Education (Assemblies) Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 7th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Brixton. I think the word he used, “charade”, is a description of our current situation. It is worth looking at how, in other debates in your Lordships’ House, we see some very intense discussion about the nature of our schools. We are seeing a lot of debate on mental ill-health among our young people. Having a charade, which is what it very clearly is, at the foundation of this is not good.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, for his kind words and apologise to the noble Lord for leaving the Chamber during his speech. If you do three Bills in a row, you have to time the comfort breaks quite carefully; I apologise for that.

As with many people in the debate today, I feel a sense of déjà vu in thanking the noble Baroness, Lady Burt of Solihull, for bringing this Bill, as I thanked her three years ago. The arguments for it now are clearer than ever.

[Lord Davies of Brixton (Lab)]

I apologise; I omitted from my speech my thanks to the noble Baroness. I want to take the opportunity to say thanks again to the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, for bringing this Bill back.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I am very happy to give way on that basis.

I want to pick up points made by the noble Lord, Lord Weir of Ballyholme. The Bill the noble Lord described does not reflect the Bill I see in front of me. Arguments were made on the question of representing society. But this is not our society any more. Looking at history, I thought it was interesting that the noble Lord spoke about Judaeo-Christianism as a foundation of democracy. I am not sure if the noble Lord knows that some of the earliest democracy that we know of in the world was the old Assyrian empire, well before even the ancient Greeks. To make a claim of exclusivity to democracy does not stack up.

There are three main points I want to make. First, we often hear about how much pressure there is on schools and how much difficulty they have fitting in time for important lessons and activities. Here is a space and time for moral, spiritual and cultural development that we could be using far more creatively and better. As the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, said, the time that is currently theoretically allocated for worship could be used creatively to learn about nature, and for the consideration of ourselves as human animals in a more than human world.

Secondly, we have not made a great deal of this argument today, but it is worth pointing out that the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child has said that the imposition of worship undermines children’s rights under Article 9 of the Human Rights Convention and Article 14 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. As I said in the context of the first Bill I spoke on today, we are seeing the rule of law, human rights and UN traditions under such pressure around the world. That really does help to build the case for this Bill.

A 2024 poll showed that a large majority—70%—of school leaders oppose this collective worship. We have this provision, but we know that it is not being delivered. As the noble Lord, Lord Davies, said, this is a charade. The UK is the only sovereign state where Christian worship is compulsory in state schools, including those without a religious character. We are talking about a law dating back to 1944. It really is time that we moved on and provided care and support for our children.

During this time, a local theatre group could come in and put on a little play that poses a moral conundrum, which could then be discussed. As I said, the time could be used to discuss nature, or there could be lessons in first aid and how to react in situations where it is needed. This time could be well spent on these really useful things—education for life, not exams—and that is what the noble Baroness’s Bill moves towards.

I finish by offering the Green group’s strongest possible support for the Bill, and I very much hope that it progresses.

Lifelong Learning

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, for securing this debate. I am interested in his suggestion of a subscription model for universities for lifelong learning, not just because, as someone who spent about 8.3 years full-time equivalent in universities, I would do rather well out of that model; none the less, I am going to stick with the Green Party’s understanding that education is a public good that should be paid for from general taxation—far more progressive taxation than we have now—rather than being a weight on the individual.

I commend the noble Lord particularly for the phrasing of the question, which looks at the social and personal value of lifelong learning, as well as the economic value. To be an informed voter, to be a parent able to help their children navigate a fast-changing world in the age of shocks, to contribute to your community as a citizen, lifelong learning is not a “nice to have”, or an add-on but an essential basis for health and survival, both individually and collectively.

However, I am going to turn one word around and focus on the importance of unlearning what we might previously have been taught—of acknowledging that science and knowledge are not one fixed certainty, or a tower built on solid foundations, progressing forward with stately certainty. As a society, as individuals, we need to unlearn much.

I am 58 years old, and much of what I was taught at school and early university, from the supposition of DNA providing a blueprint for life to the “primitiveness” of hunter-gatherer life and the inevitability of the tragedy of the commons, was demonstrably wrong. Much of the thinking of the 20th century—which often in the global North claimed universality but in fact was highly particular to the ideology and interests of the few at that moment—has been disproved or simply surpassed by the huge volume of knowledge generation we have seen in recent decades and, just starting, by knowledge recovery from indigenous and other cultures.

