Pensions Commission

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

I am grateful—I will never be so appreciated ever again, so I am really going to enjoy this session. My noble friend raises an important point. In a sense, it is up to individual schemes what their rules are for indexing their pensions. The minimum legal requirements for indexation have to be appropriate for all DB pension schemes, because they have to strike a balance between what members need and what the employer can afford. In the end, as he will know, the strongest guarantee is a good, strong sponsoring employer. However, there are two things that may help. One is, as he may be aware from the Bill, that the Government have changed the rules to allow a wider range of well-funded schemes to release any surplus that is there, with the agreement of trustees, which could be used to go towards paying for indexation, for example, if affordable and appropriate. At the other end of the scheme, the Government took action in that Bill to look at giving indexation to those who end up in the PPF or FAS for benefits earned before 1997. That will at least help.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, the Pensions Commission is rightly worried about pension adequacy for a worryingly large and even growing proportion of the population and will of course make its recommendations in due course. But given the urgency of the problem, can the Minister tell us what the Government are doing now to promote greater financial self-sufficiency and reduced welfare dependency in retirement?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

Yes. The single best guarantee of a happy retirement is a happy working life where people have the opportunity to earn enough money and to save enough money. We absolutely are doing huge amounts—I will not recite it all here as I have done many times before—and investing in all kinds of programmes to get people into work and to get them to progress in work and to be able to move up the income ladder to be able to save. However, one thing we know is that too many people are not working long enough to save or saving enough when they are in work and, in many cases, even if they put the right amount of saving in, the decisions they make at the point they come to retire—decumulation—can be crucial to how much they get to live on. We have to attack it on all fronts; no one of those alone will do it.

Maximum Temperature for Indoor Workplaces

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Wednesday 15th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

After this question, I will take a long, hard look at Part O of the building safety regulations. My noble friend, who is enormously knowledgeable in this area, makes an important point. Not only do we need to take the adaptation measures that I mentioned in the previous answer and put in place investment in our public buildings to enable suitable adaptation and to recognise the impacts of climate change, but I am sure he is right that we also need to look at how our building regulations take into consideration the impacts of the sorts of heatwaves that we have had this year as well.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, as the Minister has said, the workplace regulations already require employers to make sure that workplace temperatures are reasonable, which is a pragmatic and flexible approach, given the different conditions and circumstances of different workplaces. Can the Minister confirm that the Government will not impose further prescriptive regulations and that, if they do act, they will do so by helping employers address serious concerns, for example by making it less difficult and less expensive to install and run modern technologies for heating and cooling, such as we enjoy in this Chamber?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

It is already the case that the Health and Safety Executive provides a wide range of options for how employers can fulfil their responsibility to ensure that the people whom they employ are able to work in reasonable conditions, even in heatwaves. I have already made it clear that the Government think that this approach, potentially looking at the thresholds of action that might be necessary as workplaces get to different levels of heat but nevertheless not mandating specific action related to a specific temperature, is the most appropriate way to go forward.

Industrial Training Levy (Engineering Construction Industry Training Board) Order 2026

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Tuesday 14th July 2026 Grand Committee

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing this order. We support the continuation of the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board levy for the 2026, 2027 and 2028 levy periods. This provides continuity for the industry without imposing additional costs. As others have said, the levy system clearly commands the support of the vast majority of those who pay for it. It works precisely because it is driven by industry need. Companies understand their workforce requirements far better than Whitehall ever can. The role of government should be to create the conditions in which businesses can invest, recruit and train, rather than to control industries with centrally designed employment schemes.

But it is important to look at the levy in the context of both current and likely future pressures. The scale of the challenge is considerable. The Minister cited estimates of a need for another 40,000 workers by 2030. Demand is rising in nuclear construction and decommissioning, offshore wind, hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, industrial decarbonisation, and the maintenance of existing energy infrastructure. The industry is competing for workers with other infrastructure sectors that need the same skilled trades and technical professionals. The central challenge is how to make sure that the country has the capacity and skills to deliver projects that are already planned.

Employers are facing considerable difficulties in recruiting and training. The workforce is ageing and few new entrants are coming through to replace retiring workers in key occupations. We need more and better technical education. Undervaluing technical and vocational education is a perennial British problem that stretches back for well over a century, and good technical education is not cheap. Successive Governments have wrestled with this for decades, and I can say with confidence that the problem will not be solved by a few soundbites about parity of esteem or by an education policy that is driven by social justice ambitions and that treats educational excellence, national prosperity and growth as afterthoughts. The Government should be taking a hard look at their equivalence and performance tables policy which, over 20 years, has done so much to push young people at school away from technical subjects at GCSE and into non-technical classroom BTECs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I thank the Committee for its contributions to the debate, and I welcome the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, as this is the first time we have faced each other in her new role. I congratulate her on that.

The debate has underlined not only the importance of the ECITB’s work but the scale of the challenge facing one of our most economically vital industries, with a core workforce of 90,000 people and responsibility for £33 billion of output. As noble Lords have recognised, the industry plays a vital role in supporting our energy security, manufacturing capability and critical infrastructure.

As has come through clearly today, the engineering construction industry cannot meet the skills demands of the coming decade without a stable collective system of investment in training, alongside government support. I will return to this in a moment. The evidence is consistent that market forces alone will not deliver the pipeline of skilled workers that the industry urgently needs to meet the demand for new major infrastructure projects.

The ECITB’s levy is the mechanism that enables the collective benefits of a focused skills strategy for the engineering construction industry. It ensures that employers can access support for training and share the benefits of a skilled, competent and resilient workforce. It also opens opportunity, helping apprentices and other new entrants to complete high-quality training and helping existing workers to reskill or upskill to progress their careers.

I will respond to some of the specific points raised. The noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, rightly emphasised the need for success in the spending of the levy and the successful completion of training courses and apprenticeships. The ECITB has confirmed that it currently tracks apprentices and graduates while they are on programmes and receiving grant support. The data that the ECITB collects indicates a positive impact of its grant support on, for example, apprenticeship completion rates. Based on the ECITB’s latest available data for England, Scotland and Wales, of the apprentices who started an apprenticeship in 2020 and were supported by ECITB, 78% have successfully completed their apprenticeship as of December 2025. While we have seen improvements in the completion rates of apprenticeships over recent years, I think that is above the average rate.

The noble Baroness also raised the question of when the annual reports and accounts will be published for 2025. They will be laid in the autumn.

On the point about charitable status, it is not determined by the Government; it is determined by whether an organisation’s purposes are exclusively charitable and legally deemed to provide a clear public benefit. It was therefore a decision for the training bodies themselves—CITB, equally, is a charity—to take on that charitable status.

The noble Lord, Lord Palmer, raised the success of the levy consultation. It would be fair to say to the noble Lord that there are a lot of statistics around. Some of the statistics the noble Lord quoted related to the Construction Industry Training Board rather than the Engineering Construction Industry Training Board; perhaps it would be easier were the Government to decide to go ahead with the merger of the two. Nevertheless, they are different sizes and they do different jobs. The point he made is right: for the ECITB there is, if anything, an even greater level of approval as a result of the levy consultation than the figures he quoted.

Several noble Lords rightly cut to the chase of what the ECITB is responsible for. In other words: what does it actually do, and how, in the broader context, are the Government supporting the need for skills in the engineering and construction industry? On the former, the ECITB continues to invest in skills hubs, training standards and competence assurance across key sectors, including energy, nuclear and renewables. It has supported more than 6,900 new entrants since 2022 and invested £32.6 million in 2025 in training grants and new entrant programmes. During 2024, the ECITB funding supported over 2,000 new entrant starts, including over 1,000 apprentices and 500 graduates. Almost 64,000 learners were trained or assessed using ECITB-approved products, including more than 31,000 learners achieving industry-recognised safety passports and 2,763 learners supported through competence-related programmes. Of course, while the ECITB and the levy we are discussing are important for addressing some of the market failure in delivering skills in the engineering construction industry, it is just part of the broader work the Government are doing to support the engineering construction industry and wider skills. This relates to the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman.

The Government are delivering significant investment to strengthen engineering construction skills, as part of wider reforms, helping employers to respond to current and future workforce needs. This includes an additional £1 billion of investment to help deliver around 50,000 more apprenticeship opportunities for young people over the coming years—that is particularly important given the 40% fall in young people’s apprenticeships over the last years of the last Government—alongside increased flexibility through the new growth and skills levy and specific sector skills packages in engineering and construction that are worth over £800 million.

