Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I am optimistic for a hat trick from the Minister. Clause 50 is one of the clauses that leave me most worried about the Bill because it risks directly damaging the education that children receive. Again, that is obviously not what Ministers intend, but it appears to ignore the impact on the school performance of sponsored academies—to be clear, not every single sponsored academy, but I know that the Minister will agree that, overall, the evidence shows a really important impact on the lives of children in those schools.

To be clear, I do not think that anyone on my Benches thinks that autonomy is a magic bullet to solve the problems of any school, whether or not it is failing. The key is how that autonomy is used. Some MATs have used their autonomy to focus on developing really great and deep expertise in turning around struggling schools, supporting staff and transforming outcomes for pupils. Others have focused on developing great curricula. There are lots of other examples; of course, there are also examples of professional generosity in the maintained sector, too.

There are now 2,796 sponsored academies in England —more than 23% of our secondary schools. As we have heard from a number of noble Lords, including my noble friend Lord Sewell earlier, trusts have led to extraordinary turnarounds in some of the most difficult schools in our country; I pay tribute to everyone involved in that critical work. However, Clause 50 changes that. No longer will a failing maintained school automatically join a strong MAT. In her Written Ministerial Statement, published yesterday, the Secretary of State wrote:

“Subject to the passage of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill, structural intervention through issuing of academy orders will continue to be the default approach for schools in special measures, because no child should be left in a school that does not have the capacity to improve”.—[Official Report, Commons, 9/9/25; col. 29WS.]


I am genuinely confused by that because I do not feel that that is what the Bill says, as it removes the section in the Academies Act 2010 that facilitated this intervention. I hope that the Minister can explain that and reassure me.

The Government have argued that we should intervene earlier in schools that are struggling. Nobody would disagree with that; we were already doing that in the department when I was in office. Of course, if that works, it is the best outcome for children.

The other argument that the Government have put forward is that directive academy orders are too slow. I think that, if the Minister has time to dig into the detail, she will agree with me that the ones that are slow are really complicated. They may need significant financial help, which the department is struggling to find down the back of any education-shaped sofa; that might be in relation to capital or to revenue. There may be very complex governance issues, or—as in one case that I can remember, which was very slow—there may be crippling PFI contracts in place.

However, even that does not stop immediate help being put in. The Minister will be familiar with a number of cases where that has happened, often with trusts taking significant risk and commitment of resources without any guarantee that they will end up being the sponsor for the school. They do it because it is the right thing to do.

My Amendment 445B aims to address the Government’s concern about delays while still keeping the urgency that is necessary to address the weaknesses in a particular school. It says that, if

“no suitable sponsor is available, the Secretary of State must, within 14 days, publish a plan to secure appropriate governance and leadership of the school and to secure its rapid improvement”.

This would bring about the clarity and transparency that will be crucial in retaining the confidence of parents, pupils and staff. I think that that aligns with the Secretary of State’s Statement yesterday but, if it does not, I hope that the Minister can explain where the gap is.

My Amendment 446A aims to address a problem that is likely to emerge as a result of the Government’s approach—namely, an increase in the number of judicial reviews of academy orders. Schools will want to understand why they are not being given more support or more time to turn around. However valid any individual case might be, the outcome will be a slowing down and reduction in the use of academy orders, leaving pupils in failing schools for longer.

My Amendment 446B aims to reintroduce the automatic academisation of maintained schools that have received from Ofsted a significant improvement judgment, or whatever the latest language is—however the department and the chief inspector judge that to be framed—and where the RISE teams believe that a school is “significantly underperforming”.

The Bill fails to address another problem: the schools that, under the previous Ofsted framework, were repeatedly graded as requiring improvement, some as many as seven times or more. None of us in this Committee would want our child to attend or work in a school that is so stuck in a rut of underperformance. I know that the decision to intervene in the so-called 2RI+ schools—to use the secret language of school intervention—was not universally welcomed, including by my noble friend Lady Spielman, and she and I debated this many times in her previous role. The aim was to send a strong signal about the priority we put on addressing underperformance in a timely and effective way. Sadly, the Secretary of State reversed this approach very early on in her tenure.

I ask the Minister to reconsider whether this clause should stand part of the Bill, particularly given the Secretary of State’s comments yesterday. Where is the evidence that the department’s proposed approach will be more effective? Children in failing schools need urgent action, as the Secretary of State herself has said. Sometimes the leadership of that school does not want to become part of a trust, but, ultimately, we need to be clear that the interest of the pupils must always come first. I beg to move the amendment in my name.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 447 and 447ZB, which appear in my name. I must begin by apologising to the Committee and the Minister for failing to introduce my amendments in the group before the break. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, for picking up the slack. My only explanation is that it has been a long 24 hours.

This Bill, as currently drafted, sits in an awkward position. On the long-term disastrous policy of academisation—too often forced academisation and rarely resisted successfully by local and school communities —the Bill makes half a U-turn. It ends the presumption that all new schools must be an academy and removes the duty to force schools into multi-academy trusts. As the National Education Union has said, this a welcome shift in policy. But this is not a full U-turn but a half U-turn. It leaves far too many schools stuck, pointed awkwardly at 90 degrees across the flow of history, like a vehicle on a traffic island with fast-moving lorries approaching from both directions.

The Bill does not provide the option for schools and their communities that are unhappy in their current situation to leave multi-academy trusts and join the local authority system or other groups that are better suited to their needs. Making that provision would provide the chance of escape and allow schools to get out of the iron grip of dangerous and failed ideology into the empowered position of local choice and decision-making—the kind of devolution that the Government say they are in favour of.

This is an area of policy that the Green Party, as on so many others, has been leading ever since it resisted from the start the disastrous push to free schools and academies that has fragmented our systems and seen enormous sums flowing into fat cat executive pay—something we may come to in the next group—and big supply profits hoovered up by multinational companies on the contractor bandwagon. These two amendments take two possible approaches to dealing with this and starting to untangle the mess.

Currently, schools in multi-academy trusts lack separate legal entities. Leaving it to the MAT board to decide which powers, if any, it chooses to delegate to each academy is a profoundly unequal relationship. Amendment 447 does not seek to directly prescribe how to get out of this undeniably complex situation; rather, it would create a new clause in the Bill directing the Secretary of State to set out, within 12 months of the Act passing, a report with proposals for converting academy chains, individual academies and free schools into maintained schools under local authority control.

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Clause 50 is about empowering the Secretary of State to act in the best interests of children. Far from leading to the weakening of school improvement, it will accelerate it. For that reason, and because of the assurances I have provided, I hope that noble Lords will feel able to withdraw or not move their amendments.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I am taking some encouragement from the Minister’s remarks. I wrote down and underlined that the Government have no immediate plans. That is interesting, because it is a statement of a possibility for the future. We all know how hard it is to get parliamentary time to get Bills through Parliament—the Government will certainly attest to that. I ask the Minister to consider future-proofing. Would it not be a good idea to provide the potential here, without the necessity to activate it, and set up some mechanism for the possibility of getting the kind of diversity that she says she is looking for?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I also said that the proposals run contrary to our policy. I would not want the noble Baroness to run away with anything that is unlikely to happen—so no.