Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Spielman Excerpts(1 month ago)
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Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
The noble Lord, Lord Russell. There we are—promotions are good. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Russell, even though he pre-empted one of my lines: imagine having on the front of every Bill a statement that says, “This complies with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child”—what a step forward that would be.
I want to return to the comments made by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, about listening to children—indeed, this is where the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, started us: nothing about us without us. The noble and learned Baroness referred to how important it is to listen to children. She said that children have really good ideas and a clear psyche. It is important that we follow Article 12 of the UN convention and ensure that we follow the right of children to be listened to and taken seriously. That is crucial for children’s mental health and well-being. The sense of agency really is important; a lack of that sense of agency is a problem across the whole of our society, but particularly for our children.
Turning that round, children have really good ideas. We are facing a polycrisis: we are exceeding our planetary boundaries and we are damaging our health with the state of our world. Children have ideas, with very clear sight of how to tackle those things—fresh ideas that we would all benefit from listening to.
On the specifics of the rights impact assessment proposed by Amendment 469, I will take us back to 2010. I declare an interest here that I was on the board of the Fawcett Society. In 2010, it took a judicial review over the lack of a gender impact assessment on the Budget that year. In the classic way of these cases, the Fawcett Society lost the judicial review but it won from the Government an acknowledgement that there should have been a gender impact assessment on various aspects of the Budget. Creating this right would force Governments to think harder to do the proper impact assessments that the noble Lord, Lord Russell, referred to. This could have real impact. It is not a panacea; it will not suddenly fix everything if we put it in the Bill, but it is an important step in ensuring that questions are carefully examined, not just brushed aside.
We have already heard from a former Children’s Commissioner, but I note that, in the last few days, the current Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, carried out a national census of school leaders and found that schools are being left to plug more and more gaps. Children are not getting the right to the services that they should have and schools are trying to fill in the gaps. I refer to that because I suspect there might be quite a few people out there listening to our debate who think that Britain is a good, developed and successful country and that we must therefore be meeting all our obligations under the convention on children’s rights. But of course we are not, demonstrably.
Our very respected Joint Committee on Human Rights, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who is not currently in his place, is starting an inquiry into the human rights of children in the social care system in England, having identified that there is a problem. I will cross-reference our recent debates on the Mental Health Bill—an attempt to deal with the needs of some of the most vulnerable people in our society. We have improved the law there, but there was broad agreement that we have not got the resources to deliver the improvement in the law. Ensuring that we are signed up to this convention is crucial.
I will briefly cross-reference an earlier amendment of mine which called for a place efficiency duty for local authorities. One of the less noted elements of the UN convention is Article 31.1, which states that:
“States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts”.
An academic article in the Human Rights Law Review of June 2025 by Dr Naomi Lott sets out how we could deliver on that. This takes a global perspective, but it is still highly relevant to the UK.
My final point is a large one and takes a global perspective, thinking about where the world is today—this is particularly relevant in the light of a certain ongoing state visit. As the noble Lord, Lord Banner, says, signing up to the UN convention was done by the Thatcher Government. The principle of respecting human rights and the rule of law has been embedded in British society over decades. However, on a global scale, human rights and the rule of law are under threat like never before. Previously leading countries in defending human rights, to at least a degree, are now stepping out and expressing opposition to them. We often heard from the previous Government, and we hear from the current Government, a desire to be world-leading. Wales and Scotland have been world-leading here. It is time for England and Westminster to step up to the plate.
This matters terribly for practical reasons of human rights and the rule of law and impact assessments and all those things within the UK, but it also matters on a global scale if we are to be leaders and say that human rights and the rule of the law apply to all citizens. The noble Lord, Lord Meston, referred to the right of a child’s identity. As he was speaking, I was thinking of the Ukrainian children kidnapped into Russia and being denied their identity. We cannot stand up for this unless we stand up for ourselves on our own soil. This is a globally important debate, as well as crucial for the children of England.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I oppose Amendments 469 and 470. I recognise that they are proposed with the very best of intentions and at first blush sound wonderful, yet it is blindingly obvious that they would be likely to do more harm than good in practice. They embody a fundamental misconception that children have no real rights in the UK except to the extent that they are specified in supranational charters and conventions. This is simply not the case. We have a long and generally positive history of acknowledging and protecting human rights, including those of children, and recognising the ways in which children need to be treated differently from adults. We do an enormous amount to give children a voice.
I will turn to the negatives. First, the amendments would create a vast and costly administrative burden for very little additional value. The amendments specify that children’s rights impact assessments would have to be published for every single ministerial decision, including operational decisions. Scotland and Wales have been repeatedly cited as models to follow, yet it is genuinely hard to find ways in which children in Scotland and Wales are doing better than children in England and easy to find ways in which they are doing worse. I am afraid that the educational comparative studies, on record for all to see, show very big gaps. The impact of lockdowns was no less harsh for children in Wales and Scotland. All countries have experienced a spike in persistent absence post-lockdown. Whereas the latest persistent absence figure in England is 23%, when I looked it up a couple of months ago, in Wales it was 31% and in Scotland it was 37%. I may have got those two the wrong way around but one is 31% and one is 37%. It is not obvious that those two nations provide a clear example of why we should adopt this approach.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 502YM. I will echo some of the comments made by my noble friend Lord Jackson in relation to his amendment. I believe that my amendment complements the comprehensive final-stage procedure he outlined neatly.
Anyone who works in education knows how problematic dealing with complaints is becoming. Of course it is right that public bodies should have a complaints procedure, as is required by law. Of course dissatisfied parents should be able to complain to or about a school, and schools failing in their responsibilities should rectify their errors and omissions promptly. But the current system is complex and, in the main, giving satisfaction to no one.
I remind noble Lords that complaining to government is, typically, a fourth-line action after a series of stages. The first stage is attempting to resolve the issue with the staff member most directly involved, such as a classroom teacher; the second is escalating the issue or making a complaint to the head teacher or another school leader; the third is making a complaint to school governors; and the fourth is escalating a complaint to the local authority or the academy trust.
Yet the number of complaints to government has grown enormously in recent years, although there is not much evidence of a corresponding deterioration in the service offered by schools to children and parents. It seems likely that it is at least partly down to a higher propensity to be dissatisfied in a more fractious world. Furthermore, the use of AI enables parents to generate extremely lengthy complaints, which are time consuming to read, investigate and respond to. Safeguarding will often be invoked to ensure that a complaint is prioritised.
The various provisions in law relating to the consideration of complaints by national education bodies generally require that local routes have been exhausted. The expectation was that escalation to national bodies was a last resort for when serious concerns are ignored or mishandled by those more directly responsible. But, sadly, we see today an increasing willingness to escalate even relatively minor issues if the school’s response is anything other than doing exactly what the parent wants. When more serious concerns arise, such as those pointed out by my noble friend Lord Jackson, the sheer volume can mean that those more serious concerns are drowned out by the volume of very minor complaints.
Furthermore, the patchwork of law and regulation often means that any complaint must be considered in all the places to which it is sent. Each of the government organisations has a different purpose and will apply a different filter to determine whether it needs to act, but all of them must take the time to read and understand what are often long and complex documents, and often must check with the school to establish the facts. This is a huge burden on schools as well as being a wasteful model for government to operate, and it does not appear to be making parents any more satisfied. We need to reset the system and return to the expectation that the vast majority of complaints are considered and closed at local level.
My amendment therefore proposes that a single government complaints system is established, which can triage and direct complaints to the most appropriate body or reply to the complainant to say that there is no further action to be taken. There would need to be discussion about where this should be located. If it was desirable for such decisions to be made by those with substantial school experience, it might be located in Ofsted; otherwise, it might be a DfE team. Either way, the complaints and action taken should be recorded in a single database, accessible to all bodies with regulatory functions, including inspection, so as to minimise duplication, with all the burdens that that imposes.
Such a system should reduce the wear and tear on parents themselves—pursuing complaints is very damaging to parents in their relationships with schools—as well as the wear and tear on schools from protracted and inconclusive complaints processes. In short, this is a pragmatic amendment that would benefit almost everyone.
Lord Storey (LD)
I understand where these amendments are coming from. Personally, I have not formed a complete view about this. I understand what the noble Baroness is saying and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply, because there is an issue here and this is about how we handle that issue.
Education has become a successful business for the lawyers, to be quite honest. Dare I say, you only have to look at special educational needs, which lawyers and solicitors have made a lot of money out of. I declare an interest as my daughter is a solicitor. One also sees solicitors involved in school admission procedures. In some cases, that is a natural route to take, and I wonder about complaints—never mind the bureaucracy involved—if lawyers get involved in that side as well.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I have listened to a number of Lords speak movingly and wisely about the risks, concerns and things we need to guard against in the use of technology. I want to talk about the risk to learning itself. I have forgotten their name, but somebody recently wrote an excellent piece that illustrated this very vividly.
We all understand that when we send our children to school and when we teach them, the point is not simply for them to have a thing they can say they have done; it is the process that they go through that really embeds it and enables them to use that knowledge and those skills in future.
We have all seen it in the kinds of problems that have arisen with coursework. If a coursework essay or a homework assignment is produced for a child or university student by AI, then that child or student has not done the thinking, they have not learned what the assignment was set for, and the education will not achieve its purpose. There is a real risk at the moment that a lot of education in a lot of places is being quite significantly undermined because young people do not recognise that they are harming themselves by taking the shortcuts. Perhaps we have all been a little bit slow to recognise this risk.
There is a helpful distinction to be made here. I recently read a piece which distinguished between cognitive offloading and cognitive bypasses. The use of assistive technology, such as that which the noble Lord, Lord Addington, has referred to on occasion, might be described as cognitive offloading, where the point is to help the child with the additional challenges they are experiencing without losing the point of the lesson or what they are meant to be learning.
If we get to the point where the technology becomes a way of simply bypassing the learning, we are actually destroying education. The enthusiasm for technology—which has understandably invigorated us all; there are clearly tremendous opportunities—and the incredible energy and power of the tech firms, which of course concentrate immense efforts on Ministers to bring their products and services into schools, mean that there is a massive job for government to do to find that balance and to really understand the risks, not just around data and to children’s well-being but to education.