Additionally, we are providing targeted incentives for employers, including payments of up to £2,000 for taking on foundation apprentices. We have developed a new foundation apprenticeship in engineering, helping more young people to enter skilled careers, as well as other incentives, particularly for taking young people who may have been out of work on to these apprenticeships. We have continued and in fact increased investment in skills bootcamps and increased devolved approaches through mayoral strategic authorities, enabling local areas to respond to local employer demand and skills shortages.

The noble Baroness specifically raised technical and vocational education. I reassure her that this Government’s action, even in the two years that we have been in government, goes far beyond the soundbites that she characterised. A major reform of post-16 education is in progress, and stronger vocational routes are being developed through the new V-levels, an expansion of the possibility for young people to gain an in-depth technical education through T-levels, improved level 2 qualifications to get young people on to those vocational routes, and the investment I have already outlined in turning around the fall in the numbers of young people who have been able to start apprenticeships, ensuring that those opportunities are available for young people in the future.

Together with the ECITB support, these measures will strengthen the pipeline of skills available to the engineering construction workforce and support the delivery of major infrastructure projects across Great Britain. I hope that, in responding, I have reassured noble Lords about the role of this levy order, its importance in supporting the needs of small and larger businesses, ensuring maximum impact and value for money from employers’ levy contributions, and the important role the ECITB plays in ensuring that this key industry for growth, the development of infrastructure, energy security and manufacturing capability is supported both by the ECITB and the wider policies of this Government.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

Can the noble Baroness address my question about the impact of government policies enacted over the last two years on the engineering construction sector, particularly increased national insurance and employment rights?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I spelled out some of the impacts of the Government’s policy on the numbers of apprenticeships, the shift to vocational and technical education, the support this Government are providing to turn around the decline we have seen, and the £800 million of sector skills support we are providing for the industry. Is the noble Baroness genuinely arguing that this Government should now reverse the national insurance increases, which is where the investment in the National Health Service, which is also of considerable importance to employers, will come from? If she got her way and we reversed that, I think engineering employers, along with others, would not want their employees to be sitting on the waiting lists we inherited from the last Government.

Unemployment: People with Autism

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Thursday 25th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, if reducing unemployment is a serious government priority, the proportion of young autistic people beginning sustained employment must be improved substantially. Can the Minister therefore explain how the Government plan to use their funding and regulatory levers to ensure, first, that colleges place autistic students on the most suitable courses for them and, secondly, that colleges connect these courses to local job opportunities in sectors and roles where young autistic people can thrive?

[Baroness Sherlock (Lab)]

The noble Baroness raises an excellent question about schools and education, and I reassure her that my department is working very closely with the Department for Education to address it. I am sure that she has read the interim report from Alan Milburn, so she will know that he identified problems not simply in getting young people into employment, but in making sure that schools were doing the right thing in transition and in making sure that health services were doing the right thing in engaging with prevention. We are developing plans across that piece. We are doing a lot, and I would be very happy to talk to the noble Baroness outside if she would like to pursue this.

Child Poverty

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Thursday 18th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I, also, thank the noble Lady Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett, for this important debate today. I think we all agree that eliminating child poverty is an important aim. I went into education 25 years ago because I wanted to take forward the education approaches that are most effective with the most disadvantaged children, so I know how much work already goes on in all stages of education to support children in poverty. It was good to hear the noble Lord, Lord Kestenbaum, recognize this.

I have studied the Government’s child poverty strategy and its publications on deep material poverty. The first thing I notice is how hard it is to measure child poverty. Much effort has gone into the new measure. It gets closer than the relative measure to children’s actual experience. Do they have three meals a day, fresh fruit and vegetables, somewhere to do homework, games, toys, and outdoor equipment? Do they live in decent and warm housing? Can they get around on public transport? Can their families cope with an unexpected bill?

First, the measure suggests that there are just over 2 million children in deep material poverty. That is, of course, a concerning figure, but, startlingly, it correlates poorly with the Government’s preferred poverty measure of having less than 60% of median household income after housing costs. More than 70% of children in families below the 60% line are not in deep material poverty and, conversely, more than 40% of the children in deep material poverty are not in households falling below the 60% threshold. This clearly needs more examination and suggests that it is time to retire that arbitrary 60% number. It is good for political point-scoring, but is not very helpful for actual children and their lives.

We know the main risk factors, which the strategy acknowledges. Work, family structure, family size and geography all matter, and there are some striking ethnic disparities. All this is acknowledged, yet so much is ignored or glossed over in the strategy, and I will follow on from the points made by my noble friend Lady Coffey and several others.

First, I must talk about fatherlessness. I am not denigrating single mothers, most of whom make every effort for their children. Yet it is undeniably the case that, on average, children who do not live with their father have worse life outcomes on many fronts. It was good to hear the noble Baroness, Lady Paul of Shepherd’s Bush, and the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, touch on this. More than half of children are now born outside marriage. Most have cohabiting parents when they are born, but cohabitation is less stable than marriage, so too few children are growing up with both natural parents, and it is obviously unrealistic to believe that state support, however good, can entirely compensate for a parent-shaped gap in a child’s life. There are countries that have significant incentives for parents to marry and remain in stable unions. We have disincentives in tax, welfare and social housing, so it is worrying that the strategy does not even mention marriage, let alone set out policies to reverse a damaging social trend that is directly responsible for a lot of child poverty.

The strategy skates fairly lightly past at least 500,000 children—although published estimates vary—in families that have no recourse to public funds. Almost certainly, these children make up a hefty slice of the 2.1 million in deep material poverty. Some families will get leave to remain, in which case the full range of benefits and support will become available to them, and some will not and will leave. But, as the noble Lord, Lord Sahota, noted, these children’s interests are surely best served by resolving their cases swiftly. It is none the less a puzzlingly large number of children affected.

Linked to this, there is no mention of cultural differences that contribute to making some ethnic groups much heavier users of welfare than others and making their children more likely to be poor. Relatively few women of Somali origin work. Estimates range from 10% to 24% compared with over 70% of white women. Bangladeshi and Pakistani women are also far less likely to be earning. For balance, I point out that Haredi Jewish households are also particularly likely to depend on benefits. The strategy is silent on a real issue of fairness. Is it reasonable to expect families where both parents work to provide for their children to pay taxes to support families where at least one parent may be choosing not to? If not, how will the Government adjust the relevant incentives?

Improving parent skills should be a much bigger piece of the jigsaw. The labour market values mathematical competence, so improving numeracy helps. For many families in poverty from immigrant backgrounds, it would be hard for the adults to earn a decent wage until they speak better English. Many parents who have grown up in countries with more limited education systems will need some good vocational education to help them move beyond insecure casual work. As the noble Lord, Lord John of Southwark, noted in his excellent speech, a child poverty strategy is ultimately self-defeating if it ushers children of poorer families into adult lives of worklessness and dependency. Making sure that these children move from education into proper jobs and stay in sustained employment is critical.

I do not want to dismiss the Government’s measures, but I think I have shown where the real differences lie between these Benches and the Government. Too many current policies are sticking plasters to treat symptoms, not cures or preventive measures. They do not solve the underlying problems—the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft, made some important points here. In essence, child poverty arises when a child’s parents cannot or do not earn enough to provide for their child. Of course, there will always be a small proportion of families who, for good reason, will not be able to achieve this, but most could. By definition, anyone over 21 working full-time on the national minimum wage will be earning 60% of national median income. Therefore, there are an awful lot of children in families that do not have the equivalent of even one full-time wage coming in.

If we are serious about eliminating child poverty, we need to focus more on better skills and a growing economy that generates better jobs and higher real wages, plus the kinds of support that help families become more secure and independent—such as the debt advice service mentioned by my noble friend Lady Coffey and the parenting service described by the noble Baroness, Lady Wheatcroft—I think I was the first person to talk publicly about the problem of children starting school in nappies, almost a decade ago during my time at Ofsted.

