Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Hampton and Baroness Burt of Solihull

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Burt of Solihull (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 201 in my name, which deals with the issue of faith-based selection in school admissions. This speaks to the missing data that the Schools Minister raised in Committee in the other place. The Department for Education currently does not collect data on how admissions policies are applied in schools and therefore does not know how many parents are missing out on a place at their preferred school because of their religion or because they do not have a religion. Collecting data would shed light on what the impact of faith-selective admissions is for parents and pupils, and on whether such selection is contributing to or undermining parental choice. This is not an argument against faith schools; many provide an excellent education and are deeply rooted in their communities. Rather, the purpose of Amendment 201 is to promote fairness and genuine parental choice by limiting the extent to which oversubscription criteria can be used to select pupils on the basis of religion.

In Committee, the Government pointed to the existing admissions framework, by which admissions must be published and applied consistently. But the question is not simply whether rules exist on paper but what those rules do in practice when a school is oversubscribed. If admissions turn on faith tests that some families cannot meet, because they are either of a different faith or of no faith, then, in reality, the local school is not equally accessible to the local community.

There is also the wider issue of inclusion and cohesion. Selection by faith risks narrowing pupil diversity and, over time, separating children along religious and, sometimes, ethnic lines during their formative years. Evidence suggests that faith-based selection can correlate with lower inclusion. The Sutton Trust has found that faith schools are more socially selective, admitting fewer pupils eligible for free school meals than would be expected given their local status. Research highlighted by the London School of Economics has reported the underadmission of children with special educational needs and disabilities to faith primary schools. The Office of the Schools Adjudicator has reported concerns from local authorities that faith-based criteria can in some cases disadvantage looked-after and previously looked-after children.

The aim here is straightforward: to ensure that publicly funded schools serve their whole community and that parental choice is not narrowed by criteria unrelated to a child’s needs or a family’s proximity to the school. Amendment 201 is a measured step that would support fairness in admissions and help ensure that our children are brought together rather than separated. Amendment 201 promotes fairness and parental choice in schools’ admissions policy, and I commend it to the House.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 199, to which I have added my name. In this, I am channelling my inner Baroness Wolf of Dulwich—the noble Baroness sends her apologies that she cannot be in her place. This amendment attempts to rectify another example in the Bill in which a well-intentioned idea is turning out to be a mistake. It is a bit of an example of top-down government seemingly punishing a school for being successful. Whereas education is all about nurturing and helping improvement in those who are less successful, this is a cold logic to reduce empty places and surplus capacity.

In an ideal world, the number of children wanting to go to various local schools would fit neatly into the number of places in local schools, but it does not. That is, in part, because parents are now much more aware of the league tables, Ofsted inspections, academy specialisations and all sorts of online opinions. It also reduces the most important incentive for a school to succeed and improve—one that has been at the heart of Labour’s and successive Governments’ academies programme, which has itself been at the heart of 20 years of school improvement, and which threatens to be reversed by this.

If good and oversubscribed schools can expand, and unpopular schools are not filled up with unwilling attendees, all schools would have a strong incentive to be good. When school choice and academisation were introduced, there were predictions that we would end up with lots of sink schools and a significant number of children having an even worse education than before recruitment was freed up. This did not happen. There has been a steady decrease in the number of badly performing schools. Competition works, not by creating a monopoly but by incentivising and driving improvement.