Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Finlay of Llandaff and Lord Moynihan

Monday 9th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My Lords, this amendment is both necessary and important. It is a credit to the noble Baronesses, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Walmsley, who eloquently introduced it, and for years fought for the mandatory reporting of child sexual abuse to be firmly placed on the statute book.

Child abuse, whether in the form of physical, emotional or sexual mistreatment, whether through lack of care, or whether leading to injury or harm, is offensive and detestable. I welcome recognition by the movers of this amendment that the amendment should capture the importance of child sexual abuse in schools and sport clubs, as covered in proposed new Schedule 1A.

Within sport, each case of sexual abuse among children is one case too many. In sport, it is compounded because it takes place within a relationship of trust or responsibility; it is an abuse of the power and it is a breach of that trust. The influence that a sports coach or physical education teacher has over children is disproportionately compounded by the physical nature of proximity in sport and the near total control which can be exercised over an ambitious child seeking success in the world of sport. We have seen how prevalent this is in the worlds of gymnastics, football and athletics, to name just three sports which have witnessed the ugliness of child sexual abuse.

Taking each in turn, for decades this was a problem that was festering at the heart of gymnastics. For far too long, some coaches and teachers have been able to act with total impunity, forcing young children to experience extreme training programmes while bullying and humiliating dissenting voices into silence. Some coaches have abused their power and authority to commit terrible crimes against the children they should have been caring for, leaving lives destroyed in their wake. In the wake of the #MeToo movement, numerous prominent gymnasts spoke out about the bullying, discrimination and abuse that they experienced in the sport at schools and in clubs. As a result, the Whyte review was commissioned, and an independent report examined the allegations of mistreatment in the sport of gymnastics. Predatory coaches and teachers were allowed to move from school to school and gym to gym, undetected by a lax system of oversight, and predatory coaches and teachers worked to conceal abuse.

In football, a child abuse scandal involving the abuse of young players at football clubs began in November 2016, and by the end of 2021, 16 men had been charged with historical sexual abuse offences, 15 of whom were tried. One was head of PE at a school in Birmingham, another a secondary school teacher. In athletics, the documentary “Nowhere to Run” in the UK concerned the sexual abuse of athletes by a coach and how the athletes tried to deal with the impact of the abuse.

The current situation in law, as noble Lords in this Committee know, is that while child safeguarding requirements are mandatory for all schools and colleges in the UK, a duty is legally enshrined in the Education Act and various statutory instruments, which are welcomed. However, we need to go further. Those measures did not deter many of the cases that have come to light, and there is no law that compels everyone to report child sexual abuse. Despite the promises for action within the Crime and Policing Bill, there is no criminal sanction for failing to report child sexual abuse under the mandatory reporting plan. We need to go further than a duty to report that “may be referred” to a

“professional regulator (where applicable) or the Disclosure and Barring Service, who will consider their suitability to continue working in regulated activity with children”.

I join the noble Baronesses in their view that there should be professional criminal sanctions for failing to report or covering up child sexual abuse, which they have put in the amendment they have tabled.

The noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, has led work on a duty of care and safeguarding; I have been privileged to support on it for over 20 years. We have sought to create a sports ombudsman, or a sports duty of care quality commission, who would also have duties of care within all schools. We have sought to develop an independent benchmark survey to measure duty of care, to monitor whether duty of care policies are working, and to inform future policy and investment decisions, and we have sought to ensure that there is a duty of care guardian—one in every school, I hope—with responsibility for engaging with participants in school sport, as well as with young people across the talent pathways and in community sport.

Today we can go one step further. We can rectify the position of the absence of a well-designed, mandatory reporting law at the heart of the safeguarding shortcomings in institutional settings such as sport and recreation at schools. Let the lessons of the past protect the children of tomorrow, and let those of us who I hope one day will vote for this amendment, if it is not accepted by the Minister today, take the lead for future generations.

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, this is an extremely important amendment. I have a slight concern that the Minister in replying may say that the Crime and Policing Bill is the place for such an amendment, but the problem with the proposals in that Bill is that they are based on age, whereas this amendment is much more subtle in responding to the emotional entrapment that goes on in grooming, the activity that goes on in grooming, and the difficulty of sexual abuse being perpetrated at all ages.

There are five areas that I think would have to go along with this—a public health awareness over the dangers of the early stages of emotional entrapment, leading to grooming that leads on to sexual abuse and the pressures that children are under. Therefore, there must be an awareness overall across society that none of this is acceptable, with training and support of all those who have any responsibility for children, and, when there is suspicion, clear pathways to people who can really deal with this sensitively.

One of the situations that comes to mind is the child who goes in to see their GP, perhaps a teenager seeking contraceptive advice. They may actually be in a sexual relationship where they have been coerced, pressured and emotionally groomed, and entrapped with the person who is abusing them, even if that is somebody who is also very young. There may be an imbalance in that relationship, particularly if it is a child who is desperate for love, affection and closeness altogether in their life.

When legislation is introduced, which it must be, it will also need good scientific evaluation—not just a tick-box review but a proper study to see how it is working. I was glad to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, say that this was a probing amendment, simply because there is a change I would like to see to it. The amendment refers to healthcare, including in GP surgeries, and I would like that to be extended to primary care services, given that a lot of primary care services occur out in the community. District and community nurses are going into people’s homes, which may well be places where they pick up that something is not right, particularly if there is one parent, or sometimes even two, who are ill and need input.