Economic growth is the most powerful lever to reduce poverty, but, sadly, the Government’s current policies are increasing the welfare burden while disincentivising work for an increasing proportion of the population—which in turn constrains economic growth and hence the capacity to fund benefits. I warn the Government here. The social contract that underpins the welfare system requires mutual trust and cohesion, which is more than a little frayed, especially in relation to disability-linked benefits for adults and children. The collective willingness to fund a comprehensive welfare system depends on those paying having confidence that all but a small minority will contribute to the system through most of their working lives, that claims will be genuine and that decision-makers will be effective in gatekeeping the system to prevent abuses.

I remind noble Lords that the benefits bill this year will be about £330 billion, which is around £11,000 per household. Since more than half of households are now net recipients of benefits, the annual bill paid by the minority of households who make a net contribution is higher still. We simply cannot afford fraud. So I was not reassured by the reply from the noble Baroness, Lady Sherlock, to a recent Written Question asked by my noble friend Lady Coffey about the number of prosecutions for benefits fraud since July 2024. All it said was:

“The information requested is not readily available and to provide it would incur disproportionate cost”.


I will finish by asking the Minister four questions. Will the Government set clear targets for moving families that are dependent on benefits towards independence, including parental employment rates and earnings progression, and report regularly against these? Will the Government set targets for successful labour market entry and continuing employment for all young people who grow up in benefit-dependent households and report regularly against them? Will the Government commit to publishing regular comprehensive information about children and families with no recourse to public funds, including their nationalities, how and when they came to Britain, how they are being housed and helped, at what cost, and how their temporary status is being resolved? And linked to my earlier point, will the Government commit to publishing regular updates on the incidence of benefit fraud, on the perpetrators and on the cost to the taxpayer, together with reporting on the effectiveness of steps that are being taken to deter and minimise fraud?

I will end by thanking everyone who has spoken today for recognising that there is a moral imperative here to do what is right for all our children and, above all, to do what is right for them in the long term, as well as in the short term, so that children live the best lives they can for themselves and as parents in their turn.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Wednesday 25th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Meston (CB)]

My Lords, I will confine myself briefly to supporting Motion B. It is commonly agreed now that the pilots of the pathfinder model in selected family courts have been a success and represent the way ahead. This model has been shown to reduce delays significantly and has forced the focus on to making things better for the child concerned, rather than on the parents’ disputes and confrontations. That model has developed sufficiently well, in that the delay in moving it on into the mainstream should really now be avoided. It means that the very recently announced expansion into child-focused courts will be welcome.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will o speak to Motion K1, tabled by my noble friend Lady Barran. The Government are rightly acting to give local authorities the power to prevent children subject to a child protection plan being withdrawn from school. However, the scope of the Bill is clearly too limited, even with the amendment to give effect to a backward extension of five years for child protection plans.

I will briefly remind noble Lords of the characteristics of the children we are talking about. Clearly, they have all experienced abuse or neglect, but even apart from this we are talking about an exceptionally vulnerable group. Nearly three-quarters of children in care have special educational needs—often conditions they were born with that can make them particularly challenging to bring up and to educate—and often complicated physical or behavioural needs as well. Alongside that, these are children of parents whose ability to care for and protect their own children has already been shown to be inadequate, at least for a time. Even after a care order or child protection plan has been discharged, these are, in the main, children with serious challenges and complicated needs, whose parents have limited capacity. They are very often fragile families needing a lot of support and with a strong likelihood of further social care intervention being needed in future.

Therefore, there should be local authority consideration of proposals to home-educate any child who has been in care, had a supervision order or is under a child protection plan: first, to make sure that the child will actually get the education and support they need at home; and, secondly, to make sure that the child can safely be removed from view. Once a child is home-schooled, it may not be seen by any adult from outside the family for years. That may have been exactly the thing that was keeping that fragile family in balance.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)]

My Lords, I want to share the experience of schoolteachers, particularly head teachers. I and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, were on a call earlier this week with three head teachers from different parts of the country and from very different economic backgrounds. Their plea was: “You need to help us, because at the moment we have different policies on phones”. One, interestingly, was banning year 7s from having phones but not others. Another was to say: “Put it away. As long as we do not see it, it’s not a problem”. Others have pouches. A lot of their time is being taken up by a small group of vocal and often aggressive parents who demand that their children have their phones at school. Those head teachers are being distracted from their core duties to deal with this, and they were pleading with us, particularly with this vote tonight, to send a clear message to the Government that head teachers want to teach children rather than police smartphones.

The other thing I want to share is about the harms. We have talked a lot about social media, but often phones in schools lead to further bullying. We all saw a few years back the craze of happy slapping, where young people in playgrounds came behind others and slapped them, and the footage would be used and shared.

There is one other thing I want to share that is very personal. When one of my sons first started at a school in Rotherham, he was very keen to fit in—because we are from Sheffield—and he wanted to make friends. Unfortunately, a small group of so-called friends followed him into a toilet a few moments after he had gone in and, while he was sat on the toilet, they kicked the door in and took footage of him on the toilet. He did not tell me or the family. I got a phone call from a local community centre a week or two later to say, “Shaf, we are horrified by what we’ve seen. We’ve seen footage of your son. He didn’t know what to do, he couldn’t get up, and these kids were laughing. We saw it, and we think you should be made aware”. To their credit, the parents of the two young men who were involved came straight to our house when they found out; they were mortified. The school itself tried its level best, but, I have to say, we had to leave that school, and my son had to go to the other side of Sheffield to give him a fresh start.

There are real consequences. That is why, tonight, I will be backing the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the amendment of my good friend and colleague, my noble friend Lord Addington, on the requirements for people with special educational needs.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I want to make just one point, following up on the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, and the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley. The medical devices exception in the amendment is already provided for. If a more general exception were made for special educational needs—that is already close to 30% of children—the pressure on parents and pupils would be to game this, and the proportion of children with a special needs label would rise to truly stratospheric levels, at which point the phone ban would clearly have no meaning whatever. I urge noble Lords to think about the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, on other ways to provide the assistive functionality that might be needed.

[Lord Elliott of Ballinamallard (UUP)]

My Lords, very briefly, it will come as no surprise that, when I was going to school, I did not have a smartphone, just like many of you here this evening, probably; we did not have that opportunity.

I fully support the principle of Amendment 215. I find a difficulty, though—this is a follow-up to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan—on the policing of this issue in schools. Doing your homework is a requirement at school; not every kid does it. Bullying and fighting in the playground are not allowed, but it still happens. I fully appreciate that the son of the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, is not allowed a smartphone, but not every young person is accommodating like that: not every young person has the respect for their parents, let alone for their teachers.

It is okay making these laws, but, unless we have some type of policing and enforcement, it will not be of any benefit, because you are going to punish the people who willingly give up their phone when going into school. The noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, says, “It is okay, they will simply be asked to leave their phone at the door”, but they will not all leave their phone at the door. Some will have a phone hidden. How do we police and manage it? That is my serious question, because I absolutely know that not every young person will willingly do it. What do you do? Are you going to criminalise teachers for not taking the phones? Are you going to criminalise parents for allowing children to go to school with their phones? It is not that simple.

I fully support the principle of the amendment. Let me be clear: I wish phones had never been allowed in school. But the management, policing and enforcement of this is something totally different and it is not dealt with in this amendment or anywhere that I can see in this legislation. I am willing to support this amendment, by the way, but it needs a lot more doing to it before it is finished.

Does the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, think that, if those kids had been asked to leave their phones at the door, it would have stopped them breaking into the toilet cubicle with a phone hidden in their sock or down their shirt? This is an incomplete amendment that I am willing to support, but unless something better and deeper is come up with that allows it to be enforced and policed without criminalising teachers and parents, I am afraid it is not going to be of much use.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and largely to agree, although I would go somewhat further and say that I think we have reached the situation of a market in schools in which very crude judgments are being applied by Ofsted, and schools are being pushed to game the system. That is why I signed Amendment 230 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and why the Green group will oppose Amendment 199 should it come to a vote.

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, was charitable when he said that there is a strong suspicion that off-rolling is going on. I am afraid I have no doubt that off-rolling is going on because up and down England, particularly in some of the most deprived communities, I have spoken to parents, often parents from very disadvantaged backgrounds themselves, who have said, “I’m trying to home-school my child now because the head teacher said they thought that was the best thing that could happen”. That was not home schooling by choice. That was usually pupils with special educational needs that the school just did not want to deal with. I have some sympathy with head teachers. Having been a school governor, I know how much pressure head teachers are under to keep up with the results. The problem is that we have created a competitive system where schools compete against each other instead of working together to create the best result for every pupil.

