Education and Skills Reform

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 17th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord. He is right that we are seeking ways to support kinship carers, to strengthen the opportunity for children to live with those who are close to them in those arrangements. We are also taking action to support the educational outcomes of children who are in kinship care. I think I am right in saying that we are expanding the role of virtual head teachers to those children. I will certainly write to the noble Lord with more detail about our plan.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much welcome the emphasis that the Government are placing on work experience. Might the Minister like to say a bit more about how the Government plan to deliver this? It is clear that work experience will be available both to students below and post-16. With the two funding streams that will now cover those areas and the extra responsibility that will be put on schools, can she give an absolute assurance that there be equality of opportunity for children from all backgrounds and that the extra work will not fall merely on schools? I think back to something which was called the business education partnership, which offered a brokerage service which meant that greater access for everyone was available and schools were not overburdened.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is right. The opportunity for high-quality work experience is a very important theme in these reforms. The Government are committed to offering two weeks of work experience for every child pre-16, starting from an early age, with different ways to engage with employers. It is an important part of that work. She is also right that, given the ambition we have post-16 for T-level placements and other work experience opportunities, we need to support, for example, our mayoral and strategic authorities to be able to broker those links locally. My noble friend’s ideas about support for brokerage are very important and something we are reflecting hard on.

Skills, Vocational Training, and Further and Higher Education

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Thursday 3rd September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, for introducing this debate and for the way in which she presented it. I sense, as the noble Lord, Lord Barber, said, that this could be a time when we might make the changes that we have failed to make over the last half a century or more. Despite our pride in what is a good and improving school system in this country, we have a record of relative failure on vocational routes.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, referred to the White Working Class Educational Outcomes report, on which we both served. To be honest, for all my years in education, I was genuinely surprised and frightened by the level of disengagement there is between people living in these communities and what the education and school system is delivering for them at the moment.

Vocational education, which is the type of route to a better life that these communities particularly value, delivers poorer outcomes and poorer opportunities for people from these communities than it does for many people from more affluent ones. Instinctively, we all know that, if you begin to look at the good apprenticeships that we now have, they are not being accessed by people from white working-class communities. Fewer people from deprived backgrounds are taking the degree apprenticeship route than are attending Russell group universities or the university sector in general. This is not about saying, “That’s a route that serves people from this community”, but it is about offering real choice. While the curriculum is less rigorous, the qualifications are less coherent and the routes to employment are less clear, this route will not serve either the people in deprived communities or the nation and the economy in the way that we need it to.

I welcome the Government’s announcements so far in this field, but adding technical education to one basket in 14 to 16 education is not going to cut it. I worry that our thinking is limited by worry about our past failures. Very often when I start a conversation on vocational routes, the first thing anyone says is, “We can’t go back to splitting people into sheep and goats”. Of course we cannot. No one wants that now. A knowledge-based curriculum is there for everyone, but we should not let our past failures blind us to the need to get this right—and we should believe in our own ability to do so.

I have never quite bought into the phrase, “You can’t be what you can’t see”. I never use it. I do not like it. It underestimates the vision, imagination and determination of young people to be what they want to be. But I am sure that those young people cannot achieve what they believe and dream they can if they cannot see a clear route as to how to get there. That is the challenge that we face now. I very much hope that the Minister will build on the work she has already done in delivering it.

Free School Meals

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Tuesday 10th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

