Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Spielman and Lord Storey

Thursday 18th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 502YM. I will echo some of the comments made by my noble friend Lord Jackson in relation to his amendment. I believe that my amendment complements the comprehensive final-stage procedure he outlined neatly.

Anyone who works in education knows how problematic dealing with complaints is becoming. Of course it is right that public bodies should have a complaints procedure, as is required by law. Of course dissatisfied parents should be able to complain to or about a school, and schools failing in their responsibilities should rectify their errors and omissions promptly. But the current system is complex and, in the main, giving satisfaction to no one.

I remind noble Lords that complaining to government is, typically, a fourth-line action after a series of stages. The first stage is attempting to resolve the issue with the staff member most directly involved, such as a classroom teacher; the second is escalating the issue or making a complaint to the head teacher or another school leader; the third is making a complaint to school governors; and the fourth is escalating a complaint to the local authority or the academy trust.

Yet the number of complaints to government has grown enormously in recent years, although there is not much evidence of a corresponding deterioration in the service offered by schools to children and parents. It seems likely that it is at least partly down to a higher propensity to be dissatisfied in a more fractious world. Furthermore, the use of AI enables parents to generate extremely lengthy complaints, which are time consuming to read, investigate and respond to. Safeguarding will often be invoked to ensure that a complaint is prioritised.

The various provisions in law relating to the consideration of complaints by national education bodies generally require that local routes have been exhausted. The expectation was that escalation to national bodies was a last resort for when serious concerns are ignored or mishandled by those more directly responsible. But, sadly, we see today an increasing willingness to escalate even relatively minor issues if the school’s response is anything other than doing exactly what the parent wants. When more serious concerns arise, such as those pointed out by my noble friend Lord Jackson, the sheer volume can mean that those more serious concerns are drowned out by the volume of very minor complaints.

Furthermore, the patchwork of law and regulation often means that any complaint must be considered in all the places to which it is sent. Each of the government organisations has a different purpose and will apply a different filter to determine whether it needs to act, but all of them must take the time to read and understand what are often long and complex documents, and often must check with the school to establish the facts. This is a huge burden on schools as well as being a wasteful model for government to operate, and it does not appear to be making parents any more satisfied. We need to reset the system and return to the expectation that the vast majority of complaints are considered and closed at local level.

My amendment therefore proposes that a single government complaints system is established, which can triage and direct complaints to the most appropriate body or reply to the complainant to say that there is no further action to be taken. There would need to be discussion about where this should be located. If it was desirable for such decisions to be made by those with substantial school experience, it might be located in Ofsted; otherwise, it might be a DfE team. Either way, the complaints and action taken should be recorded in a single database, accessible to all bodies with regulatory functions, including inspection, so as to minimise duplication, with all the burdens that that imposes.

Such a system should reduce the wear and tear on parents themselves—pursuing complaints is very damaging to parents in their relationships with schools—as well as the wear and tear on schools from protracted and inconclusive complaints processes. In short, this is a pragmatic amendment that would benefit almost everyone.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I understand where these amendments are coming from. Personally, I have not formed a complete view about this. I understand what the noble Baroness is saying and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply, because there is an issue here and this is about how we handle that issue.

Education has become a successful business for the lawyers, to be quite honest. Dare I say, you only have to look at special educational needs, which lawyers and solicitors have made a lot of money out of. I declare an interest as my daughter is a solicitor. One also sees solicitors involved in school admission procedures. In some cases, that is a natural route to take, and I wonder about complaints—never mind the bureaucracy involved—if lawyers get involved in that side as well.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Spielman and Lord Storey

Tuesday 16th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I will pick up that last point, which was very incisively made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. My primary school was a two-form entry primary school. It was a popular school, and we wanted to increase the size to three forms of entry. The local authority initially said, “No, because if you do that, you’ll take children from the two other primary schools in the locality, which will weaken those schools”. At the time, I was a bit miffed about this, but I thought, “Okay”. The local authority said, “What we need to do is to build up the numbers and the esteem of those two other primary schools”, which it did very successfully. Then, guess what: it agreed that my school could become a three-form entry school.

It is not just about size; it also about schools working together. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, quite rightly paid tribute to the role that the noble Lords, Lord Agnew and Lord Nash, played as Ministers in establishing multi-academy trusts. One area which has never worked, to my mind, is that you can have the headquarters of the multi-academy trust at the other end of the country. It has never worked for me that a multi-academy trust can have schools in Devon and Cornwall but also in the north-east. Where is that community feel about them?