Amendment 230 is very modest. It simply calls for a review. I can tell my anecdotal stories, but I cannot say how big the problem is. I have seen it in many places, and I am sure that it is quite widespread. I do not believe the noble Lord intends to put this to a vote, but surely we can ask the Government to look at this anyway. As other noble Lords have said, it is something we should know about because this is one way in which we are failing some of our most disadvantaged pupils. Amendment 199, if it were to be passed, just furthers that sense of competition, which is the last thing we need in our schooling system.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 198 and will touch on Amendment 230 from the noble Lord, Lord Addington. Listening to noble Lords around the House, I find it surprising that they consistently believe that inspection, for which I was responsible for seven years, does not place a heavy emphasis on inclusion. Certainly throughout my time it did. The current framework has increased that focus almost to the point of giving up on looking at education, for which one learning walk and the results are about the extent of the coverage. Inclusion is and has long been taken extraordinarily seriously.

There are two issues that I want to touch on. The first is that however much we might want to believe that every child’s special needs can be coped with, there are times when those special needs consist of problems that inflict real harm on other children. The most awful parental complaints that came across my desk were about children who had been seriously assaulted and harmed, on occasion raped, by another child who had been admitted by a school either conscientiously trying to include a child for whom the local authority was desperate to find a place or that had been directed to take a child. That is agonising to learn about. We have to acknowledge that the interests of other children need to be considered when placing the most difficult children. That is important for children most of all but, of course, it is important for staff as well. If people are trying to work outside their capacity, schools tend to deteriorate, and that is not good for anybody.

Linked to that, I want to make a point about off-rolling, which has been touched on. In my time we put more of an emphasis on looking for signs and pursuing that—inquiring into it—where we found it. One of the things we discovered is that it is extraordinarily hard to characterise definitively whether an individual case is a case of off-rolling. There is typically quite a long history, a deterioration of the relationship between the child and the school. It is not a clean and tidy yes or no. Getting to a point where you could definitively say what the extent was would be extremely labour-intensive. The issue, in my view, is not a lack of regulation to prevent this—inspection is perfectly capable of disincentivising it—but we have to acknowledge that it needs a lot of resource that simply does not exist in Ofsted or anywhere else to dig into individual cases and establish the extent and the remedies.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak on Amendments 198, 199 and 230. I will give some historical background. The word “education” is derived from two Latin root words. The first is “educare”, which means to impart knowledge. For too long, some schools have seen themselves as imparting knowledge. They have emphasised too much that first root of the word, “educare”.

The other Latin root word is “educere”, which means to draw out knowledge. The best schools often do both. They impart knowledge but they also realise that a person is not a blank sheet of paper on whom you simply impart knowledge and do not draw out the best that is in them. In most schools that do both, the pupils all thrive.

That being the case, I think we have gone through a short-term revolution. Her Majesty’s inspectors, as they were then, saw themselves as helping the school to do better. Then Ofsted arrived and seemed to give simple judgments on the school, sometimes on very narrow elements. If the school failed one of its elements, it was totally judged to be a failing school.

I declare an interest here. The Archbishop Thurstan School in Hull had been there for many centuries. It was not performing as it should be and, therefore, there was a decision by the Secretary of State that it should be rebuilt. The council agreed to have it rebuilt and that it should be given a name that would be canvassed for in Hull. To my surprise, the pupils, staff and council decided that it should be called the Archbishop Sentamu Academy. That was the beginning of academisation.

We were very fortunate that the Labour Government, who lost the election in 2010, had agreed to provide the money. I was told by John Prescott, “Be quick, make sure that you get this money, because the new Government may not want this to happen”. Anyway, we got the £45 million and the place was rebuilt; the place was thriving. Students in Hull were thriving and doing excellent work for the first time, going to university for the first time. Four of them went to the University of Liverpool to read maths, which had never been dreamed of.

So the school was doing well but, as it went on, there was a problem in one of the departments and there was an Ofsted inspection, which said, “The school has failed”. If a school fails, the schools commissioner has a job to do: the school has to be brokered and brought into a much larger group, and that is what happened. What shocked me was that Ofsted would not then visit that school for three years. I said, “As a parent, if I had a child in that school and you judged it to be failing, I would like to know whether it had improved by the following year”.

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[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak against Amendment 199, and I am following the very wise words of my noble friend Lady Morris in doing so. I just do not understand how this amendment would allow the management of school places and the good use of taxpayers’ money. Year 7 places in the capital, London, are expected to fall by 7.6% in the next five years and reception places by 6.4% in the next four years. That means that those schools will see altogether about a £45 million cut in their budget. That cannot just be left to chance.

There needs to be a way of managing the school population, ensuring that taxpayers’ money is well spent and that children are placed in schools that are viable and have enough pupils that they can be offered a full curriculum. We do not want the situation in Northern Ireland, where the grammar schools fill up and the secondary modern schools are left with completely variable roles year on year and are unable to offer a full curriculum or to give the children in Northern Ireland who most need it the education they deserve.

Amendment 199 would take market forces to a ridiculous level and would mean that the Government and the local area could not manage school places to ensure a broad and balanced curriculum for each child. That would be particularly the case with the new curriculum, which will be broader and more balanced and is long overdue. It is important to reject Amendment 199 because there needs to be a mechanism for the most vulnerable children.

I am afraid I have to disagree with the former chief inspector. Everyone knows there are certain schools that do not take the children with special educational needs that they should, and that other schools are then dumped on since they have to take far too many children with profound special needs, to the real detriment of those children and other pupils in the class. Everyone knows that in reality, that happens. The noble Lord, Lord Nash, is nodding—it is true.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

Can the noble Baroness say at what point I said that there were schools which did not take children? I do not think I did.

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

If that was the case, let me apologise for saying that. They have got better at inclusion, and the noble Baroness is quite right to upbraid me on that.

However, it is really important that there is a power to direct schools to take pupils in order that they get an education. Secondly, we need a way of organising an admissions system which allows all children within the locality to have a viable education with a full, broad and balanced curriculum.

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[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 207 to create a duty to keep schools open for attendance. The speeches that have been made excellently explained why.

I arrived in this House during lockdown, and I was shocked—genuinely, to the core—by the ease with which people in this House on all sides clamoured to close down schools. It was an extraordinary thing to witness. I could not justify it at the time and argued against it. That argument—which was a minority argument, not just put forward by me—was treated as though somehow those of us who were worried about schools closing were the irresponsible ones; whereas I think it was the other way round. I genuinely think that many of the issues that the Bill is trying to tackle—many of the real problems and challenges that we face with young people today—were created, exacerbated and turbocharged as problems during that period. Schools were closed down, which meant that adults broke the social contract with children—not for their sake but ours—and it was against all the evidence. I am very keen to hear the Minister’s response to this, even if it is not tested in a Division of the House, as I think that this will be a huge, important lesson for us to learn.

I will note a few of the problems that have already been raised. We have a mental health crisis, which we talk about regularly—as we will later and have been throughout the Bill—as though it came out of nowhere, but there is serious reason to imagine that young people’s mental health suffered during that period. But we are also talking about behaviour. A lot of teachers will tell you that once that social contract was breached, it created discipline problems because pupils were no longer in class. We have increasing numbers of parents withdrawing their children from mainstream schools. The habit of going to school was broken. We have spent a huge amount of time in this Bill talking about home-schooling, which is going up, and that is partly because schools were no longer considered necessary. I said then that if you tell pupils that truancy is okay in certain circumstances, it will be hard to get back to normal. If you say, “You shouldn’t come into school”, it will be hard to say, “You must come into school”.

Certainly, as a teacher, I lectured young people—many a time—saying, “There is nothing more important than going to school. There is nothing, nothing, nothing more important than your education”, and then suddenly as a society we said, “Oh, there are lots of things that are more important than going to school or your education”, so they learned a very bad lesson.

We will come on to talk about the problems with smartphones. What did we do when we sent all those young people home? First of all, we told them to look at screens to get lessons—a lot of the time we did not bother even supplying the lessons on the screens—and what they did was spend a lot of time on their phones. They were not out socialising. They became desocialised—anti-social.

