of whom are not receiving any suitable education, or any education at all, and some of whom are involved in gangs and crime. Particularly for children not known to social services, how is the local authority to know that they are not receiving a suitable education without a right of inspection?

I am sure LAs would not use this power very often—many would not be staffed to do so—but I think they should have it. If an LA was, for instance, to sample 100 children and find that the vast majority were not receiving a suitable education, it would throw the whole issue into higher profile. While Sara Sharif had previously been under a CPP, she does not appear to have been so at the time of moving into home education.

On the part of the Bill on schools, it seems most odd that the Labour Party, having invented the academy movement—albeit building on the CTC reforms introduced by my noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking—now seems intent on dismantling it, despite the obvious success of the academy and MAT movement in the substantial increase in the performance of our schools. Rather, the Labour Party should be taking the credit which it deserves; it was a brilliant piece of innovation. Why is it determined to deny future children the benefits that the academy freedoms have brought? There are quite a few failing schools that are academies, but then 82% of secondary children attend academies and MATs have taken on many failing schools, often quite recently. It can take many years to turn some of these schools around.

I am quite sure that the RISE teams will be ineffective. It is obvious from past attempts to bring consultants in to turn around schools that they just do not work. They have no skin in the game, they are temporary and they have no direct real authority—the complete opposite to a MAT.

I am concerned about the clauses taking micromanaging powers to the centre, which I do not think are necessary, the overriding of funding agreements, which are contracts—never a good look for a Government—the ability for LAs to change hands and, of course, the sledgehammer Henry VIII clause. From this, coupled with the weak academisation intervention powers the Government are now adopting, it is pretty clear that, if the Government pass this legislation, they are setting themselves up for endless litigation and judicial reviews. Good luck with that.

The Government have rushed out this legislation on schools without any material consultation directly with teachers and school leaders, from whom I sense no desire for it. I remember our Prime Minister saying outside No. 10 that he was going to tread lightly on our lives. Well, this part of the Bill is not going to tread lightly on the lives of working people in academies, who are already substantially disturbed by having to balance their budgets, and I strongly believe it is going to work against the interests of children and parents. The Government would be well advised to scrap it and start again.

If not, there will clearly be many amendments to the Bill, put forward in the spirit, I am sure, of a genuine attempt to improve it. When I took the Children and Families Act through your Lordships’ House, we made over 170 amendments, including many I accepted from those now on the Government Benches. I hope the Government will take a similar constructive approach.

14:36

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly and positively about good home education. I disagree with some of the assumptions that the noble Lord, Lord Nash, has just made about the majority of people being home educated, and I will come to that in a moment.

I absolutely understand and—like all other noble Lords—support the Government’s ambition to protect children and deal with the very real problems of non-attendance, disappeared or abused children, and children at risk. However, these laudable intentions as presented in the Bill will risk damaging the education of thousands of children who are currently receiving good home education.

There are two distinct populations here: those children at risk who need protection and those who are being lovingly cared for and educated by their parents, whose efforts deserve support. The Bill treats both groups in the same way. Several parents in the second group said to me, “We are already too often treated with suspicion, as though we are criminals, even before the provisions in the Bill are introduced”.

More than 110,000 children are being home educated, of which about 60% have special needs. Many are diagnosed or non-diagnosed autistic or have learning disabilities or difficulties. More than half the increase in recent years is of children who have been enrolled in schools which have failed them. It is these children I am particularly concerned with. Their parents have acted in their children’s best interests, often at great personal cost, emotionally, time-wise and financially, and many are on benefits. They provide education themselves but also use online resources, joint sessions with other children and support from museums and other institutions which run programmes for home-educated children.

The Bill, however, puts many obstacles in their way. A register may be a useful tool in tackling risk, but my concern is with the detail of the register. Its requirements for information are intrusive and unnecessary and create bureaucracy for authorities as well as parents, and all changes must be reported within 15 days.

There are also some other unintended consequences of the Bill. Similar demands for information are being put on any organisation or person providing activities deemed to be educational, so organisations such as Cubs and Brownies and sports clubs, for example, which provide elements of education, may stop taking home-educated children because of these sorts of demands.

Education is not defined in the Bill, nor is leisure time. A great deal of this is left to the discretion of education authorities as the sole arbiters of these and other matters, including, most importantly, what is in the best interests of a child. There is plenty of evidence from the past that some, though not all, authorities have been very heavy handed and sometimes directly hostile to parents who are home educating, treating them with deep suspicion.

Home-educating parents need to know what they can expect from authorities in support, and I will be tabling amendments—some of them very simple—to address some of the detail of the register and to redress the balance by proposing a code of practice for authorities on what they should be doing to support home education.

There are very many good schools, but there are also too many which are overwhelmed and fail the most vulnerable children. With time and improvement and resources, they may be able to offer the sort of flexibility and personalised approach that many of these children need. In the meantime, we need to offer the sort of positive, effective home education which in many cases is delivering what the schools cannot. Many are in effect helping authorities with their responsibilities for special educational needs provision in a system that is failing. We need to recognise that many parents are doing a very good job and playing a very good role in doing this. There are two distinct populations here, and we need to create appropriate legislative frameworks to deal with them both differently.

14:40

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this Bill. It reminds me of that Frank Sinatra song about New York—so good they named it twice. The Bill has in effect been named twice, because it contains two very good and distinct parts, which merit being Bills in their own right. There are so many elements that I want to comment on, but through lack of time will not be able do more than namecheck some of them.

Keeping families together and making children safe should not even need stating as aims, but, sadly, of course, they do. Multi-agency protection teams will help to avoid children falling between the cracks in terms of the support that they require, but there needs to be clarity as to the difference between children in need and child protection.

The Bill has much to say that is positive on children in care, leaving care and kinship care. It has less to say on the value of fostering and nothing at all to say on adoption, which I do not understand. Children in foster care should have the same support to the age of 25 as those in residential care, but the Bill does not provide that. I believe it should.

Proposals for regulating unregistered children’s homes are most welcome—in fact, we might ask why there are such things as unregistered children’s homes at all—as is the provision for the excessive profits of private children’s homes to be capped.

Moving on to schools, I welcome enshrining in law the benefits of universal, free school breakfasts. However, there needs to be a guarantee that these can be effectively reached and support the most vulnerable pupils, including those with special educational needs and disabilities, for whom access to a nutritious start to the day can be life-changing.

On many occasions in your Lordships’ House, I have advocated a register of children not in school. Fundamentally, this is a safeguarding issue and it is one that Conservative Ministers, whom I faced at the Dispatch Box, consistently supported—I cite the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Barran and Lady Berridge; I cannot remember whether the noble Lord, Lord Nash, did or not, but I am sure he does from what he said—but nothing happened, and it has been left to a Labour Government to take it forward.

The clauses on academies have caused much frothing at the mouth on the Benches opposite. Of course, I understand that Tories want to defend their record on education, but that record is patchy. A Lords Library briefing reported in 2023 that data from Ofsted

“does not show that schools in MATs have better ratings than other types of school … On academic results the picture is mixed ... The percentage of pupils achieving the expected standard in reading, writing and maths was, on the whole, slightly higher in maintained schools than in MATs”.

I am concerned about the opposition to Clause 46 on the requirement for qualified teacher status. When I take my car to the garage for its MoT or go for dinner in a restaurant or go to the dentist with toothache, I do not expect to be treated by an enthusiastic amateur. While I respect the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, and accept what she said, parents do not expect, when they send their children to school, that they will be taught by anyone other than a professional.

Guidance on developing a whole-school approach to mental health and wellbeing was introduced in 2015 and that guidance was updated six years later. But it lacks the statutory backing needed to make it effective, and I hope the Government will consider introducing an amendment that will provide for that.

Finally, I regret that the Bill has nothing to say on the inequality of selection. The 11-plus has been abolished in most parts of the UK for over 50 years, yet it is still inflicted on more than 100,000 10 year-olds in England each year, three quarters of whom are branded failures at that age, with predictable effects on their self-esteem, mental health and perhaps also their life chances. I am not calling for the banning of grammar schools, but they should certainly be banned from selecting their pupils.

I have no time to speak about inclusive school assemblies, UTCs or retaining the 50% cap on new faith schools, inter alia—pace the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare. I look forward to Committee, which will certainly be interesting and, I hope, productive.

14:45

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, at speaker 32, it is already quite challenging to find something new to say, and my sympathy goes out to the speakers towards the end of this debate. I am sure we will be tolerant if they find themselves repeating something that has already been said.

I very much welcome the maiden speeches today of my noble friend Lord Mohammed and the noble Lord, Lord Biggar. They will both bring great talents and skills to this House, and we look forward very much to hearing them speak in future. I have to say that in the heady days of the coalition Government, I was the education Whip to the noble Lords, Lord Hill, Lord Nash and Lord Agnew. I am delighted to see that I did not manage to put them all off education entirely, and to see them back speaking on this Bill.

A Bill calling itself “Children’s Wellbeing” should surely merit the support of all of us, but there are elements in the Bill which the Government have included which are going to be contentious. I mention to start with, in Clause 4, the consistent identifier. I thought that this was proposed many, many years ago. The simplest solution obviously seemed to be the NHS number, which is given to every child at their birth, which would follow them to school and enable local authorities to be mindful of children who disappeared off their radar. The lack of a consistent identifier across services impedes joined-up and responsive support. It makes it much harder to match records and share information confidently and safeguard children who are in touch with multiple services. It is possible that migrant or asylum or Traveller children may not have that number, but they jolly well should do, because they will have as much need as anyone else of healthcare and education to give them a better start in life than they had at the beginning.

My noble friends will be talking about different areas where we have concerns, but I raise the issue of the national pay rules, which will be extended to academies, many of which have different pay and conditions. We argue strongly that teachers in further education colleges should have at least as good pay and conditions as those in schools. FE teachers have demanding schedules and wide-ranging responsibilities. For too long, they have been underpaid and, indeed, overlooked, as they appear to be in this Bill.

We would like to see stronger partnerships between colleges and schools, because many 14 to 16 year-olds move to colleges if they find that schools do not meet their needs and their choice of study is better catered for in colleges. Some have been excluded from schools, some are home-educated but find colleges can enhance their homeschooling, and there are any number of those with special educational needs and disabilities and those who have become disengaged from mainstream education who find their way to college.

FE has always welcomed practitioners. I entirely endorse the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, in saying that the shortage of practitioners of practical subjects means that insisting that they have a teaching qualification will be incredibly negative. It will make recruitment even more difficult in subjects where we really need those skills to be taught—subjects which will be of benefit to the economy. What steps will the Government take to improve pay and conditions for further education staff? Can the Minister assure us that FE staff will not have to have a teaching qualification if there is a shortage in their specialist subject and there is a great need for their skills?

My noble friends will talk more about home education, breakfast clubs and school uniforms. Like the curate’s egg, these provisions are good in parts.

However, it is difficult to have this debate without the curriculum review. Our House of Lords committee in the last Session found that the current curriculum was not fit for purpose: it did not prepare young people for life and work and state schools had often given up music, dance and drama—the creative arts—which are great contributors to the economy as well as great factors in children’s well-being. What is being done to provide all children with the possibility of excelling at something, especially those for whom the academic curriculum is challenging and a constant source of failure?

This is a wide-ranging Bill. With all the expertise in the debate today and in your Lordships’ House, I am sure we will give it a thorough going over and I hope that it leaves us in better shape, because our children deserve no less.

14:49

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my interests in the register, in particular as the founder and chairman of an academy trust with 11,000 children and 18 schools.

In the short time I have available, I will focus on one specific area in the schools Bill. In Part 1, I broadly agree with the move to improve scrutiny of home education—it has become a very worrying issue. Many parents, clearly unable to educate their children, are taking them out of school and we cannot do anything about it. The Government are to be commended on their action, and we will no doubt get into the details as the Bill progresses.

However, if unaltered, the schools part of the Bill will plunge the English education system back into the badlands of 20 years ago, before the previous Labour Government had the courage to begin the reforms that we had built on. I will focus on one area: the watering down of academisation of failing schools. The proposals introduce ambiguity on whether a failing school should be academised. This will present a “get of jail” card for the incompetent management of those schools. Organisations rot from the head down: schools do not fail because of the teachers but because of the people who manage them. Having taken on at least nine failing schools in the last 12 years, I can say, very simply, that the academy trust I founded employs hundreds of teachers who today do a magnificent job under good leadership. Previously, those schools were failing children on an industrial scale.

In defence of this retreat, the line trotted out by the Government is the marvellous new concept of RISE teams: 65 people brandishing clipboards who will run around the country offering advice. If only the Government would listen to those who have tried this before, they would save time, money and, most importantly, not repeat something that has failed comprehensively in the past.

Under my stewardship in the DfE, we had a national leaders of education programme—does that not sound wonderful? RISE teams are just a reheated version. NLEs did not work because there is no line of accountability for the failing school to act on the advice they are given. More often than not, implementing the advice will require strong leadership, such as changing staff structures or bringing budgets into balance.

Do not just take my word for it. In 1998, the last Labour Government did something similar: the beacon schools initiative. The names get ever better, do they not? In that case, the laudable aim was to get high-performing schools to share best practice to raise standards. It was abandoned in August 2005 because there was a lack of clear evidence that the initiative improved weaker schools. My question to the Minister is: what has changed 20 years on? Certainly, human nature has not changed. If weak managers can avoid a reckoning through procrastination without penalty, that is what they will do. It is the Damoclean sword of consequences that will drive change in failing schools.

It is important to say that I do not tolerate failing academies either. Many will know; they had interviews without coffee with me when I was the Minister. The current Government have not addressed this. They have not even seen fit to appoint an Academies Minister, despite them now educating over 80% of secondary children and 40% of primary children.

Addressing failure does not need legislation but just a spotlight on such failures and strong calls for accountability. In my home county of Norfolk, at least two academy trusts have just received financial bailouts from the DfE which should have come with a requirement for mergers or a clear-out of that failing management. That has not happened. This is where the Government’s energy should be directed.

I fear that, as we go through this Bill, a theme we will come across often is that the Government are in essence condemning children to a failed education. It seems they are not prepared to allow the hard edge of intervention to sweep out mediocrity and failure. Those children get only one chance, and we are about to imperil that chance for tens of thousands suffering in badly run schools.

As we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Harris, the Government are simply introducing a two-year delay. Of course, most of those failing schools are in areas of deprivation, so the communities that the Government claim on their Benches to represent will be the ones thrown under the bus, under a senseless ideology. Unless the Government start to listen, I expect this Bill to face a stormy passage as we pit ideology against the interests of children.

14:53

[Baroness Cass (CB)]

My Lords, I am pleased to take part in this important debate. I draw attention to my interests set out in the register.

In bringing forward this Bill, the Government should be commended on their many laudable objectives in strengthening the safeguarding of children, removing barriers to opportunities in schools and improving the safety of the education system. However, any legislation addressing the subject of safeguarding children, and opportunity and safety in schools, cannot ignore the impact of digital technology on the lives of children and young people. Safety and opportunity—and, indeed, risk—have to be seen in relation to the contemporary world of 2025 and not the world as it was well over a decade ago.

We all appreciate the many benefits that the online world can bring to children and young people, so we do not need to rehearse those here. However, a visit to the NSPCC website provides a helpful listing of harms that children can suffer. It expands beyond the four classic categories of abuse to list 13 types of abuse. Most of these, including cyberbullying, emotional abuse, sexual abuse and exploitation, and grooming can be carried out online and even during school hours. It is not, however, just deliberate harm that should concern us; that is just the tip of the iceberg. There are multiple other risks associated with digital technology that have been discussed in this House, including adverse effects on learning, attention, sleep, educational attainment and mental health. Addictive apps are a particular problem, especially for boys.

My noble friend Lady Kidron and I recently hosted a meeting which brought together Peers with clinicians and academics in the field of child health. Among them were senior leaders within the medical community. The group was clear that we cannot wait for the evidence to give us all the answers about the adverse effects of digital technology and how to mitigate them. The evidence we already have, coupled with the views of young people, parents and teachers, is powerful enough that it would be negligent not to start taking action. The strong sense in the room was that this is a public health emergency. We need to learn through action, studying the approaches that are most impactful in harnessing technology for benefit while protecting vulnerable developing minds.

This is not just an issue of whether we ban smartphones in schools. There is a wide array of possible actions that can be part of a strategic, multifaceted approach to the problem. For example, RSE is compulsory in schools, yet there is no requirement to teach young people how to manage the digital technology that occupies so many hours of their lives, nor indeed to include appropriate training for the staff who are teaching our infants or older children. There is insufficient consideration of the impact of loss of safe play spaces, which would give children alternative recreational activities to spending time on their digital devices. There is no focus on providing education and advice to parents on how to manage access to technology so that they can facilitate their children’s learning and development.

I very much hope that the Government will be receptive to a range of amendments that will address these deficits in the Bill, and thus gift our children with a safer and healthier future. Without such measures, we are looking at losing a generation to poor mental health and at even more young adults being unable to contribute to the workforce. This is not just a moral problem but an economic timebomb that we can ill afford.

14:58

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure and an honour to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, who has done so much, of course, for the rights and well-being of children in her work.

It will probably not surprise colleagues to hear that I do not think that this is a good Bill. As other noble Lords have said, it is shot through with the spirit of “the state knows best”, of state control, of seeing education as a vehicle for indoctrination and children almost as the ward of state rather than as the property of their parents. The centralisation that the Bill is going to bring in will squeeze out good performance in schools and undo the progress that has been made over the past 20 years.

However, others have said that, and I do not want to dwell on it. I want to spend a moment or two speaking about the provisions in the Bill for home education, which are in Clauses 32 to 35. These are represented as pragmatic changes to the current set-up, but actually they are not; they are going to be a major change to the current home-education arrangements and a big change in practice to what happens currently under the 1996 Act.

The core provision in the Bill is a register for children who are being educated at home—so far, so good—but there is much more to this register than the word suggests. Those educating at home will have to provide a vast amount of very detailed data about their children, set out in great depth in the Bill. To add to that, new Section 436B(3), to be inserted by this Bill, says that the register

“may also contain any other information the local authority considers appropriate”.

In other words, there is no real limit to it. It also requires data on “education providers”—which is very widely defined as anybody who provides any sort of teaching to children—to be submitted to the local authority. Here, we see some of the hostility to anybody teaching privately that we have come across in other situations as well. This is going to make a huge change.

I did not home-educate my own children, but I have come across a lot of home-educating parents in the last few months. Some do so by choice, some because their local schools are failing, some because their children have special needs, and some because their children simply cannot deal with the environment that the local schools provide. It is right that home-educating parents should be able to look to their local authority for support. Often, they do not get it, and come close to being harassed by local authorities that are completely out of sympathy with home education. I wonder what the problem is here. In 2023, only 1.4% of home-educated children got a school attendance order. In the same year, 10% of state schools were considered by Ofsted to be inadequate or requiring improvement. Where is the actual problem in the system?