Lord Tarassenko (CB)
My Lords, I support Amendments 493, 494, 502K and 502YI, as someone with an interest in the use of educational technologies, including AI, both in schools and universities. I declare my interest as chair of the Maths Horizons project, funded by XTX Markets, which earlier this year reviewed the maths curriculum in England from five to 18, and briefly investigated the use of edtech to support the teaching of the subject.
I speak as a supporter of the deployment of educational technology in the classroom as I believe it can and should have a positive impact on the education of children, and not just in maths. But this must be done within a framework which protects children from its misuse. We must balance innovation in education through edtech with appropriate regulation. The regulations listed in subsection (2) of the proposed new clause in Amendment 493 would support the adoption of edtech in our schools rather than hinder it.
In this context, what has happened with chatbots based on large language models is a salutary example of the early release of AI products without proper safeguards, especially with respect to their use by children. Tragically, this week the parents of the American teenager who recently took his own life after repeatedly sharing his intentions with ChatGPT told a Senate judiciary sub-committee investigating chatbot dangers:
“What began as a homework helper gradually turned itself into a confidant and then a suicide coach”.
Ironically, we are now told that OpenAI is building a ChatGPT for teenagers and plans to use age-prediction technology to help bar children under 18 from the standard version. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, wrote in a blog this week just before the Senate hearings—and then coming to this country—that AI chatbots are
“a new and powerful technology, and we believe minors need significant protection”.
The risks associated with the use of edtech may not be on the same scale, but they are nevertheless real. In many cases, edtech products used in schools rely extensively on the collection of children’s data, allowing it to be used for commercial and profiling purposes. The recent report from the 5Rights Foundation and the LSE, which has already been mentioned, highlights that some popular classroom AI apps track users with cookies from adult websites and may provide inaccurate and unhelpful information. Most worryingly, a popular app used for educational purposes in the UK generates emulated empathy through sentiment analysis and so increases the likelihood of children forming an emotional attachment to the app. I therefore support Amendments 493, 494 and 502K, which together would ensure that edtech products provide children with the higher standard of protection afforded by the ICO’s age-appropriate design code.
In addition to the safeguards introduced by these amendments, there is a need for research to establish whether educational technologies deliver better educational outcomes for children. Most edtech products lack independent evidence that they lead to improved outcomes. Indeed, some studies have shown that edtech products can promote repetitive or distracting experiences with minimal, if any, learning values. By contrast, there is a growing body of evidence on the positive side that edtech can effectively support vocabulary acquisition, grammar learning, and the development of reading and writing skills for students for whom English is the second language, particularly when these tools are used to complement a teacher’s instruction.
To establish a causal relationship between the use of an edtech tool and a specific learning outcome, we need to design randomised control trials—the gold standard for demonstrating the efficacy of interventions in the social or medical sciences. Longitudinal data will then be needed to track student usage, time on task and completion rates. Crucially, the trial must have enough participants to detect a meaningful effect if one exists. This is unlikely to be possible using the data from a single school, so data from several schools will need to be anonymised and then aggregated to obtain a statistically meaningful result.
I am satisfied that Amendments 502K and 502YI would allow this methodological approach to be followed. Indeed, subsection (4)(c) of the proposed new clause in Amendment 502K would ensure that the code of practice enabled the development of standards to certify evidence-based edtech products and support the testing of novel products. This would provide UK- based companies with the opportunity to innovate in edtech within an appropriate regulatory environment.
As English is the lingua franca of the digital world, there is the opportunity for the UK to become a leader in edtech innovation and certification, for the benefit of children not only in the UK but in many other countries. These amendments should be seen by the Department for Education not as an attempt to overregulate the edtech sector but instead as a mechanism for the promotion of existing evidence-based apps and the development of a new generation of products, some of which may be AI-facilitated, using—no pun intended—best-in-class trial methodology.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Spielman Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Lord Storey (LD)
I will pick up that last point, which was very incisively made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. My primary school was a two-form entry primary school. It was a popular school, and we wanted to increase the size to three forms of entry. The local authority initially said, “No, because if you do that, you’ll take children from the two other primary schools in the locality, which will weaken those schools”. At the time, I was a bit miffed about this, but I thought, “Okay”. The local authority said, “What we need to do is to build up the numbers and the esteem of those two other primary schools”, which it did very successfully. Then, guess what: it agreed that my school could become a three-form entry school.
It is not just about size; it also about schools working together. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, quite rightly paid tribute to the role that the noble Lords, Lord Agnew and Lord Nash, played as Ministers in establishing multi-academy trusts. One area which has never worked, to my mind, is that you can have the headquarters of the multi-academy trust at the other end of the country. It has never worked for me that a multi-academy trust can have schools in Devon and Cornwall but also in the north-east. Where is that community feel about them?
The trouble with expanding schools is that you can get to a situation in which schools just want to grow and grow, because they get more money. They can get too large for the existing children and families. I think of the school that my wife worked at, a seven-form entry comprehensive which was allowed to increase its size to 11. It became completely unmanageable. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, rightly said, by taking children from one school, in many cases you are almost putting a close notice on that school. The way to deal with it is not by moving children or allowing schools to grow but by providing the resources and expertise and making that school popular, putting in real expertise to change its character and educational purpose.
I put my name to the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, and I have also put an amendment down myself. Let us first understand the definition of a managed move. It is a permanent move of a child from one school to another for reasons not related to family relocation. It is important to put that into context and to remind ourselves that currently 1.49 million children are persistently absent from school and 171,000 children are severely absent from school.
The Who is Losing Learning? report of 2025 uncovered a deeply concerning trend; that
“for every child that is permanently excluded, 10 more invisibly move”
between schools or are off rolled entirely. These moves are unregulated and unmonitored, meaning that too often even the Department for Education does not know where or even if those children are being educated following a managed move.
Managed moves, when done correctly, can have great success for both the pupil and the school. That is why these two amendments, which are very similar, are so important. We need a fair access protocol to make sure that, when we carry out those managed moves between schools, we know how it is happening. I like the notion that the local authority should perhaps report on this—not creating more bureaucracy but just giving confidence to the system. I hope the Minister when she replies will tell us how important it is to get this right.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Barran’s amendments to Clause 56 and my noble friend Lord Agnew’s Amendment 454. I have heard much around the Committee this afternoon that is extremely important, but I think there are some wider points to make.
There are many romantic expectations of school admissions—that there is a perfect world in which every child will go to the school that they and their parents choose, in which every mainstream school can provide well for every child no matter how extreme their needs, and in which no child will ever cause harm to any other child or adult in a school. In this perfect world, the romantics expect children to be distributed perfectly evenly between schools on any measure by which we choose to analyse the population. But this is a dream, and chasing dreams rarely improves children’s experiences in the real world. Sadly, it is entirely possible that the extended powers to direct admissions will backfire, especially with policy pressure on local authorities to keep even the worst behaved children in mainstream schools irrespective of the consequences.
Consider a child for whom an LA is trying to find a managed move. If several schools decline to accept the child, it may mean that they are all shirking their responsibilities, or it may mean that they have correctly assessed that the child’s needs are too great for that school or any mainstream school to manage the child safely. One shocking case I saw as chief inspector related to a girl who was raped by a boy who had come to her school on a managed move and, worse, the receiving school had not been informed by either the LA or the sending school of the boy’s known history of serious sexual misconduct. No school should be levered into putting other children at risk in this way.
If the LA directs the child to one of its own schools, it still has direct responsibility for the child, but if it can direct the child to an academy, it has offloaded the problem, at least in part. There is an obvious incentive for local authorities to use this power to offload the most difficult children and leave academies to shoulder a disproportionate responsibility for the most difficult and even dangerous children, and to inflict the greatest risk on the other children and staff in those academies.
Let us also consider the point that, while a decision will relate to a single child, good schools also have to consider how many children with behavioural problems they can manage and support properly without destroying the very strengths that make them able to work effectively with such children. I have seen already how difficult this is for local authorities in the context of SEND. Local authorities control EHCPs, which name a school to which that child should be admitted. In theory, it is parents who choose that school, but in practice, local authorities have significant influence over those parent choices, and some local authorities have perhaps on occasion found it convenient to encourage parents to choose academies rather than maintained schools, or at the very least to not discourage them from doing so.
As a result, some popular and successful academies have at times found themselves facing real difficulties. I know of cases where local authorities expected a school to fill more than one-third of its year 7 places with children requiring intensive individual support, many of them for behavioural problems. This would have turned those schools into de facto special schools without the wider infrastructure and support that we expect of special schools.
It is in fact extraordinarily difficult for local authorities to be impartial between mainstream schools and academies. For this reason, I strongly support my noble friend’s Amendment 452ZA, requiring local authorities to act impartially between maintained schools and academies. It will still be difficult in practice, but the principle should be explicit in the Act.
Similarly, my noble friend’s Amendment 453A to Clause 56 and Amendments 457A and 457B seek to ensure that changes to school admission numbers are made in the interests of children and parents, rather than the administrative convenience of the local authority. Again, these decisions will always be hard and will never please everyone, but it is right and important that children’s needs are explicitly put first: otherwise, it is sadly all too certain that, with the shrinking birth cohort, some excellent schools will see their admissions restricted while mediocre schools carry on. My noble friend Lord Agnew’s Amendment 454 gives some protection to this principle. I hope the Government will see how unfortunate this would be and will take steps to guard against it.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, Clause 53 covers the role of schools in general and academies in particular in relation to pupil place planning. As we know, in the vast majority of cases, academies co-operate and fulfil their role in helping the local authority to meet its sufficiency duties, as the Bill says, so far as is reasonable. Clause 54 gives the local authority new powers to direct admission of individual pupils, despite the fact that those powers already exist for the Secretary of State to use within the funding agreement for all academies.
The policy notes say, slightly quaintly:
“Schools and local authorities’ interests may not always be aligned, and they are not expected to agree on all admissions and place planning matters. However, it is expected that they will behave reasonably and collaboratively, for example, considering the other party’s views, being willing to meet and discuss differences, and sharing information in a timely manner”.
