Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie (Con)]

My Lords, if the Bill is to succeed in breaking down barriers to opportunity and severing the link between background and success, let me give the Government a warning from Scotland. These aims have also been a much-publicised priority of the Scottish Government. However, over the past decade, despite a 13% increase in funding, the SNP’s centralising of control has seen falling educational standards, as evidenced—as other noble Lords have said—by the OECD’s PISA league tables. What went wrong?

The amalgamation of the inspectorate with Learning and Teaching Scotland to form Education Scotland removed its independence; it became answerable to government. There is no bulwark against falling standards and no voice to be raised against ineffective teaching methods, inadequate curriculum content or restrictive curriculum structures.

The implementation of our new curriculum for excellence—as it is called—was ill thought out. One of its original purposes was to broaden the secondary school curriculum, but evidence reveals that students in S4—the equivalent of GCSE level—are studying fewer subjects, and enrolment in non-compulsory subjects such as modern languages and expressive arts continues to decline. Choice has been restricted. Most damningly, the attainment gap between Scotland’s richest and poorest schools has increased.

An attempt to give all children in Scotland a “named person” was ruled unlawful by the Supreme Court because it breached the right to private and family life. The Bill is in danger of making some of the same mistakes.

In contrast, I have looked at England’s increasingly improving and diverse education system with a degree of envy. We do not have the choice of academy schools. There is only one mainstream school in Scotland not run by a local authority—Jordanhill—which consistently tops the league tables, even this weekend. However, houses in Jordanhill’s catchment area are some of the most expensive for any Scottish school, doing nothing to close the attainment gap.

I am also, therefore, concerned at the constraints on academies in this Bill, and specifically the proposals for qualified teacher status. There is a difference between a qualified teacher and a competent one, and if we want to attract people into the profession, the ability to “try before you buy” will be lost. Perhaps an amendment to limit the time that unqualified teachers can teach in schools to, for example, two years could be helpful. By then, both parties should know whether it is right and whether it is worth the effort and expense of qualifying.

Other issues that concern me are the implications of provisions in this Bill for SEND children, and in particular, the lack of appropriate school places and the consequences that this has for families. The powers in Clause 30, where parents have to obtain a local authority’s consent to remove their child from school, allow the corporate parent to erode parental responsibility and override the rights of parents and families to decide what is best for their children.

With such a large Bill and such a crowded list, however, there is not an inordinate amount of time to go into too many details, which I will look forward to addressing in Committee. Having given my warning from Scotland, I dearly hope I make it in time for the last flight home tonight.