Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Agnew of Oulton Excerpts

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

34: Clause 3, page 4, line 14, at end insert—
“(7A) The local authority must provide the resources to enable continuous professional development training to be provided to all teachers and teaching assistants with responsibilities for supporting vulnerable children that interact with multi agency child protection teams.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to ensure that schools have the resources to meet their statutory commitments.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, this is really a probing amendment. I am the first to admit that this is not an area in which I have deep expertise, but my questioning comes from the angle of the impact on schools and is on how much time and cost would be involved.

I understand that Clause 3(4) amends Section 16J of the Children Act 2004 to require safeguarding partners—local authorities, police and health—to ensure that multi-agency child protection teams are adequately staffed. This includes representation from education. Schools themselves are not made statutory partners, but safeguarding partners must secure the participation and representation of education and childcare agencies at both operational and strategic levels in local safeguarding arrangements.

I also understand that the legislation does not impose new direct financial obligations on individual schools. The duty to ensure that teams are sufficiently staffed falls on the safeguarding partners, not the schools themselves. However, I presume that schools will incur some indirect costs related to staff time for participating in safeguarding arrangements, meetings and training. How will this change from the current arrangements? What additional obligations are likely to occur?

I listened carefully to the Minister’s point on the new money for implementation—£270 million. I respect the fact that she cannot give any clarity on long-term funding until the spending review in a few weeks’ time, so I do not have an issue with that. However, if we take that money—£270 million—and assume that even half goes to schools, when of course it will be a fraction of that, it is only £6,000 a school. I will come on to this in a minute.

I understand that the Government are planning to provide guidance to support implementation and that safeguarding partners are expected to tailor arrangements to local needs, which may help manage additional burdens on schools. When will that information be available? This is important because of the need for schools to budget. Unforeseen burdens are particularly likely in schools in areas of high deprivation, which are seeing the backwash of so much suffering of vulnerable children. The point, of which I hope the Minister will be mindful, is that we have only 1,265 hours a year of directed time for our teaching cohort, so every hour doing something other than teaching is salami-slicing away our ability to provide good education. Something has to give.

The other area I am puzzled by—this, again, is my ignorance—is these pilots that have been running. I have been trying to find some feedback on these pilots but have not been able to find anything. The Commons Select Committee raised this issue of a lack of clarity, so can any be provided? My noble friend Lady Barran said that some of these pilots had received extra money to juice them up and get more participation, which is great, but will that be rolled out more widely?

I am very worried about this because, as noble Lords know, we are facing something of a financial bloodbath in the school sector. If we have to start hiring supply teachers to enable ordinary teachers to be released to go to safeguarding meetings, these costs will hit us. Can the Minister give us a timeline on the implications for schools and assure us that schools will have sufficient time between the publishing of the guidance and the setting of their budgets? For example, we really need to set our budgets in April to go live in September, because that tends to be when teacher recruitment goes on, as people resign and are appointed. I hope the Minister will understand where I am coming from. I acknowledge that I have a lot less knowledge of this sector, but I am worried about the backwash into the school sector. I beg to move.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to support my noble friend Lord Agnew of Oulton’s amendment. The example that he gave of teachers and teaching assistants, as cited in his Amendment 34, could obviously be replicated for many other agencies, with a valuable contribution to make to multi-agency child protection teams and wider safeguarding activities, including local drug and alcohol services, mental health services, domestic abuse services, housing associations and more. The key point here is that practitioners need to feel confident about how to engage in the process and how any information they share will be used, confident that it will not put anyone at risk and, as my noble friend so ably put it, confident that they have the time in their working day to be able to participate responsibly. From my own experience, I know we make assumptions at our peril about how confident even statutory agencies are in some of these areas, so any programme that promotes safe and effective partnership work is to be commended.

My Amendment 38 seeks to understand what capacity the Government think will be needed on the ground and what guidance they plan to give for this. The Bill says in Clause 3, page 3, lines 16 to 21:

“Arrangements … must include the establishment of one or more multi-agency child protection teams … for the purpose of providing support to the local authority in connection with the discharge of its duties under section 47 of the Children Act 1989”.


In Clause 3, page 3, lines 27 to 31, it says:

“A multi-agency child protection team is to consist of … at least one of each of the persons mentioned in subsection (4), and … such other persons as the local authority considers appropriate after consulting the other safeguarding partners”.


My cracked-record question is this: what does this mean in real life?

I am sure that the answer to this is no, but, as written, it could mean that Birmingham has one team and Rutland has one team. I am sure the Minister will reassure me that that is not the plan. Even smaller local authorities, particularly rural local authorities, have multiple child protection teams already, so adding one more will not be that useful to them if they have multiple existing teams that need that multi-agency engagement.