All this is fine, but presumably the point of the clause is to get quicker decisions and to address a problem of academies apparently unreasonably refusing to accept these pupils. But where is the evidence that that is true? In the academic year 2023-24, there were just under 11,000 exclusions. Looking at the data on the department’s website for exclusions and suspensions, including repeat suspensions, one sees incredible differences, in the rates of permanent exclusion in particular, even in neighbouring local authorities. This is true for local authorities where almost all the secondaries are academies and for those where there are predominantly maintained schools.
Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)
My Lords, Amendment 502N, in my name, would insert a proposed new clause after Clause 62, which raises the issue of seclusion in education, particularly in the form of isolation rooms.
Isolation rooms have serious implications for the emotional and psychological well-being of children, especially disabled children and young people and those with special educational needs. This is a probing amendment that would introduce a statutory definition of seclusion. It would empower the Secretary of State to regulate its use through consultation. If regulations are made, my amendment requires minimum protections: banning seclusion as discipline, notifying parents, recording incidents and ensuring internal safeguarding oversight.
The experience of seclusion impacts too many children today—children with speech, language and communication needs—whose communication may not be understood, recognised or supported in that moment. Children with ADHD may find it hard to regulate strong emotions without timely support, and yet instead of being supported they are removed, placed alone and not free to leave, in rooms with such labels as isolation, calm, breakout room, nurture space or any other number of euphemisms. What they experience is seclusion, whether it happens in a locked room, a space with a closed door, or an area where the child is simply not permitted to leave. The impact is the same: a loss of connection and potential safety.
Disabled children and those with special educational needs are disproportionately affected. Some children are removed daily, and there is no guarantee that parents will be told. These experiences can be isolating, traumatic, and deeply damaging to a child’s sense of safety and belonging. Other sectors, such as healthcare and secure settings, already regulate seclusion and deprivation of liberty. Education should not be an exception.
The Department for Education acknowledged the issue in its 2020 guidance, but guidance alone does not close a legal loophole. This proposed new clause invites us to act thoughtfully and proportionately, to close a legal gap that has persisted for far too long. It is not a radical proposal. It is a proportionate, enabling amendment, grounded in evidence, shaped by lived experience and guided by the principle that no child should be left unsupported or invisible in the name of behaviour management. Seclusion happens in our schools, even if we do not call it that. This proposed new clause would not ban it but would give us the tools to see it, define it and scrutinise it. At the very least, we should agree that when a child is confined and not free to leave, we ought to know and we ought to care.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I speak in support of Amendment 502YF, proposed by my noble friend Lord Nash, and Amendments 502YV to 502YYA, proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran.
There has long been a lot of discomfort about permanent exclusions. No one likes the idea that there are children who cannot thrive in mainstream schools or who are too likely to harm others to be allowed to attend them, but last year’s youth justice statistics show 12,000 convictions of children for offences of violence, 3,000 for knife-related offences and 1,400 for sexual offences. Serious misconduct does not begin only once children have left school. There is also a lot of hope that keeping children in mainstream schools, no matter what they may do, will avert later criminality, but in fact excluded children are more likely to have come into contact with youth justice services before they are excluded than after. Because we have been remarkably successful in reducing the number of children in custody, there are more children with very serious behaviour problems in the school system who might once not have been there.
What I saw at Ofsted is that the vast majority of schools work extremely hard to keep children in mainstream schools. Relatively few exclusions are unjustified. Many parents, especially those with children who have been harmed by other children, believe that there is too much pressure rather than too little on schools not to exclude. The vast majority of exclusions are a culmination of a long period in which a school does all that it knows how to do to support a child and help them to progress academically and socially.
As a result, I believe that we have a problem of a different nature. Many teachers will tell you that it is often possible to spot the children who are most likely to fall out of school as early as reception year, or even earlier, but the pressure is always to keep them in mainstream schools, even when that school can do little more than warehouse a child with teaching assistants until this becomes manifestly unhelpful for the child and the parent succeeds in obtaining an EHCP and a special school place.
We do not start contingency planning for those children as early as we should and could, which contributes to there not being enough specialist provision. Even at the point of permanent exclusion, our laws and processes are focused on the legitimacy of the exclusion and the process that has been followed. What is not part of any of those processes is a pragmatic assessment of what kind of education to adulthood will give the excluded child the best chance in life, by which I mean reaching adulthood with basic skills in place, functioning within social norms, being willing and capable of holding down a job and, in the longer term, being capable of sustaining a marriage or stable relationship. The amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Nash will help to concentrate minds on how best to do what it is in the power of the state to do to help excluded children to the best possible future.
My noble friend’s Amendments 502YV and onwards in this group would also help to direct attention appropriately. They reflect a pragmatic recognition of the circumstances in which the harm to other children from reinstating a child is likely to exceed the benefits to the excluded child of reinstatement. For example, it is well known that sexual offending tends to be a persistent pattern of behaviour, and I referred to one such case in an earlier group. I add that the bullying survey suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, might be useful in showing how much fear and unhappiness can be induced in many other children by a very small number of their peers.
For many years, there has been a strong presumption that children should be reintegrated in mainstream schools as soon as possible after exclusion and policy and processes have been designed on this basis, but there is good data that shows that pupils who have been permanently excluded and returned to a mainstream school very rarely stay in mainstream to age 16. Nearly all will be moved into alternative provision subsequently, with or without another permanent exclusion, or drop out entirely. It would be useful to know what proportion of managed moves are in fact effective in the long run and which kinds of children and problems are most likely to be effectively dealt with in this way. My noble friend Lady Barran’s amendments, relating to a presumption against reinstatement for certain children, dovetail with my noble friend Lord Nash’s amendment to steer schools and local authorities towards constructive and realistic planning for the children with the greatest difficulties in their lives.
I echo some of the concerns expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. The last thing we need is more measures that could be weaponised and potentially cause more divisions in schools and society. When two young children fight, labelling the tussle as racially motivated may not help those two children get along and may in fact encourage factions in the class. Promoting and focusing on what we have in common and should value together is at least as important, and probably more important, than labelling and division if we are to achieve the social cohesion that we all aspire to.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, no one stands to speak here or anywhere else about SEND without preparing for a social media barrage from one direction or another. But unless we can discuss the underlying problems and tensions openly and honestly, there can be little hope of getting to a better place than we are in at the moment.
From the parents’ point of view, some are happy, but others say that theoretical entitlements do not translate into the support they believe their child needs. From the schools’ perspective, they are loaded with enormous expectations and have inadequate resources to meet them. From the funders’ perspective, eye-watering amounts of money are already being spent on SEND.
If you do the sums, the average household in England already contributes £450 a year just for the cost of the high needs funding block, on top of the other money it contributes for education. Yet local authorities, and behind them the taxpayer, must meet almost unlimited demand from this large but finite resource, with few levers to direct that resource to the activities where it will make the most difference.
As my noble friend Lord Gove said in a previous group, the SEND category has expanded and diversified to an extraordinary degree in recent years. Among other things, I think we are mixing up the children who have conditions that will always affect their lives with those who really only need some catch-up teaching or some extra encouragement, and who should be able to lead unimpaired adult lives. They are really quite different things.
Clearly, this situation cannot go on, and that explains the raft of amendments relating to SEND proposed for insertion after Clause 62, as the Bill does not contain any direct proposals for SEND. In aggregate, what I take from these proposed amendments is a hope that if only we can find a few more ways to extend and push harder, everything will be better.
There are certainly ideas that deserve attention within these amendments. We do need a national body for SEND, but what we need is the SEND equivalent of NICE: a body that collates and, where necessary, commissions evidence of the effectiveness of and value for money of SEND interventions, and that determines which treatments can be paid for out of the public purse and which cannot be justified. Someone needs to set and hold that line.
We need better join-up between schools and youth justice services. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, has an alternative educational plan for children involved with youth justice that parallels my noble friend Lord Nash’s amendment discussed in a previous group. We have already pushed identification and labelling to the point where they may be doing more harm than good to some children at the margins. Even though a label may feel reassuring, it can also do real harm if it lowers the child’s own expectations of what they can achieve, or their teacher’s expectations of them.
Neurodivergence is a term that has no clinical definition. In essence, it invites people who do not meet clinical criteria and thresholds to self-identify into services and funding streams intended for those who do meet those criteria. The definitions that float around for neurodivergence often sound like most young people’s adolescent experience. I suspect there are few of us who did not feel awkward, socially inept, and often just out of things in that period of life.
Good schools understand the adolescent experience and work to make a culture and framework in which teenagers have the structure and encouragement they need for most to succeed and emerge into adulthood without ever needing to be labelled as abnormal, and reserving specialist support for those who really need it.
The Government must take great care not to create incentives to segregate children within schools into SEND and non-SEND categories. With very few exceptions, children with rare physical needs need to learn the same things, and cognitive science shows us that they learn in the same way, though some may need the learning broken down into smaller steps with more repetition and reinforcement along the way. Most children with SEND will do the vast majority of their learning in their mainstream classrooms. Concentrating on getting that core classroom experience right for all children, with a strong, coherent, well-sequenced curriculum taught effectively, must come first, because doing this well minimises the number of children who come adrift, which is never a pleasant experience for the child, and it enables the expert SEND practitioners to concentrate on those who will always need their help. If, for example, we expect SEND funding to be spent on things that are specific to children with SEND, those mainstream classrooms will be neglected and starved of resource.
I look forward to the Government bringing forward their reform proposals for SEND and to proposing amendments in this vein in due course.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I very much support Amendment 502W from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. We need a much better standard and a much better quantity of data in this area. We need to start with some clear understanding and definitions of the terms we are using. There seems to have been a lot of drift and expansion in definitions, and we need to get back to something that is clear, commonly defined and commonly understood.
Then we really need to understand what works for these children. We need to track what we are doing and when and why it works. This is a really complex area, so we will not get the answer out of small studies and small amounts of data. We need to track every child who has been fingered as SEND, and then we will get enough data to start seeing some patterns. Perhaps we can add other categories, such as young carers and those who are in care, where there are known difficulties with their education that are not associated with SEND but which may well share some common characteristics. If we get better at data, we will really start to understand how to do better by the children and work the cost down at the same time, and that is important.
