Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bousted Excerpts

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Longfield (Lab)]

Perhaps I might add a few thoughts from my experience. As Children’s Commissioner for six years, I found that the greatest level of responsibility was around children in care, and I looked in detail at the experience of children in care throughout that time. One of the things that was absolutely clear to me was that the ability of local authorities to focus on early intervention diminished hugely during that period. The amount that was spent on early intervention halved during that period, while the amount that was spent on crisis doubled. You do not need to be a great mathematician to realise that the more you spend on crisis, the less you will have for early intervention.

At the heart of Josh MacAlister’s review and recommendations, which were incredibly and extensively consulted on with people at all levels, from expert practitioners to leaders of children’s services and care-experienced people themselves, was that we had to move and reset the system towards early intervention, and do so boldly in a timely manner, because it was unsustainable for the public purse to do anything other. As important, if not more important, is that more children were being left without support.

Everyone needs to be alert at any time to the consequences of any move towards increasing harm for children. What we now know and have known for some time is that more children are coming to harm now because they are not getting that support early, so it is absolutely essential that there is an urgency about that. As I said on Tuesday, those directors of children’s services that I speak to want to see that change urgently and are very much in line with the proposals that are being put forward. There will always be things that directors of children’s services will want to amend locally and test out—that is absolutely right—but what they want to know is that there is a framework nationally for them to work within and clear guidance. So, it is so important that this is here. That is not to say that those individuals will not have their own expertise in delivering.

When there are experts involved in delivering these expert practitioner roles, they are actually going to use their judgment all the time. It is not going to be about process; it has to be about children and about those families. Anyone who is just following a process because the process is there is not the expert practitioner in that role that we have the ambition for. They are going to be looking at children’s lives and responding to individuals, but at the heart of it, we have to move boldly forwards, to—

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

Boldly go?

[Baroness Longfield (Lab)]

Yes—I apologise for that on many levels. We have to move forward at pace, but also with confidence and determination, while also checking along the way that we are giving support where it is needed.

Finally, we need to ensure that investment is there, but we have to get to the point where we are investing money to prevent rather than to just pay the costly bills when things have got to acute status.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, having read both these amendments, I think it is reasonable to ask the Government what resources are required. When it comes to teachers, we have often dealt with the question of what is required and, if it is a new skill, how they will acquire it. Having enough awareness to call in an expert is another thing we have often talked about in other fields—I certainly have on special educational needs.

If you do not have that training in place, it is a matter of where you go to get that support. Asking for that is one of the things we should do here. I hope the Minister will give us a reply that at least starts to push us towards looking to where these resources are and, more importantly for the people on the ground, where they can look to for support and help, or be trained to do so. Without that linkage, people who are only now being brought into this process on an official basis will fail if they do not know what they are doing.

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, I was not going to speak to this amendment, but I have to say that the idea that schools have not been at the centre of child protection and safeguarding over the last 20 years is just ludicrous. Under the last Government, the central grant to local authorities decreased by 40%. Real-terms school funding decreased by 9%. In that period, schools became the fourth emergency service as children’s social work, child protection and all the safeguarding systems around the child were absolutely decimated by austerity.

Schools have become extremely good at identifying children in need of safeguarding and protection. They have become extremely good at providing information, support and training to their staff, and they did this very well at a time when the last Government were reducing real-terms support to schools. They have had to become experts in child safeguarding and child protection because the other services that should have been there to work with schools simply were not. Multi-agency professional teams, legally responsible for working with schools to support them to protect children, will strengthen child safeguarding and child protection. CPD, or professional development, is always helpful, but the idea that schools need extensive CPD on this, that they have not been doing this, and that it will be a new thing to them is, frankly, ridiculous.

[Lord Nash (Con)]

Although I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Bousted, about schools becoming very good at child protection in recent years, there will be a cost to engaging in this activity. I support my noble friend Lord Agnew and his point about the cost for schools. All schools are facing a very severe funding shortfall, and I am concerned that they will have to make a lot of redundancies. None of us wants to see that but schools are telling me that it is the only way they will be able to balance their budgets. If the Government’s worthy target of getting 6,500 new teachers into the profession is a net figure of leavers and people coming into the profession, then redundancies will make them miss that target. I support the point about money being needed to support this activity.

