Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Morgan of Cotes Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak in this debate on such important topics. I declare my interest as chair of the national Careers & Enterprise Company. It is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord; I agreed with his comments and those made by all the speakers so far. Unsurprisingly, I will start with Clauses 47 and 50, in relation to academies.

I entirely agree with the sentiments expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, and my namesake, the other Baroness Morgan, who exhorted us to remember that we should look for a debate about quality, rigour and standards in our schools. I think we are going to have a good debate in your Lordships’ House. With the expertise here, I hope the House is going to help to improve the Bill and ask the right questions of the Government in relation to both academies and maintained schools.

In my experience, the challenges of maintaining two systems are in relation to both funding and accountability. One of the questions we will explore as part of Clause 50 and school improvement is: if academisation is not the answer in particular situations, then what is? How is school improvement, which has, after all, been the holy grail of Governments over many decades, going to be achieved and who does that most affectively? As the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, has just said, we should want freedoms and for the national curriculum to be a minimum standard, but as, we have also heard, a number of specialist schools feel strongly that the national curriculum is not right for them.

As the Minister said at the beginning, we have the curriculum review at the moment. Former Education Secretaries and Ministers are very good at speculating about what goes on in the classroom. Even better than that, we love talking about what is happening in the curriculum and what should be taught; we all have views on that. We await the forthcoming review with great interest. That will be relevant to the curriculum that we want all our schools to follow.

On specialist schools, I and, I think, a number of noble Lords have been written to by various specialist school providers. One is Aldridge Education, which said in relation to UTCs and studio schools:

“In offering choice, they bring relevance to education for thousands more students than we would otherwise succeed with. It isn’t lowering educational ambition; it is offering breadth and depth in a way that would not otherwise be available to learners in this country”.


I will move on, given the time available.

In relation to schools inspections, I would be very interested to explore the continuing role of the Independent Schools Inspectorate, having had recent experience of it where it completely failed to interrogate properly the governance of a school. Governance is often overlooked when we debate education policy. It is hugely important. I wonder whether its time has perhaps come, whether it is to work ever more closely with Ofsted or even to merge with it, and perhaps we will debate that.

In relation to home education, I really support the provisions in the Bill. Frankly, when we were in government, we should have done more to know exactly which children were home-educated and who had chosen to opt out of the school system. We heard of the tragic case in Norfolk that the noble Baroness, Lady Shephard, talked about, and sadly there will be others. Of course, the difficulty with this will be that difficult examples—often some religious schools—mean that the option of reform is not taken when it should be. I really welcome the Government’s proposals.

Finally, in relation to well-being, I am glad that the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, is back in her seat. We worked well together on the Online Safety Act. One of the greatest dangers, as she outlined, to our children’s well-being is undoubtedly the online world and the internet. I remain slightly unconvinced by banning phones in schools—there is guidance available and schools can do it—but I am absolutely willing to listen to the evidence the noble Baroness will bring to this debate. Honestly, if we feel this strongly about it, then we need to ban a lot of apps and smartphones for under-16s—luckily, my son is 17, so I will not be having any opposition at home. One of the great challenges in relation to teachers and safety in the classrooms—and I would be interested to hear other noble Lords’ views on this—is misogyny, much of it fuelled online. That is where the opportunity to limit exposure to phones and what is on them is very important. We are going to have a set of good debates, and I hope the Minister will welcome them.