Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Spielman and Lord Knight of Weymouth

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, first, I express my support for what the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, has put forward in his amendment. In many respects, the amendment that I am about to speak to and the twin amendment proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran are an elaboration and development of the principle.

We have a long-established regulatory model focused at school level and a much more recently established regime for academies and academy trusts. As the noble Lord said, there was a separate regime for local authority school improvement work, which was abolished some years ago—perhaps a good idea, perhaps not. The noble Lord said that the underlying model evolved in the 1980s and was one of high autonomy for schools, balanced by strong accountability. It is interesting that few in English education even recognise that this comparatively high level of autonomy continues today, relative to other countries.

There has been constant pushback on accountability for decades, whatever form it takes, and there have been important changes in recent years. A powerful model of autonomous school group operation has emerged with academy trusts. In these groups, some decisions and activities can sit at the centre or in schools, depending on the model adopted. There is a wide range of models, from the very highly integrated through to the highly devolved. Much good has flowed from this model—as well as, inevitably, problems from time to time—but regulation and oversight have not quite caught up. Let us remember that, for an academy, the legal entity is the academy trust, so it is the trust that carries the legal responsibility and is properly held accountable at group level, not just at school level.

On the other hand, inspection has been constrained by government policy to school level. Bizarrely, school leaders are increasingly being held accountable for decisions and actions that actually sit elsewhere in a MAT. It is unsurprising that some school leaders feel that they are bearing a disproportionate share of the accountability burden relative to their bosses.

Of course, the DfE has been extending and elaborating its oversight model for trusts, but this remains heavily reliant on self-reported and outcome data, and perhaps lacks some of the insight that comes from expert scrutiny of MATs’ central operations and professional dialogue with MAT leaders.

It is widely acknowledged that there has to be more scrutiny of MATs. Outcome measures alone do not give enough assurance that MATs are using their freedoms well to provide education with real substance and integrity and the support that enables all children to grow into resilient and competent adults.

My Amendment 436ZZB and the immediately preceding amendment from my noble friend Lady Barran are intended to draw together a somewhat disparate set of provisions to help create a coherent regime for the regulation of academy trusts. This regime would set out clear purposes and priorities for the regulation of academy trusts, although the interests of children, and parents on behalf of children, should still come first. It would recognise the varying structures of trusts and the divisions of responsibilities within them and be flexible enough to respond appropriately. It would draw on expert insights and judgments in arriving at rigorous and well-evidenced decisions and keep the various bodies involved in education regulation in alignment. DfE, Ofsted, the admissions adjudicator and others each have their own sphere, but there is further to go in thinking systemically about how to make sure that those levers fit together in the most effective and efficient way.

Finally, it is very important that there is the right level of transparency on this work—something to which the amendment from my noble friend Lady Barran draws our attention. Confidence in the system depends on making sure that people can see what is being done and understand the basis for it. Those transparency provisions are, therefore, also really important, and I hope they will be taken on board.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 435 in the name of my noble friends, led by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. In doing so, I remind the House of my interests, in particular as chair of the E-ACT multi-academy trust.

I have thought for some time that it is important that we bring forward the inspection of MATs. I was therefore delighted to see it as an election commitment from the Labour Party when it went into the last election, and I have been looking forward to the Government implementing it. It is right that the Bill is being used as an opportunity to introduce powers to do that. It would then be up to the department and the Government to do the necessary work with Ofsted to get ready for that, so that Ofsted has the expertise within its inspectorate on how MATs work—something that it currently does not consistently have. We therefore should not rush at this, and I have some nervousness about some of the other amendments that are arguing for a six-month implementation timeline. We should leave the timeline to the Government until they are confident that the expertise exists to do it.

I am also interested in whether we should define the proprietors of academies and local authorities as responsible bodies for schools, so that we can have a single inspection framework for both local authorities and academies in respect of their inspection and get more consistency across both forms of governance.

If we are inspecting those responsible bodies—MATs in this case—it is also interesting to look at whether there is an opportunity for rationalisation around inspection. Good, well-governed, well-run MATs have good school improvement capacity and good capacity to support the schools that are in their trusts financially, in procurement and in all the various aspects of running good schools. After Ofsted has carried out an effective inspection of the MAT, it then ought to be possible to use a risk-based approach to decide whether it needs to inspect all the schools in that trust. That rationalisation could then release capacity for more consistency within Ofsted. One of the main complaints about Ofsted in the school system is the consistency of the outcomes of inspections. I do not blame Ofsted; it has operated within considerable budgetary constraints and has had to take its fair share of resource cuts over the period, and that has an impact on the consistency of inspections. Anything we can do to increase capacity should be welcomed.