When I led the charity SafeLives and we did the rollout of multi-agency risk assessment conferences around the country, we gave estimates to every area based on evidence of realistic case loads, resource requirements and so forth—and we had rather less influence than the Government do. My challenge to the Minister is: if a small charity can do that, surely the Government can do something similar or work with the ADCS or the LGA to develop appropriate clarity and guidance. I would be very grateful if the Minister could explain the Government’s plans.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I am glad that the noble Lord reinforced my point—I think I am in big trouble with my son for having outed him in this debate. I am glad to hear that other excellent teachers have experienced this training. The noble Lord makes a very fair point. I will certainly go back to my colleagues in the department and say that, in reality, if we want people to be trained and updated on Keeping Children Safe in Education guidance, and if we expect that to happen at an inset day at the start of a school year, it would be a good idea if the guidance was there in time for them to be able to do that. That is a fair request.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

I thank the Minister for her answers. I reassure her that I was not trying to suggest that this is a whole new scale of undertaking for teachers. My noble friend Lady Barran was right: I was trying to understand the scale of it, because this is a big and complex Bill. The Minister was helpful in saying that her son, who is dealing with this on the front line, feels that one inset day will be sufficient for the kind of familiarisation that will be needed. I am not trying to put words in her mouth. I am trying to say that, in my experience, a Bill of this complexity will need quite a lot of CPD for our teaching cohort—that is where I am coming from.

We have a specific amount of time available, because of the 1,265 rule, which, again, we will work to. Every hour that is taken away from what teachers are doing at the moment is one that has to be filled. I take absolutely at face value what the Minister has said, and I am encouraged that she has in her immediate life someone who can give her front-line experience. I genuinely mean that, because that is where I am coming from. I tabled this amendment because head teachers in my academy trust had asked me to clarify the situation. It was put forward with the best of intentions.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Agnew of Oulton Excerpts

Tuesday 20th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

I support this amendment, and I hope to illustrate to the Government that this proposed purpose clause will help them and will be of benefit to the debate in reaching an effective and clear Bill. Like the noble Lord, Lord Meston, I do not have a Second Reading speech; I am focusing only on this amendment.

The noble Baroness on the Government Back Bench, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, for whom I have the greatest respect, and other noble Lords seemed to be saying, “We don’t need no education Bill purpose clause”. I suggest that many Bills, including this one, would benefit from a purpose clause. It provides clarity, as the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, said, and the ability to check each clause against it to ensure that they would indeed meet the purpose of the Bill. It also provides needed clarity to the debate.

The principle can be seen in any organisation that is trying to think through a change in direction and how to implement it. It starts with the strategy, which is the purpose. Having decided the strategy, it moves on to the tactics—the other clauses are the tactics that fulfil the purpose. Otherwise, you are not quite sure why a whole range of clauses are there. You cannot fit them into the overall plan; there is no strategy, there are only tactics, with the ability for people to cram all sorts of things into a Bill that do not actually meet whatever that strategy was.

The purpose clause, as written, is not controversial. If a further clause in the Bill does not meet purposes (a), (b), (c) and (d), then it can be more swiftly disposed of or amended so as to meet whatever the Bill’s purpose is—which is of course for the Government to decide and accept. However, a purpose clause goes beyond that. Such a clause on the front of the Bill will, for that regrettably small part of the electorate who will read this Bill, provide clarity as to what on earth those hundreds of pages are up to. As we all know, any Bill is quite difficult to read. As the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, just pointed out, the Bill becomes much clearer with a purpose clause. For those tasked with the unfortunate duty of implementing the Bill, to know what they are trying to accomplish will reduce the horrors of compliance.

The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, spoke about outcomes and having active verbs in the purpose clause. Active verbs lead to outcomes, and my noble friend Lord Balfe pleaded for outcomes, not process, to be the Bill’s purpose. In this House, we very often seem to focus on process—how something is going to be done—rather than outcomes: what on earth we are trying to achieve.

I meant to say when I was addressing the good remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, that he should be comforted by the fact that around half the amendments that he complained were taking up so much time in the football Bill came from his side of the House. Therefore, as to his reprehending the length of time—which I also had to sit wearily through—when one points a finger forward, there are three fingers pointing backwards.

