Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[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.