Pupil Absenteeism

Baroness Bousted Excerpts

Wednesday 7th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, the Institute for Government recently published a report, Reducing School Absence, which concludes that under the last Labour Government, absence rates for secondary school pupils fell by 42%. Its key recommendation is that the most effective way to tackle absence is to bring all parties together—adolescent health, special needs, school disengagement and family support. That is what the last Labour Government did under the Every Child Matters agenda. Does my noble friend the Minister agree that this is the best way to reduce absenteeism, which under the previous Government ballooned to 1.5 million pupils being persistently absent in 2023-24?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is absolutely right that we have seen big increases in the number of children who are missing school, both those who are persistently absent and those who are severely absent, as I said in my earlier response. My noble friend is right that, particularly to deal with children who are severely absent, you need to bring together a range of properly resourced agencies to work on the individual plans I talked about in the previous answer. That is one of the reasons why we are investing £500 million in children’s social care and in prevention, so that we can ensure that severely absent children are routinely assessed for family help, bringing together those services in the way she outlined.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bousted Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, the party opposite claims that education was transformed during its period in office and that this Bill will undo many of the gains made. In the short time I have available, I would like to set some of the record straight. During that period I was general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers and, from 2017, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, which represents 500,000 members—teachers, leaders and support staff—who, as many Members in this House have affirmed, are the professionals who teach and support our children and young people, and I commend their work today.

Under the party opposite, there was the scandal of “the forgotten third”—the third of all 16 year-olds who failed to get a grade 4 at GCSE English and maths. Under the party opposite, they were denied the help and support they so desperately needed in order to take their place as productive members of society. They were condemned to endless resits of GCSE English and maths, with very low pass rates, unable to get an apprenticeship or to access other routes into training and learning to turn their fortunes around. The party opposite left the most deprived young people stranded. As the noble Lord, Lord Baker, said recently, there are now 750,000 youngsters under 25 who are permanently unemployed. That is a disgrace, and it happened on the watch of the party opposite.

Money talks. Figures from the Institute for Fiscal Studies show that, from 2010 to 2020, spending per pupil in England fell by 9% in real terms. That had huge consequences for the education that schools were able to provide and was compounded by a huge rise in child poverty. But, shamefully, schools serving deprived communities saw the biggest fall in funding of all schools, of 14%. The party opposite professes to care for the most disadvantaged, but in practice during this period it reduced the amount of support needed by the most vulnerable children and young people.

Then there is the party opposite’s apparent alarm at the measure contained in this Bill that all children and young people, whichever school they attend, should follow a broad and balanced national curriculum. The current curriculum in England’s schools is one of the narrowest in the OECD, both pre 16 and post 16. Since 2010, there has been a dramatic and worrying decline in the numbers of pupils studying arts subjects—a 73% decline in GCSE entries for design and technology, 45% for drama and 41% for music. That is why this Bill’s provision of a broad and balanced curriculum for all pupils is absolutely necessary. It is their entitlement. “Broad and balanced” does not mean an overstuffed curriculum; it should, and I am sure will, allow for specialism and appropriate choice. This is a wholly welcome measure.

Then there is the teacher supply problem, which has become a crisis confected by the party opposite. I am chair of the University College London teaching commission looking at this issue. It is shameful that the most deprived children, who most need to be taught by qualified teachers, are the most likely to be taught by teachers who are not qualified in the subject they are teaching—temporary and unqualified teachers. That is why it is so important that all who teach in our schools have, or are working towards, qualified teacher status. This is a social justice issue.

For the party opposite, which reduced spending in schools in such a savage way in real terms over a decade, to support unfilled places throughout the country in order for academies to determine their pupil intake is, frankly, unbelievable. How much more taxpayers’ money would be needed to support this wasteful idea? Surely this is a prime example of an ideology that supports structures, not standards.

The Bill is ambitious. It is positive for all our children and young people. It is proportionate and necessary. I fully support it and commend it to the House.