Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Meston and Baroness Spielman

Wednesday 25th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Meston (CB)]

My Lords, I will confine myself briefly to supporting Motion B. It is commonly agreed now that the pilots of the pathfinder model in selected family courts have been a success and represent the way ahead. This model has been shown to reduce delays significantly and has forced the focus on to making things better for the child concerned, rather than on the parents’ disputes and confrontations. That model has developed sufficiently well, in that the delay in moving it on into the mainstream should really now be avoided. It means that the very recently announced expansion into child-focused courts will be welcome.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will o speak to Motion K1, tabled by my noble friend Lady Barran. The Government are rightly acting to give local authorities the power to prevent children subject to a child protection plan being withdrawn from school. However, the scope of the Bill is clearly too limited, even with the amendment to give effect to a backward extension of five years for child protection plans.

I will briefly remind noble Lords of the characteristics of the children we are talking about. Clearly, they have all experienced abuse or neglect, but even apart from this we are talking about an exceptionally vulnerable group. Nearly three-quarters of children in care have special educational needs—often conditions they were born with that can make them particularly challenging to bring up and to educate—and often complicated physical or behavioural needs as well. Alongside that, these are children of parents whose ability to care for and protect their own children has already been shown to be inadequate, at least for a time. Even after a care order or child protection plan has been discharged, these are, in the main, children with serious challenges and complicated needs, whose parents have limited capacity. They are very often fragile families needing a lot of support and with a strong likelihood of further social care intervention being needed in future.

Therefore, there should be local authority consideration of proposals to home-educate any child who has been in care, had a supervision order or is under a child protection plan: first, to make sure that the child will actually get the education and support they need at home; and, secondly, to make sure that the child can safely be removed from view. Once a child is home-schooled, it may not be seen by any adult from outside the family for years. That may have been exactly the thing that was keeping that fragile family in balance.