Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Layard Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Layard (Lab)]

My Lords, children’s well-being is referenced in the title of this Bill, and so it should be. Obviously, children’s well-being matters, but it is also the best predictor of how happy the child will be in their subsequent life, predicting it far better than the qualifications which they obtain. However, the only outcome of education which we measure is those qualifications—and, of course, what you measure becomes what you treasure. Exam results have become the only touchstone of a school’s success, which is a catastrophe. There is only one way to change this, and that is to measure well-being as well, to put something else into the balance.

That is what happens in many countries. It happens in the Netherlands and in South Australia, and in England it now happens in Manchester, as has been mentioned, and in Hampshire. The system is quite simple, and I think it is what we need. The Government design the questionnaire and hold it on a central platform. If a school wants to participate, it arranges once a year for the students in the school to complete the questionnaire, which takes about 20 minutes. The results are analysed centrally, and the findings are sent back from the centre to the school. From this, the school gets vital information about how well it is doing on progressing the well-being of its students. It is left up to the school how it uses its information. Participation in the survey is voluntary for both the school and the individual, and the individual responses are totally confidential to the individual.

This is a change which could transform what happens in our schools. It would give them the incentive to do more for the well-being of their children, and the justification, which most of them want, for paying more attention to it. There is no conflict between doing more for well-being and improving academic performance. All the evidence shows that extra time devoted to life skills improves not only well-being but academic performance—or certainly does it no harm. Our children are subject now to all kinds of new pressures, and their mental health has demonstrably suffered, so we have to do something about well-being. That is the reason why a cross-party group of us will be moving an amendment to state that the Government should introduce a measurement system of the type that I have been describing. It might be said, and it is true, that it is already possible for a school or schools to measure well-being—it happens in Manchester, However, it is a huge effort to make it happen, and if we want this to become the norm, we have to make it as easy as possible. That is what we owe our children, and that is what the system that I have described would do.

Finally, I turn to our greatest educational failure, which is how we treat people after school who do not go to university. One-third of our young people get no education or training beyond the age of 17. It is really shocking. The number of apprenticeships for young people has more than halved in the past 10 years. To rectify this, the Government need to take on for these young people the same obligation that they take on for young people wanting to go to university; namely, ensuring that there are enough places for qualified applicants. In 2009, the apprenticeship Act put that obligation on the statute book. It was repealed by the coalition Government, and I believe it should be reinstated in this Bill.