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.

Pupil Mental Health, Well-being and Development

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle]

That this House takes note of the role of schools in caring for the mental health and well-being of pupils, and assisting in their development as community and family members.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking the Library for the excellent briefing setting out the problem. A standout statistic in that briefing about the truly terrible state of the mental health of school pupils was that in November 2023 NHS Digital estimated that 20% of eight to 16 year-olds had a probable mental health disorder.

I thank the significant number of NGOs and campaign groups that sent briefings for the debate. I pick out particularly Square Peg, an organisation established by and for those with lived experience of school attendance difficulties. It works in partnership with Not Fine in School. Its existence since 2018 demonstrates how the issue we are discussing pre-dates the Covid pandemic, while acknowledging that it has undoubtedly magnified issues for pupils, parents and schools. Absence rates were rising by 15% to 20% per annum pre pandemic, while exclusion and suspension rates, off-rolling and de-registrations were also increasing.

I thank very much the noble Lords who signed up for this last item of business on a Thursday. This is an acknowledgement of the concern about this issue and the desire to examine not just treatment but causes. I look forward to all noble Lords’ contributions.

The origins of this debate lie in alarm following the report, in November 2023, by the Children’s Commissioner for England. The report found that pupil absence had become endemic at key stage 4, with over one-third of pupils either persistently or severely absent for at least one year. But from both the largest parties in our politics, discussion and debate about those figures has, I am afraid, focused on what is wrong with pupils or parents. The Government have launched a national communications campaign called Moments Matter, Attendance Counts, which targets parents and carers, trying to get through to them the importance of attendance for attainment, well-being and development.

That seems to ignore the fact that a survey by the youth mental health charity stem4 found that 28% of 12 to 18 year-olds had not attended school over the last year due to anxiety about the experience of attendance. Experts comment that many of them are unable to cope with the school experience, and the “prosecuting parents” report reflects that threatening legal action against parents, as often happens, is both pointless and damaging. But, all too often, that continues to be the response. What does it do to a parent-child relationship if the parent or carer is being pressured by the Government to force the child to go to school, even when school is making the child ill? The top Labour response was that it would legislate for a compulsory national register of home-schooled children, who are not, of course, the source of the attendance issue.

Rather than focusing on pupils or parents, the Green Party and I want to focus on what is happening in our schools. What are they doing to push away pupils—particularly, but far from only, those from disadvantaged backgrounds and with special educational needs, disabilities and chronic illnesses, including long Covid—and discourage their attendance? Why are they failing to be attracted to school?

There is a whole other issue about the rising levels of poverty and child poverty, which were addressed in the powerful earlier debate today. That is obviously a major contributor. Our society is dysfunctional and is failing many, particularly the young. But I will keep the focus today within schools. There is also a big issue of underfunding, but I will not focus on that today because it descends so easily into a pointless duel of statistics.

I stress that I am not blaming hard-working heads, teachers and other staff, who operate within a system forced on them, one that has been ideologically driven, over the course of Governments of different hues, to focus on discipline, rigid frameworks, teaching to the test, regimented and tightly controlled behaviour, and so-called preparation for work. Of course, I have to mention dealing with the impacts of austerity, which saw the most deprived one-fifth of secondary schools’ spending per pupil fall by 12% in real terms between 2010 and 2021. As a former school governor, I saw the pressure that heads and teachers were under to conform, to test and to push square pegs into round holes.

The spread of multi-academy trust schools, independent of local democratic control—with schools not infrequently forced, rather than choosing, to join—has been associated with models of rigid discipline and heavy penalties for the slightest infraction: not having a pen, speaking in a corridor or having the wrong hairdo. A former teacher described it as “institutional bullying”. These schools are concentrated in more economically deprived, often so-called levelling-up, areas. A mother shared with me on social media her child’s response to the suggestion that school was preparing them for society. The child said, “But the only place in society that is like school is a prison”. Out of the mouths of babes come some terribly clear truths.

One of the things that I want to reflect on goes back in history, and how little schools have changed in the past century. If you set aside the technology of whiteboards and personal tablets then the structure, system and perceived purpose of schools is essentially unchanged. The subjects taught and favoured, the external exams and classes, with dozens of pupils of the same age all proceeding together, the idea that this is to prepare pupils for the workplace and the focus on discipline, uniform and conformity—all this would be entirely familiar to a Victorian student, and to what use is the technology put? In initiating discussions about this debate, I learned that in many schools an app records a pupil’s demerits—how many black marks they have earned that day—which are also conveyed electronically to parents, to show how much time pupils are supposed to spend in detention. What does it do to your mental health to know that when your phone vibrates, you have another black mark, another perceived failure, another punishment?

