Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Blackstone Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I oppose Amendment 427C and the gist of the speeches and comments that we have heard so far. In doing so, I tread with great care, because I realise the history, the sensitivities, and the passion and commitment of those people whose lives would be involved. I do not pretend to be part of that community or to criticise it in any way. I am very proud that our country welcomes people of all faiths. I have always been a defender of faith schools and served for a while on the board of Church of England schools. As a Minister, I argued—sometimes with great difficulty within my own party—for continuing with faith schools. That is the background I come from, but I cannot support this amendment.

Over the past 12 months, together with the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, I have had the privilege of meeting young adults, some up to the age of 30 and some in their late teens, who have been students at yeshivas and educated within the system, living within the community. To be honest, they would not recognise the description that the noble Lord, Lord Glasman, has just given. They would not describe their own education and their own lives in that way. So I think our starting point should be that, as with any school or any community, there is a risk to children if we do not protect them in an orderly way and in the way that we should.

I am not opposed to this community being able to continue to educate in its own faith. Why would we not wish it to do that when we allow every other faith to do the same? But that is possible already. There are Haredi-registered schools where parents can send their children. It is not the case that if you close down the yeshivas, no one can have a school based on this faith. They can—and it is in the registered sector. What I have a problem with is the yeshiva. This is where I oppose Amendment 427C. My argument for doing so is very straightforward: if you are there at 8 am and you leave at 6 pm, it is a school. Whatever you do at home afterwards is not full-time education. If you are there at 8 am and leave at 6 pm, it does not in any way have that balance of education that I think we want for everyone.

I understand that it is difficult to get the balance right and decide where to draw the dividing lines. It is not easy and there is an element of compromise, but what I have heard from the people who have spoken so far is that we all welcome the Bill and we all want things to be regulated to protect children—but not this religion, not this faith, not this group. I cannot buy into that. Every child, including children in this community, deserves to be safeguarded and to have a broad and balanced education, which we are all signed up to. Unless you register it, I cannot see how this will happen.

Where I think the debate comes in is the nature of the registration and the consultation with the community. I urge the Minister, as I know she will— I suspect the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, spoke with her already on this—to try to get an understanding and, where possible, to fit our wish to regulate to protect children with the rights of the community to continue to educate its children in its faith. I would not want to stop that, but I would not want to support anything that excluded children from this community from being safeguarded in the way that children from other communities are.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I support what my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley has just said. Perhaps I can say to my noble friend Lord Glasman that I am Lady Blackstone of Stoke Newington, so we share part of our region in our titles. I am familiar with the Haredi community and have been for very many years, and I admire a great deal of what they do, but I am concerned about what is happening to some of the boys in this community. I share the concern based not only on the meetings that I have had, with my noble friend Lady Morris, with some of the young men who have been through these institutions, but also on the very good charity Nahamu, which is concerned about the abuses of children that are taking place in these yeshivas in north London and, I think, Manchester as well. The trustees of Nahamu are proud members of the Orthodox Jewish community and they are concerned about what is happening to fellow Jewish young men and boys. I think that we should respect that concern in considering how we approach the whole issue of these yeshivas. I will speak at greater length in the next group about what I and my noble friend Lady Morris think we should do to make sure that these young men get the education they deserve, which they are not at the moment, and that their experience is properly safeguarded.

[Lord Marks of Hale (Con)]

My Lords, I rise to support and compliment the amendments to Clause 36 in the names of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, my noble friend Lord Lucas and the noble Lord, Lord Glasman. The amendments seek to ensure that institutions that provide only religious instruction alongside guaranteed out-of-school education are not wrongly categorised as independent educational institutions under this Bill.

Education in this country has never been a one-size-fits-all, state-run system. Home-schooling remains every parent’s legal right. One community, however, has been singled out by Clause 36: the Haredi, or strictly Orthodox, Jewish community, whose boys attend yeshivas, which are supervised religious settings, alongside receiving home-schooling. As one professor remarked about the Bill’s intentions, which in its supplementary documents almost exclusively singled out that community, it is fine to be Jewish in the UK in 2025 as long as you are not too Jewish. That should not be.

Yeshivas are not schools and they cannot become schools. They are religious spaces operating alongside home-schooling with a wholly different purpose. They are settings where young men engage deeply with their heritage, to develop their spiritual and ethical character and absorb the wisdom and traditions of the Jewish rabbinic corpus. Inculcating a lived faith is fundamentally different from teaching subjects like geography or history. Those subjects are generally limited to one or two sessions a week. Inculcating one’s children into a lived faith must be an immersive experience. That is what yeshivas are all about and why they are so central to our faith community. Yeshivas operate as supervised spaces with robust safeguarding and health and safety arrangements in place. They allow sufficient and flexible breaks to enable attendees to continue their home-schooling alongside yeshiva.