The final reason why we have to remember that this is so important is that a cohort of young citizens was told, “If there is a problem, you stay at home, you withdraw”. I think that if we say to young people, “If you feel ill, you aren’t up to coping with going out and being part of society”, we are creating a medicalised fragility and an acceptance of illness as a reason to withdraw that have led to massive social problems. We are now paying for that with a huge welfare bill. Many young adults now lack the resilience to become economically active.

The cost of what we did was enormous and we are yet to come to terms with it. The Bill is trying to deal with a lot of the problems created by that period, and this amendment is therefore important in raising the possibility that we should not, as a default, close schools. The default should be that we do not, that we owe it to children to have their education and that schools are kept open for attendance. There has to be an extremely good reason why schools are closed, and that should be thought through deeply. As someone who was here when we were deciding, let me assure noble Lords that it was not.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I too support the amendment. We have relied through history on a presumption that schools will stay open, even in adverse circumstances such as epidemics or bombardments. But once we closed schools for Covid, we set children adrift because there was nothing in law to balance their interests against those of adults. Children stayed locked up for months, learning little even when schools made great efforts to provide online learning.

I shall not repeat what others have said, but the story of the continuing harm to children—their academic progress, social development, health and happiness—is still unfolding. Ofsted did some of the earliest work on this in autumn 2020, when my inspectors made a series of fact-finding visits to schools and published monthly reports on the impact of Covid on schools and children. They reported that children were lonely, bored and miserable—the advance warnings of the lasting problems that we now see. I spoke about this publicly a number of times, but the tide of emotion was too strong for people to hear.

With hindsight, the existence of a formal duty and a mechanism to ensure that the available evidence, such as the reports I mentioned, is considered and weighed up against the representations of the adults who work in schools, health sector representatives, and so on might have helped to focus minds. I believe that there is an opportunity here for the Minister to get ahead of potential recommendations from the Covid inquiry.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I am sorry if I sound like a dinosaur, but I will. Hindsight is always a harsh, cruel science. It makes us think, “If only we did not do this”. The evidence is very clear; as the inquiry went on, the lessons to be drawn have not yet been concluded, and the nation needs to take those lessons into its lifeblood.

We are talking about legislating for an assurance that if a huge pandemic breaks out—or, let us say, a war—we need to go to Parliament every two weeks to consult. But perhaps Parliament will be permanently shut. I would not want us to reach a stage where we have not fully learned all the lessons. I have grandchildren who, because their parents were working, were seen as those who needed to be supported at school during the pandemic. Even then, there were infections, and shutting down schools looked like protecting children. When something like Covid happens, our first look is to the vulnerable, such as children and other vulnerable people. I would find it difficult to support a measure which thinks that Parliament will always provide security.

Do you remember the Second World War? For their own protection, pupils had to be taken out of areas where the bombs were dropping pretty fast, so let us learn the lessons. We may return to this proposal, but for the time being let us support what the Bill as drafted is doing.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 114 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, and my noble friend Lord Young’s Amendment 117. It is clearly a better solution to have a monetary limit than a number—that just seems obvious. As for gifted items, I could not agree more with my noble friend. Are we really saying that if I manage to secure for my multi-academy trust some free gifted strip from a football club, I have to say to those people, as a charity, “I’m sorry, I know I’m a charity, but the Government have passed a law which requires me to say no, I can’t take your benefit in kind. I’m sorry”? It is potty, because I am clearly going to have at least three other items apart from a tie. It is clearly daft, and I very much look forward to the noble Baroness’s explanation as to why they are so insistent on this point.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 117 in the name of my noble friend Lord Young of Acton, to which I have added my name. Although it may seem a small point, it matters. The draft guidance perfectly illustrates the consequences of poor policy-making: the cart was put before the horse and an announcement was made about reducing the number of branded items but without the clarity about the policy goal that should have informed the drafting of the legislation.

I will not repeat the examples given by others, but it is unfortunate that the draft guidance is so unequivocal. It is the kind of Kafkaesque rule that brings officialdom into ill repute, and it probably will not save parents a single penny. I add that if the policy goal is narrowly to save all parents money on school uniforms, this could be better achieved through Amendment 114, which would give schools more flexibility and avoid the problem that Amendment 117 is intended to address—although I believe that an automatic inflation adjustment should be incorporated to avoid the messiness of an annual review.

If this limit is enacted, will the Minister ensure that two particular impacts are fully evaluated. First, what is the social impact on children? In demonising branded clothing, the Government have lost sight of part of the value of uniforms. Uniforms are not only about badging and encouraging identification with an institution but about having all children wear clothing that is genuinely identical in quality and cut, not just broadly similar in appearance. We all know how sensitive the young are to status markers, such as having the right—usually expensive—trainers, even when the differences are all but invisible to the adult eye. Fewer school-branded items may mean more pressure on children to have the highest-status version of the unbranded items, which will inevitably bear hardest on the poorest children, so this should be evaluated.

The evaluation should also consider whether parents spend less money not only on school uniforms but on children’s clothing overall. If the change reduces spend on branded items but leads to poorer families being pressured into spending more rather than less overall on children’s clothes, it should be counted as a failure. I hope the Minister can reassure me on those points.

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[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister that the Government have moved on some of the concerns raised by me and others, particularly about some of the detail required on the register. However, I of course want to press her to move further. A lot of new and significant amendments have just arrived. I want to make two general points relating to those amendments and then comment on several of them.

I believe that the Government need to revisit their whole policy on home education. We are debating a significant set of amendments very late in the day which are creating a new regime, but I do not think the full implications have been thought through. Let me give one example which is relevant to this group and to other areas. As many noble Lords will know, most local authorities—I believe it is most rather than just many—hold annual meetings with or request annual reports from home-educating parents in their area. These are done regularly on the basis of case law, which says that local authorities are entitled to ask for an annual meeting or an annual report, which involves quite a lot of work.

I do not understand why these have been ignored and the additional requirements for meetings, information and monitoring are not built around them. There seems to be inconsistency in developing the policy. I would be grateful if the Minister would explain—either on this group or on one of the groups to do with information on activities on the register—why the Government have chosen to ignore this annual reporting system which exists in so many places. Presumably, it was an explicit decision to do so. Can I also ask her to confirm that parents will still have to comply with requests for annual reports or meetings? Or can they now just say, “Look at the register”?

Home education has changed enormously in the last few years and policy certainly needs to reflect this, but it needs to be based on a detailed examination of what is going on. Most importantly—we have not really spent time in Committee on this—we need to understand in some detail the causes of the big increase in the last few years, driven by parents who believe that schools are failing their children, many of whom have special needs and require special hope. These are big questions, and it is important that the Government take this beyond this Bill and look at the wider policy. After all, those parents are taking on emotionally and financially demanding responsibilities. Why do so few head teachers use their powers of flexibility to accommodate children in the way that their parents would want them to? Some of those issues are around mental health and other things that we have touched on, but they are also about how schools are governed and the increasing requirements placed on them.

Another question that needs to be considered is: how many parents are trying to home-educate for all the wrong reasons? What proportion do we think this is? I know from listening to education officers that it is quite small, but it demands attention. Let me be clear that I understand the concerns about safeguarding and educational standards. They are real, just as they are real in schools, and they need to be dealt with proportionately. In terms of safeguarding, Peers who like data may want to know that the only figures I can find are that home-educated children add up to about 1.4% of the population of schoolchildren and they account for 1.2% of serious case reviews. As noble Lords will know, those are reviews where children are seriously harmed or die. These figures suggest that home-educated children are no more at risk than children at school and conceivably less so. My point is that home education should be seen as a risk factor only for those with a record of abuse or where there is an existing concern, but not for the generality of parents, yet the approach we see in the Bill suggests that all home-educating parents are viewed with suspicion. That is certainly what they feel.

Looking ahead, once proportionate checks are done at the beginning of a relationship between parents and the authorities, I believe the approach should be one of partnership, as the Minister said. It is strange that it is not, given that in other policy areas government is considering more partnership with parents. In health, for example, it is now becoming accepted that parents know their child better than any professional can. As the Minister knows, I am working with a group of home-educating parents together with a home education officer and my noble friend Lord Hampton to look at alternative policy ideas for the future, and I am grateful to her for facilitating access for discussions with her officials about this.