To give three examples: students are still taught, and the media extols in expensively produced wildlife documentaries and casual news commentaries, that life on this planet is built on the foundation of competition. Yet everyone should know that the 20th-century giant of biology, Lynn Margulis, developed our understanding of symbiosis—the co-operation between species—and of the source of mitochondria and chloroplasts, the origin and foundation of all complex life forms, and everyone should understand how soils are a co-operative production of more-than-human life and non-living entities, not an inert chemical substrate, as I was taught at university. If the very foundation of life is co-operation, not competition, our view of the world and our society has to change.

Then there is the so-called central dogma of US biologist James Watson, the physicist, eugenicist and misogynist—after whom, astonishingly, the new research centre at St Pancras was named—which has been substantively debunked yet is still widely taught.

There is also the tragedy of the commons, which is all too often taught as fact rather than the fantasy of Garrett Hardin, a would-be applier of coercive population control. We were told that holding resources in private ownership was the only way to protect them. Yet it was in 1990 that Elinor Ostrom, later a Nobel Economics Prize winner, published Governing the Commons: the Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action.

The Minister frequently speaks to us about the Government’s curriculum review. I hope that it and indeed the curriculums and approaches of our colleges and universities, and the approaches to further education taken by everything from the University of the Third Age to sceptics in the pub, will all adopt knowledge for the 21st century, because that is what we need.

Schools: Citizenship Education

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 5th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The ability to take part in citizenship education in both primary and secondary schools, as the noble Baroness says—of course, in secondary school it is a compulsory part of the national curriculum—is an important part of ensuring that young people are engaged. On her first point, the need for broader support of and engagement with young people is the reason why the Government launched plans in November 2024 to create a new national youth strategy for and by young people, as part of our mission to improve opportunity.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, debate in your Lordships’ House in recent weeks has often focused on the issue of poor mental health, particularly among young people. In general, we know that it is good for your mental health to have agency and control over your own present and future. Would the Minister agree that bringing in votes at 16 or younger would be good for mental health and that education to accompany that would be excellent as well?

Free Schools and Academies

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Evans of Bowes Park, for securing this debate on the “achievements” of free schools and academies—although that is not the noun that I would use.

Our debate already has focused—and I suspect largely will focus—on exam results. My focus will be broader, for I, and the Green Party collectively, do not think that education should be for exams or focused primarily on future employment but should provide life skills, particularly an interest in and capacity for lifelong learning, and allow for the development of innate interests and talents, the blossoming of body and mind, that provides the foundation for a decent, healthy life for each and every child and young person. Schools should be at the centre of active, lively, flourishing communities and not the cause of massive traffic jams as parents cross the city back and forth to hunt for the “best” school.

The creation and—often forcible—spread of free schools and academies, particularly chains, which account now for more than 80% of secondary schools in England and heading towards half of primaries, has actively worked against schools meeting those goals. They have been set to compete against each other for exam results, to outdo each other with the appearance and actuality of harsh and punitive discipline, particularly in poorer communities, with competition that encourages them to expel, or shuffle out, pupils who do not fit “the brand”.

How might we judge that cross-party consensus of the past 25 years? I have one league table: the Children’s Society offers us a crucial and deeply disturbing tool in its annual study of 15 year-olds across 27 nations, on which the UK ranks bottom. Last year, 25% of UK 15 year-olds reported low life satisfaction, compared with 7% of Dutch children of the same age. Low levels of life satisfaction were at least twice as prevalent among UK 15 year-olds compared with their peers in Finland, Denmark, Romania, Portugal, Croatia and Hungary—that makes my blood boil.

Blame for the unhappiness and the mental health crisis that the Financial Times highlights today with figures on mental health admissions to general medical wards, reflecting what one expert described as

“a population-level increase in mental health conditions”,

is often put on the rise of social media or on concern about the future linked to the climate emergency and nature crisis. Those are factors, but they have smartphones and the climate crisis in those comparable countries too.

