Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Meyer Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, education in this country has always been about shaping free minds and raising thoughtful, moral citizens who can think for themselves. The Bill threatens that proud tradition. It does not modernise education; it centralises it. It strips away the freedoms that have helped so many schools succeed, handing power to bureaucrats. It is the children from working families who will lose the most—less choice, lower standards, fewer chances to break through.

I support the Government’s aim to protect children, but I fear that the Bill overreaches. As it stands, the state is grabbing sweeping powers, especially over home-educating families, demanding personal data, club attendance and anything local authorities consider appropriate. My concern behind this is the mindset that the state knows best, and that parents cannot be trusted and need to be managed. Authoritarian regimes always start by inserting themselves between parents and children, and demanding conformity of thought and value. Is this really the path we want to take?

Many parents turn to home education because the system failed them, or because of special needs, safety concerns or different values. They are doing what they think is best for children. I was home educated for two years. It was not ideal, but I survived, and I even went to university. We lived in a part of the world where schooling was not possible. My parents could have sent me to a boarding school but, being French, to be separated from children was not part of their beliefs, and I was only seven years old. Does that mean that, according to the Bill, my parents would have been criminals?

Meanwhile, this Bill also goes after some of our most successful schools—high-performing academic schools that have transformed lives, especially for children from tough backgrounds. What is their crime? They are different. They are independent, but they work. Instead of learning from them, this Bill seeks to drag them down, imposing an unpublished national curriculum, removing freedoms over hiring, flexibility and admissions, and tightening control through local authorities. That is not about raising standards; it is about government control. It does not fix what is broken; it breaks what is working. It does not raise standards; it lowers them. We should be backing good schools, not burdening them with red tape.

As the Bill stands, it creates an education regime that will be less human, less free and ultimately less effective. Can the Minister explain how, exactly, forcing home-educating families to share private details will help their children, and how stripping the autonomy of successful schools will benefit working families?

In closing, I welcome the two new noble Lords and congratulate them on their excellent speeches.