I am with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, in the spirit of some of the other things that he is doing but I hope that, if this amendment ever came to be enacted, there would be alongside it a recognition of the interests of the other children in class.
Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)
My Lords, I speak in support of Amendment 502YG, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, and other noble Lords. Your Lordships may well have seen the helpful briefing from the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, of which I have the honour to be a parliamentary ambassador. For those noble Lords who have not had the chance to read it, I will share some brief highlights, given the hour.
Two children per class suffer from food allergies, on average. If your allergic reaction to milk, cheese, nuts or anything else triggers an anaphylactic shock, you need an immediate dose of adrenaline injected with an EpiPen, also known as an autoinjector. Half of all of England’s schools have not got one—that is 10,000 of them. Two-thirds of teachers have not had any formal training on what to do if a pupil suffers from an anaphylactic reaction or shock—and that is in the buildings outside the home where children are most likely to have an anaphylactic shock, unsurprisingly, since they spend six hours a day, five days a week, 38 weeks a year there.
I am confining my remarks on this amendment to the support of all elements relating to EpiPens and autoinjectors, but I support all of the amendment. Your Lordships can see from my comments that requiring all schools, not just half of all schools, to have an EpiPen and someone who knows how to use it has the potential to save lives and reassure countless parents that their children will be safe at school.
Your Lordships might be wondering why so many schools are completely unprepared for this sort of emergency. Schools have a vital day job to do. It is hard enough teaching maths to children who are not interested—please insert your own least favourite lesson if you happen to be a mathematics enthusiast—so is it fair to load this responsibility on to them as well? I gently say that all that is being asked at this point is that an EpiPen is in the school reception and that there is someone who knows one end of it from the other. I am not joking—I am afraid that there has been at least one incident of a member of staff injecting themselves with adrenaline rather than the pupil in shock.
Another argument which might be used against the amendment is that it is surely the responsibility of the pupils at risk to carry their own EpiPens and of their parents to make sure that they do. This is true, but I imagine that my noble friend the Minister agrees that it is not realistic to assume that every child will follow the rules every day without fail. The evidence shows that pupils are most at risk when they are 15 to 17 years-old, precisely the age when they are most likely to take risks.
I have spoken in this House on this issue before, as the mother of a now 17 year-old pupil who has suffered two episodes of anaphylactic shock. Yes, she has two EpiPens in her bag and yes, I try to make sure that she always does. But just like any other mother, I know that things do not always go to plan. I live with that fear just like so many others.
Shortly after my daughter’s first anaphylactic shock, 10 years ago, her doctor at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital, just across the river, asked for my phone after her emergency treatment. To my astonishment, he then took photos of my pale, limp and silent daughter as she lay in my arms. He explained to us that we should print out these photos and give them to her grandparents, her friends’ parents and anyone else who was a bit doubting that severe peanut allergy is really dangerous, and keep one for her first boyfriend in years to come, so that everyone who might have to treat severe allergies would understand that this is what can happen, and that the adrenaline in EpiPens is life-saving.
It is well worth requiring schools to keep them and for them to know how to use them. They save lives.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I will be fairly brief. I mainly want to commend the Government on the restraint that they have shown in this Bill in clauses relating to mental health and well-being.
Despite the Bill’s title, there is a welcome absence of clauses that imply that well-being and activities that promote it are separate from, or even antithetical to, good education. In reality, they are strongly correlated. For most children, well-being is a likely outcome of being well taught, well supported, discovering and developing their wider interests, and forming good relationships with peers and with adults—developing a sense of belonging.
Further, there is a growing recognition that spending too much time talking about mental illness to young people who are not ill can be counterproductive. We may need less mental health awareness training in schools, not more. For those advocating more universal mental health interventions in their amendments, I recommend reading the findings published by DfE earlier this year on the effectiveness of several school mental health awareness interventions. These tests of established programmes found that they did not reduce emotional difficulties in the short term, and in the longer term appeared to be associated with greater emotional difficulties and decreased life satisfaction.
Those who have been around in education long enough may also remember the evaluation of the then popular SEAL programme; I think it was “social and emotional aspects of learning”. This study of the programme, which was for primary schools, showed not only that the positive outcomes expected did not materialise, but also that there was an unwelcome side-effect in that, to paraphrase, it taught the mean kids to be better bullies, using the techniques of emotional manipulation that the programme taught them. These findings are a valuable reminder that sometimes less is more.
A word of warning: much of what is proposed in these amendments is hugely well intentioned, but I am particularly nervous about some of the ideas around measurement. If we do not want measurement processes in themselves to harm children, we should not collect data by constantly asking children who are not unwell about their well-being, and especially about their negative emotions. I have seen so many dreadful examples in schools where even very young children are constantly prompted to express emotions and invited to say that they are experiencing negative emotions. You can see the change; they start to believe they are sad or worried or afraid, where this had not even occurred to them. Nothing could fit the phrase “throw the baby out with the bath-water” more accurately than to make children unhappy through well-intentioned measurement processes.
I therefore urge the Government to prioritise advice from expert clinicians in this field and to allow schools to do only—
Lord O'Donnell (CB)
I will just say one thing. The noble Baroness mentioned all the things on which she has been able to talk about the evidence because there was data. I just remind noble Lords that this amendment is talking about one annual survey. It is not asking people every couple of minutes how they are doing, just to be absolutely clear.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
Children are very frequently surveyed from different directions; another one would actually add to an extensive load of surveys that they already complete.
The wider point is that there are many ways of measuring indirectly. If we want to measure, we should look for indirect routes that do not involve constantly asking children to self-assess. We should make sure that schools are doing only what is genuinely likely to be helpful for children. The Government should resist the urge to launch crowd-pleasing but ultimately wasteful or even harmful initiatives.
Baroness Sater (Con)
My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 472 and everything that has been said by the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, and my noble friend Lord Moynihan so passionately. I cannot agree more with what the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, just said.
I frequently touch on themes of well-being, especially with regard to sport, physical activity, mental health, inclusion and financial security. The term “well-being” means different things to different people. If we do not define and measure it consistently, we leave it to drift and risk missing the opportunity to improve children’s lives in meaningful and measurable ways.
We all recognise that young people today face mounting pressures, whether increased anxiety or reduced physical activity, yet we lack a consistent national framework for measuring how children are really doing—not just academically but emotionally and physically. That is why I look forward to hearing how initiatives like the Be Well programme are progressing. Be Well is an example of what can be achieved when universities, charities and local authorities come together to prioritise children’s well-being. It can offer valuable lessons on how data, gathered and shared sensitively, can inform targeted support and drive better outcomes. Anything that improves children’s well-being and strengthens the evidence base behind policy has my full support.
This amendment, as we have heard, proposes an annual, voluntary and confidential national survey. It would equip schools, local authorities and policymakers with the data they need to understand and respond to what young people are really experiencing. Better data leads to better policy and ultimately to better outcomes. Back in 2023, Youth Sport Trust chief executive Ali Oliver said that “fewer than half” of children in the UK meet the Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines for the minimum recommended activities. She said:
“This is contributing to a nation where too many children are missing out, have poor wellbeing and lack a sense of belonging. The evidence is clear: unhappy and unhealthy children do not learn”.
Well-being is closely linked to educational attainment. When children feel better and more supported, they are much more likely to engage in learning and reach their full potential. Understanding that connection and measuring it properly is vital.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, first, I want to reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that the World Health Organization has a clear definition of well-being:
“Well-being is a positive state experienced by individuals in society … Well-being encompasses quality of life and the ability of people and societies to contribute to the world with a sense of meaning and purpose.”
So this is not about self-focus; it is clear that it is about people being in a position to contribute. The WHO goes on to say that a society’s well-being can be
“determined by the extent to which it is resilient, builds capacity for action, and is prepared to transcend challenges”.
Perhaps most of us can agree that that is something society needs to do much better.
I am afraid that I disagree entirely with the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman. The noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, said that the Dutch score particularly highly, along with Denmark, in the recent PISA figures on children’s well-being, and we score astonishingly badly. I was looking at a publication from a few years ago, The Dutch Way in Education. The publisher of that notes how the Dutch system measures not only academic achievement but also the well-being and involvement of students. I can reassure the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, that I have raised the study he referred to a number of times. I would like to raise it tonight, but in the interests of the Committee making progress, I will not. Every time we are told how much progress our schools have made, saying, “Look at the exam results”, I say, look at the state of well-being of our pupils. I say particularly to the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, that if we measure only the exam results, that is what we are going to judge our schools on. That is what we have been doing, and it is what has got us into this position.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
Ofsted, where I was chief inspector, took personal development, including children’s well-being, very seriously; it was one of the judgments there. I have never suggested, nor would ever suggest, that academic outcomes were the only thing that mattered for children.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Spielman Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Lord Sentamu (CB)
My Lords, the concern of those who have spoken against Amendment 427C in the names of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and the noble Lord, Lord Glasman, is, if I have understood right, around whether these pupils are being safeguarded. Proposed new paragraph (h)(iii) says
“where the institution demonstrates to the Local Authority that it provides the required safeguarding measures”.
That is important. If it did not say that, I would be joining those who do not want this amendment.
The noble Lord said that it is wrong to call these schools and to think that they are providing education, and that the education being provided is in home-schooling. In terms of safeguarding, the amendment is very clear: the local authority must be satisfied that safeguarding measures are in place. Therefore, for me, the arguments fall away because the drift of them was about whether there is sufficient safeguarding for these pupils.
Because the amendment is quite sensitive, I was not going to speak to it or support it. Having heard the arguments, I am persuaded that proposed new paragraph (h)(iii) answers the question. Therefore, I am bound to support this amendment.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I want to speak to this group of amendments on the poorly understood world of unregistered provision, including the types of religious institution that have had a lot of discussion already, as well as looking more broadly. I support two of the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Lucas—Amendments 427 and 427B.