What about physical health? Of children aged between 11 and 15, 19% are obese, and less than half of our children and young people are meeting the recommendation of 60 minutes of daily physical activity—and 30% did less than 30 minutes a day. We also all know that education about life skills, such as first aid, cooking and nutrition, food growing, financial literacy and indeed the enjoyment of reading for pleasure, which your Lordships’ House discussed earlier today, is sadly lacking. The FT’s Christmas campaign was directed at providing financial education.

Even worse, what about those who are forced out because they do not fit in? Figures for the autumn term 2023-24 are horrifying, showing nearly 350,000 suspensions—a rate of 413 suspensions per 10,000 pupils. The rate of expulsions is up too, with 4,200 children permanently excluded in one term, up from 3,100 the previous year. Those are the formal figures: from travelling around the country, I hear many reports of informal exclusions. Parents, often of children with special educational needs, are being encouraged—strongly suggested—to take the home-schooling route, much against their will.

Then there is attendance. There is a focus on the 150,000 “severely absent” children missing 50% or more of school sessions in the last year. That has tended to look at individuals and their families, but why is school not an attractive, welcoming, nurturing place but one to be dodged at almost all costs, particularly for vulnerable pupils?

My words are not intended in any way to be a criticism of some 500,000 teachers and other school professionals, the vast majority of whom I know, from regular school visits, do their best to provide a rounded education and a healthy, caring environment, all too often in opposition to government policies and institutional structures imposed on them, and in the face of grossly inadequate funding. I acknowledge that there are many other aspects of British society that impact badly on young people’s lives, but many of the young people I talk to tell me that school is something that harmed them—that they survived. If they did indeed struggle through the experience, they endured it, waiting to escape. That is not what school should be. Yet the academisation and expansion of free schools, competing against each other, delivering large profits to private providers of goods and services and high pay to fat cat bosses, is, together with a central ideology of valuing exam factories, fundamentally failing our young people.

Children’s Social Care

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 19th November 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend makes an important point. She is absolutely right that we are seeing profiteering in this market. The Competition and Markets Authority found profit levels of nearly 23% for the 15 largest providers of children’s homes. There is good provision in the private sector and there will still need to be private sector provision as we develop, but a 23% profit level is not appropriate competition.

The first solution, as my noble friend said, is to increase the supply of placements—this is where the £90 million is important—and we can use local authorities, the voluntary and charitable sector and ethical investors to do that. That has to be the first step. In making this Statement, my right honourable friend has also made it clear that we will not stand by if that message and action do not provide the necessary placements and we continue to see the profiteering that is breaking the banks of local authorities, when it comes to providing the care that children need. We will take action on that profiteering, if necessary, and we will have the legislative ability to do it in the children’s well-being Bill.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I declare my position as a vice-president of the Local Government Association. I follow on from the questions from the noble Lords, Lord Shipley and Lord Laming, and the noble Baroness, Lady Armstrong. There is lots in this Statement to agree with about early intervention and tackling problems before they escalate. However, I had a meeting last week with groups supported by the Crossroads Women’s Centre, who are very concerned that parents affected by poverty, particularly single parents, are simply not getting the support they need at an early stage. They referred to Section 17 of the Children Act, which this Statement does not refer to: the general duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children, which rests with local authorities.

Of course, local authorities are terribly cash strapped. The Statement talks about future investment in preventive services. Can the noble Baroness assure me that local authorities will get the funding they need to provide that early support, so that poverty does not put children on this path—particularly the children of disabled parents, where I heard particular concerns about a lack of support that was desperately needed?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Baroness makes an important point, taking us even further back in the process to the situations that families find themselves in that put them under the sort of pressure that sometimes—not always—brings potential harm to their children. Of course it is important that we think about child poverty in a holistic manner, which is what the task force with my right honourable friends the Secretary of State for Education and the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions is working on now. It is also important that we support local government in providing some of those broader services. At the moment, we are seeing enormous increases in spending on children’s social care but relatively small increases in benefits for children. That is why we need to reform the system, alongside ensuring that the money is there.