Home education is a vital safety valve in a system that will become more and more state controlled as a result of the Bill. It is a safety valve for those who cannot afford the increased fees for private education. It is the last area where there is an element of experimentation and freedom in the system. I hope the Government will consider whether it really is necessary to bring in these huge changes. There is a risk it will be regulated to death. If that happens, it will be parents and children who are the losers.

15:02

[Baroness Wilcox of Newport (Lab)]

I declare that I am a vice-president of the LGA.

My 35 years as a teacher, working in such diverse areas as south London and south Wales, give me a little insight into this subject. Despite the differences in the demographics of London and Wales, there is a golden thread that runs through that experience. Teachers arrive at school every day to do the best for the pupils in their care, and children and young people, on the whole, want to learn and enjoy their school experience. We saw how that was profoundly impacted by the pandemic, and the road to recovery continues.

The Bill brings important changes that this Labour Government want to provide for our children and young people. I am pleased that the Government are acting on a long-standing call by the LGA for councils to have and maintain children not in school registers, something we almost achieved in opposition during the passage of the now abandoned Schools Bill.

Unique identifiers for children are a very welcome step, facilitating better information sharing and, most importantly, adding to the security and safety of the child. It is positive that, within the responsibilities of corporate parenting, there is now a legal undertaking for local authorities to collaborate with each other when performing their corporate parenting duty. An important further addition is that councils will have greater powers to direct school admissions, and failing council-maintained schools will not automatically become academies.

The Bill will legislate to allow councils to open schools again and make academies follow reformed national teacher pay scales and conditions—a long overdue reform of the Academies Act 2010. Furthermore, the Bill amends that Act so that, as well as being “balanced and broadly based”, an academy’s curriculum must include the national curriculum, and this is intended to apply to the revised curriculum following the conclusion of the current review.

An important safeguarding measure is that parents will lose their automatic right to home-educate if their child is subject to a child protection investigation or plan, and councils will get powers to require school attendance if they find a child’s home environment unsuitable or unsafe. The Bill will make sure that teachers and schools are always involved in decisions around safeguarding children in their area. It is often in the school environment where issues are picked up first. Teachers have much insight of and provide much care to the pupils in their charge, but they have not always been included or considered in such decisions.

While education and social care policy and decisions are devolved in Wales, children’s welfare, safeguarding and protecting children’s rights are a key focus of the work of the Welsh Government. It is therefore appropriate that discussions have already taken place regarding the areas that could apply to the children and young people of Wales. The Bill strengthens existing UK legislation relating to child protection, children not in school and children’s social care in both countries. This will benefit from additional measures and will support local authorities and partners to meet their safeguarding duties. The Welsh Government have asked that certain provisions within the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill be applied to Wales in the same way as England. The areas that will currently apply include children in secure accommodation, the extension of the offence of ill treatment of a child by a care worker to cover 16 and 17 year-olds, and children not in school. I believe that other areas may be included at a later stage.

In conclusion, this is an innovative Bill, allowing for the scrutiny that is the hallmark of this Chamber, but I hope it gets on the statute book sooner rather than later. We owe it to children and young people in every part of our nations and regions.

15:06

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the Government for introducing what I hope will leave this House as an improved example of vital legislation for children. Every generation owes it to the next to give them better life chances than were experienced by their parents. Nowhere is this more important than in the area of special educational needs legislation and provision. I applaud the excellent speech made earlier in this debate on that issue by the noble Lord, Lord Addington.

When she was opening this debate, the Minister cited some excellent reports that have appeared in recent times. I am about to add an additional report that was launched last week in this building by the Michael Sieff Foundation, with which I have worked for a number of years, on issues related to children’s justice. The launch was attended by two government Ministers.

The report seeks to show how to provide the best life for children with SEND and neurodivergence issues which, in many cases, bring them in front of the criminal justice system. In England and Wales, 80% of children cautioned or sentenced within the youth justice system are from the SEND cohort. That is a shocking figure, and it is carefully measured. Children with neuro-disabilities enter custody at higher rates, from an earlier age, receive longer custodial sentences, are associated with higher rates of reoffending, commit more violent crimes as adults, and spend many more years in prison. That can be resolved by attending to those children’s needs in the education system earlier in their life and keeping them out of criminal justice activity.

Each year, more than 100,000 children under 18 have encounters with the criminal justice system. Some of those encounters scar them for life, because the criminal justice system, try as it does, is not always very good at dealing with children due to a lack of training and of understanding of the issues that are being dealt with. The proportion of children remanded in custody is at a record high. The number of sentenced children in custody is now mercifully low, but a ridiculous number remain in custody on remand and then do not receive custodial sentences when they are finally dealt with.

Almost all children in the criminal justice system have special educational needs and/or neurodivergence. It exacerbates challenges in communication and social interaction and makes it very difficult for them to lead a good life when they leave custody. One of the issues is that information is so poorly shared. I did a report when Michael Gove—the noble Lord, Lord Gove, as he is about to be—was Secretary of State for Education on the Edlington case. The details do not matter, but what was revealed to me during the preparation of that report was that the communication between statutory agencies for children with special educational needs and home difficulties was almost non-existent.

I hope to table amendments in an effort to persuade the Government to incorporate some of the forms which are proposed in the CIF report if legislation is needed as part of the Bill. The provision in schools for children’s well-being generally must include avoiding involvement in the criminal justice system. We owe it to children to somehow persuade them that living by the rule of law is a component of a full and rewarding life.

15:11

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, the party opposite claims that education was transformed during its period in office and that this Bill will undo many of the gains made. In the short time I have available, I would like to set some of the record straight. During that period I was general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and, from 2017, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, which represents 500,000 members—teachers, leaders and support staff—who, as many Members in this House have affirmed, are the professionals who teach and support our children and young people, and I commend their work today.

Under the party opposite, there was the scandal of “the forgotten third”—the third of all 16 year-olds who failed to get a grade 4 at GCSE English and maths. Under the party opposite, they were denied the help and support they so desperately needed in order to take their place as productive members of society. They were condemned to endless resits of GCSE English and maths, with very low pass rates, unable to get an apprenticeship or to access other routes into training and learning to turn their fortunes around. The party opposite left the most deprived young people stranded. As the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said recently, there are now 750,000 youngsters under 25 who are permanently unemployed. That is a disgrace, and it happened on the watch of the party opposite.

Money talks. Figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that, from 2010 to 2020, spending per pupil in England fell by 9% in real terms. That had huge consequences for the education that schools were able to provide and was compounded by a huge rise in child poverty. But, shamefully, schools serving deprived communities saw the biggest fall in funding of all schools, of 14%. The party opposite professes to care for the most disadvantaged, but in practice during this period it reduced the amount of support needed by the most vulnerable children and young people.

Then there is the party opposite’s apparent alarm at the measure contained in this Bill that all children and young people, whichever school they attend, should follow a broad and balanced national curriculum. The current curriculum in England’s schools is one of the narrowest in the OECD, both pre 16 and post 16. Since 2010, there has been a dramatic and worrying decline in the numbers of pupils studying arts subjects—a 73% decline in GCSE entries for design and technology, 45% for drama and 41% for music. That is why this Bill’s provision of a broad and balanced curriculum for all pupils is absolutely necessary. It is their entitlement. “Broad and balanced” does not mean an overstuffed curriculum; it should, and I am sure will, allow for specialism and appropriate choice. This is a wholly welcome measure.

Then there is the teacher supply problem, which has become a crisis confected by the party opposite. I am chair of the University College London teaching commission looking at this issue. It is shameful that the most deprived children, who most need to be taught by qualified teachers, are the most likely to be taught by teachers who are not qualified in the subject they are teaching—temporary and unqualified teachers. That is why it is so important that all who teach in our schools have, or are working towards, qualified teacher status. This is a social justice issue.

For the party opposite, which reduced spending in schools in such a savage way in real terms over a decade, to support unfilled places throughout the country in order for academies to determine their pupil intake is, frankly, unbelievable. How much more taxpayers’ money would be needed to support this wasteful idea? Surely this is a prime example of an ideology that supports structures, not standards.

The Bill is ambitious. It is positive for all our children and young people. It is proportionate and necessary. I fully support it and commend it to the House.

15:15

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, the Bill contains a first step, possible underreach, possible overreach and, I think, a bonus.

Clause 11 is a good first step as it brings about 1,000 vulnerable young people who are deprived of their liberty under the inherent jurisdiction of the courts into a statutory framework. High Court DoLS, as they are referred to, have developed when there is no secure children’s home place under Section 25 of the Children Act, or that is not an appropriate placement for them. However, that section will still refer to only looked-after children and the report by the Children’s Commissioner on this vulnerable group makes it clear that it is not only looked-after children who are under this regime. Could the Minister clarify whether the inherent jurisdiction will still have to be used for those children? Before statutory instruments are laid, can we have some more details about the definition of “relevant accommodation”?

On the underreach, it seems that under Clause 32 a preliminary school attendance order can be made only when a child is under a Section 47 Children Act inquiry, not for a child in need or a child protection plan. It is my understanding that Sara Sharif was actually a child in need, so could we actually have bizarre underreach in that we have not covered the main mischief, the main sad case, under these provisions?

The overreach, as noble Lords have said, is in relation to special educational needs and disabilities. For many of those parents, this is not elective home education; it is sadly withdrawing your children when mainstream education has failed. I implore the Minister to have another go at stakeholder engagement with the many groups. There are fears, founded or unfounded, of local authorities coming through your front door and asking you probing questions about your curriculum and how you are educating your children. It is important to recognise that this is a very different environment for education. I make the comparison with Ofsted, which is left with some of the smallest independent schools that are often small belief systems; it has developed particular expertise to inspect those schools while keeping engagement with the parents and school leaders. It seems that that is going to be required of many local authority employees, and it is a difficult task to get right.

At this moment, I sidestep to agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, about whether the day has come for ISI. It is clearly a historical accident. Imagine if your BUPA private hospital could join an association that then gave it access to its own inspection regime. We would all be worried if our healthcare were not all inspected by the CQC. I hope we will come back to this matter in Committee.

The bonus is, I think, for those with children with complex needs. Clause 30 says you need local authority consent to remove your child from, basically, special schools. Section 61 of the Children and Families Act 2014 contains the acronym EOTAS, meaning “education other than at school”. That is not elective home education; it is where the local authority has responsibility to provide education outside school. Surely, if the local authority has consented to you removing your child from a special school, it is much more likely now that you are going to pass the test that school is an inappropriate venue for the education of your child, and therefore you will be able to have the EOTAS regime for your child with complex needs.

I greatly respect DfE officials and I hope the Minister will give parents a bonus and quash the rumours that officials are pressing local authorities not to grant EOTAS as it is saying that children can be educated at home rather than in an institution. I hope she will give that bonus to those parents today.

15:19

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I rise in the middle of a long, important and well-informed debate. I first felt it was getting to the heart of what this Bill really should be about with the contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. He showed appropriate preparedness to accept responsibility for the state of childhood in the UK today, with many children being failed by expulsion, off-rolling and schools that in no way meet their needs, suppress their energy and enthusiasm and fail to value their talents.

We are so keen on league tables, but why are we not focusing every day on the fact that the UK is ranked lowest in Europe in children’s well-being? That reflects the poverty, poor housing and poor food that so many children are forced to survive—the kind of systemic obstacles the Minister referred to in her introduction. I am very keen to see the Government doing a lot more about that—see the two-child benefit cap—but I am also sad to say that it reflects the very structure, nature and direction of our schools.

The two parts of this Bill, sadly, are working against each other. Schools are damaging well-being, and that is not how it should be.

I stress that I am blaming not teachers—who are forced to turn their classrooms into exam factories and their corridors into battlegrounds, suppressing all the natural inclinations of young people—but the directions from the centre, from successive Governments in Westminster who have seized control from local authorities, removing local democratic control, and enforced their own ideas and those of commercially linked giant academy chains.

I will focus briefly on one school, Southchurch High School in Southend-on-Sea. It has just brought in so-called silent transitions, where being caught saying a word to a friend or exclaiming in anger during the changeover between lessons will result in a one-hour detention. One parent of a neurodivergent child shared how impossible it would be for his son to cope with the rule, reflecting points raised by the noble Lord, Lord Addington. Parents are horrified—500 people have signed a petition, and the local Labour council cabinet member has expressed concern—but schools are not under local democratic control, as the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, highlighted. All parents can do is vote with their feet by walking away with their children, as so many parents I have met have been forced to do.

The final part of my speech will be in the form of a list of issues to which we Greens expect to return in Committee, reflecting some of the issues raised by our honourable friends in the other place and adding a few more.

First, my noble friend Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb, who cannot be here today, will deal with the grave concerns that many home-educating parents have about the Bill, drawing on her personal experience.

I will put a particular focus—building on work I did on the Domestic Abuse Bill when very new to this House—on extending to children in England the same protection from assault that children in Scotland and Wales have enjoyed, the so-called smacking ban that is surely long overdue.

Reflecting my membership of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary Accommodation, I will call for a duty on local authorities to notify their schools and GPs about the circumstances of children so placed.

We Greens may find common cause with the Liberal Democrats in an effort to extend free school lunches to all primary school children.

I will support a number of noble Lords who have already indicated plans to table an amendment to introduce a national programme to regularly measure and report on the mental health and well-being of children and young people in schools.

I will seek to establish a right to nature for children, something to help both their well-being and their education.

My final point is something new. Soon after I came into your Lordships’ House, I was horrified to learn that there was still Afro hair discrimination in our society and our schools. You would think it was illegal under the Equality Act, and it should be, but hair texture is not explicitly named as a protected characteristic. Pupils are still being told in school that their hair is “too big”. What does it do to a child to be so labelled? That is one example of the way in which echoes of the genocidal, ecocidal British Empire continue in the attitudes that too many young people encounter in our schools today. Getting free of that imperial past, and so many inherited Victorian-era ideas about how schools should be, is central to building a healthy future for our children.

15:24

[Lord Lemos (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my interest: from 2018 to 2025 I was the lead non-executive director of His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service, which includes the Youth Custody Service.

I welcome the Bill for its important ambitions on children’s social care, in particular to improve the supply and quality of accommodation for children under deprivation of liberty orders. The number of children under these orders has more than doubled in five years. In 2024, 1,280 children were subject to deprivation of liberty orders, either because they are a risk to others or because others are a risk to them—principally the risk of grooming and exploitation. These children are all over the country, they are equally boys and girls, and 90% of them are over 15 years old.

All these children are well known to local authority children’s services, and often to criminal justice and mental health services. Many have moved more than 10 times while in care. They have faced trauma, violence, crime, sexual exploitation, parental neglect, rejection, abandonment and criminal exploitation. There are many other problems: county lines, gang affiliation, substance misuse and, inevitably, long periods out of school. It is a familiar litany but is without a familiar solution. A quarter of them have physical disabilities or neurodiverse needs and, unsurprisingly, many now have severe and lasting mental health problems, including persistent self-harm and attempting suicide. The deprivation, adversity and poor prospects that these children face are a deep scar on our society’s commitment to children’s well-being and opportunities.

As the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, said, once the court makes an order, the accommodation can be of poor quality, unregulated and privately provided. Children are moved all over the country, and unscrupulous actors are involved in this lucrative business. A shortage of accommodation means they can name their price, creating considerable financial strain for local authority children’s services. They offer little therapy or education, despite the judge’s order and the undertakings they have given to the judge.

Local authority children’s services inevitably struggle to maintain adequate provision with highly trained staff for a small number of children with very complex and multiple needs. The Bill proposes regional collaboration and procurement, but I fear this may not be enough to increase good-quality accommodation along with the education and support that children need. In Clause 10, surely the Bill needs to set out a national commissioning strategy for accommodation for this group. I also urge the Minister to encourage the larger of the children’s charities to do more in the provision of this accommodation to reduce reliance on the dysfunctional and broken private market.

I endorse entirely the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, about children in the criminal justice system. The 500 or so children in youth offending institutions have very similar histories and problems to the children I have described. The Bill should recognise this overlap. Will my noble friend the Minister consider amendments to Clause 11 to ensure that provision for young offenders is also included in a new national commissioning strategy? Prison is no place for children.

15:28

[Lord Fink (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my entry in the register of interests, especially as a director of Ark and Ark Schools.

I find this Bill a bit like the curate’s egg, as it has been described already—very good only in parts, sadly. The clue to my views on the Bill is in its name: the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill. Wherever it genuinely deals with the short-term and long-term well-being of children, I support it. I regret to say, though, that in several areas it seems to try to reduce the freedoms offered to academies and free schools, which today make up over 80% of secondary schools as well as a large number of primary schools. Truthfully, I believe that some of these curtailments are absolutely not in the best interests of children, hence I will support amendments in these areas.

As my noble friend Lord Hill of Oareford said, a number of provisions in the Bill destructively strike at the absolute heart of the wonderful academy movement, which throughout the last 20 years has, in general, delivered improved outcomes and innovation and raised aspiration across communities that had long been underserved by our education system. Indeed, 20 years ago, when I began my journey into schools, I discovered that a disadvantaged young person in a poor inner-city school had a greater chance of ending up in a young offender institution than going to university. That is shocking.

I praise the academy movement’s origins, begun by Tony Blair and the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, and accelerated by Michael Gove and David Cameron in coalition with the Liberal Democrats. I believe it actually had cross-party support. It was the freedoms offered to academies, together with the passion and dedication of philanthropic sponsors—several of whom are here in this Chamber—many inspirational head teachers, committed governors and, we should remember, hard-working professional teachers, that led to this improvement.

To be clear, I do not support freedoms if they allow students to be let down, and I do support transparency and accountability. But this Bill as it stands does not strengthen our system, as the Minister espouses; it centralises it, homogenises it and risks extinguishing the very freedoms that made academies and vast parts of our school system so successful over the last 20 years. The Minister supports innovation. When did centralisation ever lead to innovation?

I could refer to many clauses, such as Clause 56, which gives local authorities the power to challenge the reduction of pupil numbers at successful schools. Why would you want to stop successful schools growing, or even shrink them? I could also reference Clause 41, for example, which will require all academies to follow the national curriculum. Some of my noble friends have dealt with specific reasons why that is not always a good idea. I would also reference the many excellent academies, especially the early ones focused on the failing schools, where most of the disadvantaged students now have a decent chance of getting to a good university. We are really starting to see the educational gap closing for the most disadvantaged students in many areas.

In my view, academies have probably done more for social mobility than any other single government policy over the last 25 years, and it was initiated by new Labour for the sake of our children. Why would the Minister want to challenge good schools accepting as many children as possible? Why would the Government want to undo the amazing investment made by so many philanthropic founders and delivered by the incredible hard work of school principals, governors, teachers, students, support staff and parents? We must not let political short-term theatre dismantle the long-term cross-party progress that has been made in education policy over the last 20 years.

Children only get one chance in education, as has been said before. The price of getting it wrong or delaying the change by two years really harms a cohort of children. So the Government should think again about many of these restrictive ideological measures. I will be following them closely.

