Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

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

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

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

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

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

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