Education (Values of British Citizenship) Bill [HL]

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 18th October 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, both for bringing us the Bill on this initiative and for his fine introduction. I agree with many of the speeches made already—that of the noble Baroness, Lady Uddin, and notably that of the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, with her expressions of concern about Prevent.

Given the time limit, I will focus on Clause 1(5), which concerns the required inclusion in educational directions of respect for the environment. This follows from the contribution of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Sheffield; I repeat his question for the Minister on where the new GCSE in natural history is.

We have inherited a disastrous set of values and attitudes towards the environment, with thinking that goes back a long way and which we have adopted into our intellectual tradition. It includes the great chain of being, which is the concept that human beings are some kind of pinnacle of life, and the idea that the whole complexity of life on earth—the living system that James Lovelock identified as Gaia, which has evolved over billions of years—is there for us as a species, under our control and for our exploitation.

The 21st century has exposed that for the dangerous fallacy it is, with the climate emergency, the nature crisis and the poisoning of our planet with novel entities; six of the nine planetary boundaries have been exceeded. We know that there are other intellectual traditions and other ways of looking at the world, which are attracting attention from our scientists and researchers. For example, I note that, across many African religions, there is the concept of ukama, which states that animals are part of a community with humans; it emphasises mutual dependence, a sense of unity and, at least sometimes, a moral imperative of respect.

For those for whom that perhaps goes a bit far, I go back to 21st-century science. It tells us that we are holobionts, a complex of tens of thousands of species. We need to understand our own bodies, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Drefelin, said yesterday in my Oral Question about biocides. I point noble Lords to a book written by a Member of your Lordships’ House—the noble Baroness, Lady Willis of Summertown, who is not currently in her place—entitled Good Nature: The New Science of How Nature Improves Our Health. We are failing our children if we do not educate them about their place as part of nature; that needs to be part of a much broader change where our education system works to prepare people for life, not just exams and jobs.

Higher Education Funding

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 12th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, the parlous state of our universities—extending far beyond, although deeply interrelated with, their funding crisis—was a subject of considerable discussion at Green Party conference last weekend, so I thank the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, for securing this timely debate.

I am going to focus on the deeper and broader problems of which the funding crisis is a symptom rather than a cause. The University and College Union (UCU) fringe, at which I spoke at Green Party conference, summed it up with “Cancel the Market”. The chair of the Office for Students recently claimed that the “golden age of universities” could be over. That is not how recent decades look to growing numbers of academics and other workers in universities, to students or to the communities that house them.

Forced by neoliberal ideology to become competitive businesses, with control taken from communities of scholars and put into the untender hands of business managers, universities have certainly grown their shiny, glass-fronted buildings—and their debt loads. They have added to GDP with massive student fees that weigh —unpayably—on their graduates for decades. They have presided over growth in staff numbers—increasingly, low-paid workers on zero-hours and other insecure contracts. Universities have bulged across disadvantaged communities and then risked dumping them deeper in the financial mire. I was in Hull last night, where one in 10 academic staff faces the chop and the city faces a significant economic blow.

The neo-liberalisation of the university is a trend that has progressed, to varying degrees, around the world. It has been accompanied by the meteoric rise of the work of the website Retraction Watch—exposing fraud and error at startling levels—and the replication crisis, a growing area of literature and of great concern. This is not an accident. It is what the market—what publish or perish—demands: volume and rankings, not innovation and sense.

Visiting universities, I often see that the most celebrated academics are those who have produced a spin-out company, a marketable product. That attitude has seen, particularly from the former Government, a drive against the humanities and creative subjects, dismissed as luxury, unnecessary items, “More STEM, more STEM—there’s money in it.”

At the Green Party conference at the National Education Union fringe, a despairing student from a fast-expanding and hopelessly overstretched aeronautical engineering course asked, “What do we do when the universities collapse?”

Positively, I would say that this direction of travel has come not from within universities but from ideological forces here in Westminster, but universities, students, academics and communities want something different and they have lots of ideas. We have to look to them for the ideas for how to repair this situation.

I also note the Slow Knowledge movement, as charted by Cal Newport. His model of slow productivity has three principles: do fewer things, work at a natural pace and obsess over quality. How do we create institutions that do that? How do we take this crisis of funding and turn it into an opportunity—as the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, said—to change direction?