15:32

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I welcome what the Secretary of State has described as

“child-centred legislation through and through”,—[Official Report, Commons, 8/1/25; col. 854.]

brought by a “truly child-centred Government”. The emphasis has been on the Bill’s contribution to the opportunity mission, but the well-being framing points also to the importance of action to improve children’s childhoods—children as beings as well as “becomings”. An holistic measure of child well-being could play a valuable role here.

The Bill promises to remove barriers to opportunities in schools through action on free breakfast clubs and school uniforms. There may be some debate on the details—for example, around the number of branded items permitted, whether breakfast clubs could be more flexible and why there is no action on free lunches—but broadly, these measures have been widely applauded in the context of the shocking level and depth of child poverty. Evidence from charities and teachers underlines how educational opportunity is stunted by hardship and hunger, which also damage children’s well-being. But as Action for Children and others emphasise, these measures can represent only a minor element in the much-anticipated child poverty strategy, which has to address family incomes directly, including investment in our tattered social security system, starting with abolition of the two-child limit and benefit cap, which are key drivers of the increase in child poverty.

What is disappointing is that this child-centred legislation makes no mention of children’s rights. My noble friend the Minister acknowledged, earlier this year, that

“we must consider children’s rights in all our policy-making”.—[Official Report, 27/1/25; col. 9.]

However, unlike in Wales, Scotland and Jersey, here, there is no general legal duty to do so, even though we have ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Organisations such as the Children’s Rights Alliance for England have argued that this matters because failing explicitly and systematically to consider children’s rights—including at the earlier stage of policy-making—means that laws and policies are not always developed with children’s unique needs and best interests in mind. Their voices are all too often not heard in policy-making and implementation processes.

As an aside, a children’s rights perspective also supports the case for equal protection for children from physical assault, where, again, we lag behind other nations. It reminds us that a concern for children’s well-being must include all children in the UK, including migrants and those seeking asylum.

I agree with the Children’s Rights Alliance for England that this child-centred Bill presents an invaluable opportunity genuinely to embed consideration of children’s rights into law and policy-making processes. While that would ideally be done through direct incorporation of the UN convention into UK law, as is the case in Scotland, significant steps could be taken in this Bill by following the examples of Wales and Jersey.

Therefore, I will table two amendments in Committee that will place a duty on Ministers to consider children’s rights when exercising their functions. They will be required to prepare and publish a children’s rights impact assessment of all relevant policies, legislation and decisions. These amendments have the support of over 100 organisations, which believe that the time is ripe for us to follow the lead of the devolved nations. They would strengthen the Bill by underpinning its ambition to promote children’s well-being and by adding teeth to the aim of

“child-centred action across Departments”,—[Official Report, Commons, 8/1/25; col. 854.]

which the Secretary of State for Education heralded as part of a mission-led Government. If we believe that children’s rights, as codified in the UN convention, are crucial to child-centred government, we must ask: if we do not legislate for them now, then when?

15:36

[Baroness Wheatcroft (CB)]

My Lords, a Bill that has at its heart the aim of improving children’s well-being can only be welcomed, and its good intentions are clear. I support most of the measures in the Bill, particularly in Part 1, but I have some qualms about Part 2, not least that it will fail to generate the improvements to opportunities that should be its driving force.

Let me start with the moves to safeguard children and young people who spend time in social care. Currently, the outcomes for far too many of these youngsters are desperately poor and the only qualifications they end up with are a criminal record. There are initiatives to improve the outcomes, and I welcome them, particularly the provisions in Clause 7 for staying close where necessary. Those who, for one reason or another, do not have any family to rely on need to know that there is someone watching and caring. However, that need goes far beyond what is covered in the Bill.

Equally, the Bill boasts the concept of family group decision-making, and makes it a right in most cases that, before crucial decisions are taken about the future care arrangements for a child, parents or other family members should be offered a meeting. Ensuring that that offer reaches the right people will not be easy. All too often, it becomes clear too late that abused children were in situations that excluded any contact with members of an extended family, including grandparents. Sadly, often, children at risk are kept in near isolation from those who might be concerned about them. I would like to be sure that every effort would be made to offer to those people the chance to be directly involved; only then might they become aware of what has been happening. Indeed, it might be the first opportunity a child has to confide in someone they can trust.

In Scotland, the idea of every child having an appointed guardian from outside the family was mooted. It has been adopted to a certain extent. Such is the dysfunctionality in some parts of our society that I wonder whether the idea should be considered here. I know of schools in parts of Kent, for instance, where the number of children on the at risk register is significantly more than 50%. Whatever the failings of Kids Company, it did demonstrate that many children simply have nowhere to go and no one to turn to, even on Christmas Day. If guardianship is a step too far for this Bill, let us at least explore how we can make family involvement more than a box-ticking exercise.

Moving on to Part 2, I share concerns about trying to restrict the freedom of academies, but, while an excellent core education is essential for all children, they need so much more than the ability to read and understand maths if they are truly to thrive. The provision of music and the arts in some of our schools is pitiful. Inevitably, there will be pressure for the national curriculum review, currently under way, to consider this, but I think we need to go beyond that. Not only are the arts crucial to all children’s well-being, but this is one area in which those from underprivileged backgrounds, whether or not they are in the care system, are particularly disadvantaged. Sport and outdoor activity is another area where they tend to miss out and which is entirely absent from the Bill. How much better would the lives of those in care be if they spent at least part of their weekend occupied in physical team games or doing ballet? It would be life-enhancing, as would be the opportunity to visit galleries and museums and watch drama.

If we are really to look after the well-being of all children, we need to think more broadly than the Bill goes so far.

15:41

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a vice-president of the Local Government Association and as a member of the Beckfoot multi-academy trust in West Yorkshire and of the Leeds Diocesan Learning Trust.

The Bill before us today is, in part, a disappointment. While some parts go some way towards further protecting children through additional safeguarding requirements, it is unfortunate that great amounts of the Bill are in danger of driving down standards in our education system and of winding back many of the successful education reforms introduced by the last Conservative Government. As the Shadow Secretary of State remarked in the other place, this Bill can be seen as

“nothing less than educational vandalism”.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/1/25; col. 863.]

The last Conservative Government left office with educational standards on the up. As we have already heard, within international league tables, England rose from 21st to seventh-best in mathematics, while Labour-controlled Wales slumped to 27th. That Government left us with an educational system that was working for students. But I worry that this Government have weaponised this Bill, based on ideology as opposed to what is best for children in this country.

For example, this Bill rolls back a lot of the freedoms gifted to academies during the coalition years, particularly with respect to pay. We should uphold the principle that academies can decide for themselves how much they wish to pay their staff. If academies want to set competitive salaries as a means to drive up standards in schools and deliver better results for students, we should encourage them to do so. The plans outlined in this Bill to bring academies in line with the same core pay conditions as in other schools risks cutting pay for more than 20,000 hard-working teachers. We must seek to listen to the experts. The chief executive of the National Education Trust said that the Bill seeks to

“inhibit academy freedoms that have led to innovation”

and “raised standards for pupils.”

I also wish to touch base on the provisions in the Bill that will prevent schools with academy status recruiting teachers who do not hold qualified teacher status. Of course, as a former teacher, I have a great deal of respect for teachers who train hard in their early years and aim to give something back to students. However, in some cases academies bring in teachers without QT status when they have specific industry-level experience. This has greatly improved our education system. For example, I have heard of veterans from the Armed Forces and business leaders being brought into academies to teach specific subject areas. It is hugely beneficial to students and, rather than banning it, we should seek to retain the rights of academies to do this and we should use the Bill to extend the right to local authority-maintained schools. Surely, as academies have been so successful, the Bill should extend the freedoms academies have to local maintained schools.

The Bill needs significant changes in Committee if we are to safeguard the standards across education and not appear to be using ideology, rather than the needs of children, as the basis for our thinking.

15:45

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Mohammed on his passionate maiden speech; he makes a great addition to our Benches.

I welcome the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill because legislation to improve children’s happiness, health and well-being is well overdue, and this Bill intends to deliver on transforming childhoods. However, Barnardo’s and other children’s charities believe we must go further, and I declare an interest as vice-president of Barnardo’s.

We believe that enhancing obligations on local agencies to provide early support for families before they reach crisis point is crucial. Public finances are tight, but investing in our children—especially early years—is an investment worth making. Every year, some 13,000 young people leave care without the support they need. Outcomes for these young people remain much lower than for their peers. We believe there should be a new minimum standard of support for care leavers—a national offer regardless of where they live, which should include measures recommended by Barnardo’s.

The charity First Star Scholars, of which I am a patron, has a high success rate of getting care leavers into university. We want to work with the Government to expand this programme across the country, to enable more care leavers to succeed in higher education. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss this further with the Minister.

Barnardo’s also believes that children deserve protection from smacking. Some 68 countries have banned the physical punishment of children. This Bill has the power to do the same across the UK—so let us do it.

The Bill, as it stands, will have unintended consequences and risks harming, rather than helping, young performers. It is my primary concern that, by including children who perform and receive tuition outside their school setting within the proposed register, the Bill threatens to divert vital attention and resources away from the children it was intended to protect. While it makes positive strides in addressing youth employment, it fails to recognise the unique needs of children working in the entertainment industry, where many are educated in flexi-alternative provisions. It will not record the positive reason for their absence; it will be merely another day missed from school. This will negatively affect both the child and the school’s register, which could affect its Ofsted standing.

This Bill requires a joined-up approach to the recording of absences from schools for performance. However, there is a disconnect between the multiple agencies that are currently responsible for licensing children. These children are already governed by a well-established framework, the child performance regulations 2014, which I was instrumental in securing. These regulations are still the best place to regulate the performing engagements of young people, but they have not kept up with the changes and advances in the world we now live in: the world of social influencers, streaming and young performers who may earn a six-figure sum for one engagement.

In 2014, the Government committed to a review of the regulations, which is now well overdue. With the leads of the new “Harry Potter” television series soon to be announced, now is the time to ensure that those children will be safe, educated and celebrated for their contributions to the cultural economy. The Children and Families Act 2014 facilitated amendments to the existing performance regulations. I propose that this Bill similarly includes provision for a comprehensive review and update of the child performers regulations of 2014. Will the Minister agree to meet to discuss this matter further? This landmark Bill has the opportunity to change childhoods and ensure that children’s wishes and feelings are considered in all decisions made about them. As I always say, childhood lasts a lifetime.

15:50

[Lord Browne of Belmont (DUP)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for the care and sensitivity that she has displayed in introducing this important Bill. Balance is very important. I must declare two interests: first, I was for many years a grammar school teacher; secondly, I have a grandchild who was exclusively home educated from the ages of five to 14. For those reasons, I wish to comment on some aspects of the Bill that touch on home education.

I am concerned that an unintended consequence of the Bill will be a reduction in educational diversity. That would be damaging to children’s well-being, purely because children themselves are diverse. The register of children not in school is presented as a research tool, enabling the Department for Education and local authorities to better understand the different learning strategies used in home education. For example, many home-educated children learn to read and write when they feel ready, with some learning at three and others at seven.

However, if officials compare these children to their counterparts in British primary schools, it may appear that only half of them are receiving a suitable education. The risk of officials viewing the data through a pro-school lens has been noted by the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel. If staff use age-related attainment targets set in British schools, they may conclude that the education being provided is not suitable and serve a school attendance order on the child. This undermines the very reason for home education: to introduce learning at a time that both suits and appeals to the child.

The Bill also contains provisions for local authority staff to enter and inspect the homes of home educators and, if refused, to apply a school attendance order. We should not use threats of court orders to force people to give up human rights. We should remember that, if local authorities have reasonable grounds, they already have plenty of powers to enter homes and safeguard children. These include the Education Act, the Children Act and the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act, covering education, well-being and radicalisation.

Research conducted by the charity Education Otherwise showed that 0.44% of home-educated children were issued with a child protection plan in 2018, compared with 0.43% of children in school. On this basis, we must ask whether the cost of setting up a new register is justified. Fundamentally, if we want to make the biggest possible difference to child well-being, surely we should target the huge cost of creating this home education register at children who are already known to be in the most severe and distressing need—the thousands of children in care who go missing each year, the 5,000 child prostitutes, the child slaves, unaccompanied child asylum seekers with PTSD and homeless children.

Finally, I am concerned about the way in which we are approaching well-being. For some children, their well-being is best achieved by being home educated, and we should encourage the state to recognise and celebrate this. With this in mind, I draw attention to the Northern Ireland home education guidelines, codesigned by Home Education Northern Ireland, the Children’s Law Centre, the Safeguarding Board for Northern Ireland and the Department of Education, which are an excellent case in point. Built on very similar laws to those governing home education in England and Wales, they recognise home education as an imaginative alternative framework that is equal to but different from school, and I commend them to all.

15:54

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, the Minister in her opening sentence stated that there are few subjects which unite people more than the well-being of children. I fully agree, and for that reason I believe there will be a constructive approach across the Committee when it comes to seeking ways to strengthen the Bill and achieve that objective.

The Roman poet Juvenal coined the famous phrase:

“Mens sana in corpore sano”—


a healthy mind in a healthy body. That emphasises the eternal interconnectedness of physical and mental well-being. It suggests that prioritising both is crucial for overall health, happiness and well-being. A healthy body can support a healthy mind by providing the physical energy and resilience needed for children to navigate life’s challenges. Conversely, a healthy mind can positively influence physical health for children by reducing stress, promoting better sleep and enhancing immune functions.

In the educational context, physical exercise is an essential part of mental and psychological well-being, yet here we have a Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill in which, if you run a word search through it, there is not one mention of sport, physical activity or even physical education.

In the build-up to and during the London Olympic and Paralympic Games in 2012, as chairman of the British Olympic Association, I called for a sports legacy from the Games which would reach every pupil, whether they were in the East End of London or the northern parts of Scotland. The UK needed a radical new national school policy for sport, health and well-being. The situation has deteriorated year on year since then. The Bill turns a blind eye to the importance of physical education and sport and today’s concerns over the well-being of our pupil cohort, and instead recognises a world of growing obesity, declining participation rates, reduced PE hours, poor teacher training, inequalities in access, particularly for girls and children from lower-income backgrounds, and funding cuts. The Youth Sport Trust reports that fewer young people are meeting the Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines for daily physical activity, with over 50% of all our pupils failing to reach the recommended 60 minutes, which is a de minimis recommendation of moderate to vigorous activity a day.

There is concern about the decline in the number of PE hours, as mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson. Delays or cuts to funding for school sport, with uncertainty over the short-term funding programme for primary PE and sport premium, have led to schools using the funds for purposes not set out by government, and teachers often doing less than three hours of training for physical education during the totality of their teacher training. That is not a child-centric policy.

The pandemic has added to the problems and led to changes in how children play, with more time spent online and less time outdoors impacting their physical activity levels. Children are not learning to swim properly, with a third of primary schools delivering fewer than 10 swimming lessons a year. Yet, as I mentioned, there is not a single mention of any of this in a Bill on children’s well-being. You might as well write a health strategy without mentioning medical treatment.

In Committee, I intend to propose a wide series of amendments to rectify this oversight, to secure improvements to the Bill which place physical as well as mental well-being at the heart of school life. When it comes to school sport, state schools are in crisis: 40% of our medallists in the Tokyo Olympic Games came from just 7% of the population, those educated in the private sector—which is also under threat. It was 36% in London and 33% in Paris.

The noble Lord, Lord Layard, spoke of the vital need to measure well-being, both physical and mental. I could not agree more and will be fully supportive of any amendment which seeks to achieve this objective. Committee provides us with the opportunity to set out the changes necessary to ensure the Secretary of State’s objective—to improve the well-being of children—is achieved, and I look forward to taking that agenda forward.

15:59

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan. Nevertheless, this Bill is wholeheartedly welcomed. It tackles issues which have been neglected for 14 years, as well as new ones such as the devastating drop in attendance following the pandemic. I will focus on the all-important provisions for children not in school, Clauses 30 to 35. I also briefly commend the further crackdown on unregistered schools, whose so-called teaching is damaging the fabric of our society.

While it is still of prime importance to make it easy for children to thrive in school—learning together, making friends and benefiting from pathways to further education and satisfying work—there is at present a significant number who do not get there. There are some parents who cope well with, or choose, home education and carry it out well. They will not be interfered with by the obligation to register their child.

But I strongly agree that many of the reasons why children drop out of school show that a managed system of home education is vital. Children may find school intolerable, but their parents may well not have the time or the capacity to teach them. Particularly among Gypsy, Traveller and Roma children, prejudice and discrimination play a large part in their attitude to school. I declare an interest as a holder of several positions among these communities’ organisations. Bullying is still widespread and, while some schools are welcoming, I have heard many examples of teachers who have not supported the bullied child. One said, “Drop the Traveller thing”, for instance. Sometimes when a child is bullied, they hit back—but they are the ones who are excluded. Suspensions of Gypsy, Traveller and Roma children are increasing—in the case of some groups over the last five years, from 21.26 per 10,000 to 33.71, with a comparable proportion among permanent exclusions. We all know that that often leads to county lines and all sorts of really sad behaviour. Then there is the demoralisation which comes from feeling unwanted and unvalued. Some schools encourage the parents to take their children out of school if they are not going to increase the school’s rate of exam passes.

It would be helpful if the Bill could also stimulate a more proactive response by local authorities. Instead of waiting for parents to request support and help, they should offer it. Parents in marginalised communities may not know help is available and may be reluctant to approach officials. This would also enable the local authority to find out the reasons behind the drop-out, which should be recorded and the aggregates analysed. Complementary to that, schools’ systems should contribute to increasing awareness of why children drop out of school; for instance, schools should seek and record the reasons. Racist incidents should be recorded and reported, as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby referred to—a recommendation of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry which was never implemented.

While it is essential to keep records of the characteristics of children on the register, I am uneasy about their being kept after the child reaches maturity. It is for consideration whether the local authority should not then destroy any non-anonymised information.

Finally, as regards children who do not get regularly to school, I am also a bit uneasy about the increase in fines for non-attendance and the possible sentence of imprisonment. I remember that when I was a magistrate there were cases of extreme poverty among defaulting parents, whose children truanted for various reasons, rarely through parental neglect of their obligations, and whose deprivation would have been exacerbated if the often single parent were imprisoned.

But, in general, this Bill will go far to bring all our children into a future of value, opportunity and achievement.

16:03

[Lord Farmer (Con)]

My Lords, I will focus my comments on Part 1, particularly on areas recommended or inspired by Josh MacAlister MP’s independent review of children’s social care. I was on his design group, and Josh’s emphasis throughout was on relationships and prevention: preventing children going into local authority care in the first place or being further damaged in the care process. Enabling them to maintain or develop good relationships while in care is a key protective factor to that end.

I welcome Clause 1 on family group decision-making, but will the Government strengthen it? The Family Rights Group points to the impact of the 2016 Scottish legislation mandating every local authority to offer family group decision-making. Its lack of clarity and precision meant that a third of local authorities in Scotland still do not offer FGDM.