Clause 36 is a constructive attempt to put sensible controls in place around the oversight of educational provision for children outside schools and colleges. It creates a wider category of independent education institution to supplement the narrower concept of an independent school. This is a complicated and messy landscape. I could draw out at least four strands—there are probably others—and they overlap. There are the alternative provisions, most often for children with severe behavioural problems. There is a huge patchwork of provision there. Some of it is registered and inspected, so it has a level of quality control, but much of the weakest is not, and there are no neat cut-offs.
A school puts two children in a volunteer-run community garden for one afternoon a week. That would be best viewed as part of the school’s educational model, and the school would be accountable for the child’s experience. However, if those same children are at the garden four days a week and are barely attending school, it is unrealistic to ignore the fact that the gardens become the children’s main source of education —though it is clearly an incomplete education—and that school registrations become a fiction, perhaps to avoid recording an exclusion.
It is often assumed that alternative provision is or should be a brief stint to prepare a child for reintegration into a mainstream school. However, the reality is that few children who move into alternative provision will successfully reintegrate. Hardly any such children take their GCSEs in a mainstream school. AP needs to be seen as a mode of education, not just as respite care.
Then there is provision for children with psychological problems, such as school refusal. Again, unregistered provision is often born out of excellent local initiatives. If a child makes use of such a programme for a short period as part of a plan to help them acclimatise to a suitable school, direct oversight might be overkill. However, if it becomes a de facto permanent placement, it has become that child’s main place of education and it needs to work to the same standards as other schools.
As has been touched on, there are programmes for children who are home-educated, including sports, music, art and other worthwhile activities. Parents are entitled to home-educate, and sports, music and art are all part of a rounded education, but, if an organisation is running five different programmes, one each day, and a child attends all of them, the reality is that, at that point, the organisation is best viewed in the round as having the characteristics of a school—or at least an independent education institution—in taking responsibility when parents are not present for a large part of the week. It is hard to see why such an entity should sit outside the legal framework that protects children’s education and safeguarding.
Finally, I need to talk about illegal schools. It is depressing that they exist, and even more depressing that some of them operate knowingly and intentionally outside the law. Ofsted has a small budget to investigate suspected illegal schools and to warn those that are outside the law that they must register with the Department for Education. It has successfully prosecuted proprietors of such schools, at least one of them twice; I should day that I do not think any of those prosecutions related to a Jewish-affiliated institution. Current legislation just is not equipped to deal with bad-faith operators. It dates back to a time when it was almost unimaginable that a school that had omitted to register would not do so when it was pointed out.
It has been extraordinarily easy for operators to sidestep the law. There is a kind of artificial separation. An operator running multiple illegal institutions, teaching the same group of children in one location in the morning then bussing them to another location to be taught in the afternoon, may claim that they are separate institutions and that neither reaches the threshold to be considered as a school, but, clearly, the reality is that it is a single school. That is why I support my noble friend Lord Lucas’s Amendment 427B. There needs to be a sensible ability to take a holistic perspective so that avoidance does not readily happen.
We have had a lot of debate about institutions that rely on the fact that children are not being taught subjects such as English and mathematics, but only an exclusively religious programme, to say that they are not schools. It is a shocking fact that there are British citizens reaching adulthood without the most basic education that they need in order to play their full part in British society and the workplace, if they choose to do so, as adults. They may not choose that, but pre-emptively taking away their capacity to do so should concern us deeply. It seems unreasonable that an institution that is part of such a model should want to be outside the scope of any meaningful scrutiny. We know from IICSA and from many previous cases that, sadly, a strong religious affiliation is not a guarantee that children will be completely protected from the kinds of harm that adults can inflict on them.
It is worrying that so many people do not want to acknowledge or discuss this problem and its tensions. There is widespread hesitancy to venture into sensitive areas linked to faith or ethnicity; we have seen this where other issues have arisen recently. I can see the temptation of offering an opt-out, as proposed by my noble friend Lord Lucas, yet I also know that the better path is to carry on working to try to find models that do a better job of reconciling the desires of a faith group and the important rights of children. I know that many of my colleagues, including my noble friends Lord Nash, Lord Agnew, Lady Morgan and Lady Barran, worked hard in their time in government to try to find those next steps and better accommodations. An opt-out is just not, in my view, sensible or workable. At the point when this country has become simply a patchwork of self-segregated communities, cut off from each another, there will not be much of a nation left.
I note that there is an evolving picture internationally around the same issues that we have been seeing in schools in England. As chief inspector, I talked to my counterparts in countries such as France and Sweden, which are seeing parallel trends. This is something that needs discussing, not just domestically but internationally. I believe that it is impossible—and, indeed, undesirable—to try to make tidy regulatory categories covering every kind of provision outside school. They quickly become obsolete, as would any micro-precise thresholds.
Overall, the extension of scope in Clause 36 is important and justified, but it is also important that the regulations that are made are clear and well understood, and that enforcement is adequately funded, with enough resource for Ofsted to carry on its investigatory work and for the DfE to act where it should. There has to be a high level of transparency about the work, to help stave off pre-emptive attempts to brand this difficult work as biased or unfair. We must carry on doing all that we can to make the intrinsically knotty subject matter here fully discussable.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Spielman Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Spielman (Con)
Perhaps I could inform my noble friend that the oversight mechanism for ISI was first reduced a good many years ago when DFE asked it to remove the strand that involved monitoring a sample of inspections, and then it subsequently withdrew all the remaining elements. So, there is no longer any oversight model to my knowledge.
Lord Black of Brentwood (Con)
That is not the case, as I understand it, but perhaps we could speak about that afterwards.
Most importantly, the regime is effective because inspection is best conducted by experts who know the sector. The ISI is made up of people who understand how it works. That is particularly true for boarding schools, which have a very different operational model from the vast majority of schools that Ofsted inspects. The noble Baroness rightly talked about accountability, which is an extremely important point. Peer review, in this case, is the best way to produce some form of accountability, but we will have to differ on that.
ISI is also, as the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, said, self-funding. So it is no burden on the taxpayer, which is an important point, especially in the current economic circumstances. Changing this tried, tested and effective system would be costly, placing additional burdens on Ofsted; it would be disruptive; and above all, it would almost certainly weaken standards of inspection because inspectors would be unfamiliar with the types of schools they were looking at, and therefore what issues of which to be mindful and aware.
I hear what the noble Baronesses say, but I do not believe the case for such a significant and expensive change has been made; nor, indeed, is there any clamour within the sector, or from parents and teachers, as far as I know, for radical reform of this sort. I hope the Committee will reject these amendments.
Lord Nash (Con)
My Lords, I add my support to what my noble friend has just said, and the comments made by the noble Baronesses, Lady Morris and Lady Blackstone. It is a matter of balance, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, between the needs of the religion and the needs of the child to receive a broad and balanced curriculum sufficient that, when they are adults, they can make choices. Certainly, when I was a Minister there were a number of unregistered settings where the children were attending very full-time, and the organisations were pleading home education as their defence. There was no way, frankly, that there were enough hours in the dark day, or the energy, for that to plausibly be happening.
I also support the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran. Can the Minister say why it is necessary to have these powers and these changes in relation to academies in the Bill? In five years as the Academies Minister, at no time did I feel that I needed any more powers—either those in this group or those we will discuss later—to sort out problems. Of course, we now know why these powers are in the Bill, even if we do not know why they are necessary: because the unions want them. We know that because the Secretary of State for Education told us so yesterday at the TUC conference. I must say that I admire her honesty. The unions have made a number of excellent comments recently about the dangers of smartphones and social media, because they know that they are creating considerable problems in schools for children and for their members. The fact that they have been so current on this and so strongly outspoken is very impressive, and I commend them for that.
However, it is my perception that the unions are still very anti-academies, which I suggest is an out-of-date attitude. It is clear that a teacher in a good multi-academy trust has far greater career progression opportunities, far greater CPD and far more support than they could possibly have in a single school. I therefore invite the unions to consider their antipathy for academies a bit more in the context of career progression, and to support for their teachers.
Of course, these powers are a power grab not just by the Secretary of State but by civil servants. I personally believe that academy, school and MAT leaders are far better placed to decide how to run their schools than officials micromanaging a system from Whitehall. We know that officials’ first pass at mass academisation after 2010 was not well managed. Having said that, there are currently a number of senior officials in the academies and regions teams in the DfE, as my noble friend Lady Berridge has alluded to, who are very experienced and for whom I have a great deal of respect, but they will not be there for ever. Given the Civil Service’s penchant for moving staff around far too much, such that they never build up any serious domain expertise, I believe that handing so much power to officials is dangerous. The Government would be far better off leaving things as they are because they are working perfectly well—we all have funding agreements and we all understand the deal—so that they can bask in the success of the academies programme, which, after all, was invented by the Labour Party.
I turn to Amendment 436B specifically. New subsection (2)(g) in Clause 39(5), to do with premises, appears to say that if a school wanted to change the use of a classroom from teaching pupils to a crèche or nursery, because of a drop in roll, it would have to ask the DfE. Really? Is that what is actually meant? I ask the Minister to clarify that, please.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Barran’s Amendments 428 and 429A to eliminate any potential confusion between two distinct regulatory regimes. I will not repeat what others have said, but I believe that academy funding agreements should continue to be the primary regulatory instrument for these schools.
I also support Amendment 423 from the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, to strengthen the set of offences linked to operating illegal schools beyond the somewhat narrow conception of a “proprietor”. Illegal schools often operate in the context of a wider community where they are intentionally enabled by the support and action of others besides the proprietor. Alongside that, I thank my noble friend Lord Lucas for Amendment 432 and the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, for her remarks. Both recognise the importance and difficulties of collecting evidence in relation to unregistered schools.
I support Amendments 430 and 436, proposed by my noble friend Lady Morgan of Cotes, relating to independent school inspection. Again, I will endeavour not to repeat what has already been said, but I have an additional couple of points to make. Things can and do go wrong in all kinds of schools for all sorts of reasons, and always will. There needs to be an inspection model that is rigorous and thorough enough to report fairly and honestly, even when the findings are profoundly uncomfortable for the school and its leaders. Such a model has existed for Ofsted inspections—so for all state-funded schools and the half of independent schools, mostly the smaller and less well-known ones, that are inspected by Ofsted—and I hope that will continue to be the case under the new Ofsted model.