The trouble with expanding schools is that you can get to a situation in which schools just want to grow and grow, because they get more money. They can get too large for the existing children and families. I think of the school that my wife worked at, a seven-form entry comprehensive which was allowed to increase its size to 11. It became completely unmanageable. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, rightly said, by taking children from one school, in many cases you are almost putting a close notice on that school. The way to deal with it is not by moving children or allowing schools to grow but by providing the resources and expertise and making that school popular, putting in real expertise to change its character and educational purpose.

I put my name to the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, and I have also put an amendment down myself. Let us first understand the definition of a managed move. It is a permanent move of a child from one school to another for reasons not related to family relocation. It is important to put that into context and to remind ourselves that currently 1.49 million children are persistently absent from school and 171,000 children are severely absent from school.

The Who is Losing Learning? report of 2025 uncovered a deeply concerning trend; that

“for every child that is permanently excluded, 10 more invisibly move”

between schools or are off rolled entirely. These moves are unregulated and unmonitored, meaning that too often even the Department for Education does not know where or even if those children are being educated following a managed move.

Managed moves, when done correctly, can have great success for both the pupil and the school. That is why these two amendments, which are very similar, are so important. We need a fair access protocol to make sure that, when we carry out those managed moves between schools, we know how it is happening. I like the notion that the local authority should perhaps report on this—not creating more bureaucracy but just giving confidence to the system. I hope the Minister when she replies will tell us how important it is to get this right.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Barran’s amendments to Clause 56 and my noble friend Lord Agnew’s Amendment 454. I have heard much around the Committee this afternoon that is extremely important, but I think there are some wider points to make.

There are many romantic expectations of school admissions—that there is a perfect world in which every child will go to the school that they and their parents choose, in which every mainstream school can provide well for every child no matter how extreme their needs, and in which no child will ever cause harm to any other child or adult in a school. In this perfect world, the romantics expect children to be distributed perfectly evenly between schools on any measure by which we choose to analyse the population. But this is a dream, and chasing dreams rarely improves children’s experiences in the real world. Sadly, it is entirely possible that the extended powers to direct admissions will backfire, especially with policy pressure on local authorities to keep even the worst behaved children in mainstream schools irrespective of the consequences.

Consider a child for whom an LA is trying to find a managed move. If several schools decline to accept the child, it may mean that they are all shirking their responsibilities, or it may mean that they have correctly assessed that the child’s needs are too great for that school or any mainstream school to manage the child safely. One shocking case I saw as chief inspector related to a girl who was raped by a boy who had come to her school on a managed move and, worse, the receiving school had not been informed by either the LA or the sending school of the boy’s known history of serious sexual misconduct. No school should be levered into putting other children at risk in this way.

If the LA directs the child to one of its own schools, it still has direct responsibility for the child, but if it can direct the child to an academy, it has offloaded the problem, at least in part. There is an obvious incentive for local authorities to use this power to offload the most difficult children and leave academies to shoulder a disproportionate responsibility for the most difficult and even dangerous children, and to inflict the greatest risk on the other children and staff in those academies.

Let us also consider the point that, while a decision will relate to a single child, good schools also have to consider how many children with behavioural problems they can manage and support properly without destroying the very strengths that make them able to work effectively with such children. I have seen already how difficult this is for local authorities in the context of SEND. Local authorities control EHCPs, which name a school to which that child should be admitted. In theory, it is parents who choose that school, but in practice, local authorities have significant influence over those parent choices, and some local authorities have perhaps on occasion found it convenient to encourage parents to choose academies rather than maintained schools, or at the very least to not discourage them from doing so.

As a result, some popular and successful academies have at times found themselves facing real difficulties. I know of cases where local authorities expected a school to fill more than one-third of its year 7 places with children requiring intensive individual support, many of them for behavioural problems. This would have turned those schools into de facto special schools without the wider infrastructure and support that we expect of special schools.

It is in fact extraordinarily difficult for local authorities to be impartial between mainstream schools and academies. For this reason, I strongly support my noble friend’s Amendment 452ZA, requiring local authorities to act impartially between maintained schools and academies. It will still be difficult in practice, but the principle should be explicit in the Act.

Similarly, my noble friend’s Amendment 453A to Clause 56 and Amendments 457A and 457B seek to ensure that changes to school admission numbers are made in the interests of children and parents, rather than the administrative convenience of the local authority. Again, these decisions will always be hard and will never please everyone, but it is right and important that children’s needs are explicitly put first: otherwise, it is sadly all too certain that, with the shrinking birth cohort, some excellent schools will see their admissions restricted while mediocre schools carry on. My noble friend Lord Agnew’s Amendment 454 gives some protection to this principle. I hope the Government will see how unfortunate this would be and will take steps to guard against it.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Spielman and Lord Storey

Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I want to express some concerns about Amendment 183CD. Its intentions are clearly excellent, but there are nevertheless some real concerns to take note of here.