The requirement to offer this is based on evidence from family group conferencing, so reproducing its benefits requires implementation fidelity to this model. For example, older children and their families must be in the driving seat when determining who is involved. Neighbours and family friends can be fictive kin, referred to as aunties and uncles. Others in the support web around them are vital for children’s welfare. Their voices should be heard when the family says so.

Also, legislation needs to ensure that FGDM represents a process, rather than a one-off meeting, to avoid this becoming a mere formality that local authorities go through. This process does not always mean that a child goes into kinship care, but it does increase the likelihood of it. Where they end up in local authority care, FGDM should lead on to and facilitate another highly beneficial process referred to as Lifelong Links. Lifelong Links builds rather than breaks relationships and enables children in the care system to have a lasting support network of relatives and others who care about them.

All those involved in the FGDM and others important to a child should not simply disappear from their life when they go into care. Capturing contact details of former foster carers, youth leaders, teachers and others in the community who have been kind or caring towards them means that they have a wealth of family and other connections when they leave care. Knowing that they matter to people, being invited to Sunday lunch, and having a family to spend Christmas Day with and a source of advice throughout the year all makes a massive difference to their sense of identity and stability. Lifelong Links runs in more than 40 local authorities, in 22 of which it is currently funded by the DfE. Will the Government consider referring to it in the Bill and including it in regulation or guidance?

Next, Clause 11 ensures that children deprived of their liberty are housed in “relevant accommodation”. Even in good surroundings, they are often far from their families and communities, which can further dent already fragile mental health. Will the Minister ensure that improving the experience of children deprived of their liberty will include concrete steps currently missing from the Bill to help them maintain key relationships?

Finally, I have concerns about a single unique identifier. The Bill is concerningly vague about how it would operate and whether it would need a new computer system at major public expense. Using the NHS number would overlook those children, often at higher risk, who were born outside the country and have no NHS or state education involvement. They would escape the system. More generally, can the Minister assure us that the SUI will not reinvent the failed contact point database abolished in 2010?

16:08

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, there are certainly many welcome aspects of this Bill, not least the proper recognition of the importance of children’s well-being. What plans do the Government have to ensure that all schools are alert to the issue of bereavement and have access to resources beyond themselves to support any child or young person—perhaps as many as one in 29, as the Childhood Bereavement Network notes—who suffer a bereavement?

On the question of the curriculum and assessment, I earnestly hope that the review currently under way will address in full the narrowness of the existing curriculum, provide for much greater access for all children to arts and technical subjects, and allow for local curricular initiatives. It was always wrong that only academies had these curricular freedoms, as my noble friend Lady Morris said.

I ask my noble friend the Minister when we can expect to see the final report and what she expects to be the lead time for what I hope will be welcome changes in both curriculum and assessment. We have a lot to learn on this from other jurisdictions and, clearly, from my noble friend Lord Layard.

In relation to the pay and conditions of teachers, the Bill in its original form would have required all state-funded schools to follow the school teachers’ pay and conditions document. I regret that it has been amended to simply “have regard to”. As many will know, there is broad flexibility in the STPCD—in my view, less would be desirable, certainly in regard to the excessive salaries paid to some academy CEOs.

However, the full range of conditions of service appear not in the STPCD but in the Burgundy Book: the national conditions of service document, most recently revised in 2023. It covers appointments, resignation, retirement, occupational sick and maternity pay as well as trade union recognition and facilities, and it should be followed, in my view, by all state-funded schools. At a time of a deepening recruitment and retention crisis which is deleterious to all being educated, coherence and consistency in pay and conditions for all teachers in state-funded schools could certainly be an incentive to enter and remain in the profession. The fragmentation of the education service through academisation has certainly been a barrier to career mobility in some cases. An end to the presumption that all new schools must be academies is therefore very welcome, as is the intention to strengthen local authority powers in relation to school admissions.

Finally, the proposal that all teachers in all state-funded schools should have qualified teacher status, and that they should therefore be paid commensurately, is very welcome. There is currently exploitation of some teachers who do not have qualified teacher status. Therefore, I ask the Minister whether she is sympathetic to the creation of a statutory duty to ensure that all overseas-trained teachers are financially supported to complete the assessment-only route into QTS in a timely fashion.

16:11

[Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie (Con)]

My Lords, if the Bill is to succeed in breaking down barriers to opportunity and severing the link between background and success, let me give the Government a warning from Scotland. These aims have also been a much-publicised priority of the Scottish Government. However, over the past decade, despite a 13% increase in funding, the SNP’s centralising of control has seen falling educational standards, as evidenced—as other noble Lords have said—by the OECD’s PISA league tables. What went wrong?

The amalgamation of the inspectorate with Learning and Teaching Scotland to form Education Scotland removed its independence; it became answerable to government. There is no bulwark against falling standards and no voice to be raised against ineffective teaching methods, inadequate curriculum content or restrictive curriculum structures.

The implementation of our new curriculum for excellence—as it is called—was ill thought out. One of its original purposes was to broaden the secondary school curriculum, but evidence reveals that students in S4—the equivalent of GCSE level—are studying fewer subjects, and enrolment in non-compulsory subjects such as modern languages and expressive arts continues to decline. Choice has been restricted. Most damningly, the attainment gap between Scotland’s richest and poorest schools has increased.

An attempt to give all children in Scotland a “named person” was ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court because it breached the right to private and family life. The Bill is in danger of making some of the same mistakes.

In contrast, I have looked at England’s increasingly improving and diverse education system with a degree of envy. We do not have the choice of academy schools. There is only one mainstream school in Scotland not run by a local authority—Jordanhill—which consistently tops the league tables, even this weekend. However, houses in Jordanhill’s catchment area are some of the most expensive for any Scottish school, doing nothing to close the attainment gap.

I am also, therefore, concerned at the constraints on academies in this Bill, and specifically the proposals for qualified teacher status. There is a difference between a qualified teacher and a competent one, and if we want to attract people into the profession, the ability to “try before you buy” will be lost. Perhaps an amendment to limit the time that unqualified teachers can teach in schools to, for example, two years could be helpful. By then, both parties should know whether it is right and whether it is worth the effort and expense of qualifying.

Other issues that concern me are the implications of provisions in this Bill for SEND children, and in particular, the lack of appropriate school places and the consequences that this has for families. The powers in Clause 30, where parents have to obtain a local authority’s consent to remove their child from school, allow the corporate parent to erode parental responsibility and override the rights of parents and families to decide what is best for their children.

With such a large Bill and such a crowded list, however, there is not an inordinate amount of time to go into too many details, which I will look forward to addressing in Committee. Having given my warning from Scotland, I dearly hope I make it in time for the last flight home tonight.

16:16

[Lord Carter of Haslemere (CB)]

My Lords, I will focus on the aspects of this Bill relating to academies, and I have two points. First, I have read the Second Reading and Committee debates in the other place very carefully, and especially the evidence given about the performance of academies. This was to the effect that 87% of them are good or outstanding, even though many were previously failing schools which became academies for that very reason. Apparently, the top five state schools in England are academies.

The Labour MP Dame Siobhain McDonagh gave examples at Second Reading from her constituency. She cited the Harris academies in Merton and Morden, and the St Mark’s Academy, which are all marked “outstanding” by Ofsted. She said that one of the keys to success of the Merton academy has been the “aspirational curriculum”, which is tailored to pupils’ needs. Forcing such schools to teach the national curriculum risks undermining that. All this is evidence that academies work well as they are, and their heads know how to run schools better than the Government, so why are the Government removing their flexibility to do so?

My second point is more technical and affects how future changes would be made to the way academies have to operate the national curriculum. The bottom line is that it would not be done by primary legislation but by statutory instruments amending primary legislation. This is in addition to Clause 63, which the noble Lord, Lord Addington, has already mentioned. It is a rather “long and winding road”, but the essence is as follows. Clause 47 of the Bill inserts a new Schedule 1A into the Academies Act which mandates the application of the national curriculum provisions in the Education Act 2002 to academies. However, in doing so, it also applies to academies all the order-making powers enjoyed by the Secretary of State under the Education Act. These order-making powers enable the Secretary of State to amend the Education Act and are therefore Henry VIII powers which will now also apply to academies.

They are very substantial powers. For example, the Secretary of State can by such orders add further requirements to the basic national curriculum or amend all the four key stages, as well as the foundation subjects, including attainment targets and assessment arrangements. By virtue of Clause 47, all such changes made by Henry VIII powers will now be applied to academies, almost by the back door. These Henry VIII powers may have been considered acceptable in the Education Act 2002 for maintained schools, but is it really appropriate for them to be able to be used by a side-wind to change the groundbreaking new regime now proposed for academies?

In addition, under Clause 47(5), any such orders can directly amend the new Schedule 1A to the Academies Act, which sets out which provisions of the national curriculum are to apply to academies. This is another Henry VIII power, by which further provisions could therefore be applied to academies. I had thought that this Government were clamping down on Henry VIII powers. I will be interested to hear the Minister’s response.

16:19

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I am not sure that I am really the right person to talk about the Bill, but I thought it might be worth giving a few reflections. I cannot even count how many education Acts have taken place during my lifetime, but it is a very considerable number. It is absolutely clear that there is no final solution. The reason why is that each child is unique, and when we talk about children in the plural, we have a tendency to forget that what actually faces us is each individual child.

I was brought up with a classical education, and know that education means to draw out, not to shove in—educare being the Latin word. That is a great challenge. Education starts extremely early, and, as my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham said, it is better to get into it straightaway. Indeed, parents are the primary educators. By the time a child reaches the age of five, something is being delivered that is pretty well formed already. We are talking about the journey of a child finding out who they are and of what they are capable. Very often, when we talk about, for example, the care system, which has 86,000 looked-after children at the present moment, we are talking about a time when, to a large extent, the horse has bolted. That is a huge problem.

It leads me to say that there will never be any centralised answer to these problems, There is a place for professional independence, which my noble friend Lord Hill laid emphasis on, and a place for experiment, in trying things that work and responding to what happens.

Thinking about the first part of the Bill, on the care system and the no doubt welcome sophistication of the existing system, I am impressed that, nevertheless, there are now more looked-after children than there have ever been before. What we are looking for is some way of tackling this particular problem, so that we achieve improvements.

On the second part of the Bill, whatever the rights and wrongs of how much control there should be over the academy system, it has proved to be a great success, as have the technical education initiatives of my noble friend Lord Baker. We should be very careful not to go backwards.

16:23

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Humanist Group—I guess I am on my own today. Given the scope of the Bill and the number of speakers, I will restrict myself to issues of inclusion and community cohesion within our schools.

I have twice introduced to the Chamber a Bill to repeal the legal imposition of collective worship in all publicly funded schools. I first introduced it more than three years ago, when it passed the Lords but fell in the other place due to lack of time. I introduced it again three months ago, and it has passed Second Reading. I am hopeful, but I fear that time may not be on my side again.

The amendments that I and others intend to lay before the House will work to introduce inclusivity policy and to get rid of the bizarre position where the UK is the only sovereign western democracy to enforce mandatory worship. The School Standards and Framework Act requires all state schools that are not of a religious nature to hold daily acts of collective worship that must be of a wholly or mainly Christian nature. Children cannot withdraw themselves from prayers without parental consent. This contravenes children’s rights under the Human Rights Act and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Mandatory collective worship is by its very nature illiberal and divisive. It imposes religious activity in a blanket manner. Even in schools that do not have a religious character, it forces parents to choose between allowing their children to be part of school assemblies that are so valuable for the school community or ostracising them, leaving them in corridors and classrooms with little or nothing to do. I believe that it would be far better for school assemblies to be inclusive, strengthening collective school communities and contributing to schools’ spiritual, moral and cultural development without prejudice towards a single faith.

Similarly, I argue that we should use the opportunity of a schools Bill to ensure that religious education is inclusive of the beliefs and worldview of all our population, including the beliefs of non-religious people—who are the second-largest group by religious affiliation after Christianity, represent one-third of the population and are growing. Case law from a decade ago, specifically Fox v Secretary of State for Education, requires non-religious belief systems, such as humanism, to be treated with equal regard in RE provision. Our laws should reflect this.

There is much to welcome here, and I look forward to helping make our children’s education wider and more inclusive.

16:27

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, this portmanteau Bill has its strengths, which I concede and welcome, particularly on child protection and safeguarding, pupil absence and kinship care—an area close to my heart that I campaigned on in the other place. It is also deeply flawed, particularly in Part 2, which is ideological and divisive, written at the behest of the teaching unions and careless of fundamental priorities around standards, parental choice, teacher recruitment and retention, local autonomy, innovation and independence. As more sensible Labour figures have rightly noted, it is a betrayal of the laudable record of not just the 2010 coalition Government but the first two Blair Administrations from 1997 onwards. It may well result in poor outcomes, social immobility and worse life chances, particularly for children from modest backgrounds.

My focus today is squarely on some troubling aspects of Part 2, which is predicated on the misguided belief that micromanagement by officials, whether in Whitehall or the town hall, will somehow enhance child safety or education standards. This may be the natural direction of travel of a bureaucracy, but it is one that this House must firmly resist. To echo the remarks of my noble friend Lord Frost earlier, the trend is starkly evident in the mandatory registration scheme for children not attending school. Consider the sheer intrusiveness of the data demanded. It compels parents to report the number of hours each of them spends educating, but parents educate their children constantly—when cooking a meal together, opening a bank account, or simply talking and living life together. Home education is often an extension of this integrated approach. It is not institutional provision for classes of 30, following rigid timetables. How are parents expected to delineate their specific hours with each child?

The requirements extend to the names, addresses and hours of everyone else contributing to each child’s education: grandparents, Sunday school teachers, music tutors, scout leaders or someone who gives a talk at an art gallery that the child visits with a grandparent. Parents must update the local authority within 15 days of any change for each child. It is, frankly, an absurd and impossible requirement. This constitutes state-mandated surveillance of family life on an unprecedented scale for law-abiding citizens choosing a perfectly legal form of education. As highlighted in the learned Aidan O’Neill KC’s legal opinion, there are significant questions over the scheme’s compatibility with the convention as well as with UK GDPR principles. The justification for such intrusive measures is that these children are “invisible”; they are not invisible to their parents, families or communities.

The tragic and appalling case of Sara Sharif was repeatedly raised in the other place. She was already on a list of children about whom social services had been concerned. The local authority had been notified that she was educated at home—already a legal requirement of schools. How would placing her on yet another list have made a difference? It is a question that demands an answer. We must do all we can to prevent such terrible tragedies occurring again, but we need to ensure that the actions taken will be effective. Even if another list was helpful, what possible justification is there for all the detail demanded in this Bill? I challenge the Minister to address that in her remarks at the conclusion of this debate. The limited research available shows that, although home-educated children are disproportionately referred for safeguarding concerns, they are significantly underrepresented on child protection plans. Let us make sure our approach is founded on empirical evidence and not prejudice, so that we genuinely protect children who need it without imposing ineffective bureaucratic restrictions on everyone else.

16:31

[Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Lab)]

I started my working life as a residential social worker, and I am godmother to a beautiful boy being cared for by his wonderful grandparents. Kinship care is a great solution for many young people whose parents are unable to take on parenting, and this Bill will, thankfully, finally define kinship care in legislation, recognising the tremendous work of so many carers whose dedication is often overlooked and underappreciated. I am delighted.

While I am on the topic of being delighted, I was also delighted to see that the needs of children leaving care are contained within this Bill. I am delighted that care leavers will no longer be classified as intentionally homeless and that local authorities must publish more information on the services available to care leavers. I am also delighted that Staying Close support will be rolled out universally or nationally.

That is all good, but we know that many children in care face challenges adjusting to their new life and 41% have emotional and behavioural assessment scores which are a cause for concern, so I was saddened to hear that the Government have reduced the grant available for assessment and therapy each year to £3,000. I am hopeful that the Minister will keep this decision under review, because I know she will agree that preventive mental healthcare for a child often reduces the cost to the state for the adult they become.

I want to talk about food, because hungry children find it difficult to learn. Creating breakfast clubs in all primary schools for all schoolchildren will provide proper nutrition and, hopefully, install healthy eating habits in growing children. But there is a wider crisis. The Food Foundation tells us that 18% of households with children are currently experiencing food insecurity—that is 18% of all households with a child or a parent who is going hungry. As I have said in this House before, I have been told by children that it is not their turn to eat that night.

The provision of good-quality school food, including breakfast clubs, is, I believe, key to reducing those shameful statistics and helping to reduce education inequality. I know that many in this House will favour the provision of universal free school lunches for all children in primary and secondary education. I know that is expensive and I am fully aware of the financial circumstances of the country, but I also know the heart of this Government, so I am hopeful that we can begin to work towards something that is closer to universal provision in the long term.

Some noble Lords may not be aware of the shockingly restrictive criteria for free school lunch eligibility. Children qualify only if they live in households that both receive universal credit and have an income below £7,400 a year after tax and benefits. An estimated 900,000 children living in poverty fall outwith those restrictive criteria.

The need to raise the threshold is particularly acute at this moment because we are at the end of the transitional protections that were put in place during the introduction of universal credit under the last Government. Until the end of last month, children receiving free school meals would retain access to them even if their household income had subsequently risen above the £7,400 income threshold, but those protections have now expired and children will be reassessed, so it is urgent. I hope the Minister has heard me and others on this issue, and that we may see some movement over the summer.

There are many exceptional parts of the Bill, delivered just nine months after the Government took office, and I am proud to support its passage. It is a shame that the time limit is so short that I have been limited to two small sections and, like Oliver, been left asking for more.

16:36

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome the opportunity to debate the Bill. I take this opportunity to thank the Minister and the Secretary of State for the briefing they gave us and the opportunity to express, in my case, the concerns I have about the resources and funds available to run the breakfast clubs. I declare my interest as a patron of the National Association of Child Contact Centres.

I welcome the provisions in the Bill setting out child protection and safeguarding and working towards keeping families together as far as possible. I also welcome the kinship care provisions. In my capacity shadowing early years in the other place, I was acutely aware of the role that grandparents and other close family members wished to play but in many instances were not able to do so.

In Committee, I would like to explore the opportunity and the increasing role that could be played by child contact centres and other venues, which offer space for parents to meet and spend time with their children in the event of a family break-up. I urge and encourage the Government to promote and support child contact centres and the vital role they play.

My other main comment at this stage relates to admissions policy—in particular, access to, and the cost of, school transport. Previously, rural counties such as North Yorkshire enjoyed good relations between local education authorities and schools, which is possibly why the take-up of academies was less in those education authorities than others. Recently, however, tensions have been created over the funding of home-to-school transport.

In my view, that is a direct result of the Government cutting the rural services delivery grant. In 2024, that grant provided £110 million to 94 rural authorities to help maintain essential public services. Ending the grant has deprived rural areas of around 40% of funds, so they have 40% less money to spend per head than urban areas. I hope the Government will take the opportunity of the passage of the Bill to urgently address the inequality of funding between rural and urban schools. Previously, that was addressed by policies such as rurality and sparsity of population, but that is no longer the case. We have the opportunity in the Bill to address that.

