Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Russell of Liverpool and Lord Addington

Thursday 18th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I was very happy to add my name to the noble Baroness’s on the majority of these amendments. She has outlined the compelling need to do something in these interrelated areas sooner rather than later. I will not bore your Lordships but rather try and illustrate one or two examples of what is going on in real time.

I will start with Copilot, a tool that most of us will be at least faintly familiar with—or will at least have heard of—and which is integrated into the Microsoft package that we use in Parliament. At the time that research was started by a group of organisations, including the 5Rights Foundation founded by the noble Baroness, Microsoft, which owns Copilot, stated publicly that Copilot was intended for users 18 and above, such as all your Lordships. However, in May 2025, the company announced without warning that Copilot would become available to users aged 13 and above. This shift raises important questions, none of which was answered at the time by Microsoft. The user age change proceeded without any published child rights impact assessment—which takes us back to an earlier group that we discussed—or documentation of any child participation in this decision. Using it in this way, without any child-focused safeguards, is unlikely to be in the best interests of the child, but currently there seems to be no satisfactory way to hold Microsoft to account for this.

A second example is Vimeo, a popular video channel that some of your Lordships may be aware of. In a particular case where a child used Vimeo and some of its video capability to do his homework, a detailed look at what Vimeo had done with his homework demonstrated that 92 different commercial companies had gained access to this child’s data. Not very satisfactory.

A third example is the problem that data protection officers—each school nominates one—as you might imagine, are struggling to try and understand and keep up with this blizzard of new technology and new tools. There are more and more sophisticated ways of, in theory, giving children a good education, underwritten by hideously long and complex terms and conditions, which I suspect even an artificial intelligence tool would have a problem making any sense of.

An example would be perhaps one of our best known technology companies, Google. It has a very successful edtech business called Google Classroom. Google, as is its wont, packages different Google products together in the same package. Within Google Classroom, you have Google Maps, which I am sure most of your Lordships are familiar with and will use occasionally. Let us assume you are doing a geography project using Google Classroom and, as part of that, you decide to go into Google Maps to use its capability. The minute the child clicks on Google Maps, he or she loses the data protection provided by Google Classroom, which allows Google Maps to harvest all of their data.

That is a real life current example of what is happening in plain sight. Data protection officers are not going to be aware of that, neither are headmasters, students or parents. It seems compelling that the people who should be most aware of that are the Government, the Information Commissioner and the bodies which are there to protect children and guide schools through this extraordinarily difficult complex morass of these competing technologies which, quite rightly to some extent, the Government are encouraging schools to take advantage of. But beware of what you encourage without understanding exactly what it is you are recommending.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when it comes to technology, I think I have a slightly different relationship to it, although the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, may even go beyond me for this. We need it to operate in the modern world. I have said before several times on this Bill that I am dyslexic. I cannot produce a one-page document that is in a readable form in any sort of format unless I use voice dictation. The relationship with technology changes.

If you want to make people independent and they are, in this case, dyslexic—dyspraxics might use the same technology in a slightly different way—you must make sure information is available to them and they can function with it. Having said that, the second part of this is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, that there should be safeguards within it. These things actually go hand in glove. You should have something that allows people to function in the modern world. When you are independent and interacting with a computer, you have to put the correct information in for the computer to function; you have to actually know what you are doing. A balance needs to be achieved.

There is a move to use systems which are built into computers, as opposed to bolt-on bits for educational support. In certain cases, which the Minister is aware of, schools decide to use the free bit of tech as opposed to purchasing it. But the free bit of tech is there to advertise; otherwise it would not be there. There must be a commercial advantage for somebody to provide you with a free bit of tech.

The balancing structure the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, puts forward here is essential to allow those like me who need this technology to carry on using it. We are talking about schoolchildren here, but there will be no shortage of people who will need it in the future and we are identifying more and more all the time. I hope we can strike a balance and make sure we get further forward into it.

The same is true—I am sure we are going to hear about smartphones being the devil’s work—for smart- phones, as it is the information on the smartphone we are talking about. If you can ban social media sites on smartphones and you can block them, they merely become a platform you can fill with other technology.

This is as the Minister gets an answer by using her smartphone. I hope we will get a more balanced approach to this, because it is not all bad, and not all good, it just needs to be used correctly, and using safeguards is something we have not really got our heads around. I am sure most of the commercial companies did not come in with this as their first priority, they just came in as commercial companies. The fact that they said they were platforms and did not need to worry about this is now coming back to bite them. However, I hope there is a balanced approach and a sensible way that we can get the best out of technology.