Yeshivas are not illegal schools; they are not schools at all. They operate alongside home-schooling arrangements. The children there do not have access to television, smartphones, video games or social media. Their daily routine is geared towards study and productivity, making the days longer and more suitable for home-schooling.

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The Minister in the other place argued that one could not be sure that a new building at a private school was suitable for students. If this is the case, why do the Government think that the school would be more likely to respect this legislation than that which already exists surrounding health and safety and building regulations? I beg to move.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, Amendments 432A and 434 in my name concern enforcement provisions. They are critical elements of the Bill that seek to address the harm caused by unregistered educational settings.

Let me begin by referring to the experience of a woman whom I shall call Dina, a mother in the Haredi community in Stamford Hill. Like other Haredi women, Dina received a broad and balanced education in a Haredi school. She wants the same for her son, but boys are expected to be protected from secular education, and Dina found herself with no genuine choice but to send her son to an unregistered educational establishment called a yeshiva. The curriculum that Dina’s son studied was exclusively religious, with no provision for any secular subjects, including important subjects such as English and mathematics. This was not parental choice in any meaningful sense; it was the result of communal pressure within a context that often leaves families with no real alternatives. These are the institutions that Clause 36 rightly seeks to bring within the scope of regulation.

I accept that there are parents who genuinely choose to send their sons to yeshivas, but let us be clear: they are schools by any functional definition, and the Bill makes the necessary statutory clarification to ensure that they are treated as such for regulatory purposes. Once within the scope of regulation, they will be a viable option for parents who wish to make use of their services. However, boys in these environments often attend for very long hours, including Sundays. That secular education can be delivered at evenings and weekends in the home is, in almost every case, entirely implausible, so there is no adequate home education for boys who are attending these institutions, often from 7.30 am until late in the evening and on Sundays.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, whose name is also on the amendment, and I offered to visit two yeshivas, but the offer was rejected. There was therefore no transparency in that respect. However, we have met young men who attended such yeshivas. We were struck by their resilience but also deeply saddened by the obstacles they faced in accessing the education that was denied to them in childhood. I am deeply disappointed that the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, who is not in her place, was so disparaging about the comments that they have made; they were genuine, and the young men were deeply concerned.

It is important to note that these young people do not wish to abandon their religion or community; they seek to live full lives as both observant Jews and fully educated citizens. That is a goal that all in this Committee should affirm, respect and support. They also raised serious safeguarding issues in relation to the excessive use of corporal punishment in the yeshivas. We should be concerned about that, too.

The Bill adopts a two-pronged strategy. First, Clause 31 introduces a home education register to provide transparency and ensure that those genuinely providing home education can continue to do so, and Clause 32 strengthens school attendance orders where that education is not genuinely being delivered.

Secondly, Clause 36 enables regulatory oversight of independent institutions operating outside the law. Our amendments strengthen the enforcement mechanisms required to make these provisions truly effective. These provisions are not about targeting responsible home educators; they are about ensuring that no child, whatever their background, falls through the cracks. Unfortunately, these boys are falling through the cracks in a big way.

I turn now to the amendments themselves. Amendment 432A creates an offence for landlords, property owners and letting agents who knowingly facilitate the operation of an illegally unregistered educational institution. It also creates a further offence for assisting or encouraging such activity in any other manner. This is a proportionate response to a practical challenge. In many cases, it is not immediately clear who owns or operates these institutions, but it is clear who owns the buildings. This amendment aims to create a disincentive to any individual or organisation from profiting from unlawful activity that places children at risk, either directly or indirectly.

Amendment 434 grants His Majesty’s inspectors the power to search premises without a warrant during investigations into suspected illegal schools. This is a necessary power to prevent disguised compliance and to enable timely safeguarding action. Delay can perpetuate harm.

The enforcement provisions are not about criminalising communities; they are about upholding our collective duty to protect the rights of children to a safe and adequate education, irrespective of cultural or religious context. I greatly agree with everything that the noble Baronesses, Lady Spielman and Lady Berridge, said in their speeches to a previous group of amendments.

I acknowledge the important contribution by the noble Lord opposite, who referenced Article 2 of the protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights. It is indeed vital to uphold the right of parents to educate their children in line with their beliefs, but that right is not absolute, and that is what we must all accept. It must be balanced with the state’s duty to ensure that every child receives an education that meets minimum standards of safety and quality. That duty is enforced by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Bill does not constrain religious practice; many Haredi children already attend registered schools, where they receive both religious and secular education, and they are frequently within the maintained sector. That might be relevant to the questions that the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, asked earlier.

As the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, stated at Second Reading, no cultural or religious norm should be permitted to override the fundamental rights of children. I thank all those Members of your Lordships’ House who engaged on this issue with considerable care and conviction, but I urge the Minister to consider these amendments seriously. They seek only to ensure that all children in this country, without exception, can access the education that they deserve.