However. it is hard for the ISI to provide a corresponding level of rigour when it finds real problems in a school. I think the ISI inspection model is best characterised as a form of peer review. Peer review is a wonderful way of providing support and advice on ways to improve at the margin, but it is not so good as a method of landing really tough messages. It is simply too hard not to soften your messages and pull your punches a bit when you are talking to your peers. I understand that the ISI has only two full-time inspectors who must also oversee its whole inspection programme. There was once a DfE oversight mechanism for the ISI and a sample of its inspections used to be monitored, but that one control was dropped some years ago.
So, while the ISI peer review model has real value, and I do not want to undermine that, it is not the ideal model to underpin an effective regulatory system. In my experience, the DfE now turns to Ofsted to inspect ISI-inspected schools about which serious regulatory concerns have arisen, and, with the broadening range of schools being inspected by the ISI, that is not surprising. I therefore think it is time to extend a clear and important principle that has long applied in the regulation of state schools. For all state schools, inspection and reporting are kept separate from improvement and support work as a matter of principle. That principle has been maintained under successive Governments and is being maintained by this Government, and it is a good one, provided that the dividing lines are correctly drawn.
I realise that I have not declared my interest as a previous chief inspector, for which I apologise. I took an extraordinary amount of flak from people who did not realise or want to acknowledge that for me to turn Ofsted into a school support model would have been to cut directly across settled government policy. There is a strong logic for looking at the independent schools that are not already inspected by Ofsted on the same principle that improvement and support should sit separately from the hard job of inspection and reporting. There is a strong logic for unbundling the ISI—putting its formal inspection functions with Ofsted and leaving the supportive peer review model to be carried forward by the ISI. This would be a sensible step in the direction of a coherent and effective regulatory system.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, first, I express my support for what the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, has put forward in his amendment. In many respects, the amendment that I am about to speak to and the twin amendment proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran are an elaboration and development of the principle.
We have a long-established regulatory model focused at school level and a much more recently established regime for academies and academy trusts. As the noble Lord said, there was a separate regime for local authority school improvement work, which was abolished some years ago—perhaps a good idea, perhaps not. The noble Lord said that the underlying model evolved in the 1980s and was one of high autonomy for schools, balanced by strong accountability. It is interesting that few in English education even recognise that this comparatively high level of autonomy continues today, relative to other countries.
There has been constant pushback on accountability for decades, whatever form it takes, and there have been important changes in recent years. A powerful model of autonomous school group operation has emerged with academy trusts. In these groups, some decisions and activities can sit at the centre or in schools, depending on the model adopted. There is a wide range of models, from the very highly integrated through to the highly devolved. Much good has flowed from this model—as well as, inevitably, problems from time to time—but regulation and oversight have not quite caught up. Let us remember that, for an academy, the legal entity is the academy trust, so it is the trust that carries the legal responsibility and is properly held accountable at group level, not just at school level.
On the other hand, inspection has been constrained by government policy to school level. Bizarrely, school leaders are increasingly being held accountable for decisions and actions that actually sit elsewhere in a MAT. It is unsurprising that some school leaders feel that they are bearing a disproportionate share of the accountability burden relative to their bosses.
Of course, the DfE has been extending and elaborating its oversight model for trusts, but this remains heavily reliant on self-reported and outcome data, and perhaps lacks some of the insight that comes from expert scrutiny of MATs’ central operations and professional dialogue with MAT leaders.
It is widely acknowledged that there has to be more scrutiny of MATs. Outcome measures alone do not give enough assurance that MATs are using their freedoms well to provide education with real substance and integrity and the support that enables all children to grow into resilient and competent adults.
My Amendment 436ZZB and the immediately preceding amendment from my noble friend Lady Barran are intended to draw together a somewhat disparate set of provisions to help create a coherent regime for the regulation of academy trusts. This regime would set out clear purposes and priorities for the regulation of academy trusts, although the interests of children, and parents on behalf of children, should still come first. It would recognise the varying structures of trusts and the divisions of responsibilities within them and be flexible enough to respond appropriately. It would draw on expert insights and judgments in arriving at rigorous and well-evidenced decisions and keep the various bodies involved in education regulation in alignment. DfE, Ofsted, the admissions adjudicator and others each have their own sphere, but there is further to go in thinking systemically about how to make sure that those levers fit together in the most effective and efficient way.
Finally, it is very important that there is the right level of transparency on this work—something to which the amendment from my noble friend Lady Barran draws our attention. Confidence in the system depends on making sure that people can see what is being done and understand the basis for it. Those transparency provisions are, therefore, also really important, and I hope they will be taken on board.
Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)
My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 435 in the name of my noble friends, led by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. In doing so, I remind the House of my interests, in particular as chair of the E-ACT multi-academy trust.
I have thought for some time that it is important that we bring forward the inspection of MATs. I was therefore delighted to see it as an election commitment from the Labour Party when it went into the last election, and I have been looking forward to the Government implementing it. It is right that the Bill is being used as an opportunity to introduce powers to do that. It would then be up to the department and the Government to do the necessary work with Ofsted to get ready for that, so that Ofsted has the expertise within its inspectorate on how MATs work—something that it currently does not consistently have. We therefore should not rush at this, and I have some nervousness about some of the other amendments that are arguing for a six-month implementation timeline. We should leave the timeline to the Government until they are confident that the expertise exists to do it.
I am also interested in whether we should define the proprietors of academies and local authorities as responsible bodies for schools, so that we can have a single inspection framework for both local authorities and academies in respect of their inspection and get more consistency across both forms of governance.
If we are inspecting those responsible bodies—MATs in this case—it is also interesting to look at whether there is an opportunity for rationalisation around inspection. Good, well-governed, well-run MATs have good school improvement capacity and good capacity to support the schools that are in their trusts financially, in procurement and in all the various aspects of running good schools. After Ofsted has carried out an effective inspection of the MAT, it then ought to be possible to use a risk-based approach to decide whether it needs to inspect all the schools in that trust. That rationalisation could then release capacity for more consistency within Ofsted. One of the main complaints about Ofsted in the school system is the consistency of the outcomes of inspections. I do not blame Ofsted; it has operated within considerable budgetary constraints and has had to take its fair share of resource cuts over the period, and that has an impact on the consistency of inspections. Anything we can do to increase capacity should be welcomed.
This goes to the importance of governance. When the noble Lord, Lord Gove—who is not in his place—was the Secretary of State and oversaw the rapid expansion of academies, to which my noble friend Lord Blunkett alluded, I do not think he properly appreciated that one of the core elements of the success of the academies that I oversaw when I was the Academies Minister under the previous Labour Government was around governance. It was from having individuals such as the noble Lords, Lord Nash and Lord Agnew, put their names to a multi-academy trust and their reputations on the line to ensure that the governance was strong. In those reforms from the noble Lord, Lord Gove, we had this rapid expansion without a serious focus on whether or not the governance was improving alongside it.
So I also encourage the Government, as part of thinking about this, to review the governance of multi-academy trusts to ensure that we have good consistency as we expand the number of MATs and seek to improve their improvement capacity. As part of that, I ask them to look at the appointment and term of office of the members of academies. The five members of E-ACT are wonderful people, and I thank them for their service, but they are self-appointed and appointed for as long as they want to do the job. It is a slightly odd arrangement in that they are the people I am accountable to as the chair of the trust, while their accountability—and to whom—is questionable.
I would be interested in a solution whereby the local authorities within which the MAT operates appoint the members, and then the trust board would be accountable through that route to the local authorities. In that way, the local authorities would not be operating schools through the trust, but the governance would be accountable to local authorities. That would bring better consistency and better accountability into the system. On that basis, I support my noble friend Lord Blunkett and his amendment.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, briefly, I support the noble Baronesses, Lady Grey-Thompson and Lady Sater, in saying that physical education is one of those things that we all decry and think somebody else should be doing. The fact of the matter is that there are certain physical skills that you need. In racquet sports, for example, you need to know how to move your feet, how to hold the racquet and so on; I say that in front of the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, with, shall we say, a degree of fear. There are certain basic skills that you will need to get the best out of a sport and to see whether you have any potential for it—if you do not have them, you are not going to find out.
When it comes to how to integrate those abilities into PE lessons, you need some training and structure. If you turn around and say to your outside agency, “This is possible, so please make sure that it happens”, you are taking a step further forward. So a degree of knowledge is required.
We have just mentioned the fact that special educational needs are a factor. I have managed to make a couple of speeches without mentioning them, so I shall revert to the norm. If you have special educational needs but somebody who is trying to teach you does not understand what they are about, chances are you are going to fail. They may say, “Everybody take some notes”, but you may have one person who is dyspraxic so cannot do that easily and two people who are dyslexic so will not be able to read them back and will not get everything down in time. You have to have some degree of knowledge to reach them—and those are fairly commonly occurring conditions. You will need some training somewhere in this.
I do not say that the existing pathways are always there because, if they were, I would not be making this point in the first place. However, we need to have that degree of training—or at least the awareness to say, “Right, I don’t know how you do this. Can you defer and find me another pathway?” That would be very helpful. I look forward to exploring this matter, both in this Bill and in future Bills, to make sure that we get something in place that means that more teachers can become teachers of special educational needs—not just saying that they are, because more of the same does not work. What they have at the moment is failing them.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
I want to come in on this group to inject a note of pragmatism into the discussion. First, I observe that the current freedom does not seem to have created significant problems in practice. To ask that classic question, “What is the problem that the clause in the Bill is trying to solve?”
Secondly, it is absolutely right that there are excellent programmes—the noble Lord, Lord Knight, described them—to encourage people to move from instructor and teaching assistant roles into qualified teacher status. Those are excellent—they should exist and people should be encouraged, of course—but the pragmatic point is to think about all the people who might choose to be teachers but choose instead, for example, to go off and be tutors, lavishing their skills and expertise in a very small subject on children whose parents can afford to pay. They are then lost to the state system because they simply will not go down that path.
