Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Spielman and Lord Lucas

Tuesday 16th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, no one stands to speak here or anywhere else about SEND without preparing for a social media barrage from one direction or another. But unless we can discuss the underlying problems and tensions openly and honestly, there can be little hope of getting to a better place than we are in at the moment.

From the parents’ point of view, some are happy, but others say that theoretical entitlements do not translate into the support they believe their child needs. From the schools’ perspective, they are loaded with enormous expectations and have inadequate resources to meet them. From the funders’ perspective, eye-watering amounts of money are already being spent on SEND.

If you do the sums, the average household in England already contributes £450 a year just for the cost of the high needs funding block, on top of the other money it contributes for education. Yet local authorities, and behind them the taxpayer, must meet almost unlimited demand from this large but finite resource, with few levers to direct that resource to the activities where it will make the most difference.

As my noble friend Lord Gove said in a previous group, the SEND category has expanded and diversified to an extraordinary degree in recent years. Among other things, I think we are mixing up the children who have conditions that will always affect their lives with those who really only need some catch-up teaching or some extra encouragement, and who should be able to lead unimpaired adult lives. They are really quite different things.

Clearly, this situation cannot go on, and that explains the raft of amendments relating to SEND proposed for insertion after Clause 62, as the Bill does not contain any direct proposals for SEND. In aggregate, what I take from these proposed amendments is a hope that if only we can find a few more ways to extend and push harder, everything will be better.

There are certainly ideas that deserve attention within these amendments. We do need a national body for SEND, but what we need is the SEND equivalent of NICE: a body that collates and, where necessary, commissions evidence of the effectiveness of and value for money of SEND interventions, and that determines which treatments can be paid for out of the public purse and which cannot be justified. Someone needs to set and hold that line.

We need better join-up between schools and youth justice services. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, has an alternative educational plan for children involved with youth justice that parallels my noble friend Lord Nash’s amendment discussed in a previous group. We have already pushed identification and labelling to the point where they may be doing more harm than good to some children at the margins. Even though a label may feel reassuring, it can also do real harm if it lowers the child’s own expectations of what they can achieve, or their teacher’s expectations of them.

Neurodivergence is a term that has no clinical definition. In essence, it invites people who do not meet clinical criteria and thresholds to self-identify into services and funding streams intended for those who do meet those criteria. The definitions that float around for neurodivergence often sound like most young people’s adolescent experience. I suspect there are few of us who did not feel awkward, socially inept, and often just out of things in that period of life.

Good schools understand the adolescent experience and work to make a culture and framework in which teenagers have the structure and encouragement they need for most to succeed and emerge into adulthood without ever needing to be labelled as abnormal, and reserving specialist support for those who really need it.

The Government must take great care not to create incentives to segregate children within schools into SEND and non-SEND categories. With very few exceptions, children with rare physical needs need to learn the same things, and cognitive science shows us that they learn in the same way, though some may need the learning broken down into smaller steps with more repetition and reinforcement along the way. Most children with SEND will do the vast majority of their learning in their mainstream classrooms. Concentrating on getting that core classroom experience right for all children, with a strong, coherent, well-sequenced curriculum taught effectively, must come first, because doing this well minimises the number of children who come adrift, which is never a pleasant experience for the child, and it enables the expert SEND practitioners to concentrate on those who will always need their help. If, for example, we expect SEND funding to be spent on things that are specific to children with SEND, those mainstream classrooms will be neglected and starved of resource.

I look forward to the Government bringing forward their reform proposals for SEND and to proposing amendments in this vein in due course.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much support Amendment 502W from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. We need a much better standard and a much better quantity of data in this area. We need to start with some clear understanding and definitions of the terms we are using. There seems to have been a lot of drift and expansion in definitions, and we need to get back to something that is clear, commonly defined and commonly understood.

Then we really need to understand what works for these children. We need to track what we are doing and when and why it works. This is a really complex area, so we will not get the answer out of small studies and small amounts of data. We need to track every child who has been fingered as SEND, and then we will get enough data to start seeing some patterns. Perhaps we can add other categories, such as young carers and those who are in care, where there are known difficulties with their education that are not associated with SEND but which may well share some common characteristics. If we get better at data, we will really start to understand how to do better by the children and work the cost down at the same time, and that is important.

I am with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, in the spirit of some of the other things that he is doing but I hope that, if this amendment ever came to be enacted, there would be alongside it a recognition of the interests of the other children in class.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Spielman and Lord Lucas

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

I want to come in on this group to inject a note of pragmatism into the discussion. First, I observe that the current freedom does not seem to have created significant problems in practice. To ask that classic question, “What is the problem that the clause in the Bill is trying to solve?”

Secondly, it is absolutely right that there are excellent programmes—the noble Lord, Lord Knight, described them—to encourage people to move from instructor and teaching assistant roles into qualified teacher status. Those are excellent—they should exist and people should be encouraged, of course—but the pragmatic point is to think about all the people who might choose to be teachers but choose instead, for example, to go off and be tutors, lavishing their skills and expertise in a very small subject on children whose parents can afford to pay. They are then lost to the state system because they simply will not go down that path.

For that reason, I support the amendments put forward by my noble friends Lady Barran and Lord Agnew—as well as the pragmatic amendment proposed at the start of this group by the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf of Dulwich—as a way of making sure that the potential impact of this clause is not the opposite of what I am sure the Government intend. It is absolutely right to want both to upskill teachers and to make sure that as much teaching as possible happens with qualified teachers, but it would be desperately sad if many subjects and a lot of the potential school experience for millions of children were diluted for that purity of principle.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I quite agree with my noble friend. The current system does not create a lot of problems because most schools are teams. If you really need a particular skill, so you bring in someone who has that skill but lacks the other skills that one needs to teach well, the community rallies round and makes sure both that everyone works together and that the experience for the children is good. What I would like to see is not a system that says, “Go away, we don’t want you unless you have QTS first”, but one that welcomes people in and says, “Let’s bring you on”—the sort of thing that the noble Lord, Lord Knight, was describing. Such an attitude to bringing in the skills that we need seems to me to be the right one.

There are lots of people out there who could contribute their skills if it were made possible for them to do that in a way that works for them. As my noble friend said, there are a lot of young people who tutor and do it really well and who, therefore, develop an interest in the idea that they might be teachers although they want to get there in a way that suits them. There are lots of older people in their fifties and sixties who are coming to the end of their career and know that they are not going to go anywhere else. They may be consultants in IT and just do not want to sit down and write another computer system. They would love to get involved with young people and help to bring them on. You have to make it easy for them and find a way in for them. Creating something as inflexible as this Bill does seems destructive.