Finally, I admire hugely the role that academies have played in those areas where they have performed well. I pay tribute to successive Governments and former Secretaries of State, as well as those around the House, who have made these such a success. I hope the Government will listen very carefully to the comments that have been made today and will take them on board when it comes to the passage of this Bill. I hope these issues can be addressed and monitored and that the Bill can be improved, but I do wish it a swift passage through the House.

16:39

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

The pleasure, my Lords, in speaking quite late in a debate such as this one—I think I am listed as the 59th speaker—is the opportunity of hearing excellent earlier speeches. In that regard, I refer to the speeches of the four former Secretaries of State: the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard of Northwold, the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Baker of Dorking, and my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley. I am so glad that three of them are here to hear this praise.

I wish to address the subject of home schooling. This is covered in Clauses 30 and 31 of the Bill, covering pages 50 to 64. Clause 30 is directed to “Local authority consent for withdrawal of certain children from school” and Clause 31 is directed to registration of children not in state school education. These provisions cover altogether 14 pages of the Bill and are, I suggest, too long and too complicated. Regrettably, we no longer legislate on principle but in tight definitions. As a result, we have before us a very detailed Bill of some 137 pages—not as long as other Bills that your Lordships are currently considering, but still, I suggest, too long.

I first got to know about home schooling during the ill-fated passage of the last Government’s Schools Bill in 2022. Home schooling covers only about 1% of all schooling in the United Kingdom, but it remains very important. A common characteristic of home-school parents is that most, although not all, have had a university education. Why do they want to home-school their children? It can be said very simply: to obtain a better education. I will give two examples of that. First, their children get one-to-one education at home, as opposed to in a school class of 30 or more pupils. Secondly, they have a choice of subjects not available in their local state schools. I refer, for example, to classics. The noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, spoke earlier about the value to him of having had a classical education.

I should disclose at this stage that I have one grandchild who has recently been moved to home education by my son and daughter-in-law because he had become completely unsettled in state education. My worry is the test in the Bill that has to be applied by local authorities in their decision to agree to a child moving from a school to home education.

In new Section 434A(4) of the Education Act 1996 on page 51 of the Bill—one of the complications of this Bill is that it refers back to that Act—it appears that the test is whether the child is suffering from “significant harm” in state education. This is completely the wrong way round. The test should be whether the child is going to benefit from home schooling. The position is not clear, because in new Section 434A(6), also on page 51, the suggested test is what is in the “best interests” of the child.

This is all the victim of excessively complicated legislation that will make it so hard for home-educating parents, and indeed for anybody who has to construe the provisions of this Bill. May Bills become more simple.

16:44

[Lord Wei (Con)]

My Lords, it is with a heavy heart that I rise to speak today—heavy because the legislation before us cuts to the very fabric of our democratic society, which was built on freedom of thought, parental responsibility and the rights of citizens not to be monitored by an overreaching state.

Our forebears fought two world wars, at unimaginable cost, to secure the freedoms we now risk throwing away so casually. They fought to defeat totalitarian ideologies that sought to control not only public life but private conscience and, crucially, the upbringing of the next generation. They knew, as we should know, that the surest route to tyranny is to hand the state unchecked power over the education of children.

It is a matter of historic record that, when Parliament passed the Education Act 1944, it deliberately safeguarded the right of parents, not the state, to determine their children’s education. Those drafters had seen the rise of fascism and Stalinism and understood that a truly free society must trust its citizens to raise their children in accordance with conscience, not dictate their upbringing through bureaucratic edict. Yet here we are.

I am a parent of home-educated children, and it is to the home education-related clauses that I now turn. The Bill proposes a mandatory registration system for all home-educated children. On the surface, some may see this as benign, yet it is far more than that. It represents an unprecedented intrusion into family life, granting local authorities sweeping powers to monitor, inspect and ultimately veto the parental right to educate outside the state system.

Starting with children deemed “vulnerable”—a term dangerously undefined and open to broad interpretation—it imposes a presumption of state control where there should be a presumption of parental competence. We are legislating to allow bureaucratic diktat over the most sacred responsibilities of family life. The Government argue that this intrusion is necessary for safeguarding, but I put it to this House that the supposed justification is flimsy at best and sinister at worst.

I am informed by a reliable source that the team in charge of home-education policy at the Department for Education has overseen counter-extremism and Prevent delivery. The following is a direct quote from a Department for Education job description from July 2023:

“The Deputy Director role in our Counter-Extremism and Non-School Education Division will oversee the frontline and online Prevent delivery in education ... In addition to working on counter-extremism, the division also includes a unit working on out-of-school settings”.


Am I right in thinking that, in seeking to address Islamist and other fundamentalist radicalisation, the department is now engaged, without public consultation or transparency, in mass information gathering against innocent families?

I ask the Minister: has her department already classed all home-educating families, and indeed any alternative school, as potential hotbeds for terrorism? Does this justify the indiscriminate targeting of home educators with invasive data collection far beyond anything required in mainstream schools? Does she recognise that many Muslim voters—who loyally support Labour—will be shocked to see their communities surveilled en masse in the way proposed, and treated with suspicion under these measures? Does she realise that countless parents, of all faiths or none, will feel equally aghast at being classed under suspicion of terrorism simply for exercising their legal rights?

Authoritarianism creeps not with jackboots but with forms and databases. We are told this is necessary for safeguarding, but the data tells a different story. Child protection investigations surged 200% from 2005 to 2022, yet 70% led to no action. Meanwhile, serious harm rates stayed unchanged. The majority of investigations are false positives, wasting precious resources and traumatising families—and still the truly abusive evade detection. If you build this registration system, it will produce the same outcome: bureaucratic drag, overwhelmed services and innocent families crushed under suspicion.

There is so much more to take issue with: from the lack of any appeal mechanism to the use of untrained officials to assess home education, to shocking real-world overreach by local authorities today, with families already documented under the current regime. Let us not forget the deeply intrusive personal data this Bill collects—names, health histories, special needs records—stored indefinitely, with no credible guarantee of security as we enter the age of quantum computing. The consequences of a breach would be devastating, yet the Government appear willing to roll the dice, putting our children’s sensitive data in one place to be hacked by bad actors.

But worse is the future this Bill opens up. Let me speak plainly: you are handing on a platter to a future hard-right coalition or extremist Government the very machinery to rip socialist, trade union, progressive and environmental ideals from the curriculum—remember the Henry VIII clauses—and replace them with a hard-right patriotism, with no escape through home education. You are destroying blindly the loyalty of future generations of voters, abandoning them to a nationalism that will never look back to Labour with pride or memory.

This is not mere theory. Only last month, Mr Farage said:

“That’s what you get folks, when teaching unions in this country are poisoning the minds of young people, not just against Reform, but against everything this country has ever stood for. I’ll make it clear, when we’re in a position of power, we will go to war with these left-wing teaching unions and make sure our kids are taught properly”.


You are handing the very tools for our future to your political opponents, just as Biden, by pursuing a progressive shift without the people’s true consent, handed Trump the means and populist mandate to strike back without restraint.

Home education has long thrived, not because of regulation but because of trust: trust that parents, not bureaucrats, are best placed to know what their children need; and trust that diversity of thought strengthens society rather than weakens it. I urge this House to reconsider, pause to think, and resist—before it is too late.

16:50

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

Children are the fabric of the future, to paraphrase the excellent maiden speech from the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed. Legislating for the welfare of children is crucial, and we must take this opportunity to provide equal protection of children in law from assault. The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health strongly supports such amendment. Its report last year showed that children who experience physical punishment were up to 2.6 times more likely to experience mental health problems and more than twice as likely to be victims of serious physical abuse. This is because the definition of “reasonable punishment” is unclear.

Last year, Worcestershire’s safeguarding review into the murder of nine year-old Alfie flagged up the difficulty in distinguishing

“between what is lawful and proportionate and what is harmful and abusive”.

The preceding year, after the death of Child AK, Norfolk’s review concluded that the current law was confusing by allowing a defence of reasonable chastisement in criminal prosecutions for assault. I was glad to hear others raise this and hope the House will support this overdue change. Scotland and Wales have already tackled this; giving children equal protection against being assaulted in the name of chastisement does not criminalise parents. The Scottish Government’s implementation group has not noticed a significant impact on work in the Procurator Fiscal Service or Police Scotland. Wales introduced a rehabilitative alternative to prosecution with no increased criminalisation of parents. We cannot leave the current legal confusion in place and leave children living in fear of common assault.

Ten years ago, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health called for a single unique identifier, using the NHS number, but we failed to get it into previous legislation. Sadly, the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel reported that 485 children were affected by serious child safeguarding incidents in 2023-24 and the Independent Review of Children’s Social Care recently emphasised that a consistent identifier is essential for frictionless sharing of information between public agencies. So this clause is to be welcomed, but red flags must be rapidly acted on. I hope the Minister can tell us how, and how the process will be evaluated.

A unique identifier will help healthcare professionals quickly identify who has parental responsibility, especially for children in kinship care or with complex needs. This is especially important in emergency and palliative care, and the prevalence of children with medical complexity has risen almost threefold since 2000. Having kinship carers on the face of the Bill is welcome. Like any parent, they must be involved in decisions about their child, especially when the situation is critical and life-threatening. Sadly, parents in crisis at such times can feel inadequately listened to by clinicians and others.

There is a gap between the two parts of the Bill. This relates to bereaved children. No data is collected on the number of children bereaved of a parent or sibling, and half of bereaved children, young people and adults who spoke to the UK Commission on Bereavement said that they received little or no support from their educational setting after their bereavement. More than half of kinship carers said that their kinship children had mental health difficulties, often linked to bereavement. We must put well-being at the heart of education, especially for children who are bereaved, abused or vulnerable. We have work to do.

16:54

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as the founder of Parent Gym and the part owner of Mind Gym. Parent Gym is a programme supporting families who have the most need across our country, and I have been advocating for parenting interventions and training for families for over a decade. I am also a commissioner at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, something I omitted to record last week when I spoke at Questions.

We welcome a lot in the section of the Bill on care, particularly the encouragement of kinship care. That really has my support, as I hope to see an increase in the number of children who are kept with family when there is no provision available from their own parents. But I am sorry to say that the Bill seems to be entirely silent on three really important areas, which I hope can be rectified in Committee: breaking intergenerational cycles of dysfunction; meeting the national crisis of the shortage of foster carers; and providing real accountability in residential care, which is essential.

We all need two things to ensure that we go into adulthood in a functional way: a minimal amount of trauma, and secure attachment. We can now measure the level of trauma that individual children experience using the adverse childhood experience scoring system. The children we are talking about today are some of the most damaged and vulnerable in the country, with very high adverse childhood experience scores.

But this is not just about measuring: we know now that these scores—this level of trauma—is directly correlated with their health and socioeconomic outcomes. Children with a score of more than four in their adverse childhood experiences are three times more likely to develop heart disease, respiratory issues and type 2 diabetes. They are 15 times more likely to commit acts of violence and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. Trauma has an enormous cost to the child for their future as well as a huge cost to society.

No one speaking today does not care about these children—all children—and want what is best for them, so it is a glaring omission in the Bill that we have not sought to look at where we could break these cycles of dysfunctionality. For a start, we could look at how we can introduce parenting training and mentoring for families. Many of these children are raised by people who had no parenting role model themselves, and that is why the cycle continues. In addition, we could have community partnerships; one of my noble friends referred earlier to the possibility of looking at guardianship. Finally, there is an increased role for health visitors to play with these families; we should increase their number and the number of visits they make. Let us be honest—health visitors are sometimes perceived to be less malign than social services by the family in receipt of those visits.

The second subject I will address is the crisis of foster carers. I hope that increasing kinship care will reduce the need, but it will not solve the gaps. We need secure attachment to primary caregivers as a fundamental for these children’s well-being; we need to stop them being bumped around. The Bill is silent on this, ignoring Josh MacAlister’s 2022 review, the Fostering Network’s 2024 review and the Government’s own strategy Stable Homes, Built on Love, all of which set out recommendations to address this shortage, none of which is in the Bill.

Finally—I will be very brief as I am conscious of time—we have not addressed accountability in residential care homes. I hope that we can look at this in Committee.

16:58

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, even though I am speaking so far down the list, I am still unsure what the purpose is of the “Schools” part of this Bill. The Bill prioritises tinkering with governance, focusing on fixing a problem that does not exist—namely, stripping academies and free schools of the autonomy that has allowed so many of them to thrive—yet it avoids problems that need fixing, such as the huge challenges of discipline and behaviour in classrooms or the growing SEND crisis.

How can we scrutinise whether the Bill will fix problems when one of its key solutions is to impose a centralised new curriculum on academies before we know what that curriculum contains? It is a cart-before-horse move. The Government are not publishing their own curriculum review until the autumn, long after the Bill is due to pass. This curriculum review matters. When any Government outline what is taught, politicians reveal what they think schools are for. Are they places where we, as adults, pass on the historic body of canonic knowledge to new generations as an entitlement, regardless of background or cultural identity and notwithstanding important arguments about what constitutes the best that is known and thought? Or is this new curriculum a skills-based or therapeutic model in which knowledge is a mere second-order vehicle for the main goals of social mobility or social engineering?

Recent curriculum overhauls by devolved Governments should act as a warning. These allegedly child-centred experiments in interdisciplinarity—the Curriculum for Wales, and Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, if ever there was a misnomer—have both led to a disastrous collapse in attainment.

I am not reassured by Professor Francis’s interim review, with its focus on educating pupils through a social justice lens to reflect contemporary diversities. It sounds like a recipe for an EDI curriculum on stilts. Recently, government advisor Professor Lee Elliot Major described school trips to

“museums, theatres and high-brow art galleries”

as elite “middle-class pursuits”, condescendingly suggesting more relevant art forms such as grime, rap and brass bands—what?—for us plebs. Of course, I am speculating based on my political preoccupations and prejudices, but I have no choice but to speculate because we do not know the facts. Should we not know before we impose that curriculum, with no opt-out, on all schools?

We always need to study the detail when Governments start issuing central diktats on what is taught. We need to guard against schools being used for politicised stunts or ideological manipulation. For example, was the Prime Minister’s TV announcement that every school must screen the drama “Adolescence” really educationally motivated, or even appropriate, especially as it will potentially mislead pupils about an important distinction between fact and fiction? I am equally critical of the previous Government’s carelessness in allowing another fact/fiction conflation to become classroom orthodoxy. Children of all ages have been taught as fact that a person can literally change from one sex to another, due partly to poorly worded, centralised 2019 RSHE guidance. Worse, parents’ reasonable concerns about such lesson content has led to them being chastised by teachers as bigots.

This leads to my final point. I am genuinely baffled about why the Bill uses such disproportionate, draconian regulatory powers to target home-schooling. Unlike others, I am less of a fan of home-schooling per se—it sometimes seems a bit odd—but I am more worried about the Bill undermining important principles and freedom. The state does not own children. It needs to be wary of overreach and mission creep into families, which is why, historically, parents have the right to choose how their children are educated.

I am afraid the Bill’s intrusive data collection and monitoring, which insultingly conflate home education with safeguarding risks, is a bit of a cheek. I remind noble Lords of the terrible safeguarding record of the state acting as a parent in children’s homes. I also mention the grooming gangs. I would not trust the state. I do trust parents. I hope that in this Bill we look very carefully at that undermining of parental autonomy.

17:03

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, and my noble friend Lord Biggar on their excellent maiden speeches.

Committee on this Bill is in a few weeks. Today we are exploring many important topics covered in the Bill yet, as quite often recently, we are getting just four minutes to speak. It is hard to cover much at all in that time, and this is two Bills in one. The first is praiseworthy because it protects children’s well-being. The second is not so much because it dismantles much of the successful educational reforms of recent decades. Squashing these two together into the same Bill mixes the message.

In the rest of my short speech, I will discuss only the second part of the Bill and a few of the concerns I hope we can focus on in Committee. First, removing the academy order is baffling. We have no clue what the Government will offer as an alternative. What question was this the answer to? It attacks the successful academy concept invented by the Labour Peer, the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, who is much missed here. It fails to acknowledge the increasingly obvious superior organisation and success of multi-academy trusts, as has been shown in several speeches today by those who founded and ran them. Some justified removal of the order by saying that a lot of the worst schools are academies. That is because for years the worst local authority schools have been transferred to MATs. We know that they then improve as a result. This practice should be continued, and without a two-year wait.

Secondly, on curriculum, the Bill is yet more of, “We know best”. Head teachers should be allowed to tweak their curricula according to their classes’ specific needs and levels of ability. It is strange indeed to want to remove that constructive flexibility, when we all know that one size never fits all.

Thirdly, requiring that only qualified teachers may teach will hit teacher numbers, both in general and for specific subjects, particularly STEM subjects. Teacher numbers are already low, and this will worsen them. This looks like a closed-shop concession to the teachers’ unions—if it walks and quacks like a duck, it is probably a duck. If passed, this provision will remove so many inspiring, effective and motivated teachers from the schools in which they are right now doing great work.

Finally—it is all I have time to squeeze in—preventing successful schools expanding will prop up failing local schools, reward failure and lead to worse results for the children. We already hear of local authorities pressing successful academies to shrink so that they can fill up those failing local authority schools that have rightly been deserted by parents who want their children to get a better education. The proposal helps chums and allies but will worsen educational results.

In all that, one could end up thinking we have forgotten the children. Even with the significant gains in education in recent years, many children still leave school innumerate and illiterate. The Bill should have focused on replicating in the less good schools the approaches of schools that have shown great educational results. As written, the Bill will remove much of the good that good schools do, and revert them to much of the management practices, structure and failures of the bad schools. The unions may be pleased and the local councils and authorities that have failed to improve their local school systems may be pleased, but what about the children?

17:07

[Lord O'Donnell (CB)]

My Lords, this is a really important occasion for the House of Lords, and for the world to see that the House cares about children’s well-being. We have such great speakers in this debate. We have had some brilliant introductions but, in my experience, policies fail when you are not clear about the outcomes. I see the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton, nodding—she was very clear on outcomes. The noble Lord, Lord Hill of Oareford, asked what problem the Bill is trying to face. We heard a number of former Secretaries of State, across all parties, talk about the improvements we have had. We have had significant improvement in exam results. What is the area that we have failed in? What is our problem? The same evidence base—PISA—shows that our well-being results for children are abysmal; we are bottom of Europe. That is the problem we are trying to solve—let us be clear that it is all about children’s well-being.

If this were the children’s maths Bill, we would have a number of ideas about how we improve maths teaching and all the rest of it. Then we would have national testing to see who had done it and who had not. That is the doughnut: a brilliant Bill, wonderful on the outside, but with a very large hole in the middle—which is that there is no national testing, so we will not know what works. Noble Lords have great ideas; some may work and some will not—I am not an educational expert. I have been looking at all the material for quite a long time, and my charity—I declare an interest as honorary president—has looked at the impact of various things. It is mentioned in the impact statement for this Bill, so it is doing some relevant stuff. Basically, we need raw data and a national programme.