For that reason, I support the amendments put forward by my noble friends Lady Barran and Lord Agnew—as well as the pragmatic amendment proposed at the start of this group by the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf of Dulwich—as a way of making sure that the potential impact of this clause is not the opposite of what I am sure the Government intend. It is absolutely right to want both to upskill teachers and to make sure that as much teaching as possible happens with qualified teachers, but it would be desperately sad if many subjects and a lot of the potential school experience for millions of children were diluted for that purity of principle.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I quite agree with my noble friend. The current system does not create a lot of problems because most schools are teams. If you really need a particular skill, so you bring in someone who has that skill but lacks the other skills that one needs to teach well, the community rallies round and makes sure both that everyone works together and that the experience for the children is good. What I would like to see is not a system that says, “Go away, we don’t want you unless you have QTS first”, but one that welcomes people in and says, “Let’s bring you on”—the sort of thing that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, was describing. Such an attitude to bringing in the skills that we need seems to me to be the right one.
There are lots of people out there who could contribute their skills if it were made possible for them to do that in a way that works for them. As my noble friend said, there are a lot of young people who tutor and do it really well and who, therefore, develop an interest in the idea that they might be teachers although they want to get there in a way that suits them. There are lots of older people in their fifties and sixties who are coming to the end of their career and know that they are not going to go anywhere else. They may be consultants in IT and just do not want to sit down and write another computer system. They would love to get involved with young people and help to bring them on. You have to make it easy for them and find a way in for them. Creating something as inflexible as this Bill does seems destructive.
Baroness Spielman
“(5A) Subsection (1)(b)(ii) does not apply in relation to an educational institution that has received an OFSTED rating of Good or equivalent in the last three years.” Member's explanatory statement
This amendment and another in the name of Lord Agnew seeks to ensure that academies which are rated as “Good” are not required to follow the National Curriculum.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I am speaking to Amendments 440 and 442 from the noble Lord, Lord Agnew. He tabled these amendments because of his concerns that the new national curriculum remains so uncertain. The interim report has given little indication of what might follow in the autumn or next year, and he believes that with that level of uncertainty these amendments are appropriate. I have taken this on at short notice and will listen to what the Minister has to say and respond.
Before I sit down, I want to give a warning. We have been here before. In 2004, the national curriculum obligation applied to virtually all schools, as very few schools were academies at that time. At that point, inspection was stripped down to remove subject-level scrutiny from most of the curriculum. English and maths in primary schools were specifically examined, but beyond that almost all subject-level inspection was removed.
What was the consequence? Over time, in primary schools and at key stage 3 there was a drastic reduction in what was taught. Various reports show that, such as Key Stage 3: The Wasted Years? from Ofsted. Primary schools, especially once the science tests were dropped in 2009, taught less and less outside English and maths.
At key stage 4, this was compounded by the equivalence concept brought into performance tables at the same time. All manner of distortions and gaming emerged in the secondary curriculum, and the DfE had to play whack-a-mole for years each time a new game popped up—some people will remember things such as the European computer driving licence, equivalent qualifications that were worth four GCSEs, double entry and so on. It would be unfortunate if we went back to that world.
I understand that the Ofsted changes that have been announced will remove the very limited subject-level scrutiny that was reintroduced in 2019 to counteract this loss of real curriculum. My concern is that the national curriculum obligation included in this clause could become a dead letter, simply because there will not be effective scrutiny to make sure that is what actually happens in practice. We could once again be in a situation where only the things that are tested—which, especially in primary schools, is quite a limited set and at key stage 3 is nothing at all—will get taught. That is a warning.
Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)
My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Barran’s proposition that Clause 47 does not stand part of the Bill. Clause 47 as it stands strips academies of one of their key freedoms: the ability to innovate and tailor their curriculum approaches to meet the specific needs of the pupils and communities they serve. We have clear evidence that allowing schools this freedom, with clear accountability mechanisms in place, improves outcomes for pupils.
This summer, free schools outperformed other non-selective state schools in both GCSE and A-level results, playing an important role in driving up standards, particularly in areas of significant deprivation and low educational attainment. One of the strengths of free schools has been their diversity, representing a varied range of educational philosophies and high-quality curricula.
In a recent report, New Schools Network set out a number of principles that it had identified across high-impact free schools—those with a strong track record, outstanding Ofsted ratings, strong exam results and high levels of participation, engagement, progression and achievement. Among them was a relentless focus on the fundamentals of learning, which often drew on international and well-evidenced school and curriculum models and practices, from Teach Like a Champion to Expeditionary Learning, KIP and High Tech High. Drawing on the best evidence and proven ideas of what works, schools have used the flexibility in the current system to adapt their curriculum to suit their students. They, after all, know their pupils best.
The NSM report sets out a number of examples where free schools have used their curriculum freedoms to the benefit of their pupils. Marine Academy Plymouth has developed its own curriculum around marine themes relating to the city’s coastal tradition. School 21’s curriculum is project-oriented, with curriculum and pedagogical practices allowing pupils to choose personalised opportunities for growth which fit in with their passions and interests. For children with special needs, the Lighthouse School in Leeds, the first special free school, has supported a growing network of similar institutions. Lighthouse has shared its unique curriculum with more than 50 other school leaders and demonstrated how its innovative approach has allowed it to design provisions specifically aimed at pupils with autism, while spreading best practice across the system.
Allowing this flexibility does not and should not mean a free-for-all, and that is certainly not the case now. While academies are not required to follow the national curriculum, they are required by their funding agreements to provide a broad and balanced curriculum, and of course there are further safeguards via the Ofsted inspection framework and exam system. Again, the Government are proposing changes to dilute the autonomy of academies when it is not clear what the systemic problem is that this clause is trying to solve.
As we have heard, the national curriculum itself is currently under review, which is creating more uncertainty. As a result of provisions in the Bill, academies will be forced to sign up to a new curriculum, the content of which the Government have not decided yet, without knowing if there will be suitable flexibilities within it for them to appropriately tailor their curriculum to the specific needs and contexts of their communities.
As has previously been explained by the noble Lord, Lord Carter, the breadth of powers included in the Bill would allow a Secretary of State in future to potentially be much more prescriptive and expansive in relation to the detail of any new national curriculum if they were so inclined—again, a further reduction in academies’ autonomy.
I do not believe this is the right approach. Our education system as a whole has benefited from the ability of teachers to be creative, to innovate and to adapt their curriculum to respond to the unique needs of their pupils. Unfortunately, Clause 47 as it stands is a retrograde step.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
I thank the noble Baroness for her comprehensive answer. I have heard much about good intentions and a great deal of hope being hung on the curriculum and assessment review, but not much acknowledgement of how a number of noble Lords have pointed out that this clause could backfire, especially without better controls and guards. My noble friend Lady Evans laid out particularly lucidly how academy freedoms have enriched and strengthened education. The noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, echoed my noble friend Lord Agnew’s concerns about the undetermined curriculum and reminded us about the essence and purposes of education and the risks of limiting the scrutiny of what is taught. We had a good case study from my noble friend Lord Sewell.
There are a couple of interesting points. Design and technology GCSE entries started dropping off in the late 1990s. Most of the decline has been the result of schools using their autonomy to structure timetables to teach less of it and to have fewer people taking those GCSEs. The safeguards were not there around design and technology for a very long period, so thinking about those controls and incentives really matters.
My fear remains that this clause may encourage lip service to the detail of the new curriculum, whatever it is. But if that comes at the expense of the intellectual energy and dynamism that have been generated in the school sector in recent years, it will drag English education inexorably backwards and, in a few years’ time, we might find ourselves languishing with Scotland and Wales in the international league tables, wondering what on earth we have done and why we ever thought that it was a good idea. Nevertheless, I understand where we are and that the curriculum and assessment review needs to report. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Baroness Spielman Excerpts(1 month, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)
My Lords, I add my support to amendments 444A to C, 445 and 445ZA to ZD, in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran, which seek to rein in the sweeping new powers currently set out in Clause 49 for the Secretary of State to intervene in academy operations. As my noble friend said, of course the Secretary of State should have the ability to ensure that academies comply with their statutory duties, but the powers currently included in Clause 49 are so broad that they will undermine trust in school leaders, significantly reduce academy autonomy and create a top-down bureaucracy with potentially over-restrictive government insight.
The clause as currently drafted, for instance, allows for the Secretary of State to give directions they consider appropriate to academies if they are deemed to have acted unreasonably or to be proposing to act unreasonably. To my mind, the effect appears to be that a trust could be punished for actions it has not yet taken, with a central direction initiated simply on the basis of speculation from a Secretary of State. I may have misunderstood but, if this is the case, it surely cannot be right.
In this context, the use of the word “unreasonably” is a further cause for concern. It is a vague and subjective standard, left undefined in Clause 49 as it stands, and it seems to open the door to overreach and potential political interference in individual schools and trusts from Whitehall. Without clear guardrails, it would enable Ministers to meddle in decisions that surely must properly belong to academy trustees and head teachers.
As my noble friend has just said in her opening remarks, the drafting of the clause runs the risk of creating a micromanager’s charter. And the problem does not end there. The powers granted under Clause 49 are not only overly broad; they are also unchecked and have no independent review or appeal mechanisms built in—something which Amendment 445A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, would specifically address.
The group of amendments tabled by my noble friend, along with the amendment in the name of he noble Lord, Lord Knight, would bring some much-needed balance into Clause 49 by restoring proportionality and fairness into the process while maintaining the Secretary of State’s powers to ensure that trusts do not breach their statutory duties, funding agreements or charity law. I hope the Minister will think again about the breadth of powers that the Government are proposing.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I too support the amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran. As she and my noble friend Lady Evans have pointed out, it is again not obvious why these powers are needed. The existing legislative framework and funding agreements provide ample levers to enforce and hold academy trusts accountable. If there is an implied shift, as there appears to be, away from accountability and towards direct control and management, it is important to remember what we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, this afternoon: he laid out very clearly those underlying principles about high autonomy, balanced with strong accountability, and referred to the problems and weaknesses of some local authorities, which made it necessary and desirable to move to the model that served us well for many years. It would be deeply unfortunate if we end up with a central government that is attempting to manage the entire school system, rather along the lines of one of the weaker local authorities of 40 years ago.