Let me turn to specific amendments. Government Amendment 120 gives authorities the power to withhold permission to educate, or to decide whether they can educate, from parents of children who have been the subject of action under Section 47 in the last five years —i.e. things that have to do with safeguarding issues. To that extent, it seems proportionate and in line with what I have just said about risk factors. However, I have one significant concern. Many adopted children will end up being caught by this, because those children may have been the subject of such proceedings earlier in life before adoption. Noble Lords will know that adoption is a one-year or two-year, rigorous process. Do we really think that local authorities should second-guess parents who have been though that process about the best education for the child that they have just been entrusted with? Are they really a source of risk? I would be enormously grateful if the Minister would exempt them. My Amendment 120A makes that specific point.

However, Amendment 121A from the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seeks to change the five-year period into a lifetime requirement and include proceedings under Section 31, where children have been taken into care, and Section 17, where children have ever been in need. I believe this is disproportionate in its impact. It will draw many people into this group. Do we really want to treat disabled children differently simply because their parents have asked voluntarily for some help, or because they were in care before adoption? I know of cases where children were taken into care at the request of the wife during proceedings against an abusive husband.

Amendment 121B tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, is potentially extremely dangerous for that last group of parents, who are seeking to avoid abusive ex-partners, as it will reveal their location and possibly their address. I cannot make this point strongly enough. I know women who are in this situation. The amendment says that all parents should be consulted. The Minister will also know that where such partners discover the authority or address, they may well bring allegations against their ex-partner under Section 47, causing as much damage as possible. I note in this context that deregistering a child from a school requires only one signature, not the signature of all the parents involved. This seems inconsistent.

However, Amendment 123 by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seems eminently sensible in requiring that local authorities should spell out reasons for refusing permission to deregister children in special schools. My Amendments 122 and 124 would serve similar purposes. They are about holding authorities to account for their decisions. The wording of Amendment 122 relates to local authorities judging that staying at a school is in the child’s best interests. There needs to be some appropriate mechanism for confirming or challenging this, and I propose that it should be confirmed by a court. My Amendment 124 addresses cases where parents appeal against an authority’s decision; it asks that the Secretary of State or Welsh Ministers issue guidance on how they would judge an appeal. This seems to me a very straightforward ask. People will need to know how their appeal will be judged. I hope the Minister agrees. The more transparency here, the better.

I agree with the Minister that government Amendment 125, about meetings at the point of deregistration, seems generally sensible and worth taking forward as a pilot. I believe they should also be treated as exit interviews, asking why the relationship between the school and the child has broken down—if that is the case, because it may not—and making that information available to the education committee and Ofsted. Schools and authorities need to use that information to improve their services, and that is the purpose of my Amendment 125A, which I believe from my correspondence the Minister agrees with.

I turn to government Amendment 131 along with Amendment 131A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, about requesting meetings in the child’s home. This is the most controversial area, and I suspect other Peers have had more correspondence about this than anything else, raising a whole range of issues about access to people’s homes. I note that this is not mandatory, although there are implicit penalties for not complying. What relationship are they trying to establish? This is problematic legally, but I am not going to dwell on that; my earlier comments on Amendment 121 by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, apply here: do the parents of adopted children have to apply?

I have two further points. First, I am not clear what this inspection is about. What criteria will be used? The home as such is not a proxy for the standard of education. Surely we need to know the criteria that are involved. The only criterion that I can possibly think of is that the child has some quiet space at home or elsewhere to study, although that raises questions about Travellers.

Lastly, even more importantly, why should the child be subject to two meetings in 15 days? This is a real issue, involving the invasion of what is, for many of them, their safe space. This is very problematic for many children. We need only think of adopted children, many of whom are terrified by any officials and live in a constant fear of being rejected or taken away again. This amendment requires more debate and more answers. I certainly feel it is important that the child should be at one or other of the two meetings that are proposed in the first 15 days, but two meetings with officials in 15 days seems excessive.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 121A, relating to local authority consent for the withdrawal of certain children from school, and to Amendment 131A, empowering local authorities to make home visits to children who have ever been subject to a care order or on a child protection plan. Both amendments have been proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran and are supported by other noble Lords on other Benches.

Broadly, I have welcomed the provisions in the Bill strengthening protections for children not in school or removed from schools, and I am grateful to the Government for the amendments that they have tabled since Committee, but I do not believe that is enough. We need to recognise more clearly that, in some circumstances, the declared intention to home-educate can in itself be a signal that some risk or harm has resurfaced.

No safeguarding system can ever be entirely comprehensive and infallible, and indeed safeguarding work should always be proportionate, but schools are an important part of that system, especially for children at higher risk. Social work always involves a difficult balance. A care order is a drastic intervention. Maintaining a child protection plan is expensive and intrusive into family life. We do not keep children in care or on protection plans by default, and it is normal for the level of intervention to be adjusted in line with circumstances. So, while a child is of school age, schools provide an important continuing residual line of sight to the child and are responsible for alerting local authorities if they believe that a child’s circumstances have deteriorated.

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Finally, this amendment raises no issues of legal representation or ECHR compliance. Other professions operating under heightened regulatory duties already have bespoke procedural protections. Teachers do too, and this amendment simply reflects that reality. If the Government cannot accept the amendment today, I ask the Minister at least to commit to strengthening departmental guidance to signal professional accompaniment as good practice, and to ensure that the forthcoming Section 10 review explicitly considers teachers and school staff. Supporting school staff at their most vulnerable moments should not be controversial. Amendment 191A simply seeks to ensure access to appropriate support when it is most needed. I commend it.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 243D, which is unchanged from the amendment that I tabled in Committee. It is late and I shall be brief. We are in a world where we all have a much greater propensity to complain in great numbers and are doing so very frequently. AI is making it easy to complain at great length, with minimal effort, and service providers of all kinds are quite simply drowning in workload. Talk to any head teacher and you will hear this.

I propose streamlining the current messy patchwork of statutory provisions to create a single streamlined model in which complaints will be triaged and considered only by the most relevant body, with information available to others when necessary. I believe that this would improve schools’ capacity to respond to serious concerns.

The Minister’s response was that the issue was being considered by the Improving Education Together group of unions and other stakeholders, with which the Government are committed to co-developing policy design and implementation. Indeed, this consideration seems to have happened, because guidance was recently published, both for parents by DfE and for schools by Parentkind. The content is entirely sensible, but it does not address the major structural problem: that a minority of parents can and do spray complaints at every conceivably relevant entity, including Ofsted, DfE, the Teaching Regulation Agency, as well as school governors and MATs or local authorities. A proportion of parents do not desist, even when they get fair and reasonable responses, and these volumes are drowning out the serious complaints that absolutely need attention. And despite this guidance, there are still those different legal frameworks and best practice guidelines for maintained schools and academies, which continues to create confusion.

I think schools will have hoped for greater acknowledgement of the scale of the issue and the impact it is having both on staff well-being and more generally on school capacity to respond, especially in relation to AI-generated complaints. I think they will now be hoping that the schools White Paper will provide for root and branch review of the system, including a co-ordinated system to triage complaints, such as this amendment would provide for, and perhaps also some powers for school leaders to act where there is unreasonable behaviour that goes beyond what is contemplated in this amendment. With apologies to my noble friend Lord Jackson, I think that rationalising the current problems to release the capacity that needs to be there for serious complaints is perhaps more likely to help than adding an additional layer. I therefore hope that the noble Baroness will be able to reassure me that the Government intend to go beyond mere advice as to how all parties can use the current legal framework better.

Finally, Amendments 190 and 191A are also important in establishing some important principles of fairness for school staff as well as for parents, and Amendment 191 would close a small but significant loophole.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak very briefly to Amendment 191A, to which I would have added my name had I been slightly more organised. I have been a member of teaching unions in the past but I am not any longer. Many teachers are not members of a union. These are personal decisions, whether cost or philosophical. Trade unions play an important role in the workplace, but not being a member should not put you at a disadvantage when facing a formal allegation. It is all very well bringing a colleague along but, apart from the moral support, they might not be much help.

Doctors and dentists are permitted to be accompanied at disciplinary hearings by representatives from professional defence organisations under the NHS’s maintaining high professional standards framework. This has not undermined trade unions or weakened safeguarding: it has simply ensured that highly scrutinised professionals are not left unsupported at critical moments and has helped to ensure that due process has been followed. Teachers and school staff operate under comparable levels of public scrutiny and regulatory oversight. Amendment 191A is a modest, sensible step that reflects the reality and promotes fairness and consistency in how disciplinary processes are conducted. It does not even go so far as arrangements in medicine but is a step in the right direction and I strongly support it.