My noble friend Lord Balfe, in pleading for outcomes, put his finger on what is wrong with a Bill without a purpose clause. Whatever outcomes the Government wish to achieve, let us know what they are, let us be able to test the Bill against those proposed outcomes, and let us have this purpose clause, as my noble friend Lady Barran has advocated.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I speak in support of the purpose clause, in particular, subsection (1)(a) and (c), improving

“the safety and wellbeing of children”,

and improving

“standards”,

to

“remove barriers to opportunity”.

I also refer to my interests in the register.

As the Minister will have gathered from some 188 pages of amendments, there are serious concerns with the Bill. I am sure she will dismiss many of these as distractions, but I want to assure her that having spent nearly 15 years trying to improve the education of young people, mostly from areas of deprivation, and therefore the opportunities for them, that is not my purpose.

I first give credit to the Government for tackling the issue of kinship care. The educational outcomes for children in care are shockingly bad. If there is any cohort of children in our society that has been dealt a cruel hand, it is those children. Kinship care is often an obvious and decent solution; however, many of these children have been traumatised by several years in severely dysfunctional families, and the task facing the new carer is formidable.

That is why I have always been such a strong advocate for offering boarding school places for those children. Not only does this provide a safe and stable environment but it has shown a dramatic improvement in their outcomes when the data has been analysed. In December 2017, when I was the Minister responsible for this, we launched the boarding school partnerships service. The aim was to link local authorities with the relevant children’s charities and boarding schools themselves.

I will not repeat the data cited by the noble Lord, Lord Nash, on the Royal National Children’s SpringBoard’s Care-Experienced and Vulnerable Children programme, or indeed the comments from the Nottingham University report. However, there is one statistic that he did not mention. Not only are the outcomes for children in boarding care compared to those for a similar cohort extraordinarily higher but the costs are of a magnitude lower. In the sample that the noble Lord, Lord Nash, talked about, the cost for the cohort going into boarding schools was £3.6 million versus £8 million when they were retained in foster or residential care. The additional and perhaps even more important advantage is that it takes pressure off the kinship carers, as the intensity of their role is reduced. Common sense would suggest that this route would make it a much less daunting task. Indeed, how many times in politics do we get a chance to use an innovative measure that is both much cheaper and far more effective than the opportunities being pursued at the moment?

The national curriculum seems to be a wholly unnecessary imposition on a sector that has spent more than 10 years developing curricula that work for their schools and the communities that they serve. It is extremely important to clarify to everyone in this Chamber that every school in England has an obligation to deliver a broad and balanced curriculum; it is not a free-for-all. This is a fundamental tenet of any Ofsted inspection in all phases of education.

Having experienced at first-hand almost dozens of inspections over the years, I know that, in every instance, Ofsted requires to see the materials used and asks teachers to give them feedback on the effectiveness of them from a teaching point of view. In the case of the academy trust that I founded, we have painstakingly built an all-through curriculum for all phases. It has been colossally expensive and time-consuming, but it is working. Children arriving from feeder primary schools into our secondaries make demonstrably faster progress, as they are on a familiar path. In our maths curriculum, we have developed a 70-block building stack which goes from year 2 up to A-level.

Here is a summary of what an Ofsted report said about the curriculum in a recent inspection of one of our schools:

“The school’s curriculum is ambitious. The knowledge pupils need to know to succeed in the future is set out clearly and in a logical order. As pupils, including those with special educational needs … progress through the curriculum they use what they have already learned to understand new information”.


However, it also pointed out weaknesses. That is why, although the school got an overall “Good” with an “Outstanding” for personal development, it did not get an “Outstanding” judgment across the board, and we have addressed those perfectly fair criticisms.

Last year, that school had one of the biggest improvements in its Progress 8 score in the country. When we took it over, it was in such a mess that a campus capable of educating over 1,800 children was down to educating 400, such was its abandonment by the local community. As I speak today, the confidence has returned to the extent that a whole new school building is under construction, and I thank the Minister and her department for that.

My point is: why tear that up? A far more sensible approach would be to require any school failing an Ofsted inspection on its curriculum to then be required to follow the curriculum imposed by the DfE—deal with the 20% at the bottom of the system and do not drag the good ones down pointlessly.

I turn to admissions with the local authorities. I completely accept that there needs to be proper joined-up thinking between local authorities and schools, which should of course include academies. However, it must be for the right reasons and not for the administrative convenience of the local authorities. By that, I mean forcing outstanding schools to reduce their pupil admission numbers just so a failing local authority school does not have to bite the bullet in addressing its own failures.