The Autistic Girls Network shared with me research from 2023, showing that 94% of school attendance cases were underpinned by significant emotional distress. Some 92% of those children were neurodivergent and 83% were autistic. However, as the network pointed out, 80% of autistic girls remain unrecognised at the age of 18, so the numbers will be even higher than that. There is no doubt that children with special educational needs and disabilities are being severely failed by the current system. That issue, I am pleased to say, is often raised in your Lordships’ House, and I am confident when I look at the speakers’ list that others in this debate will focus on it. I shall focus on the fact that many pupils, particularly those who start with advantages in family background, health and well-being, may survive the experience of school—they may not show up in the absence statistics or with mental health states sufficient to appear in the medical figures—but we should want and expect much more from schools than being something to survive and endure.

I focus on the rise in discipline, rules and controls over every aspect of pupils’ bodies within the school gates, but there is also the question of what has disappeared from schools, particularly over recent years. I discussed this debate with Rick Page, ex-head teacher of Wordsworth Primary School in Southampton, a large inner-city school of 630 children. Over a number of years, when he was head, he developed a five-strand creative child programme; a music department that sent an orchestra to play at the Royal Albert Hall with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra; a sports coach team with an office on site and an extensive curriculum, plus after-school and holiday clubs; an environmental studies and forest schoolteacher, teaching in a nature zone; a dance teacher for tackling ballet and to lead the Rock Challenge; and an arts focus, which included a talented artists scheme with a neighbouring public school, the King Edward VI School. Mr Page told me that attendance, attitude and behaviour were all improved by fostering a real connection with children’s lives and the local community. Since he retired, continual real-terms budget cuts and the straitjacket of conformity imposed on schools by Ofsted have seen many significant parts of that lost. That is one school example, but the reality of many.

I want to introduce a final theme: the content of education offered in schools, which, as I said earlier, has changed little since Victorian times. This comment was inspired by hearing Nehaal Bajwa, the vice-president for liberation and equality at the National Union of Students, speaking last night and reflecting on how the system provides education throughout in how our economy, society and environment are broken, but fails to provide solutions on how to fix it. We really ought to think about how we provide pupils with the ability to deal with the many challenges that they face in our society—challenges that our generation has bequeathed to them. I would add that we have schools that are preparing pupils to be cogs in the existing economic system, a fate against which many pupils are rebelling. There is an idea that education is for exams and jobs, when it needs to be a complete preparation for life in a fast-changing world, living as citizens, neighbours and family and household members, and as consumers in and contributors to society in multiple ways.

How will we tackle the climate emergency and nature crisis, the poverty and inequality of the world and the geopolitical turmoil? The climate strikers showed us that school pupils are fully engaged with those things, but how are schools helping them to do that? What I heard from being out with and talking to those climate strikers was that they felt that schools were failing them. Indeed, a number said to me that they had teachers ask them to explain the climate emergency, because the teachers themselves did not feel that they had the framework to understand it.

What does the rigid behavioural indoctrination prepare pupils for? Perhaps behaving with the efficiency of a robot in an Amazon warehouse, or following the script in a call centre. WB Yeats said that education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire. Yet, all too often, what we have in the current system is filling school pupils with anxiety and fear; with test answers and rigid routines, rather than a love of learning and the capacity to discover and innovate; with the problems of the adult world, but not the sense that they can take control and join with others to solve them.

I like to provide solutions, so I will finish with a final stream of thought that may be the most radical part of this speech. How do we fix all this? One part of my answer is that it starts with democracy. We need to restore democratic control over schools and remove the dead centralising hand of Westminster; more than that, we need to make schools more democratic. Psychologists tell us that to be empowered and be in control of your own life and your own body is crucial to well-being. It is a central part of good mental health. That is as true for children as it is for adults.

So, what do we need? We are talking about health and well-being, helping pupils to step out into a difficult world with so many challenges, equipped to live good, healthy, productive lives. We need schools that are more democratic and more compassionate, caring and forgiving. If a child forgot a pen or did not get exactly the right uniform on that morning, how much should that child pay for that? What is the cost of penalising that child heavily? They need to be more accepting of difference, more embedded in and reflective of their communities, not reflective of the will of Westminster. They need to be far richer in art, culture, physical activity and play. That is the sort of schools that we need to care for the mental health and well-being of our future generations, to send them out into the world for a healthy, fulfilling and productive life.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister and everyone who has taken part in what has been a rich and deeply informative debate—I might even say your Lordships’ House at its best. I think I have a couple of minutes, so I want to respond and highlight some things that particularly deserve to be highlighted.

I commend the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on his courage in raising the issue of child suicide. It is very difficult to talk about and very disturbing, but it is important that it was raised in the debate. I thank him for that.