Amendment 243D, to which I did actually add my name, is very simple. I know from first-hand experience how complicated school complaints can be, with different complaints being sent to different organisations, often duplicated. They could be going to DfE, Ofsted, TRA, the school and the LEA. This is a very simple, overdue and badly needed amendment.

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[The Lord Bishop of Portsmouth]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 193A, 193B and 193C and declare my interest as chair of the National Society for Education. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, for her support of Amendments 193A and 193B. I will address these two first and together.

These two amendments are about good communication. They would require the chief inspector to include the relevant religious body along with the academy proprietor and the Secretary of State when a report is circulated at the conclusion of an inspection of a multi-academy trust that contains a school with a religious foundation. For example, in the case of the Church of England, the relevant body would be the Diocesan Board of Education.

Under the DBE Measure 2021, DBEs have a range of duties and powers, including advice-giving, data analysis and information gathering in relation to their schools and academies. Timely receipt of a multi-academy trust’s inspection report will enable the fulfilment of these duties and powers.

I seek the Minister’s assurance that these straightforward amendments, enabling good communication and the delivery of statutory duty, will find their way into the Bill.

Amendment 193C in my name would ensure that where multi-academy trusts contain schools with a religious designation, these are inspected on and held to account for their ethos, religious education and collective worship.

At present, over 42% of Church of England’s schools are academies, amounting to over 20% of all academies in England. When we include Roman Catholic academies and those with other religious foundations, the total percentage rises still further to approximately one-third of the entire academy estate.

All these academies will fall under the proposed new requirement for the inspection of multi-academy trusts. However, at present there is no provision for the specialist denominational inspection of those multi-academy trusts that have direct responsibility for the leadership and governance of academies with a religious foundation. This contrasts markedly with current arrangements, in which individual schools and academies with a religious foundation are inspected by the relevant religious body under Section 48 of the Education Act 2005 and by the contractual provisions of an academy’s funding agreement.

There is no provision within the Bill as drafted which would mirror Section 48 provision and deliver expert, individual, school-based evaluation and accountability for multi-academy trusts containing schools of a religious character and foundation. This is an omission or oversight with potential to affect adversely the quality of accountability and inspection for approximately a third of the academy estate.

Amendment 193C addresses this omission by seeking to mirror current Section 48 provision and good practice for multi-academy trusts containing schools with a religious foundation. Led by the inspectorates of religious bodies such as the Statutory Inspection of Anglican and Methodist Schools, inspections would combine, as they do most effectively today, the application of expert religious knowledge with inspection expertise to ensure that the accountability regime for the proprietors of academies includes all significant elements of the life, leadership and governance of schools in their purview. I thank the Minister for engaging with key partners in educational delivery within the National Society for Education and the Catholic Education Service ahead of this debate. I trust that the Government will continue to work with us to find a way forward and to address this omission.

To conclude, Amendments 193A and 193B are intended as friendly, simple, straightforward insertions to enhance lines of communication and to keep the relevant religious body informed when one of its schools is inspected. On Amendment 193C, however, I remain deeply concerned that, without the provision outlined in the amendment in my name, providers of schools of religious character will be left with wholly inadequate inspection arrangements. This is an entirely avoidable state of affairs which, if unaddressed, as I said in earlier comments, will affect approximately a third of the academy estate and represent a backward step from current inspection arrangements under Section 48 of the Education Act 2005. Can the Minister give assurances that she will bring forward proposals to address the omission I identify and work with the National Society for Education and the Catholic Education Service to bring forward proposals or pilots that address our concerns prior to Third Reading?

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, a substantial new chapter is being added to the Bill on Report by the Government’s Amendment 193, which provides for the inspection of multi-academy trusts. This has considerable significance for the regulation of all academies, and I must therefore make some wider points before I turn to Amendments 193D and 193E in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran, to which I have put my name. I must also declare my interest as a former Ofsted chief inspector who has advocated strongly for MAT inspection for many years.

Everyone is familiar with school inspection. For more than 30 years, this was unequivocally framed by government as a public accountability mechanism to defend the interests of children and parents. The very last strands of support activity were removed from Ofsted more than a decade ago so as to avoid any blurring. Published inspection judgments and reports with real consequences are a powerful regulatory force, precisely because they have real traction. This model has long been the subject of relentless hostility and efforts to undermine it by some within the sector.

But the law relating to school inspections has not kept pace with the evolution of sector structures over the past 20 years. The academy trust model, which now goes back 20 years, places legal responsibility for a school unequivocally with the trust board, not with a school-level governing body or an individual head teacher. Successive Governments chose to keep inspection to school level while evolving a separate regulatory approach for trusts. That separate approach broadly consists of private review within DfE of published and other data and periodic private discussion between each MAT and the DfE regulatory team, with escalation to Ministers where necessary. In the main, trust-level concerns are dealt with privately, except where the most serious failings justify terminating a funding agreement or acting against an individual. This mechanism is highly susceptible to producer capture of government —I know of more than a few examples—and it creates an imbalance; it feels unfair to many heads and those beneath them, as individual schools are publicly reported on.

There is also no clear dividing line between schools and trusts. Trusts may choose to centralise many activities, including the choice of curriculum, lesson planning, teacher training and professional development, assessment, pastoral approaches and behaviour policies as well as back-office functions. A centralised MAT with 60 schools will have around 15 inspections a year. In each of these, inspectors must ask questions about decisions, some of which are not taken at school level, to form a rounded view of the quality of education and safeguarding in the school. A judgment of school quality may have to encompass aspects that are not under the control of a head teacher, which of course feels unfair to those heads. The current model also makes it particularly hard for government to intervene when a MAT is slightly underperforming across the board but no one school is severely failing. All this makes clear that a refresh is sorely needed, and here I am only repeating what I have said publicly in the past. I genuinely welcome the Government’s decision to act.

Turning to the detail, Clause 193 in effect creates a skeleton containing the powers and obligations to put in a system of MAT inspection, but no policy proposals have been published to explain the set of purposes. MAT inspections may be purely to facilitate accountability to government and to justify inspections at MAT level. They may be intended to increase transparency for parents. They may be intended to function partly or entirely as a support mechanism for trusts. But we do not know. Nor do we know how they are intended to interact with school inspections, whose purposes have also become blurred. The Government no longer link defined consequences to overall inspection judgments, which I believe, and hear from many, has increased uncertainty and anxiety in the school sector.

The Government have also not clarified whether the policy purposes of school inspections have changed. I infer that true education quality is not the highest priority for the Government because they have accepted the current school inspection approach, which has startlingly removed all but a cursory scrutiny of education itself so as to make more time for specific government priorities such as attendance, belonging and now, of course, mobile phone policy enforcement. In so doing, government and Ofsted have intentionally, and in my view unwisely, made themselves blind to all the many ways that good education can be limited and compromised if school quality judgments are predicated too narrowly on outcomes. This watering down of school inspection makes it even more important that the MAT inspection model is well conceived, well defined, well understood and likely to be fully effective. It is also highly desirable for the judgments to be made independently of Ministers if they are to have the legitimacy that they need as a basis for government intervention.

That brings me to Amendments 193D and 193E. First, these amendments seek to ensure that the necessary work of consultation, piloting and reporting is done before the new sections are commenced and the full inspection regime begins. This period could be used to calibrate the range of judgments needed and the corresponding range of regulatory interventions, and to clarify the purposes. The thresholds also need to be tested against realistic system improvement capacity so that this can be allocated effectively.

Secondly, the amendments aim to create a coherent overall model that reflects the multi-level nature of MATs as well as the variety of organisational models that they deploy. One trust may operate in a highly integrated way, with all major decisions and the finances controlled centrally and local head teachers focused on effective implementation of the central model; another trust—including many of the faith trusts—may operate a highly devolved model, leaving most matters to heads and determining only aspects of faith-related provision and, perhaps, core administrative systems and processes. At the moment, there is only limited evidence on the relative effectiveness of different models, at least as far as I know. The trust inspection may generate some good evidence but, in the absence of stronger evidence, inspections should not force MATs into a particular operating model, as I know some fear.

