Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Blower and Lord Lucas

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, it was a pleasure to listen to the speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, which was about a modest change to the remit of the TRA. However, I support Amendment 190, to which I have added my name, precisely not to extend the TRA’s remit in two particular ways—that the TRA should be allowed to consider, as the noble Baroness opposite said, complaints about behaviour before someone becomes a qualified and practising teacher, and that it should be allowed to consider complaints after someone has stopped teaching.

I do not know whether there is any confusion in the minds of anyone in the Government. Clearly, if someone interrupts their teaching and then wants to come back to it, that is a different matter. If we are talking about people who have permanently left teaching, though, it seems unreasonable for the TRA to proceed. With regard to people against whom the TRA might seek to proceed before they have started teaching, the National Education Union says:

“Once the door is opened to pre-career conduct, it becomes very difficult to draw principled boundaries. How far back should investigations reach? Should conduct as a teenager or student be included? What weight should be given to immaturity, context, or personal development?”


What about what both the noble Baroness opposite and I described in the meeting with Minister Gould, which I was very pleased to attend, as “youthful high jinks”, which in no way reaches any kind of criminality but someone might seek to complain about?

There is a real problem here. Even Minister Gould said that she could see we were saying that these proposals seemed to be too much of a broad brush, and that is indeed my concern. Teachers are rightly held to very high standards and, although we heard some egregious examples of bad behaviour from teachers, in general the vast majority not only are held to high standards but meet and exceed them. Therefore, to create the pressure of the possibility that someone could complain about pre-career conduct or post-retirement conduct seems to be an unnecessary burden to put on both the teaching profession and the TRA, which is not currently able to manage the workload it has, although that is not my prime consideration.

Noble Lords will have heard from the noble Baroness opposite that during the meeting we hoped that there might be some movement on this. Like her, I have now had the letter from Minister Gould, who says:

“I also want to assure you that we are committing to setting out in guidance a framework which makes clear the factors that will need to be considered before the TRA can proceed with an investigation … We will do this in consultation with the sector and unions in due course”.


As the noble Baroness opposite said, and as has been said from many corners of this Chamber on many occasions, setting out guidance in a framework is not the same as having something in the Bill. The NEU concludes:

“Even if guidance later seeks to limit this, primary legislation would authorise the power, and guidance alone cannot cure an overly broad statutory remit”.


It is with regret that I say that I think the Government have got it wrong on this. However, I am slightly pleased that there will be a consultation and I am sure that the sector and the unions will engage very vigorously in that. If this amendment is not accepted, I hope that this being in the Bill does not set the tone and imply that we think there is every reason to have open season on anyone who might become a teacher or once was a teacher.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am thoroughly in favour of Amendment 191A. I have been involved in that sort of situation a couple of times in my life. It makes an enormous difference for someone facing a perilous investigation to have someone beside them to make the points that make it clear that the school—or whichever organisation—has got it wrong. It is a very hard thing to do yourself; it is much easier if you have someone beside you to take that burden. I recommend that the Government pursue Amendment 191A.

I also very much hope the Government will pursue the amendment advocated by my noble friend Lady Spielman. We have to get the complaints system right. I had a go at this in Committee and got bounced by the Government consistently. It would really reduce the burdens on people dealing with complaints to have something that takes the weight off, has a really good triage system, is really good at explaining to people why their complaint is rubbish and nonsense and is equally good at making sure it gets to the right person with the right advice tagged to it. It would also increase the effectiveness of justified complaints. Parents taking to social media and having the police called on them is not the right way forward.

Schools Bill [HL]

Debate between Baroness Blower and Lord Lucas

Committee stage
Wednesday 8th June 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

No, my Lords, nor do I; I think it would work much better in that sort of way. The Government are good at making declaratory statements such as, “We’re going to do this: we’re going to abolish the sale of petrol engine cars in 2030”. We all know how effective that sort of statement can be. What is the difficulty if the Government were to say, “We are going for this sort of process; we’re going to have a period of consultation; it will end on this date; it’ll be in a Bill in Parliament in a year’s time, and that’s how it’s going to be worked out”? They would get exactly the same process as is envisaged by my noble friend Lady Penn—

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

I intervene briefly to say that an enormous amount of work could and should be done on the curriculum. The fact is that we are into the 21st century, and fantastic work is being done by educators all over the place about how we best educate our young people for the best possible outcomes. Yet, we have this odd divide between the schools that have to do the national curriculum and those that do not.

As my noble friend Lady Morris said, we should look at what the entitlements and requirements of an educated society are in order to rise to the challenges we obviously face as we move forward. Those should be things that are available to all young people. There might well be an argument for saying that those schools that are currently maintained schools but are required to do every last detail of the national curriculum might flourish more if they had some of those curriculum freedoms. So there is a big advantage to being able to talk in the round about our vision for what educated young people would be when they leave our education system. After all, there is common agreement now that young people will stay in school until they are 18 or 19. Gone are the days when they would leave at 16. There is such a lot to gain from having a much broader discussion about what an entitlement to a broad and balanced curriculum actually looks like, not just for the good of the individual but for the good of society at large.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

Yes, my Lords, and I imagine that we will have it as a part of the process of deciding how to turn maintained schools into academies. There is a really important debate to be had on where we should be resting, and I look forward to it. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Health and Care Bill

Debate between Baroness Blower and Lord Lucas

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Report stage
Wednesday 16th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a key opportunity to do something really significant for the health of the nation, from the youngest to the oldest, and for all the groups we refer to as “excluded.” This is a key moment. If the Minister can respond positively to the questions put to him by the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan, he will be doing a very good job for the nation.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I entirely support my noble friend Lord Moynihan when he asks for proper accountability. That is what drives the few examples of successful cross-departmental co-operation. One of the recent missed opportunities is Defra not picking up on aspects of the Glover report that deal with people getting out into the landscape. To make a difference to that, Defra has to care and it has to be brought to account, but there also has to be a good enough mechanism to ensure that if Defra does propose to do something, someone is going to fund it. That would certainly apply too to schools’ collaboration with local sports clubs. Parents up and down the land want that to happen. But how is that going to be afforded? How is that going to be made to happen? Who is holding the systems accountable? There has to be some system whereby accountability and interest flow through—as my noble friend said, ideally, to Parliament—to make that happen.

I have written to the Minister on perioperative care, which is another example. How does the NHS collaborate with all the other people who might provide the support required for effective perioperative care? They are not in the NHS; it does not work that way. You can have a system that just involves spending the money and ticking the box because that money has been spent; or you can have one with real accountability, in which people care whether you get the results and are measuring that, and who feed that through to someone with a central interest in things. So I am really going to listen to the Minister with great interest on this.