King’s Speech

Lord Marks of Hale Excerpts

Tuesday 19th May 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marks of Hale (Con)]

My Lords, I first congratulate the four noble Lords on their maiden speeches, which were so inspiring.

I welcome the importance with which the Government rightly take the well-being of children. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, passed in the Session that has just ended, delivered the statutory backing for mobile phone-free schools that begins at the end of June and the consultation on social media that closes on 26 May. I thank my noble friend Lord Nash and others for their tireless efforts. These are not small things. They reflect a country waking up to the harms that have been done to a generation of children by an industry that profits from their attention.

In the limited time that I have, I will turn to faith schools. They exist because parents in this country have, for centuries, claimed the right to raise their children within a moral and spiritual inheritance. Faith schools are not a footnote in the British education system but a foundational part of it. Long before the state took an interest in educating poor children, the churches, the synagogues and later the mosques were doing the work. Today, faith schools—Anglian, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh and Hindu—consistently outperform the national average. They are popular with parents of every background, and with parents of no faith at all. Yet they live under a permanent suspicion in parts of Whitehall, as if private conviction was a public danger.

I will focus on the Haredi community, because its case is the hardest and the hard cases test the principles. It is with a sense of irony that Haredi children already live in a world that we are trying to legislate into being. They do not own smartphones. They do not scroll. They are not groomed in the small hours by strangers in foreign jurisdictions. They are not driven into eating disorders by algorithms. They do not need a Bill, because they have a tradition.

The Haredim are not trying to be different for difference’s sake. To them, the precise content of what is taught—the topics permitted and the topics deferred, the relationship between religious and secular learning—are not preferences but obligations. They cannot, in conscience, accept a curriculum that requires them to teach what their faith forbids. They are not asking the state to fund their dissent. They are asking the state not to extinguish it.

When they ask that certain topics, including aspects of sex education, be taught in ways consistent with their faith, they are not asking to opt out of being British. They are not being difficult. They are simply asking to remain who they are. The transmission of a 3,000 year-old inheritance from one generation to the next is not a lifestyle preference. It is, for them, a sacred obligation.

Walk into any Haredi classroom and you will not find a child scrolling on a smartphone. You will not find a child filming a fight in the corridor. You will not find a child who has been up half the night in the company of strangers on the internet. The corridors are not toxic. Truancy is almost unknown. The addictions that the Government rightly worry about—to screens, to vaping, to pornography—find no foothold there.

Let me say plainly what is too often left unsaid. There are Haredi schools in this country that have been threatened with closure by Ofsted: not because their pupils are failing, not because they are unsafe, not because they are unhappy but because their curriculum does not include precise content in the precise terms that the Department for Education had decided that every child must hear. That is not safeguarding. That is conformity dressed up as safeguarding. These parents will not hand the moral formation of their children to the state, and the state has no business demanding it.

My plea to the Minister is a simple one. In the pursuit of high standards, let us not confuse difference with deficiency. In seeking better SEND provision, let us not assume that one model fits all. In dealing with faith communities, let us proceed not with suspicion but with understanding and compassion, with the full consultation that this community are still waiting for and which is long overdue.