On Thursday, I think I will have the opportunity to answer a Question in this House on financial education in schools. Of course, I agree with the noble Earl that it is important that children develop the mathematical and business skills to understand the decisions that they then need to make about their own and their family’s money, and he makes an important point about pension contributions —notwithstanding his argument that young people should start them from the age of 18. I am not quite sure whether, in primary school, you can embed in a child’s mind the significance of that, but he makes an important point about ensuring that people understand the importance of pensions. Of course, hopefully, those children will look to their grandparents and the additional funding that they will receive as a result of this Government’s ability to maintain the triple lock, and they will see that investing in a pension is a good thing to do.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this Statement. It really is good news. I particularly welcome the look at nutritional standards. We talked about resources in, but, in education, we use free school meals as a measurement not only for money going into the school but for attainment levels, and that has become quite a considered and important way of monitoring performance and improvement. Have the Government given any thought to how having so many more children entitled to free school meals will affect that set of statistics, and does more work need to be done on that?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend makes two important points. First, she is right that, alongside this announcement, we have also said that we think now is the right time to review the nutritional standards for school food. My ministerial colleagues have already begun work with stakeholders on scoping out what will happen there and how those standards can be brought up to date. It is an important point that quite often accountability measures—analysis and monitoring of attainment—is based on a proxy of free school meals for disadvantage. The department will look at other ways of measuring that disadvantage and the way in which that can then be used to ensure attainment. Even more importantly, as I am sure my noble friend will have noticed, the Secretary of State is absolutely clear that the most disadvantaged groups need to have a better deal and to be supported to perform better in our schools than has been the case until this point, and she will do everything necessary not only to measure how effective that is, but to ensure that it happens as well.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall restrict my comments to the clauses in the Bill on schools. By my reckoning, we are probably entering our third decade of discussing the structure of schools in England. Interesting and important though that may be, it has not been the easiest of discussions. There have been a lot of piecemeal changes. Two government Bills on this subject have been completely withdrawn because of differences of opinion within the Conservative Party. Throughout all that time, teachers have managed to keep the school system going and raise standards.

I hope most of all that this can be a turning point when we put behind us this debate on the structure of schools and begin to focus on what makes the real difference: what happens in the classrooms. We have got to learn from those decades of discussion and years of change, and without doubt, there are more good schools than there were before. Without doubt, the birth and growth of academies has contributed to that. Academies have brought something new to the system. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, referred to them as a disruptor. They brought outside expertise that it was not always easy to get into schools, they have brought an energy, and they have helped to raise standards. But there is no evidence that I can find that shows that they should be the universal model—that only within that model can excellence be achieved. There is often, among some people in the Chamber, a lack of generosity of spirit in acknowledging that that excellence, that innovation, that improvement, exists in maintained schools as well. Academies do not have the monopoly of excellence, nor of innovation, nor of turning round failing schools.

My conclusion is that both types of schools should be allowed to flourish as part of a strong school system. If you want a choice on governance—because that is what it is about—if you want to leave the partnership of the local authority and the partnership of schools, if you want to take on those extra responsibilities, choose to be an academy; but if you want to retain that relationship with a local authority and that local family of schools, choose to be a maintained school.

Frankly, policymakers should be able to learn to live with that, rather than offering a bribe or incentive to change. If we can live with that choice and focus on other things, more schools will improve. If we want every school to be a good school, we must not only ensure that, as policymakers, we give each school the best possible chance of succeeding; we have to make sure that they do not achieve this by behaving in a way that makes it more difficult for other schools to succeed. We need a policy framework for individual schools to succeed that determines how schools relate to the wider school system. It is not a market that should govern whether schools succeed or not; it should be the strength of that partnership and the acknowledgement of the school system.

I welcome the parts of the Bill that make that more likely to happen. I welcome co-ordinated admissions. I welcome the power of local authorities to direct academies to accept particular children, often in challenging circumstances. I welcome the removal of the ability of academies to set their own admission numbers, not because I want to take away the freedoms, but because those can be exercised in a way that makes it impossible for the school down the road to flourish and succeed, and that cannot be right.

I welcome the measure on the national curriculum, as well, not because I want to tie the hands of teachers and heads, but because I have never, ever understood why it is a privilege afforded to academies but not maintained schools. It is a national curriculum: the clue is in the title.

When I look back through all my years in both politics and education, I cannot remember a time when flexibility within the national curriculum was not allowed. If the Minister could reassure us that it is a national curriculum and there are exceptions, I think it would put a lot of minds at rest. The decisions, in terms of the national curriculum, should centre on the needs of the child and not the structural status of the school. If a child has the need to do something other than the national curriculum in the maintained sector, why on earth should they not have that same freedom as in an academy?

I hope that the Bill gives us a strong framework for strong schools within a strong school system.