Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Spielman and Lord Nash

Tuesday 17th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

I shall speak to several amendments—to Amendment 170, on a capacity plan, and to Amendment 134B, on planning. I declare my interest as a former Ofsted chief inspector, where I spoke repeatedly over seven years about the issues with sufficiency in many parts of the country, and the urgency of taking action to enable homes to open in the places where they were needed.

I support what my noble friend Lady Evans just said, and I will not cover the same points about planning. I will say that the most acute need is partly in the most expensive areas, for obvious reasons, and partly for the children with the highest needs, for whom it is most difficult to configure, recruit, train and get a home open where we need it, when the children are there. We need planning for high needs. I stress that capacity planning should pay particular attention to the very high-needs children, whose care accounts for a startlingly large proportion of the total spend on care, and whose needs, in the main, are predictable, if not from birth then from very early in life. There is a high level of certainty of that being needed all the way through their childhood, and many of them will, sadly, also be in care homes in their adult lives. We need that focus and urgency to do everything that can be done, and to think intelligently, sufficiently far in advance, to enable homes to open so that, at the point and age at which children need them, they can move to somewhere within a reasonable distance of home.

I reassure the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler- Sloss, that the existence of children in unregistered accommodation is a serious concern to Ofsted. We spent a significant amount of our resources on putting pressure on those accepting placements of children to register as children’s homes, as they should.

I will speak briefly on a couple of other points. I support the boarding proposal for those for whom such schools are genuinely the right place; it is a way to create stability and a strong partnership with foster parents to make something more stable and enduring—in certain cases. The principle that it should at least be considered is important. I also support Amendment 165. As others, including my noble friend Lady Sanderson have said, that seems so obvious that one cannot imagine that it is not happening everywhere already.

[Lord Nash (Con)]

I support Amendment 119, in the name of my noble friend Lord Agnew, about the availability of boarding places. I do so as a former south London boy who was, rather unexpectedly, because of family circumstances, sent away to a boarding school—with, I believe, considerable financial help. Pretty much every child in care I have ever spoken to, when I have asked them, as I tend to do when I meet them, what the biggest issue facing them is, replies that it is the lack of a constant adult in their lives—the revolving door of people responsible for them. This leaves issues of lack of trust, which can stay with such children all their lives.

In a boarding school, a child has a constant adult—often a housemaster or mistress. I accept that it might not be appropriate for all children, but I agree that children should be offered it. It can be a very inexpensive way in which to look after these children, although obviously that is only a secondary consideration. I have seen the benefit of this in many cases of young people who have experienced boarding, thanks to the Royal National Children’s SpringBoard Foundation.

I support the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and others about unregistered settings and about children being sent away many miles from their home.