The Bill provides a real opportunity to embed physical activity at the heart of school life by introducing statutory measures. If we do, we can inspire the next generation to be more resilient and thrive mentally, socially and physically. If we do not, we are guilty of failing to grasp an opportunity to change young lives by giving them the resilience that comes from being physically and mentally strong. I look forward to discussing this further in Committee.

17:20

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I declare my education interests as set out in the register, in particular my chairmanship of the E-ACT Multi-Academy Trust, where we are enjoying recent “outstanding” Ofsted judgments in schools, while applying the national curriculum.

This is a good Bill. It is necessary legislation to tackle a legacy in which vulnerable children have become more vulnerable, and schools are struggling on multiple fronts. I will focus my time on the part related to schools. Today we have heard some argue, in effect, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, pointing to improvements in England’s PISA rankings for reading and maths as an indicator of the success of the current system. This ignores the reality facing many schools. Our absolute performance in reading and maths has stagnated in PISA, and in science it has declined. Most worryingly, as so powerfully set out by the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, the life satisfaction of our young people has plummeted. Persistent absence remains high, teacher retention is poor and NEETs are way too high. As others have said, we must use this Bill to drive ambition on standards and well-being, regardless of structures.

Academies have, by and large, worked well—but I do not believe that is because of the freedoms initially promised. A Schools Week survey of 120 academy trust CEOs found that the majority believe that the removal of academy freedoms relating to pay, curriculum and the employment of unqualified teachers would have little or no impact on their ability to run and improve schools. The success of academies is much more due to strong governance and effective leadership than so-called freedoms. Good governance is the bedrock of school improvement: it safeguards quality and challenges poor performance. When I took over as a academies Minister from the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, I was conscious that it was the likes of the noble Lord, Lord Harris, putting his personal reputation on the line, that ensured strong governance and the delivery of quality. I have some concerns that the unfettered use by officials of the powers of direction in Clause 49 of the Bill could interfere with that good governance. I will want to explore that in Committee.

I am supportive of where the Bill has got to on pay, but wonder whether we should also explore whether the pay of senior MAT executives should be referred to the STRB, so that MAT remuneration committees receive guidance to prevent pay inflation in that part of the workforce.

The Bill’s measures to bring academies and local authorities closer together are also welcome and overdue. In particular, giving councils a greater role in oversight of academy admissions is a significant step forward for vulnerable children.

Finally, on smartphone bans, like the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, I am sceptical but listening. I am perplexed as to what the sanction would be for a legal ban. Would it not be better, as a few schools are now doing, to use geofencing technology that creates a virtual boundary or fence around a school? When a smartphone enters or exits the school, the technology can automatically block use altogether or restrict its actions—or open it up again. Surely, we need to both protect children from the harms of technology and educate them to use it responsibly and realise its opportunities.

In summary, this Bill is not about rolling back progress; it is about building a system that values robust governance, real accountability and the well-being of every child. It puts children’s interests, not structures or ideology, at the centre of reform. That is why I urge your Lordships to follow the advice of my noble friend Lady Morris to put rhetoric behind us and work together for the benefit of children.

17:24

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of the Knowledge Schools Trust and a trustee of the Knowledge Schools Foundation Trust. It is a great privilege to follow the excellent maiden speeches of the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, and my noble friend Lord Biggar.

The education reforms that the Government are seeking to reverse in the second part of this Bill have been a great success. It has been a natural experiment, because education is a devolved area of policy. The way to measure the success of the educational reforms, dating back at least to 2000 and beyond, is to compare the performance of schools in England, where the reforms have been embedded, with those of Scotland and Wales, where they have not. I will not repeat the PISA data that has been cited by numerous people on this side of the House, but it shows very clearly that the education reforms embedded in the English state school system have been a success.

Given how successful they have been, I am astonished that the party opposite, and indeed the Lib Dems, do not want to share some credit for it. As several noble Lords have pointed out, the education reforms that began with the creation of city technology colleges by my noble friend Lord Baker, as created by the Education Reform Act 1988, were continued by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, in the Learning and Skills Act 2000, which created city academies, and built on by the Academies Act of the coalition Government, as my noble friend Lord Hill pointed out.

The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said earlier that he hoped all sides could work together in this House. But that is precisely what has been happening for the last 37 years, and it is his party that has decided to abandon this cross-party consensus, not mine. The part of the education reform programme I care most about is free schools, having helped to set up four of them. In a nakedly ideological act, the Government have pulled the plug on the programme, in spite of its success. The English secondary school where children make the most progress is the Michaela Community School, a free school. The sixth form that gets the best A-level results in the country is not Winchester or Eton but a free school, King’s Maths School, where the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, is the chair of governors. The secondary school I helped to set up, the West London Free School, was named last year by the Sunday Times as the best comprehensive in London.

I note that my noble friend Lord Harris, who has done more to transform the life chances of children from disadvantaged backgrounds than anyone else I can think of, says his trust’s funding for 2025-26 has increased by only 1.3%, which will not cover the pay award of 2.8% that the Government has agreed with the teaching unions. Incidentally, the teaching unions have said that they want more. They are not satisfied with that and are threatening industrial action if they do not get more, even though it was agreed. I hope the noble Baronesses, Lady Bousted and Lady Blower, will urge their former colleagues to show some restraint. I want to tell my noble friend Lord Harris that, in the case of my trust, our funding has gone up by only 1.1%, not 1.3%, and the CEO of my trust tells me that the only way it will be able to remain solvent in 2025-26 is by making between 8% and 10% of the staff redundant.

It is not just our academy chains that are in this predicament. A survey by Teacher Tapp and SchoolDash published last week in Schools Week, found that one-third of primaries and 40% of secondaries in England will be forced to make redundancies in 2025-26 due to funding shortfalls. I regret to say that the staff most at risk of being made redundant across the sector are specialist SEND support staff. So much for this Government wanting to do more for children with SEND, and so much for wanting to find 6,500 more teachers. Incidentally, what became of the £1.7 billion that the Government’s VAT raid on independent schools was supposed to raise for state schools? I hope that the Minister can tell us what has happened to that in her closing remarks.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, said earlier that we should remember what has worked and replicate that. This Government should be replicating those reforms—dating back to the 1980s—that have worked, not trying to take us back to the 1970s. For the sake of our children, I urge the Government to be guided by evidence, not ideology.

17:28

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I too congratulate my noble friend Lord Mohammed, and the noble Lord, Lord Biggar, on their maiden speeches. The noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, is absolutely right about the child well-being problem, which is why I focus my interventions on the well-being aspects of the Bill, including children’s rights and voices and physical, mental and emotional well-being—specifically, their nutrition and protection against physical or sexual violence.

Research shows strong links between poor well-being and child poverty. Children from low-income homes often go hungry or have a very poor diet. That is why the Government must use all their levers to ensure that children are properly nourished. The Healthy Start scheme has helped young families buy fruit, veg and milk for their children. However, uptake is low as many eligible families have never heard of it, let alone applied for it. The value of the vouchers has not kept up with food inflation, and this must change. Will the Government welcome an amendment from me to auto-enrol eligible families to ensure that children get their entitlement?

The second lever is the food served in schools. I welcome the new school breakfast clubs, but they must serve healthy food. It is important to distinguish between a breakfast that fills the tummy and one that nourishes. The school food standards have not been reviewed for 10 years, and they hardly mention breakfasts. Does the Minister believe that current school food standards are strong enough to guarantee that children will be getting nourishing food in breakfast clubs? Will she welcome an amendment to update the school food standards, as recommended by the report Recipe for Health of the Lords committee, which I had the honour to chair, including clear rules on what a nutritious school breakfast must look like?

Breakfasts are not the only problem. There are still children who meet the narrow entitlement for free school meals but do not get their free meal, so we also need auto-enrolment here. The quality of school lunches is often poor and may not comply with school food standards, and neither is there any proper monitoring of and compliance with the existing standards. What are the Government planning to do about that? Perhaps we can do something during the passage of the Bill.

On violence against children, children still do not have equal protection against assault as we, as adults, have. It is time that the “reasonable chastisement or punishment” defence, which can be used in court, is removed, as in Scotland and Wales. I am delighted to see a great deal of support for this change here and in the new intake of MPs in another place. Some 90% of social workers, 77% of healthcare professionals, 75% of teachers and 51% of police also support the change. Social workers say that the current legal position makes their safeguarding work more difficult, and it is unclear for parents. The current law is discriminatory because it says you can hit a child as long as it does not leave a mark on the skin. What about dark skin or one that does not bruise easily? Will the Government bring equality and clarity to the law by accepting amendments to remove the defence referred to only recently by the perpetrator in the tragic case of Sara Sharif?

Sexual violence has lifelong effects: people live with unwarranted guilt and difficulty in making healthy relationships. The IICSA has recommended that knowledge of or reasonable suspicion that a child has been sexually abused must always be reported to the relevant authority. The Government claim they intend to enshrine this in law. I look forward to reassurance from the Minister, but I am not sure that a duty of candour will be enough. If I am not reassured, the Minister will be hearing more from me and others as the Bill progresses.

17:33

[Lord Gilbert of Panteg (Con)]

My Lords, most measures that come before your Lordships’ House are a curate’s egg: good can always be found. There is wide, cross-party support for many of the measures in this Bill that aim to improve child protection and safeguarding. Some of these measures, such as introducing a single, unique identifier, will be significant if they enable much more effective, timely and joined-up multi-agency work. I suspect there is much work to be done to get this right, and there is a wealth of experience in this House that the Government would be wise to draw on.

On the second half of the Bill, I share all the concerns of my noble friend Lord Effingham and other noble Lords across the House about the rolling back of academy freedoms. I appreciate that Tony Blair is not the flavour of the month on the Benches opposite. For me, the most important of his many achievements was heralding an era of education reform that abandoned dogma. The work of successive Education Secretaries of both parties, many of whom we have heard from today, in improving schools and driving standards is a real example of a long-term approach across Governments and decades. I hope the Government will take seriously and respond to the deep concerns that have been expressed today and take a more consultative approach going forward.

I want to focus on technology in schools, which we addressed in the data Bill when it was before this House. The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, my noble friend Lady Morgan of Cotes and others highlighted concerns about the use of so-called edtech in schools. I thank 5Rights and others for their briefing.

First, I want to make clear that I am not against tech in schools and its use by children and young people. I remember visiting Cambridge, when I chaired your Lordships’ Communications and Digital Committee, where we saw remarkable work by Google and others that had developed glasses with AI-assisted technology and cameras and a discreet earpiece. Designed for and worn by blind children, this remarkable technology gave real-time audio description and other audio prompts that enabled them to interact with others, know who was in the room, where they were and who was engaging with them. These children were, for the first time, in the same place as their friends and family. It was remarkable. We were all moved, and I think quite emotional, when we saw the profound good that this well-designed technology had brought, the way it had transformed young lives and the passion of those who created it.

At the heart of this tech was thoughtful, ethical design. It is thoughtful, ethical design that we should strive for in all technology. Product design, rather than a focus on content, should be at the heart of the way we regulate technology. Indeed, if we had insisted that hardware and applications were designed to be safe for children, we would not now be thinking about trying to ban phones in schools. Edtech covers a whole range of applications and hardware that support teaching and school management. It has been widely adopted in English schools.

Many people have grave concerns about some of the actual teaching applications themselves, fearing that at the same time as parents are battling to control screen time for their children, the opposite is happening in school, where learning is gamified, gratification is instant and rewards are constant. These concerns may be unfounded, but the extraction of children’s data and its use and the lack of real evidence about the efficacy of this technology is alarming. Does the Minister agree that there should be robust standards for these technologies? If she agrees that ethical design and data standards and a strong evidence base are vital, will the Government agree to introduce procurement standards for education technology that supports schools? Will the Government review and build an evidence base on the use of edtech, looking at the long-term impact on skills and well-being?

Finally, can the Minister update us on discussions the Government have had with the ICO regarding the commitment made during passage of the data Bill to require the Information Commissioner to produce a code of practice on children’s data and education? What are the Minister’s early thoughts on what that code might cover?

17:37

[Baroness Young of Hornsey (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the Government’s intention to improve the lives of young people in the care system, which is where I am going to focus my attention. As other noble Lords have pointed out, we are familiar with the negative outcomes arising from being in care. Systemic inadequacies not only affect the individuals and families directly involved, but the ripples spread across society. Fostering is a critical component of the care system, but as the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, and the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, said earlier—and by the way, I support all three points that the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, made about what is not in the Bill—the situation is stark. We do not have enough foster carers, especially from minoritised communities.

The deficiencies in this part of the care system result in a damaging lack of options for children who cannot live with their birth families. Children’s homes are a potential alternative, but it has recently been acknowledged that,

“the quality and safety of children’s homes in England is simply not good enough”,

and that there was,

“much more that we need to do together to put the rights and needs of vulnerable children at the heart of our policymaking”. —[Official Report, Commons, 18/11/24; cols. 24-29.]

As public authorities, local authorities are responsible for the rights of children in their care. There is concern that a recent ruling declared that a private care home was not a public authority, despite the placement in question being funded by a local authority. Since more than 80% of children’s homes are run by private companies, where, then, does that leave the rights of those children in those private sector-run homes? There is a lack of clarity there which needs to be sorted.

What steps are the Government taking to address this problem? Without clarity over their rights, how will the Government deliver on their aim to place vulnerable children at the heart of policy-making?

Both through membership of the All-Party Group on Care-Experienced Children and Young People, and because of my own connections, I am fortunate to have had recently plenty of opportunity to have conversations with many care-experienced young people. They are creative, full of ideas, and they articulate powerfully their experiences. Most importantly, they know what would improve their lives now and when they leave the system.

I have also met with a number of organisations and individuals, including Barnardo’s and the Black Care Experience, led by Judith Denton, which is dedicated to addressing the needs of black and black care-experienced children—from how to tend to black children’s hair and skin, to issues of cultural identity and how to deal with racism. These young people often feel isolated, and their predicaments are ill understood. More foster parents and social workers from those communities are needed, but that is not the whole solution. Can the Minister tell the House how the Government intend to address these challenges in the current care system?

The young people I have met recognise, of course, the damaging aspects of a system in which they have little or no control over their destiny. During these talks, I have been dismayed to find that many of the challenges I experienced in the care system in the 1950s and 1960s persist. Campaigns to designate being care-experienced as a protected characteristic point out that the offer from the state to our children and young people via “corporate parents”, which is one of the most soul-destroying terms ever uttered, is not currently a life-enhancing package. They understand what the “care cliff” means because they live in anticipation of it. They also know how the ruptures they have experienced might be mitigated. They have the knowledge and insight to guide us towards developing the systems and structures that amplify their potential to go beyond survival to thriving.

17:41

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, education in this country has always been about shaping free minds and raising thoughtful, moral citizens who can think for themselves. The Bill threatens that proud tradition. It does not modernise education; it centralises it. It strips away the freedoms that have helped so many schools succeed, handing power to bureaucrats. It is the children from working families who will lose the most—less choice, lower standards, fewer chances to break through.

I support the Government’s aim to protect children, but I fear that the Bill overreaches. As it stands, the state is grabbing sweeping powers, especially over home-educating families, demanding personal data, club attendance and anything local authorities consider appropriate. My concern behind this is the mindset that the state knows best, and that parents cannot be trusted and need to be managed. Authoritarian regimes always start by inserting themselves between parents and children, and demanding conformity of thought and value. Is this really the path we want to take?

Many parents turn to home education because the system failed them, or because of special needs, safety concerns or different values. They are doing what they think is best for children. I was home educated for two years. It was not ideal, but I survived, and I even went to university. We lived in a part of the world where schooling was not possible. My parents could have sent me to a boarding school but, being French, to be separated from children was not part of their beliefs, and I was only seven years old. Does that mean that, according to the Bill, my parents would have been criminals?

Meanwhile, this Bill also goes after some of our most successful schools—high-performing academic schools that have transformed lives, especially for children from tough backgrounds. What is their crime? They are different. They are independent, but they work. Instead of learning from them, this Bill seeks to drag them down, imposing an unpublished national curriculum, removing freedoms over hiring, flexibility and admissions, and tightening control through local authorities. That is not about raising standards; it is about government control. It does not fix what is broken; it breaks what is working. It does not raise standards; it lowers them. We should be backing good schools, not burdening them with red tape.

As the Bill stands, it creates an education regime that will be less human, less free and ultimately less effective. Can the Minister explain how, exactly, forcing home-educating families to share private details will help their children, and how stripping the autonomy of successful schools will benefit working families?

In closing, I welcome the two new noble Lords and congratulate them on their excellent speeches.

17:45

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a governor of Coram and a trustee of the Foundling Museum, both of which institutions work across adoption, fostering and, particularly, the care system. Overall, I welcome the Bill. I have one cause for regret and sadness, which is that my great friend, the late Lady Massey of Darwen is not here to take part.

I do not intend to get involved in Part 2, I think, but if I sense that children’s well-being and best interests are being drowned out by political and ideological skirmishing, I may not find myself able to remain silent. In particular, I say to the Minister that I wonder what her ex-headmaster, Bill Lucas, whom I believe she and her college colleagues called “Batman”, would think about the tenor and temper of some of the debate about schooling and what is in the best interests of children.

I will concentrate mainly on Part 1, and the simplest way to declare my interest is to say that I will be all over it like a rash. There are some issues with SEND, and I particularly commend the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and my noble friend Lord Carlile on their knowledge, focus and passion for that issue, which I am sure we will hear much more of in Committee. With Clause 17, on care leavers, there is still a danger that there will be a postcode lottery. There is a strong case for having a clear national offer regarding what care leavers can expect, rather than it being left to individual areas. In Clause 10, when it comes to regional care co-operatives, I beseech the Government to learn from what I think we all recognise is the failure of the creation of adoption regionalisation, which really has not worked and certainly does not benefit the children.

On Clause 19, trying to reduce the use of agency workers in children’s social care is very important. In particular, I suggest that the Minister and her colleagues might benefit from talking to the MP for York Central, Rachael Maskell, who is my co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Adoption and Fostering. She will tell the Minister exactly what has happened in York with the new head of children’s social care and the transformation that has happened there extremely quickly. It is an example of best practice and demonstrates what is possible.

We then come to early years, and I suspect that my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, who is speaking after me, will probably mention that in a minute. That is an important part of the Bill. The Minister and her colleague the Secretary of State came to the Cross-Bench meeting last week, and she may recall that the very first question I asked of the Secretary of State was, “Where are early years in this Bill?” The answer was, “It’s really, really important and we’re really focused on it”—but she did not really answer the question.

The question is, how can we increase the mental, physical and emotional well-being of children by the age of entry to primary education? In particular I think of the effect of technology on young minds and the work being done by the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Cass. I was at a meeting last week. My brain is still fizzing and overflowing from the quorum of professors—I am not sure what the collective noun is for a group of professors—and experts, including Jonathan Haidt, the eminent social science academic from New York University. The harm that is being done to our young people is staggering.