The world needs our universities to generate knowledge and wisdom to reshape our broken economic, social and environmental systems, not just debt and new profit opportunities for planet-wrecking products. To quote the Australian academic Tyson Yunkaporta, founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University:

“I’ve been chipping away all the bits of the Age of Reason that contain world-terminating algorithms and I have to tell you it’s getting a bit thin”.

Skills: Importance for the UK Economy and Quality of Life

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, for securing this debate and particularly thank him for his formulation of the Motion, which acknowledges that skills are not just for “the economy” but for life, and indeed are the foundation of quality of life. That reflects the Green approach to education and skills training—that it indeed has to be for life, not just for exams or for vocational training.

I associate myself with the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Baker of Dorking. We have an education system that wastes term after term preparing for exams, which is not education or learning but is a very narrow skill that most people will never repeat once they leave the education system.

I want to particularly focus in one area of my remarks on the great tragedy of the collapse of lifelong learning provision. The number of publicly funded qualifications started by adults has declined by 70% since the early 2000s, dropping from nearly 5.5 million qualifications to 1.5 million qualifications by 2020—those are Institute for Fiscal Studies figures. Essentially, what is left is an extremely narrow range of courses focused particularly on education for jobs that might exist at this particular moment.

The total spend on adult education and apprenticeships combined will be 25% lower in 2024-25 than in 2010-11, and markers have already been made on the plan for adults over the age of 24 studying level 3 and 4 qualifications being forced to take on debt. We are loading our young people down with debt that they will never be able to repay, and now we are seeking to do the same thing right through our age ranges. We have seen the damage it has done to our young people. What damage will it do to people seeking to get ahead, to have that weight of debt on their shoulders?

What is happening here? I will quote one figure: in the last decade, there have been 4 million “lost learners”. That means people who have not been able to advance their productivity—to focus on something this House often looks at—but also have not been able to improve their health through education and skills training, which is very much underrated.

One of the ways in which we utterly fail to value skills is by failing to value the people who teach the skills. In a UCU survey that came out last year, among further education college staff 77% said that the quantity of work had “increased significantly” in the past three years. More than four in 10 say their workload was “unmanageable”. Those who provide education and skills training need to be valued as essential workers and paid and treated accordingly—and that is not what is happening now. If the noble Lord, Lord Patten, wants to look at why productivity might be low, exhaustion, overwork and lack of being valued and treated well may well be factors in that figure.

I want to pick up points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, on green skills, and particularly, as she said, that they are too often thought of as relating just to the energy and technology sectors. I will focus briefly on land-based skills in particular. We have seen a cascade of closures of agricultural colleges around the nation, among them recently the 125 year-old Newton Rigg College in Penrith, which is much mourned and much valued. It was deemed no longer financially viable. That is the product of government policy decisions and government funding decisions—a system that has failed to acknowledge that we need food security in this country and that that requires skills.

We have seen some movement from the Government in acknowledging that food security is not just, as I think the Prime Minister three PMs back said, a matter for the supermarkets. There is now some acknowledgement that it is a matter for the Government. Surely land-based skills, the ability to grow food and—I stress this—the ability to engage in environmental horticulture and care for our natural spaces are skills in one of the greatest areas of shortage for our country.

I ask the Minister a question. I know that we are about to start a GCSE in natural history. Can she update me, now or later, on how that is progressing, what student numbers are looking like and how many of those courses are likely to be introduced?

I have two brief final points. Even when a Green Government have introduced a wonderful education system and lifelong learning system, there will never be enough skills. We need to think about where the skills are going. We have an oversized financial sector, which employs 9 million people and swallows up many of our physics and maths graduates and many other people with key levels of skills. We need to think about where those people could be better used for the state of our society—for the future resilience and well-being of all of us.

I also briefly note that we need to acknowledge skills that have been acquired through experience. We need to stop talking about “unskilled jobs”. Many of the jobs that people do on the minimum wage are really difficult, and they have to learn to do them, and we need to acknowledge them in the levels of pay and respect.