This goes to the importance of governance. When the noble Lord, Lord Gove—who is not in his place—was the Secretary of State and oversaw the rapid expansion of academies, to which my noble friend Lord Blunkett alluded, I do not think he properly appreciated that one of the core elements of the success of the academies that I oversaw when I was the Academies Minister under the previous Labour Government was around governance. It was from having individuals such as the noble Lords, Lord Nash and Lord Agnew, put their names to a multi-academy trust and their reputations on the line to ensure that the governance was strong. In those reforms from the noble Lord, Lord Gove, we had this rapid expansion without a serious focus on whether or not the governance was improving alongside it.

So I also encourage the Government, as part of thinking about this, to review the governance of multi-academy trusts to ensure that we have good consistency as we expand the number of MATs and seek to improve their improvement capacity. As part of that, I ask them to look at the appointment and term of office of the members of academies. The five members of E-ACT are wonderful people, and I thank them for their service, but they are self-appointed and appointed for as long as they want to do the job. It is a slightly odd arrangement in that they are the people I am accountable to as the chair of the trust, while their accountability—and to whom—is questionable.

I would be interested in a solution whereby the local authorities within which the MAT operates appoint the members, and then the trust board would be accountable through that route to the local authorities. In that way, the local authorities would not be operating schools through the trust, but the governance would be accountable to local authorities. That would bring better consistency and better accountability into the system. On that basis, I support my noble friend Lord Blunkett and his amendment.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Spielman and Lord Knight of Weymouth

Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, in the amendments they have proposed. I also agree very much with the comments made by others, such as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, who made some important points, especially about the risk of overloading schools. My noble friend Lady Shephard made some very important points about safeguarding. When, as chief inspector, I reported on sexual harassment and abuse in schools, it was notable how much of that we found to be linked to smartphone use.

I would like to clear up a bit of confusion, because I think we are not properly distinguishing between personal and school-controlled devices. I think the noble Lord, Lord Addington, was heading in this direction a moment ago in his remarks. Every school has many school-controlled devices—computers and sometimes tablets—and it is much easier to maintain the framework of safeguards around devices that are owned and controlled by schools than it is around personal devices.

These devices are suitable for teaching media literacy and many other things or in teaching children how to use technology. They can also very effectively provide technology. The dividing line here is between devices schools are able to control fairly fully and devices that essentially remain children’s property and in the children’s control, and where there will never be the level of supervision needed to make them safe—at least not in the foreseeable future.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I am interested in what the noble Baroness said—that the laptop and tablet learning devices that schools have would be sufficient for teaching media literacy. Does she suggest, therefore, that they should install social media apps on those devices, and teachers would have to create profiles and personas that would start to mimic children so the algorithms would then think of them as children and start to feed them the sort of stuff the noble Lord, Lord Russell, was talking about? Is that really what she is saying? Would it not be easier for the purposes of media literacy for the personal devices that children are looking at, with the personalised feeds those children are seeing, to be used in order to educate them?

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

It is perfectly possible for children to log in on different devices. They can log into a social media account and the school can use broader control facilities to ensure that all information is wiped, or all personal details are wiped, at the end of a session. That contains the range of what children are doing in any given session.

To give another analogy, we do not teach children about the risks and harms of drugs with drugs and the paraphernalia for using them in their hands or on their desks. More generally, I am afraid that the history of teaching children about risks and sensible and safe behaviour do not have that much to show that they can be successful.

One of the saddest reports that we published during my time at Ofsted was on child obesity. It showed, sadly, that the schools that were doing the most to promote and encourage healthy eating did not have measurably different obesity rates from the schools that were doing the least. So I think there is reason to fear that simply an educational approach, as has also been advocated here, might not be all that effective.

Finally, I will explain why, although I agree with so much of what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, I have come to the opposite conclusion. It is important that we think about how to reinforce the authority of head teachers and teachers in this difficult space. With legislation, they would not have to argue the toss with parents to sustain a school policy that will always be disliked by some parents. What we have seen and heard, including expressed so eloquently in this Chamber today, shows that mobile phone use by the young is likely to be at least as harmful to them as smoking, and we have no difficulty with having a ban on smoking in schools. I believe that a ban will reduce arguments and give time back to schools—to heads and teachers—as well as helping children. So I hope that this amendment will be included in the final Bill.