In today’s Times there is an article about what is happening in France, where a group of eminent academics and experts have exhorted the Government to try to prevent children before the age of six being exposed to too much screen time. It is absolutely detrimental, and it is happening in plain sight. Unless we do something about it, all the good work we are trying to do, particularly in increasing the effectiveness of primary schools, will be limited and demolished by the poor state of well-being of the children who are going there, unable to feed themselves, not potty-trained, inarticulate and with limited attention. This is happening in plain sight. We have to do something about it. It is more than a rash; it is a life-diminishing migraine.

17:50

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, do not worry about cross-party co-operation between the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and me. We hope to influence the Bill in some ways. I am delighted to welcome this early Bill and the priority that my Government have given to this issue. I also congratulate the noble Lords who made today’s maiden speeches. I want to raise two matters. One is about what is not in the Bill and one is about what is.

I agree with Coram’s brief that babies, infants and early years are missing from the Bill. I know it is not because there is not work being done on early years, but the Bill contains “Children’s Wellbeing” in its title so surely we need to address baby, infant and early years well-being. I declare an interest as a trustee of the charity Roots of Empathy UK, whose programmes are about reducing aggression, increasing sharing, caring and inclusion, and promoting resilience, well-being and positive mental health. Its work would be an appropriate matter for discussion during the passage of this Bill.

While I applaud free breakfasts to start the day, ensuring the school readiness of our youngest must include more—for example, speech and language development, particularly for those who need it. One in five children is faced with these challenges, and recent research says that children with speech and language challenges are being unfairly punished in our schools. The excellent work of organisations such as Speech and Language UK has informed the policy in this area for successive Governments, including my own, and during the passage of the Bill it would be good to explore the vital nature of this work and its importance to children’s well-being.

Now turning to what is in the Bill, I welcome the commitment to improve the children’s social care placement market and tackle the profiteering going on there, which the party opposite has allowed to happen for the past 14 years. Measures include establishing a financial oversight regime to increase transparency for care providers and their corporate owners. I welcome measures to enable the Secretary of State for Education to implement a cap on the profits of non-local authority providers of children’s social care, but I am concerned about the words,

“if other market intervention measures do not have the desired effect”.

We already know that the market does not work, so why would we wait?

I support the creation of regional care co-operatives, which may transform the commissioning landscape, but I hope it also means that social economy and charity solutions will be considered. I commend to my noble friend the Minister the Juno project in Liverpool, the Lighthouse Pedagogy Trust and Social AdVentures in Manchester in rethinking residential children’s services.

I have three final matters. I support improvements to the Bill to protect children from corporal punishment within the family. I have worked on that with other noble Lords across the House for the 27 years I have been here.

I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, on new faith schools, which should be subject to the 50% cap on faith-based selective admissions that currently applies only to faith academies. With the noble Baroness, I will also be asking why we have a daily act of worship.

The last matter is one that I know I will not be alone in raising: the Who is Losing Learning? Coalition found that, for every child formerly permanently excluded, 10 more are moved through informal and unregulated means. That amounts to more than 30,000 children, a conservative estimate, being shifted around the system with little or no oversight. Alarmingly, that lack of accountability means that in many cases no one, including the Department for Education, can say with certainty where these children are.

There are many challenges, and I look forward to working with my noble friend the Minister and other colleagues across the House.

17:55

[Baroness Fleet (Con)]

My Lords, it is an honour to speak in this debate. I declare my interest as a governor of the Shoreditch Park academy in Hackney. I will focus on the proposed measures that I think threaten academies. Many noble Lords have already made brilliant, passionate speeches based on deep knowledge and expertise, not least our academy hero, my noble friend Lord Harris of Peckham.

What is the problem that the Government are trying to solve? Academies have been one of the most successful education reforms of our generation. Why are the Government intent on sabotaging that success, other than to please militant trade unionists? Significant parts of the Bill are inspired by ideologues in hock to the unions, putting the interests of the allies of the Marxist Jeremy Corbyn ahead of children—yes, the very working-class children who would benefit from an excellent academy education.

As a governor of a secondary school in Hackney—a pretty tough area—that is part of CoLAT, the City of London Academies Trust, I have seen the power that an academy has to change lives. Shoreditch Park was set up in 2017 in a portakabin with just 180 pupils and 20 staff. We now have 870 pupils in a brilliant new building and a thriving sixth form, with pupils from more than a dozen ethnic backgrounds—54% pupil premium and 14% special needs but with very good attendance, achieving fantastic grades at GCSE and A-level, with 100% of the 2024 sixth form going to university. That is astonishing, given that some pupils arrive at the school barely able to write a sentence, let alone with correct spelling and punctuation. Earlier this year, Ofsted rated Shoreditch Park outstanding in every category.

How has that been achieved? By being part of a very successful trust that has the experience and freedom to make decisions. Why do the Government want to change a policy that is working and helps the most disadvantaged to succeed? I have visited hundreds of schools—I am sure many others have too—and I have seen what works. Academies work because they are in charge, not the unions.

The Bill undermines academies. I will mention three areas of particular concern. The first is the curriculum. Trusts know how to produce a rigorous, broad-based curriculum that include music, drama and sport. At Shoreditch Park there are choirs, orchestras, drama productions, football, netball, basketball, debating, chess club and so it goes on, as well as the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award—incredibly important and life-changing for many pupils, with its focus on outdoor activities and community service all essential to keep these children engaged, to find something special and to build resilience.

Secondly, teacher recruitment has been mentioned before, but I am going to say it again: trusts currently have the freedom to hire who is best in certain circumstances, even if that person has not trained at an institute of education. Why change that? Pressure from the unions? Do I detect the closed-shop mentality, so familiar in the 1970s, that destroyed industry?

The third issue is school uniforms. A strict school uniform policy is essential, with branding and badges, so that children do not come to school representing street culture or gang culture, or as a fashion statement. Uniform is a social leveller, an objective authority. Why change that? The three-item proposal is hopeless.

Academies have strong behaviour programmes, routines, systems and structures that liberate pupils. They are taught to understand that schools are communities with rules and about the consequences of bad behaviour. Just like society, they bring out the best in pupils, with no phones and certainly no knives. Exclusion is the last resort but is absolutely necessary when a pupil aggressively and repeatedly defies the rules.

I want to make one more point. The changes proposed by the Government would reverse that improvement. As for failing schools, ask any trust CEO their view of RISE, the local authority school improvement programme, and they will say it is “drag and drain”. It is a drag on school improvement and a drain on resources. Trusts such as COLAT know how to turn round a failing school. Academies are a great cross-party success, envied by parents and politicians across the world. Just why have the Government allowed themselves to be captured by the self-interest of union leaders, putting those interests ahead of the needs of children? Will the Government at least listen to the wisdom of their own noble Lord, Lord Blunkett?

18:00

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, this Bill is a complex and sensitive one which will deserve careful and detailed scrutiny in Committee and on Report. I intend to concentrate my remarks at this stage to those parts of the Bill that relate to kinship care, an often overlooked and underestimated aspect of the state’s responsibility for children in difficulties in their earlier years. In so doing, I declare an interest as a member of the All-Party Group on Kinship Care. Several parts of the present Bill touch on kinship care, but not always, I suggest, as clearly or as decisively as is desirable.

First, I thank the Minister who opened the debate today for the very wholehearted contribution she made on kinship care when replying to a question on 3 April. That was very welcome, and so were the supportive remarks made on the same subject by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, who at the time was a Minister, when she replied from the Dispatch Box some months earlier. So there is an element of bipartisanship—demonstrated by the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, in the reference in his speech to kinship care—about that aspect of the subject, although perhaps not some others, which I suggest ought to continue.

Why is kinship care so valuable and at the same time so neglected and underfunded? If one looks at the way the state contributes to the problems of abused and neglected children—foster care, institutional care and kinship care—one sees clearly that the third category receives the fewest resources, and at a time when resources are singularly stressed. Kinship care gets less, even though it is even more cost effective than the other two. That is not to denigrate the other two, which often provide valuable relief, even if they have their serious weaknesses, particularly in the case of institutionalisation.

Then there are the complexities and the costs of the legal hoops which must be gone through before kinship carers can gain recognised status for their role. Little wonder that many are scared off setting off along the course of kinship care, or abandon it halfway through. Similarly, complexities and obstacles are a discouragement to local authorities, which are now, rather belatedly, being encouraged by the Government through a series of pilot efforts.

When one looks at the relevant parts of the Bill designed to address these problems, it is easy to doubt whether this is being done with sufficient clarity and decisiveness to produce effective results. Yet here is a useful provision being hidden in plain sight. It surely needs some changes on the face of the Bill to remedy that obscurity.

Here are three examples in the Bill of provisions that can and should be strengthened. The first are the provisions about family rights groups. There is a real opportunity to reform the child welfare system by giving a new mandate to local authorities to offer families the chance to come up with solutions for their children’s welfare, to help them avoid entering the care system. There are currently 153,000 kinship care children in England alone, but the expectations for councils to include families in shaping and promoting their local kinship offer are minimal. Would it not make sense to offer kinship children the same right to reasonable contact with their brothers and sisters as they currently have by law with their parents?

Secondly, family group conferences, an idea that emanated from New Zealand and has been developed by Leeds council, should surely be explicitly encouraged. A cost-benefit analysis found an average saving of £755 per family when compared with business-as-usual social care without family group conferences.

Thirdly, there is a lack of recognition and understanding of what kinship care is and its different forms. A third of local authorities do not have a kinship care policy setting out the support they offer to families in their area. Surely that too needs to be remedied.

I hope the Minister in her response will give a general recognition of the need to strengthen and make more explicit in the Bill the provisions for kinship care and undertake to respond in Committee and on Report to the points that I and others have raised. There is a real chance here to promote a cost-effective way of helping some of the most vulnerable children in our country.

18:05

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I start by congratulating my noble friend Lord Mohammed of Tinsley and the noble Lord, Lord Biggar, on their maiden speeches. I also of course welcome them to the House. Today is an important day and this is an important opportunity to make the lives and well-being of our children and young people, and their families, so much better. I have listened to all 77 speeches, which give me great hope that this opportunity will not be missed by your Lordships.

The Bill gives us the opportunity to put right important issues that affect children and families in all sorts of different circumstances. In our schools, it gives us the opportunity to build on the successes already achieved, tackle new problems that have arisen and ensure that all children get the best possible schooling. Of course, we all want the best education for our children and to see them thrive at school. We want our schools to be places of learning where children learn, discover and play, and where we ignite the joy of learning. We want children and young people, whatever their background and circumstances, to want to come to school, to learn and to discover.

The Bill builds on the successes that have been achieved but also deals with the new-found issues that are holding our children back. Let me start with well-being. Only yesterday, the Global Flourishing Study on well-being was reported. The study, which questioned more than 200,000 people from 22 countries, found that the UK came third from bottom for well-being.

The mental health of young people impacts on not only their learning but, of course, their well-being. We must not forget the profound effect that Covid had on children, in particular the lack of socialising with other children. One in five children has a mental health condition and 500 children a day are referred to mental health services. We on these Benches require a qualified and fully funded mental health practitioner in every school. For schools with fewer than 100 pupils, it makes sense for a group of schools to share that mental health practitioner. In opposition, the Government said they wanted to bring a mental health worker to every school, but this is part of the responsibility of the Department of Health. It was a manifesto commitment, but as yet there is no Bill laying this out. Perhaps the Minister will tell us when this commitment will be honoured.

Our commitment would help not only the pupil but the school as a whole and, of course, take pressure from the NHS. Academies started by the Blair Government were seen as a way of tackling low educational achievement in disadvantaged communities. They had more resources, curriculum flexibility and autonomy from the state system. The coalition Government started on their academisation programme with a single-minded—some might say ruthless—determination. Now, over 80% of our schools are either stand-alone or part of a multi- academy trust. It is right that the current Government do not change this model but allow all schools to thrive and grow—but not at the expense of each other.

It must be right that all schools are inspected in the same way and all teachers’ pay is equitable. Our school system should ensure that all teachers are fully qualified or working towards a teaching qualification. With the right safeguards in place, this should not prevent individuals coming into schools to add to the teaching experience, whether it is helping with reading or whether it is somebody with a particular interest, knowledge or expertise sharing that with the pupils. It happens in maintained schools as well. We should also remember that teaching assistants at NVQ levels 3 and 4 can teach in the classroom.

There should be a national curriculum that all schools in England follow, which makes it clear what children should learn but which equally allows time and space for an individual school to pursue areas of expertise and interest. I hope that the curriculum review will understand this sensible approach.

Talking of sensible approaches brings me to the noble Lord, Lord Baker, who reminded us that university technical colleges have a specialised curriculum that makes them unique and successful. They will not have the time to follow a full national curriculum. It makes sense to allow them to have that flexibility. At a time when we need to be providing the skills to grow the economy, we need more university technical colleges. We do not want to see them struggle with the difficulties that they might face with a straitjacketing national curriculum.

Let me frame my next remarks with some statistics: 1.49 million children are persistently absent from school; 171,000 are severely absent from school; 117,700 are in elective home education; and 350,000 are missing entirely from the school system—as we have heard, we do not even know where many of them are. Finally, there were 83,920 incidents of children missing in care in 2024.

As a society, we must always put the safety and well-being of our children at the forefront of everything we do. That is why it is right to ensure that there is a legal framework in which home education is carried out. Currently, any parent can decide to home educate without informing anybody and without any registration or checks. The majority of home educators do a magnificent job in teaching their children at home, and many local authorities have a commendable and constructive working relationship with home educators. We want a framework that is supportive, not bureaucratic, and that ensures that home education is worthy of its name and keeps children in a safe environment. There must never, ever be another Sara Sharif tragedy.

As I said, many local authorities have an excellent relationship with home educators, with some carrying out groundbreaking initiatives. To encourage that relationship, why not pay the exam fees for children who are being home educated? After all, by being home educated, they are saving the state millions of pounds annually.

All schools must be registered and inspected. It cannot be right that some schools with strict religious fundamental practices, after being closed by Ofsted, reopen in the guise of home education. Equally, it beggars belief that children and young people—often the most vulnerable in our communities, including those with special educational needs—are placed in unregistered schools after they are excluded from school. Why are we allowing local authorities to do that? It is because the unregistered schools are cheaper than the registered schools. We need to do something about it. Having said that, some unregistered alternative providers do an excellent job, but, because of their size, they are not able to meet Ofsted requirements. In Committee, let us see whether there is a possible solution to that problem.

We want children to be nourished at school. That is why we brought in the very successful free lunchtime meals for all children at key stage 1. Independent research showed that it helped children, particularly from low-income families, and that it improved well-being, learning and attendance. We would extend that provision to special schools and key stage 2 pupils. We are not opposed to breakfast provision, but it does not reach all pupils, particularly those in rural areas. Breakfast club funding for primary schools will be £30 million, increasing the number of schools with free breakfast from 2,700 to 3,450—but that is out of a total of 16,700 primary state schools in England.

Time does not permit me to talk about a number of important issues. I would have liked to talk about the national tutoring guarantee, Traveller children, refugee children, extending human rights protections, outsourced children’s care, summer-born children, school uniforms, bullying and so on.

Noble Lords will have received dozens of briefings from organisations, charities and individuals, all showing a thirst to improve the well-being of our children and their families, as well as a genuine desire to improve education and schooling. Because I am an optimist, I know that during our seven days in Committee we will deal with amendments on many of those issues and I am sure that the Government will be prepared to listen and consider, and that we will improve on what is already a very good starting point.

18:17

[Baroness Finn (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Biggar on his excellent maiden speech on the importance of our national story in liberal schools. I also thoroughly enjoyed the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley. I welcome them both to your Lordships’ House.

We have heard many powerful and moving speeches from across the House, and they confirm that this Bill matters. It will affect the lives of the nation’s children intimately and profoundly, and it is important that we get this legislation right. We will engage constructively where the Government are intent on doing the right thing, but, as so many noble Lords have pointed out, there is work to do to improve the Bill, most particularly in its impact on schools.

Every child deserves safety, dignity and a fair shot at life, and we support the aims of Part 1: to provide stronger support for children in care, to build a child protection system that protects and to end the unchecked profiteering from services meant to nurture, not exploit. These are not just policy goals but moral imperatives, and they speak to the kind of country we ought to be.

Much was done by previous Governments—most conspicuously under the coalition by Ministers such as Sarah Teather, David Laws and Edward Timpson—to improve the lives of children in care, but we acknowledge that there is more to be done, more even than the Bill currently allows for. We heard compelling evidence from expert witnesses in Committee in the other place that the Bill misses clear opportunities to intervene earlier and more effectively in children’s lives. My noble friends Lady Cash and Lord Farmer spoke of the need to break the cycles of dysfunctionality.

One example is the timing of family group conferencing during care proceedings. Used too late, its value is diminished. The same is true in private law proceedings, where earlier use could help defuse conflict before it escalates. When it comes to deprivation of liberty orders for children, the Bill says little, despite the known risks and the urgent need for stronger safeguards. These are not technical oversights; they are missed chances to protect children sooner, to reduce harm and to shift the system from reacting to crisis to preventing it. That is what reform requires and, on this, the Bill falls short.

The Bill’s provisions on regulating children’s homes and independent foster carers also fail to confront the real issue, which is capacity. The fundamental problem in foster care is not a lack of oversight; it is a lack of homes. Yet, instead of addressing that constraint, the Bill turns to regulation—elaborate, bureaucratic and unlikely to deliver the change that is needed. My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham gave us the benefit of his personal experience. My noble friend Lady Cash also highlighted further problems in the system. We will look to amend the Bill to do what it should have done from the outset—expand fostering capacity and reduce dependence on a process-heavy system that too often delivers delay, not results.

On safeguarding, there are clear omissions. The Bill is silent on the place of smartphones in schools. There is a need to give children a break from the well-documented problems of digital technology, as the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Cass, so eloquently explained. This is an issue of growing concern for teachers, parents and pupils. I commend the excellent research that Policy Exchange, the UK’s most influential think tank, has done on this issue.

More seriously, the Bill says little about the long-promised reform of the SEND system, where delay has real consequences for children and families already struggling to navigate a broken process. This issue was raised by many noble Lords, including my noble friends Lady Berridge and Lady Fraser of Craigmaddie, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and the noble Lord, Lord Addington.

My noble friends Lord Moynihan of Chelsea and Lady Sater, and the noble Lord, Lord Addington, also brought attention to the fact that there is not one mention of the importance of sport or physical activity in the Bill.

Far too much of this Bill is being left to secondary legislation. This should alarm every Member of this House. It is not just a procedural shortcut. It is a clear signal that the Government do not yet know how their own reforms are supposed to work. The noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, called strongly for the clear use of data and measurement of goals. Clause after clause is a placeholder for policy that has not been written, capacity that has not been planned and consequences that have not been thought through. That is not just weak government; it is disrespectful to this House and dangerous for the children who will live with the consequences. We will bring forward amendments to address all these points. We urge the Government to use the time ahead not to defend the text as drafted but to improve it so that it meets the scale of the challenge and the seriousness of the moment.