I am worried about the strain that this will place on the Civil Service. I have concerns about people trying to read tea leaves and decide whether a breach is likely. As others have said, it feels like a system that is almost certain to create more contention and disagreement, and more time wasted on legal disputes and challenges to action, than it is to help children by resolving problems early. I support the set of amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran.
Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)
My Lords, I support the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lady Barran. I have not spoken in Committee and apologise for not being available to speak at Second Reading. Although I supported many of the arguments earlier today in respect of teachers’ qualifications, curriculums and so on, I chose to speak on this group of amendments because these clauses go to the essence of the academy and negate much of what an academy is about and what it wishes to do.
These amendments are particularly important. It is a bit disappointing that there are so few of us loyal troopers in the Chamber tonight to address this extremely important issue about the core of how academies are run.
I will disclose my interest in a second, but I was propelled to speak because I heard from one sponsor whom I know well that, if these clauses come through, he would want to hand “his academy”, as he calls it—the academy that he sponsors—back to the state. I cannot believe that this is what the Government want to achieve, but inclusion of Clause 49 may well lead to that. It would be a tragedy for our children’s education.
I am a huge admirer of academies. I was a trustee of the London Academy in Edgware and am currently a member of the Leigh Academies Trust in Kent. A member is a peculiar status within an academy, but that is what I am. I am not a governor or a trustee; along with the county council, I am a member.
The first, the London Academy in Edgware, was one of the original sponsored academies. It replaced a failing school in Edgware and was sponsored by the philanthropist Peter Shalson. In 2023, thanks in no small part to the excellent head, Paddy McGrath, it became one of the top 55 schools in the country. Importantly, over 50% of the students are eligible for the pupil premium and the admission policy prioritised students eligible for free school meals. This was a fantastic achievement. It has been obtained not least because of the flexibilities that it has been afforded and the freedoms which have been granted to it by its academy status.
As I mentioned, I am also a member, along with Kent County Council, of the Leigh Academies Trust. Under the leadership of Simon Beamish and Frank Green, it has grown from being one of the original CTCs, which some may remember—for full disclosure, it was originally sponsored in the 1980s by my uncle, Sir Geoffrey Leigh—to now being a MAT of over 30 schools. It is widely respected for its tremendous achievements.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I want to speak briefly on academy orders and to support Amendments 445B, 446 and 446A. My noble friend Lady Barran rightly said that I did not support the extension of academy orders to those schools that require improvement. I remember writing to the then Secretary of State to warn him that, among other things, it would place inspection under impossible pressure, and I think that my assessment was borne out.
This Government were quick to change their regulatory policies to remove their dependence on overall inspection judgments, so that those judgments could be removed. What we have seen over the past year is interesting, because it has shown that the sector also dislikes opaque and unpredictable processes, such as are now operating. With the loss of clarity, every intervention decision potentially becomes just the opening salvo in a long war of attrition.
I experienced quite a few of these sadly sometimes misguided parent campaigns to defend a school that was in fact in a desperate state and where the parents simply did not realise quite how bad it was. I know how debilitating some of these situations can be for all concerned and how drastically they can delay the kind of work and action that is needed to sort things out for children. Getting things sorted out for children typically also sorts things out for staff, making their jobs doable again.
We also now have years of experience of RISE teams and their predecessors. None has been found to be fully satisfactory. Each incarnation starts by recruiting school or MAT leaders but, over time, tends to morph into being a team of generalist officials who are not themselves equipped to provide support and, sometimes, struggle to identify the most appropriate alternative sources of help. I therefore support the proposals for improvement made by my noble friend and urge the Government to think hard about how to make sure that the consequences of failure—it is important that we can recognise failure—are clear, brisk and well implemented, with the maximum certainty and the minimum delay, limbo or uncertainty for all concerned.
Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)
To get the current situation on the record, I looked around for evidence and found a quote that is helpful in our deliberations on this issue. The quote is:
“I have serious concerns about the proposal to change the pathway for turning around failing schools. I know from bitter personal experience that any change to the status of a school can become highly political. The current system, in which failing schools automatically become academies, provides clarity and de-politicisation, and ensures a rapid transition. I fear that making that process discretionary would result in a large increase in judicial reviews”—
as has been mentioned—
“pressure on councils and prolonged uncertainty, which is in nobody’s interests”.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/1/25; col. 902.]
I think that encapsulates the situation quite neatly. It is from Siobhain McDonagh, speaking on 8 January 2025. It can be found in column 902 of the relevant Hansard; I am providing the reference since my earlier remarks were challenged. So I will put them on the record as well: they came from the Spectator on 5 February. I believe that Siobhain McDonagh summarised the situation very fairly.
Public Authorities (Fraud, Error and Recovery) Bill
Baroness Spielman ExcerptsThursday 15th May 2025
(5 months, 1 week ago)
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Baroness Spielman (Con) (Maiden Speech)
My Lords, like so many who have stood up here for the first time, I am profoundly aware of the privilege it is to speak here and of the importance of using that privilege responsibly and well, for the public good. I have much to learn from all noble Lords.
I am especially grateful to my supporters and my mentor—the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf of Dulwich, and my noble friends Lord Finkelstein and Lady Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist—and many other noble friends. I am beginning to understand the strength of collegiality and mutual support that characterises this House, and I hope that I will succeed in upholding this.
I sound very English, and I bear a German surname, but I come here with connections to many parts of the UK. My father was English, from the Midlands, and my mother is Irish. I was brought up in Glasgow, though I lost my childhood accent when I came south to study. I also came to know something of Wales over seven fascinating years on the board of the Wales Millennium Centre.
I am here because I have spent over 20 years working in the interests of children and young people. After some years in investment banking, I recognised—slightly belatedly—that my real interests lay in education above all else. I spent seven years as part of the founding management team at Ark Schools, an excellent academy trust, then nearly seven years as chair of Ofqual, the exam regulator, overseeing a full programme of qualification reforms. Most recently, I served for seven years as Ofsted chief inspector, where we made an inspection model based on professional dialogue, grounded in evidence and emphasising educational substance and integrity.
It may be a surprise that I am making my maiden speech on this Bill, but Ofsted inspects many services for children and young people and, in some cases, regulates them too. In its work, Ofsted sees many excellent things: often great services run by principled and highly skilled people, but also things that we would all wish did not happen and tend to avoid talking about, including fraud. More generally, Ofsted does sometimes have to report findings that are profoundly uncomfortable for those whose failings are exposed.
Incompetence is one dimension; ethical slippage is another. I use that term because fraud, which is the main focus of this Bill, sits at one end of an ethical spectrum. Some behaviour can be considered unethical to a greater or lesser extent. For example, it is worrying when the interests of children are subordinated to those of adults, contrary to the principles that underlie the policies of successive Governments. It is not criminal, but it can harm children. It is shocking that there are a few people in control of children’s education and welfare who choose to operate outside the law, sometimes even after a criminal conviction for the same offence. When ethical slippage is normalised, it becomes harder for other adults to sustain their own purpose and integrity. Cultures are corroded, and actual fraud becomes more likely.
To spell it out, when people see others around them successfully cheating a system, at least three bad things happen. First, and most immediately, it gives people an incentive to join the cheaters. This costs the public purse and the taxpayers who fund it.
Secondly, it corrodes mutual trust in communities. A sense of community derives in large part from a social contract founded in reciprocity: if we no longer believe that those around us will contribute to mutual support when they are able and draw on support only when they need it, we lose some of our sense of community. My noble friend Lord Finkelstein wrote very well about the importance of reciprocity in the Times this week.
Thirdly, we become cynical about public authorities if we see them as incompetent and ineffective at preventing, detecting or sanctioning the behaviours that are undermining our sense of community. A loss of confidence in public authorities is destabilising for government and hard to redress. Low mutual trust in communities and in government is not conducive to individual happiness.
All this makes it important to address fraud and error promptly and effectively, and I welcome the efforts of successive Governments to strengthen this work. Deterring fraud requires a high likelihood of detection, as well as meaningful sanctions where fraud is found.
I will not repeat what has been said by others today, but important points have been made. I will make a few observations from my own experience, having had ultimate responsibility for the regulatory sanctioning process in a range of cases.
The protections for individuals are, of course, very important, but they must be proportionate and properly balanced with a legitimate public interest of deterring and sanctioning fraud. Where protections are extensive and elaborate, the complexity and cost of taking a case of suspected fraud through to its conclusion are high. This can contribute to the creeping inertia highlighted by my noble friend Lady Finn.
For individuals, those strong protections can mean longer processes, and protracted processes are in themselves more stressful at the receiving end. If it becomes even more expensive to investigate a case, public authorities are forced to prioritise the most blatant and expensive cases over lesser and more marginal cases. For example, where the total loss from a fraud is small in absolute terms and where any meaningful recovery is unlikely, it is harder for a public body to justify the cost of investigation and lesser cases are pushed down the queue. Yet inaction in the lesser cases—the broken windows, if you like—still triggers the undesirable social and economic consequences that I have already talked about.
The aggregate benefits and costs of embedding strong individual protections must therefore be regularly reviewed and weighed against the wider public interest, not just in financial terms. This should, of course, include regular system-level sense-checking, and swift adjustment of schemes and processes where needed.
The agencies and bodies that do this difficult work have to be well supported. Among the millions of decisions made by public authorities, there will always be difficult and borderline cases. Where, say, a claim in such a case is properly refused, it can be easy for a disappointed claimant to paint the public body and the individual decision-makers as soulless and unfair. Yet that authority and its staff should not be casually vilified. True fairness to all citizens, young and old, and maintaining that all-important social contract, depends on those people having the skills and confidence to make those difficult calls—humanely but without partiality.
I emphasise to noble Lords that the success of these well-intended reforms depends on collective support for the people who carry them through. Without this, the reforms could come to little.
To end, I thank your Lordships for listening to me. My watchwords in my previous life were “substance and integrity”, and they will continue to be my watchwords here.