Thirdly, the amendments ensure that inspection takes account of a MAT’s ability to manage schools efficiently, as well as their education quality and other direct child-facing aspects. This has the potential to simplify and to unify the regulatory arrangements for trusts. There are parallels with the model used in the Netherlands, which has structures similar to multi-academy trusts. There does need to be join-up in the regulatory system. It is hard for government to make and sustain decisions if it is getting conflicting messages from different strands of monitoring. I hesitate to say it, but overall judgments have their place.

Finally, I would value the Minister’s assurance that she will make it explicit that the conception of quality against which inspection is carried out should be grounded in a strong evidential foundation, in trusts as in schools, and that the regulatory framework should be revised whenever the accumulation of evidence points towards a change.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Wednesday 14th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to the amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran. We have heard from a number of Members of the House about the changes that this part of the Bill is making. A fundamental rebalancing of responsibilities in social care is being carried through in the pilots. It is putting much more on to the shoulders of less-qualified staff. The reforms are intended to streamline the system and manage rising costs but, as my noble friend has pointed out, there are many concerns from experts such as Professor Eileen Munro and from many practitioners about the implications of inexperienced staff finding themselves doing child protection work, which, paradoxically, could lead to more Section 47 investigations, not fewer, which was one of the aims of the reforms.

Taking one step back, the hypothesis behind the reforms was the idea that the social care system had become weighted too much towards individual children in isolation rather than children in the family context, and that more of the support available should be diverted to families rather than given to individual children. However, little account was taken of the profile of the children most likely to be in the care of a local authority. They include children with severe disabilities and special needs, often children who are most likely unavoidably to live in social care as adults. They are children whose parents simply do not have the capacity to manage at home, even with extensive support. Indeed, the strain of trying to manage a child’s needs has sometimes fractured parental and other family relationships. More family support and more kinship care is often simply not a solution.

Then we have to acknowledge that there are some children who simply do not have a decent parent nor any other decent adult in their family and realistically never will have. It is horrible, but true, that there are children who simply do not have a family member able and willing to give them the care, attention and love that they need. We have somehow to recognise and face this.

A substantial minority of looked-after children are unaccompanied migrant children, typically boys in their late teens. These children are not here because they have a dysfunctional family network that needs support and intervention by our social workers. They need help, but other kinds of help. There are, of course, risks to these children, and there are also risks to others from some of them.

Together, these kinds of children account for a substantial proportion of the social care caseload, yet the reforms that are being pushed through do not acknowledge their particular needs. For all these reasons, considering all these kinds of children, Amendment 17 in particular, which would defer carrying through the full reforms until the full findings from the pilots and pathfinders are published, discussed and understood, and any necessary changes reflected, is important. It would be unsafe to proceed.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education and Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, creating new multi-agency child protection teams through Clause 3 is not, as the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, suggested, about saving money; it is about bringing together social workers, police, health and education colleagues with experience in child protection to take swift and effective action that protects children from harm at the earliest opportunity. I hope that I will be able to respond to the points raised in this short debate, as we did at length in Committee and have continued to do since then through engagement, which noble Lords have acknowledged, including, in my case, directly with directors of children’s services.

Government Amendments 12 and 14 broaden the range of police staff who can work in these teams to include police officers and other police staff experienced in child protection. The need for this amendment arose as we talked more closely with the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing to make sure that we were providing the scope for the correct representatives from policing to be on these teams. We are confident that this will improve front-line operational capacity through the right people with the right skills working in the team. Regulations will be clear that individuals must have appropriate levels of experience, seniority, qualification and expertise. I will come back a little later in my remarks to how we will ensure that those appropriate levels are delivered.

Noble Lords have heard me speak before in Committee—in fact, at some length—about the Families First Partnership programme, where we are investing £2.4 billion over the next three years to change the way that we help, support and protect children. One element of that—introducing new multi-agency child protection teams—brings a sharp focus to better multi-agency working, information sharing and decision-making. I therefore welcome the opportunity to address amendments relating to these new teams, to clarify what we are learning through the national rollout and how this will inform the future legislative framework on day-to-day operations.

I turn first to Amendment 6 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, on the important matter of child protection for very young children in legal proceedings. Of course, as the noble Baroness identified, these are children who are widely represented in the system and for whom we need special care. However, Amendment 6 would require specific senior sign-off for the decision to end a child protection plan when proceedings have been initiated or care or supervision orders are issued for children under five. As I have outlined before, these plans should end only through a child protection conference, when multi-agency practitioners are confident that a child is no longer suffering or likely to suffer significant harm, and not automatically when proceedings are initiated.

I know the noble Baroness is concerned that children in these circumstances may fall between teams or services deciding whether staying at home will keep them safe from harm. I want to reassure her, and other noble Lords, that I am confident that reforming the system of family help, with new multi-agency child protection teams wrapped around, is about exactly this: making sure the whole system holds the safety and well-being of children as the number one priority.

I will now speak to Amendments 11, 13, 15 and 16, also tabled in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. These amendments focus on the operation and delivery of the new multi-agency child protection teams. Amendment 13 seeks to ensure that the new teams would operate within the existing statutory framework, Working Together to Safeguard Children 2023, and that these teams have sufficient access to health safeguarding expertise, specifically in relation to the NHS intercollegiate document, Safeguarding Children and Young People in Care: Competencies for Health Care Staff.

I reassure noble Lords that these teams, as part of the safeguarding partners, will absolutely be required, under the existing duties in Sections 16E, 16G and 16K, to comply with the expectations set out in the working together statutory guidance and local arrangements. We are working closely with health, police and local authority national leaders to ensure that practitioners in the teams have the skills, expertise and knowledge they need, or need access to, to deliver effective child protection interventions.

On the specific point about the police, I want to be clear that the intention of broadening the category, as we have done in the government amendments, would not suggest that a volunteer special constable would be suitable for one of these roles, but we could envisage police staff who would be appropriately qualified. In fact, as I have said, regulations will set out the requirements for the skills and qualifications, including police representatives.

The College of Policing’s professionalising public protection programme is developing resources to make sure that the police workforce has enough of the right professionals, with the right competences, qualifications and experience, to work in multi-agency child protection teams. There are good examples of police forces providing expert staff for child protection work: Thames Valley Police deploys experienced senior police representatives to its local multi-agency safeguarding hubs, including detective sergeant equivalents. They are decision-makers and offer expertise to support their police representatives at all levels. Thames Valley will take this approach to staffing multi-agency child protection teams as well.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I too support the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, on her amendment. In the Church of England, we had trouble with giving and passing information—having ways of doing certain things. What most people have been looking for is practical outworking of these policies. As the noble Baroness said, people could give information, but more is needed than just that: they need to be empathetic and to step into the child’s shoes in order to say what needs to happen practically for that child. The passing of information is important, but there are other consequences. If the children being safeguarded feel that the system has still not caught up in its internal ways of working, we are going to fail those children yet again.

The Government are on to a good thing, but can they, through this amendment, recognise what needs to happen? At the end of the day, a lot of children, particularly those in care, need far greater attention and more resources. It will be helpful if the Minister, when she responds, explains the practical outworking of this. What are the expectations and how will we know that they have been delivered?

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak only very briefly. I express my most sincere thanks to the Minister for Amendment 21, concerning an information standard. It directly reflects an amendment that I proposed in Committee, which, in turn, drew on the work of Professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein in his capacity as adviser to the social care review steering group. I am delighted to see that provision and glad that the Government are taking the opportunity to introduce that power.

I express my support for the amendments proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, above all else that concerning the explicit use of the NHS number. Information sharing is hard. In the thematic and joint inspections we carried out at Ofsted—the joint targeted area inspections and the area SEND inspections—time and again information sharing came up as a theme. Whether we like it or not, data protection legislation has not made it easier to do that, so everything the Government can do to make it as straightforward and uncomplicated as possible in the situations where it is needed is deeply welcome. Therefore, I support the amendments, and Amendment 23 in particular.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I will speak to the amendments in reverse order. We very much support having a single unique identifier. Unless the pilot of using the NHS number causes some unforeseen problems—we hope that that would not happen—we believe that it makes absolute sense to use the NHS number to link health and education. It is also important for children’s safeguarding: we need to know where they are, what is happening to them and when they change schools. It rightly brings added responsibility to schools, headteachers and governors.

We also believe that Amendment 19 is important. When there is a multi-agency approach, it is important that information and understanding are shared between different teams when cases are passed between them. This amendment rightly highlights the problem and comes up with a way forward.