I will finish by reflecting on a young woman I met in the north-east recently. In her mid-20s, she had spent a decade caring for her father, who had a horrible degenerative disease. She is a NEET—not in education, employment or training. She has learned so much and has so many skills, but she does not have a lot of confidence, because society has not valued what she has done. We need to value skills that people, particularly women, have acquired through care, and acknowledge them when they seek to enter the labour market.

Childcare Entitlements

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I have to say that I did not agree with everything that the noble Baroness asserted. To start with the risk register, it is not glowing red, but it is of course a priority risk for the department. The noble Baroness understands this extremely well from her previous experience. We are doubling the commitment in this area financially: we will spend £8 billion a year once this rollout is complete, from £4 billion today. That is a massive increase, and it is a real challenge in a market with a number of small providers and with the way in which, rightly, we work through local authorities and providers. So it would be irresponsible—and I think that the noble Baroness would be criticising the Government—if it was not a significant risk for the department. But that means that it gets a great deal of focus, and there are very detailed plans to support it.

As for consulting the sector, I slightly take exception to what the noble Baroness said. The department works very closely with the sector, providers, parents and local authorities, and it is crucial that we do, because we are committed to getting this right.

As for the willingness of providers, and the point that the noble Baroness picked from the report about our understanding of willingness and capacity, as I pointed out earlier, capacity for all types of provider rose by over 20% last year. That is very significant, as I am sure that the noble Baroness agrees. On the point about willingness, almost 40% of group-based providers, 33% of school-based providers and 42% of child minders said that they would be more likely to offer places to children under three, given this expansion. About half of them—it is slightly different, but I shall not bore the House with all the numbers—said that those would be additional places, so they would not be substituting an older child with a younger child.

Where I absolutely agree with the noble Baroness is that this is a very serious report. We take it very seriously, and we will respond in full.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, like every other speaker, I have read with concern the National Audit Office report, which talks about the lack of qualified staff and suitable space, which could have an impact on the quality of provision. I share the concerns about qualified staff, but we have not had much discussion about the suitable space side of the issue. The Minister may have to write to me later, but it would be interesting to know how many of these are actually new facilities, how many facilities are closing— we are still hearing reports of facilities closing—and what the comparative quality of the space of the new provision is.

One thing that I was thinking about, which is something that the Minister and I have discussed before, is access to green space. We are increasingly understanding how terribly important that is for the health and well-being of everybody, but particularly young children. What percentage of the new provision is in places that have access to space? Is expanding the number of places reducing the amount of access to green space per child? What information do the Government have about the quality of the spaces of these new provisions? That is something that the National Audit Office has brought to our attention, and it really deserves more focus.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

On building capacity, the department has awarded £100 million to local authorities to help expand capacity. On the quality of space, as the noble Baroness knows, early years settings are regulated by Ofsted. It has very clear standards that they have to meet, and we expect them to meet them.

School Inspections: Funding

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 17th April 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I think we have to be a little careful with that kind of generalisation. Like with any inspection, one may well be apprehensive or nervous ahead of it, but 90% of our schools are now good or outstanding, so the outcome for the vast majority of schools is a very good result. I remind the noble Baroness that Ofsted inspectors are almost all either former or serving teachers, head teachers and senior leaders.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to associate myself with the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Garden. I do not think that “Ofsteded” becoming a verb is cause for mirth; it is cause for great concern. I do not recognise in the comments of the Minister the statistics from the survey by the National Education Union, in which 62% of teachers said that Ofsted had affected their mental health. To quote Nick Wigmore, a primary school teacher from Rochdale:

“Ofsted turns up every four to five years to provide one-word judgements … It’s a system that doesn’t work”.


Given that there are huge problems with teacher retention and mental health issues, do the Government acknowledge that this is something they need to consider very seriously? I should declare an interest, in that it is long-term Green Party policy to abolish Ofsted.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I think the noble Baroness has heard from other noble Lords who are much more expert than I am of the value of Ofsted. In relation to one-word judgments, it is extremely important that parents have a simple and clear understanding—the noble Baroness rolls her eyes, but it is true. Parents value it. I commend to her the research on parent opinions about the value of Ofsted reports; they value those judgments, and it is important that parents are recognised in this.