That happened recently in one of my trust schools in Norwich. Norwich is a zombie zone for primary education. Some 19 of its 24 primary schools last year failed to achieve the national standards at key stage 2. We run two of the five that did. One of them is an outstanding school, but we were asked to halve the pupil admission numbers. The only way a school can do that is by merging year groups with a commensurate drop in standards, as teachers try to teach across an excessively wide age range. We were able to decline that request, but under this new legislation it will be a different story. That was one more act of self-immolation in the battle to raise standards.

Turning to qualified teachers, I believe that this terminology is a complete misnomer. Apparently, someone with a subject-specific degree in, say, maths or science is less qualified than someone with a degree in a different subject than the one they are teaching—but that is fine, because they completed a nine-month course which it is almost impossible to fail. In 2023, only 8% of applicants failed to gain qualified teacher status, and mostly because they dropped out. How can that make any sense? We keep hearing from the Minister how she trusts “great headteachers” and “brilliant schools”; if that is the case, why can she not trust them to hire the people they consider will have the best chances of success for their children?

That is before we get into the reality on the ground, which is that it is becoming increasingly harder to recruit teachers. The rates of exodus from the profession seems to be accelerating, particularly among younger teachers. The Government have even admitted that, in the past few weeks, their much-vaunted additional 6,500 teachers, paid for from the tax on private schools, is proving virtually impossible to achieve. This is just another example of what sounds like a convenient political slogan bearing no relation to what is going on in the real world.

I will end on this point. We continually hear from the Government about all the wonderful things they will do, but their words are in complete contrast to what they are actually doing. It is the cruellest of ironies, which I simply cannot reconcile in my own mind, because the people who will suffer are the children in the poorest communities, where it is extraordinarily difficult to hire good teachers. I thought that a Labour Government sought to represent these communities, but I see nothing in this cheap political manoeuvre that will in any way help those disadvantaged children.

I understand that Ministers are surprised by the level and range of pushback on the Bill, but they should not be. It was rammed through the Commons over Christmas—without a Green Paper or a White Paper and without any consultation—in a Chamber with literally hundreds of new and inexperienced MPs who were not equipped to give it proper scrutiny. That scrutiny now falls to us. The Government should not play fast and loose with the futures of millions of children, who get but one chance for their education. I urge Ministers to show some humility over the next few weeks in the passage of the Bill and adopt, as government amendments, many of the practical and useful suggestions that have been tabled. If we are to be ignored, rest assured that the avalanche of amendments will continue, as I, for one, will not go down without a fight.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Agnew of Oulton Excerpts

Tuesday 20th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, on these Benches we very much believe that there should be an independent and suitably trained person; that is really important to us. We also appreciate that if this amendment were agreed—I do not know the timescale of training people up—there might have to be some transitional arrangements. It slightly jars with me that the party adjacent to me does not necessarily believe that teachers should be fully qualified—you can have unqualified teachers—but on this issue it wants a suitably trained person. In any situation where young people are involved, it is important that the person who is training or teaching is qualified and has the right skills.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I support this amendment. Clearly, the family decision-making groups are extremely important, and we are discovering them rather late in the day. I could have said this on any of the other amendments involving family groups, but this one particularly caught my eye because of the emphasis on an evidence-based approach. The Scottish Government have had this for nearly 10 years, which gives us a tremendous opportunity to learn from the successes and failures they have experienced over that time. How much contact has the Minister had with her Scottish colleagues to learn from the best and the worst, and what has she taken from that to put into this Bill?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The fifth group we are debating comprises only one amendment, but we have had some useful contributions. However, quite a few of the arguments that I would make in response to this group were those that I made earlier in response to the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lady Armstrong on the need for evidence-based practice and on the use of proven approaches such as that of family group conferencing. I will repeat some of the points I made and respond to some of the particular issues that have arisen.

On the last point raised by the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, I do not know the extent to which we have reviewed the experience in Scotland, but as we discussed earlier, we have looked extremely carefully at the research carried out by Foundations that we talked about earlier and the recommendations and approach that it brought forward.

I agree with the intention behind this amendment that we should ensure that family group decision-making follows an evidence-based approach and is co-ordinated by trained facilitators. That is very important, and I liked the intervention from the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on this point about qualifications, and in this particular context he has identified a little discrepancy in the position of some noble Lords opposite.

The noble Earl, Lord Effingham, refers to the LGA saying that it thought that we should make it clear in guidance what that evidenced-based approach is. I wholly agree with him and the LGA, and that is why we will use statutory guidance to set out clear principles of practice, building on the evidence from successful models, such as the family group conference approach, to ensure that all families are offered quality family group decision-making. That includes people being trained to do it.

On the point about independent co-ordination, I made the point earlier that while I think that in the vast majority of cases it is right that there is independent facilitation, there might be circumstances where the family want the process to be run by a social worker who is somebody they have a very strong ongoing relationship with.