I turn to Part 2 of the Bill. As the Minister will have heard, our concerns are far more fundamental. The Bill does not take account of the careful cross-party consensus built up during the last two decades which has driven up standards in schools in England, even if they have deteriorated in Scotland and Wales, as my noble friend Lady Fraser demonstrated so persuasively in the case of Scotland.

Greater autonomy for the front line, through the growth of academies and free schools, provided with sharper accountability—my noble friend Lord Agnew was absolutely right to talk about the Damoclean sword of consequences—and intervention when schools fail, has ensured that England has risen up every international measure of educational performance. Many other noble Lords, such as my noble friends Lord Young of Acton, Lord Fink and Lady Fleet, have spoken of the huge successes of the programme. The reforms driving this improvement have been shaped, supported and implemented by politicians from every major party, from my noble friend Lord Baker to the noble Lords, Lord Blunkett and Lord Adonis, the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, Nick Clegg and David Laws during the coalition years, and my noble friends Lord Harris of Peckham, Lord Agnew of Oulton, Lord Nash, Lord Hill of Oareford and Lady Morgan of Cotes.

These measures, which touch on schools, do not all give rise to concern. There are manifesto commitments in the Bill which we want to see succeed, but they must be made to work. The proposal to roll out free breakfast clubs to all primary schools could offer real value, but only if issues around funding, staffing and delivery are properly addressed.

We recognise the case for a register of home-educated children, not least to ensure that no child becomes invisible to the system. However, as drafted, the Bill does too little to protect children already known to social care—those at the highest risk—yet overreaches into the lives of families who are not. My noble friends Lord Frost, Lord Wei and Lord Jackson have raised concerns in this area. New Section 436C mandates local authorities to collect extensive data from all home-educating families, including details about who is educating the child, how often, where and whether any third parties are involved, even for families with no history of safeguarding concerns. The noble Lord, Lord Hacking, described the clauses as too long and too complicated. Meanwhile, there is no tiered or risk-based enforcement mechanism. This is a blunt instrument and poor policy design.

There are measures in this Bill that do not merely pause the progress we have seen in our schools but threaten to undo it. As my noble friend Lord Hill of Oareford, brilliantly argued, what is most troubling is that the Government have offered no serious explanation as to why these changes are being made. There is no analysis, no evidence and, as my noble friends Lady Fleet, Lady Meyer and Lord Moynihan of Chelsea all pointed out, no clearly defined problem for which these sweeping proposals are the solution.

Take one extraordinary provision: Clause 50 repeals the legal duty to convert failing schools into academies. For over a decade, this duty has underpinned one of the few unambiguous successes in public service reform. Schools deemed to be underperforming were matched with strong academy trusts. Leadership was renewed, expectations were raised and, crucially, results improved. Without that power, as we heard from my noble friend Lord Harris of Peckham, thousands of children in our poorest communities would have been deprived of an excellent education which transformed their lives immeasurably for the better. Hundreds of schools serving some of the most disadvantaged communities were improved yet, with no consultation and no rationale, this Bill abolishes that duty.

In the same breath, Clause 49 hands the Secretary of State extraordinary powers to intervene in any academy—not when it has failed, or even when it has breached its agreement, but simply when a breach is anticipated. That is a staggering threshold. Worse still, Ministers may then determine precisely how that imagined breach must be rectified. This is not evidence-based reform; it is micromanagement by suspicion.

Clause after clause strips away the very freedoms that made the academy model work. Clause 46 of the Bill imposes a blanket requirement that all teachers in academies must hold qualified teacher status. It abolishes the current discretion that academies have long held, which is the freedom to hire brilliant, capable individuals from beyond traditional routes: the coder turned computing teacher, the actor turned drama coach, the engineer teaching physics in schools where such teachers are desperately needed. The noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, argued that technical subjects are best taught by those with practical experience, and she is correct.

Clauses 53 to 56 invite local authorities and adjudicators to override decisions on admissions, pupil numbers and exclusions, thus centralising control where autonomy once delivered results. Clause 57 goes further by allowing local authorities to propose new community schools and pupil referral units, reversing the principle that new schools should be academies or free schools. In doing so, it reopens the door to precisely the local bureaucracies whose record of school improvement was so consistently weak that it gave rise to the academies programme in the first place.

Then there is Clause 47, which mandates that academies must follow the national curriculum. My noble friend Lady Morgan of Cotes has expressed concern about this change, as did other noble Lords. The clause also gives the Secretary of State very substantial powers— Henry VIII powers—which now also apply to academies. Indeed, together with Clause 63, this Bill introduces some of the broadest Henry VIII powers we have seen in modern education law. My noble friend Lord Baker of Dorking expressed concern about the transfer of such powers to the Secretary of State, and the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Haslemere, also addressed the issue. I am interested to hear the views of the Minister on the issue of such powers in the Bill.

We are left with this: the Government propose to dismantle what works, impose what they cannot defend and call it progress. Children do not learn better because Whitehall takes charge of school uniforms; they will not succeed if this House fails to question legislation that takes us backwards, a point made by many noble Lords, including my noble friends Lady Eaton and Lord Eccles.

Perhaps most importantly, the Bill is a chance to shape the next decade of school improvement in England. Let me be clear: we on these Benches would welcome that opportunity, if the Government were serious about rising to it. The first phase of academisation tackled deep, entrenched failure in a minority of schools. The second built a national network of trusts, many of which used their freedoms to innovate, improve and deliver for children.

Now the task before us is clear: to scale what works. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Huyton, made the case for this in her excellent speech. We should take the best of our MATs and local authorities and embed that excellence across the system to improve outcomes for pupils, back our staff—my noble friend Lady Shephard and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, emphasised the need to support our brilliant head teachers and teachers—with better support and career progression, give parents meaningful choice and build a school system that is not just higher performing but more resilient and fairer.

The lesson from both academy trusts and local authorities in the recent regulatory and commissioning review was clear: if we want lasting improvement, we need a self-improving system, not one run from Whitehall. None of this is about ideology; it is about what works. We have seen that progress comes when we combine autonomy, accountability and ambition. Let us not quietly dismantle what works, let us build on it. It does not have to be this way. With the right amendments, this Bill could lay the foundations for a genuine self-improving system—one that drives outcomes, strengthens leadership and places children, not institutions, at the centre. I hope the Minister and her department will meet these proposals with the seriousness they deserve, because we do not get many chances to get this right.

I will give the final words to my noble friend Lord Harris: you can recover from a bad first job, even a second, but a child gets one shot at education. No do-overs. No second drafts. So our duty is simple: we must get it right the first time, and that begins by getting this Bill right here and now.

18:32

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My Lords, we have had a long, interesting and well-informed debate. Given the number of noble Lords who contributed, I will do my best to cover the key issues, but I will not necessarily be able to name-check all those who raised them. I welcome the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, who told us about his journey to Sheffield, education and youth work. I am sure that that will be important for our debates in this House, and we are all very glad that he got in safely. I also recognise the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Biggar. He will bring his historical perspective—as he has done today—his free thinking and his challenge to this House, and I look forward to future debates and engagement with him.

The discussion we have had today has been both thoughtful and well informed, reflecting the depth of expertise in this House. It is also clear that there is a shared commitment among Peers to work collaboratively in improving our children’s social care and education systems. The Bill makes a significant contribution to this Government’s mission to dismantle barriers to opportunity. Reforming children’s social care and education systems is a key part of this mission, ensuring that hundreds of thousands of children have the start in life they deserve.

By shifting the system’s focus towards early support that helps keep families together, we are breaking down the barriers that prevent children from thriving. Alongside and united with this, the Bill introduces measures to drive high and rising standards in education, ensuring every child has access to excellent teaching, strong leadership and a high-quality curriculum. We are committed to building a system that removes the obstacles to learning that hold too many children back, with all reforms underpinned by clear and robust accountability. The Bill includes many measures to keep children safe and prioritise their well-being, and I am glad that they have been widely welcomed across the House.

Turning to the specific points made today, I will start with the debate we have had on how we can ensure our schools are delivering for our children. The most compelling arguments have come from those arguing passionately for the urgent need to ensure that all children have the education they need and deserve. This is at the heart of this Government’s opportunity mission. Too many children are still held back by where they live or the school that they attend.

Let me be very clear, as this Government have been, that this Government back academies. We agree that high-quality trusts have been critical in driving school improvement over the last two decades. We want to build on this success and we want high-quality academy trusts to grow. As of March, we are supporting almost 700 schools through voluntarily converting to academy status. This is a higher number than under the previous Government, at any point since at least 2018.

However, the system is not working well enough for all, and significant issues persist in areas such as attainment and attendance, as several noble Lords have identified. While the best trusts have spread innovation and excellence across the system, academisation is not always the answer. Even when it is, on too many occasions it has been too slow.

The least compelling arguments came from those more concerned about a defence of structures and the status quo, which we have heard from some opposite. I have to say that some of what we have heard from those opposite smacks of complacency, not of consensus. The true consensus is among those who know that tackling underperformance needs urgency, innovation and a range of tools. As for some of the comments made about the RISE teams that are starting work, I am not sure that noble Lords in this place want to be referring to successful school leaders as “clipboard-carrying bureaucrats”, as some have.

Among the things that many noble Lords have identified as key to improving standards, the first is the issue of the national curriculum. It is not true that maintained schools are unable to innovate while following the national curriculum. As my noble friend Lord Knight identified, many academies follow the national curriculum and innovate well. There is flexibility to tailor the content and delivery of the curriculum to meet the needs of pupils and to take account of new developments, societal changes, or local and topical issues. A requirement to teach the national curriculum provides a floor but no ceiling. It does not force schools to teach in a particular way or prevent them adapting or innovating, and it does not stop them adding extra content in the best interests of their pupils.

However, there is more to do in ensuring that young people are prepared for life and that there is space for creativity, arts, drama and sport, as we have heard, as well as vocational subjects. That is the reason why this Government set up the curriculum and assessment review, precisely to deliver a curriculum that will ensure that those things are possible—the floor for innovation that I identified.

Several noble Lords talked about the specific case of university technical colleges. UTCs and studio schools offer a distinctive curriculum which specialises in technical and vocational education. Pupils make an active decision, alongside their parents, to attend these schools for that distinct curriculum. In choosing to go to such a school, they indicate that they do not want to study the full breadth of the national curriculum. As such, the requirements to follow the full national curriculum will not apply to UTCs and studio schools. The details of the exemption will be discussed with UTCs and studio schools, and the regulations will be laid before Parliament in due course. That is what happens when the power of my noble friend Lord Blunkett and the noble Lord, Lord Baker—the founder of the national curriculum and UTCs—combine.

Innovation needs great teaching, as many noble Lords have identified. High-quality teaching is the most important in-school factor to a child’s educational outcomes. That is why this Government have made good early progress to deliver towards our key pledge to recruit 6,500 new expert teachers.

We agreed a 5.5% pay award for teachers this year. We are increasing teacher trainee bursaries, with a focus on shortage subjects. We have doubled retention payments from this year. To support these initiatives, we have expanded our schoolteacher recruitment campaign. We have already seen a 6% increase in new entrants to initial teacher training compared with last year—reversing a trend of year-on-year decreases since the pandemic period. We have already made changes on some of the concerns expressed around pay. We are clear that the provisions in the Bill provide a floor for the pay that teachers in all schools, including academies, should receive—but no ceiling.

There are existing exemptions to the requirement for QTS, which allow schools the flexibility to recruit subject experts and then support them to gain QTS through an employment-based route. It is of course possible to bring technical experts and others into schools to provide contributions to teaching. We value the knowledge and passion that such people can bring to schools, but great teaching goes beyond subject knowledge. For mainstream teaching, we need teachers who understand age-specific approaches, how to adapt teaching to the needs of children and how to ensure effective behaviour management approaches. That is why it is right for all schools that teaching is done by qualified teachers. We will update the regulations to clarify that teachers will have three terms to secure a place on an appropriate route to qualified teacher status, so that schools’ recruitment processes for teachers of any subject are not held up.

On the points made about Clause 49, particularly by the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking, I have to disagree. This is not the constitutional innovation or outrage that noble Lords opposite have suggested. The Secretary of State already has a direction-making power over maintained schools and, from this Bill, will have similar powers over academies. I hope that in Committee we will get more of a chance to talk about the reality of what that will mean.

The noble Earl, Lord Effingham, suggested that there is not support for our provisions. We are clear that the measures in the Bill are the right response to the challenges of today and tomorrow. The Secretary of State for Education has engaged extensively with representatives of the trust sector over recent months. In addition to welcoming the changes we have made to the Bill on pay and conditions, the Confederation of School Trusts in its updated briefing is reassured by our approach to the national curriculum and welcomes the interim report of the curriculum and assessment review. CST is also reassured by our approach to the combination of the Bill’s provisions for QTS and regulation for setting out exemptions. On pupil admission numbers and new schools, CST endorses the need for a framework that works for children and believes that this can be achieved through regulations and statutory guidance.

I am glad to hear the welcome for breakfast clubs, and in Committee we will get into some of the detail around those. I can assure the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, that there are already 750 early adopters of free breakfast clubs. We will learn from them about how to roll out the scheme with the appropriate design and funding to ensure it is available to all pupils.

I will move on to some of the other measures that noble Lords have raised. On home education, all children have the right to a safe and suitable education, whether they are educated at school or otherwise. We know that many home-educating parents make the difficult decision to home-educate for legitimate reasons and work hard to ensure that their children receive an education that enables them to achieve and thrive. Sadly, that is not the case for all children. Some are receiving very little or no education and some may even be at risk of harm or exploitation.

This Bill includes measures that make children not in school more visible, and better enables local authorities to take action where needed. I want to reassure home-educating parents that these measures will not infringe on the right to choose to home-educate for the vast majority, neither will the content of home education be scrutinised any more than is the case now.

In relation to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Browne, the Bill does not allow local authorities to demand access to homes; they may ask for that. In Committee, we will be able to look in more detail at the provisions around what information needs to be provided by home-educators, and I hope that we can reassure people on that.

Several noble Lords raised the issue of special educational needs and disability. Not everything that this Government are doing in this enormously important area is contained within this legislation, but, when it comes to special educational needs and disability—which, as many noble Lords, have said, is a lose-lose situation for too many children and parents at the moment—we are committed to improving inclusivity and expertise in mainstream schools, as well as to ensuring that special schools cater to those with the most complex needs, restoring parents’ trust that their child will get the support they need.

We have made a clear commitment to address the challenges in the SEND system as part of supporting all children to achieve and thrive. We are currently considering SEND reforms through extensive engagement—including detailed work in partnership with expert groups, local authorities, health authorities, schools and parents—that will look at the fundamentals of the system. We are taking action now to improve the system wherever we possibly can, bringing together learning from the safety valve programme, the delivering better value programme and the change programme. We are working with local authorities and schools to ensure that the £1 billion for high needs announced at the Autumn Budget is a precursor to reform and change.

Other noble Lords talked about the emphasis on early years and a child’s best start in life. Through our plan for change, this Government will give children growing up in our country the best start in life. Delivering that plan will require strengthening and joining up family services, to improve support through pregnancy and early childhood. This includes continuing to invest in and build up the family hubs and Start for Life programme. Through that, 75 of the most deprived local authorities in England have received funding to set up family hubs, with integrated Start for Life services at their core. Joining up services through family hubs provides a welcoming front door to vital support to improve the health, education and well-being of babies, children, young people and their families, and the support for parents that several noble Lords have rightly mentioned.

We are already investing in that. At the October 2024 Budget, the Government confirmed £69 million to continue the delivery of family hubs in this financial year, and the Department of Health and Social Care announced £57 million of continued funding for Start for Life services. We are investing over £500 million in 2025-26 in the Families First Partnership programme, through which we are rolling out reforms to family help, multi-agency child protection and family group decision-making. The aim of the programme is to rebalance the children’s social care system towards earlier intervention.

Several noble Lords mentioned the issue of young people not in education, employment or training, where we are determined to break down barriers to opportunity for all our young people. It is unacceptable that almost one in seven 16 to 24 year-olds in England and the UK are not in education, employment or training. That is too high; the consequences are too serious. Bringing down this number is a complex and long-standing challenge, but we are taking the action needed to tackle it. That is why we have committed to the establishment of a youth guarantee, to support access to training and apprenticeships, or support to find work for all 18 to 21 year-olds, and why we are offering two weeks of work experience for every young person and better careers advice in schools.

Several noble Lords have said that, while there are many good elements in the Bill, there is no mention of foster care. That is not an indication that this Government are not prioritising it. All of our market reforms apply to fostering services. Fostering not being included in the Bill does not mean that we are not taking forward reforms, as demonstrated by our investment in recruitment and retention.

As part of the Chancellor’s transformation fund announced in the Spring Statement, we will provide an additional £25 million over two years for foster care, which will form part of children’s social care reform. We expect that to fund the recruitment of additional fostering families, provide better peer-to-peer support for foster carers and ensure that more children in care have stability. Beyond that, we are working closely with the sector to look at how we can improve foster care further and talking to our fostering advisory board about those issues.

On the issue of information sharing and the single unique identifier, although current legislation already allows professionals to share information, we have heard that many practitioners only feel confident to do this when there is a serious child protection concern. Of course, that reluctance can lead to fragmented information across agencies, where no single professional has the full picture needed to spot emerging risks. The new duty in this Bill provides a clear legal basis to share relevant information earlier and more confidently.

Alongside that, the consistent identifier, which several noble Lords have talked about, will be used only for the specific purposes set out in the Bill. The work we are doing on that as part of the pilot will ensure that we design that appropriately to fulfil some of the requirements, demands and concerns put forward by noble Lords.

I hear those noble Lords who talked about well-being measurement. The Government support schools measuring well-being—many already do. We are looking at how to support schools to measure components of thriving, such as well-being, most effectively to support attendance, attainment and other national priorities with our opportunity mission. I would be very happy to talk further to noble Lords who are interested in that.

I feel sure that we will discuss issues around smacking in Committee. This Government are absolutely clear that no child should be subjected to violence or abuse.

We are pressing ahead. We are prioritising the well-being of children in the Bill. There will be many issues that we will discuss in detail in Committee. I am glad there has been a consensus across this House about the significance of the work that we do with respect to children. This Government have made a good start in doing that. This legislation is designed to develop that even further, and I look forward to discussing it further with noble Lords. I beg to move.

Bill read a second time.

Commitment and Order of Consideration Motion

Moved by

[Baroness Smith of Malvern]

That the Bill be committed to a Committee of the Whole House, and that it be an instruction to the Committee of the Whole House that they consider the Bill in the following order:

Clauses 1 to 21, Schedule 1, Clauses 22 to 35, Schedule 2, Clauses 36 to 51, Schedule 3, Clauses 52 to 60, Schedule 4, Clauses 61 to 67, Title.

Motion agreed.

Sentencing Guidelines (Pre-sentence Reports) Bill

1st reading
Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

First Reading

18:52

The Bill was brought from the Commons, read a first time and ordered to be printed.

House adjourned at 6.53 pm.