Diagnoses of special educational needs are made by educational psychologists and experienced clinicians. To ensure there is consistency in diagnosis and treatment, it is important that that continues to be the case. By contrast, “neurodivergence” is a term with no clinical definition or standard. In a world where stigma about mental health conditions has been reduced, or in some cases even reversed, it is, as we all know, increasingly common for teenagers and adults alike to assert their neurodivergence. Sometimes, that leads, in essence, to a claim, by or on behalf of the individual, that they should be able to self-identify into additional services or special treatment.

In the case of the criminal justice system, the hazards of that are obvious, and, if children, parents or their lawyers see an opportunity, they will have a strong incentive to take it, irrespective of whether they have a true diagnosis that warrants that treatment. So, although it is of course sensible for police to obtain information about a child’s diagnosed health or educational conditions that are relevant to their detention and treatment, and so to make proper inquiries, that is one thing, but to set up a parallel diagnostic system leaning on a concept that does not have a clinical definition is another, and is clearly wasteful and risky. Those concerns should affect any consideration that is given to this amendment.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I do not think that the amendment says that it should not be qualified practitioners who carry out the assessments. We already know, in general terms, that 85% of young offenders have special needs. It is important for their future journey that the type of special need is identified by a qualified practitioner.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Baroness Spielman and Lord Storey

Tuesday 17th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I realise that, quite often, we are very privileged in this House that, when there is a Bill, we get showered with briefings from all sorts of organisations. Of course, we read them, and then we say, “Oh my goodness, I did not understand this. I did not know about that”. Then, when we come to debate in the Chamber, we get real expertise, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Meston, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, who bring that added understanding and information. In fact, I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, who mentioned Learn with the Lords, and when I do a Learn with the Lords session, and they ask, “Why are you in the Lords?”, I say it is because we have got real people who are experts in the field, and when you listen to them, you say, “Wow”. That is not just in this debate.

When I looked at the briefing from the Nuffield Foundation, I was just absolutely shocked. It was not something in my understanding or that I particularly knew about. I do not want to repeat the figures—the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester said we should not repeat things—but when you read the briefing, perhaps they do need to be repeated because they are quite shocking. The number of children being deprived of their liberty through the High Court is rising and rising—102 in 2017, and in 2024 it had gone up by 1,100%. These were meant to be last-resort measures, but there were 10 times as many applications to deprive children of their liberty to the High Court as there were applications for secure accommodation orders between July 2022 and March 2023. We have talked a lot about the voice of the child. It has sort of been a mantra of this part of the Bill, and yet only 10% of children were present at hearings considering their case. So where was the voice of the child? The other figure which quite alarmed me was that 89% of parents or carers were not represented at hearings.

Of course, these children are not only the most vulnerable children but also, in most cases, very difficult children to manage and to support. You need highly trained and professional people to be able to do that. Sadly, those numbers of people are not always available. The final part of this briefing, I noticed, said that costs are escalating—not that costs are everything—but outcomes are not improving. You would think if costs were going up, the outcomes would be improving.

Finally, I want to deal with one point that was made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, because it quite surprised me. She talked about children in handcuffs. The reason I was surprised about that was that I remember that, during the coalition period, one of our MPs sent a letter around saying, “If we have achieved anything, it is to stop the use of handcuffs on children”. I was quite shocked to hear that, and I went to ask my noble friend Lady Tyler if I had got this wrong and she said she thought I was right. I do not know where this is happening, and we need to find out. I really look forward to the Minister’s response on this.

I added my name to Amendment 132, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, on expanding the legal duties of the independent review officer.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to speak to Amendments 119 to 124 very briefly. We have touched on some very important points, and there is something that still needs to be crystallised. As others have said, these are some of the most troubled children in the system. They are also the ones whose care is probably the most expensive of all. Such specialised arrangements have to be made. We have touched on the tensions here between local authorities, the health service and the justice system. One of the reasons for the increase in the number of orders is the reduction in the number of justice secure beds and also tier 4 mental health beds. We have this terrible lacuna around children whom the health system deems to have, for example, untreatable personality disorders but who very clearly need to be looked after somewhere where both they and others can be kept safe and to have everything that we can do to improve their lives and to help make life work for them on a permanent basis in a healthy, humane way. This is an enormous challenge. I would very much like to hear the Minister explain how the health functions of government are also going to be tied into making the deprivation of liberty scheme work.