On the point about private family time, it is obviously an important potential part of the process that the family have the opportunity together, with appropriate preparation, to consider what would be appropriate for them, but here as well there could be circumstances—the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, referred to the issue of domestic abuse, for example—in which it would not be appropriate to leave only the family to lead that decision-making if there were fears that there was a dynamic within the family that perhaps made it important for there to be somebody else as part of that process. I think people could envisage a situation in which that happened.

This is not to say—I think this charge was made earlier —that the Government take a laissez-faire approach to the way in which family group decision-making is developed. We do not want to see a thousand flowers bloom, as was suggested by my noble friend Lady Armstrong earlier on; we want to see the right evidenced-based flowers blooming. In order to make sure that is the case, we will be very clear in the statutory guidance about the approach that needs to be taken when organising family group decision-making. I hope I was clear about that earlier on.

There is also a need to ensure that suitable people and resources are there, and that is why the Government have committed to an uplift of £13 million for the children’s social care prevention grant for 2025-26, which will be used to support the rollout of family group decision-making across the country for all families on the edge of care, including for recruiting or training extra staff to facilitate that process. On the basis of those assurances, I hope the noble Earl will feel able to withdraw the amendment.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Agnew of Oulton Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I refer to my interests in the register, in particular as the founder and chairman of an academy trust with 11,000 children and 18 schools.

In the short time I have available, I will focus on one specific area in the schools Bill. In Part 1, I broadly agree with the move to improve scrutiny of home education—it has become a very worrying issue. Many parents, clearly unable to educate their children, are taking them out of school and we cannot do anything about it. The Government are to be commended on their action, and we will no doubt get into the details as the Bill progresses.

However, if unaltered, the schools part of the Bill will plunge the English education system back into the badlands of 20 years ago, before the previous Labour Government had the courage to begin the reforms that we had built on. I will focus on one area: the watering down of academisation of failing schools. The proposals introduce ambiguity on whether a failing school should be academised. This will present a “get of jail” card for the incompetent management of those schools. Organisations rot from the head down: schools do not fail because of the teachers but because of the people who manage them. Having taken on at least nine failing schools in the last 12 years, I can say, very simply, that the academy trust I founded employs hundreds of teachers who today do a magnificent job under good leadership. Previously, those schools were failing children on an industrial scale.

In defence of this retreat, the line trotted out by the Government is the marvellous new concept of RISE teams: 65 people brandishing clipboards who will run around the country offering advice. If only the Government would listen to those who have tried this before, they would save time, money and, most importantly, not repeat something that has failed comprehensively in the past.

Under my stewardship in the DfE, we had a national leaders of education programme—does that not sound wonderful? RISE teams are just a reheated version. NLEs did not work because there is no line of accountability for the failing school to act on the advice they are given. More often than not, implementing the advice will require strong leadership, such as changing staff structures or bringing budgets into balance.

Do not just take my word for it. In 1998, the last Labour Government did something similar: the beacon schools initiative. The names get ever better, do they not? In that case, the laudable aim was to get high-performing schools to share best practice to raise standards. It was abandoned in August 2005 because there was a lack of clear evidence that the initiative improved weaker schools. My question to the Minister is: what has changed 20 years on? Certainly, human nature has not changed. If weak managers can avoid a reckoning through procrastination without penalty, that is what they will do. It is the Damoclean sword of consequences that will drive change in failing schools.

It is important to say that I do not tolerate failing academies either. Many will know; they had interviews without coffee with me when I was the Minister. The current Government have not addressed this. They have not even seen fit to appoint an Academies Minister, despite them now educating over 80% of secondary children and 40% of primary children.

Addressing failure does not need legislation but just a spotlight on such failures and strong calls for accountability. In my home county of Norfolk, at least two academy trusts have just received financial bailouts from the DfE which should have come with a requirement for mergers or a clear-out of that failing management. That has not happened. This is where the Government’s energy should be directed.

I fear that, as we go through this Bill, a theme we will come across often is that the Government are in essence condemning children to a failed education. It seems they are not prepared to allow the hard edge of intervention to sweep out mediocrity and failure. Those children get only one chance, and we are about to imperil that chance for tens of thousands suffering in badly run schools.

As we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Harris, the Government are simply introducing a two-year delay. Of course, most of those failing schools are in areas of deprivation, so the communities that the Government claim on their Benches to represent will be the ones thrown under the bus, under a senseless ideology. Unless the Government start to listen, I expect this Bill to face a stormy passage as we pit ideology against the interests of children.