Slightly more lightly, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Vaizey: no detention, I do not think. I am delighted to hear from the Benches opposite such a radical idea of how we need to get away from Victorian schooling.

I want particularly to address the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, to accept his invitation—I believe I should be at the front of the queue, given it is clearly a long one—and perhaps to apologise. Maybe my speech did not make it clear enough that I was talking about what is happening in a significant number of schools but by no means all of them, and about the direction of policy and ideology that is being pushed towards schools. I mention, for example, Space Studio West London, which I visited with Learn with the Lords. It struck me, from my two-hour visit, as a very inclusive, welcoming and caring school that has really strong approaches. I have no doubt that they exist, but I feel that they are having to run against the tide, rather than being supported in the way that they should be.

I will now pick up some points from the Minister. She said that the department is operating on the basis of evidence of what works. But today, when we are talking about mental health, the figures cited by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, about children’s experience of schools and how they feel about them were deeply shocking. That is evidence and it really needs to be taken into account.

On schools being forced into trusts, Ofsted is a whole other debate. Very importantly, after what the Minister said about the tone of dealing with parents, we heard testimony from all around your Lordships’ House, particularly from the noble Lord, Lord Wei. He said there needs to be an approach of collaboration rather than confrontation, and that targets for school attendance often mean being pushed to not act in children’s best interests. Those important testimonies from experience really need to be listened to.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bull, joined the right reverend Prelate and others in talking about the importance of the arts and music. The noble Baroness gave her classic virtuoso performance; I particularly liked the reference to how that is related to civic behaviours —voting and volunteering et cetera, and the relationship of that to cultural education. On food—one of my favourite things—we did not actually get the word microbiome in there, but I thank all noble Lords who brought that up. It is a crucial issue.

I want to finish by referencing two speeches. The first is that of the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley. It was an important and obviously very well-informed speech. The word I kept hearing again and again was “pressure”—the pressure coming from exams. I think that feeling has been reflected right around your Lordships’ House; that is how schools are suffering. There is also the way in which schools are not embedded in communities in the same way they used to be, while having to compete against each other. I think the noble Lord, Lord Storey, talked about co-operation and the importance of schools working as a network—not being set against each other in league tables, but working together.

Finally, I go to the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Hollins, who of course brings no party axe to grind to your Lordships’ House; she brings absolutely expert experience. She summed up a lot of the debate, from all sides of the House, in saying that children need to feel safe in school, that ignoring well-being does not lead to better outcomes and that we need to address the things that really matter. That is the message to finish this debate with; it really needs to be listened to by all sides of your Lordships’ House.

Motion agreed.

Children’s Care Homes: Private Equity

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 30th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord will be aware that the Competition and Markets Authority has already done a great deal of work in this area and has made recommendations which are behind our commitment to a much clearer market oversight regime. We will bring forward legislative changes to enact that when parliamentary time allows.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will follow on from the question of the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, about value for money. The Minister said that the Government are against profiteering but not against profit. What actual value is added by having private sector companies involved in this sector, when we should see all the public money that is being spent going into the care of children, and not into profits?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The first thing—whether the noble Baroness agrees or not—is that it provides an enormous amount of capacity, and in her zeal to address the profitability of the sector we need to consider also the stability of those placements for children.

Childcare

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Monday 22nd January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Lord raises an important point, and he will be aware that, at the end of November 2023, we published the local authority-level hourly funding rates. Of course, it is up to local authorities to parse that information and to decide the funding rates for their local providers. We are aware that some local authorities have not yet done that, and we are working closely with them and stressing to them exactly the points that the noble Lord made.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, we have been talking in general terms and overall figures, but the BBC reported the words of Sarah McCormick, of Little Owl Childcare, which manages three centres in Staffordshire. She says simply that they are full, with no space for more children and not enough staff to offer those places. That seems to reflect what the chief executive of the Early Years Alliance told the Independent; namely, that very many parents are turning up but being turned away and told there is a 12- to 18-month wait at least. That seems to be what the reports all say, so can the Minister comment on them? On one specific point, we are talking about something that is supposed to start in April, and one of the ways the Government say they will get the staff is through a new accelerated apprenticeship route, which will be introduced for staff. Given that this is starting in April, when is the apprenticeship route likely to begin?

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

I hear the concerns of the noble Baroness about space and staff, although I would point out that we believe the growth in demand for places will be at its greatest towards the introduction in September 2025. So there is quite a lot of time for us to be working with the sector and building capacity. I absolutely reassure the noble Baroness that colleagues in the department and my honourable friend the Minister for Children and Families work very closely with those in the sector and listen carefully to their demands.