Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Lord Storey Excerpts(3 days, 6 hours ago)
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Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, I inferred from what the noble Baroness said that she thinks I do not believe children should have vaccines. I do. In fact, there is an active element in me that considers that we should prosecute parents who do not give their children the MMR vaccine because of the potential outcomes. I am not saying that is a policy I would adopt overnight, but it is worrying that so many children do not have the MMR. But on a broader point, I hear what the noble Baroness said, and of course that is what will be written in the HSA and in PHE, but I can assure her that I am aware that this is a primary element of trying to reduce the transmission of flu. I have no doubt that, if children get flu, it can be serious. It can be serious for any individual. That was one of the driving forces and why it is aimed in particular at children in primary schools. It is widely available and is significantly designed to reduce the transmission to adults.
Lord Storey (LD)
This has been an important debate on these amendments. I want to start by saying that the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, is not able to be present. Her husband is not at all well. She added her name to Amendments 469 and 470. I am going to keep my comments brief. The noble Lord, Lord Russell, is right: I can almost see Baroness Massey on my shoulders. When I first arrived here, although she was of a different party, she immediately collared me, along with the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and gave me a briefing on children’s rights. That was the first time I met Doreen Massey. At some stage, when we come to our senses on this, her importance on this issue will come to mind.
I also wanted to mention the point made by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, about the importance of the child being heard. For far too long, we had the old adage that children should be seen and not heard. Sadly, that filters through the whole of society in all sorts of ways. It is not just parents and public bodies. I remember my wife being heartbroken when a black boy in her secondary school was fostered by white parents. At the time it was quite rightly thought to be the case that culturally it is better if foster parents have the same heritage as the child. The boy, who was 12 or 13, was adamant that he wanted to stay with his white foster parents. Nobody listened to that boy. Nobody in the local authority, in the school or in social services listened to that boy. If we say we want to hear the voice of the child, it is a nice phrase to use, but we have to make it work in practice and it has to filter through the whole of what we do.
On the convention on human rights, I just do not understand this, and I would like a detailed letter from the Minister. It is 12 years since my noble friend Lady Walmsley and Baroness Massey talked to me about this. Why can we not follow Wales and Scotland? Let us do an impact assessment. Do we just not want to do it? Well, then let us have the honesty to say that. Or, if we do want to do it, what are the reasons why we cannot? I would like to know. Perhaps the Minister, when she replies, could tell us.
I do not have anything else to add to what has been a wide-ranging discussion. This issue is crucial, of course. The clue is in the Bill’s title, is it not? If we are talking about the children’s well-being Bill, everything that we and the Government do in legislation should look at the impact on children. That is an eminently sensible move. So, I hope Government will support Amendments 469 and 470, either now or if they are brought back on Report.
I was tempted to, as we sometimes say, respond to the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman. I am afraid I just do not agree with her comments, but perhaps now is not the time to do that. Perhaps we can have a private conversation on some of the things that, to be honest, got me quite angsty.
The Earl of Effingham (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, and other noble Lords who proposed the amendments in this group. This is a very technical area, and we have heard much expert opinion from my noble friend Lord Banner, the noble Lord, Lord Carter, the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and, crucially in our opinion, the former Chief Inspector of Education my noble friend Lady Spielman, and my noble friend Lady Coffey.
It is important to flag that, although His Majesty’s loyal Opposition completely understand the spirit of noble Lords’ amendments, we are not in a position to support them. The UK has already signed and ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, in 1990 and 1991 respectively, and it came into force in January 1992. As such, the UK is already bound by international law to implement the agreement, and our progress is being monitored by the Committee on the Rights of the Child. But several of the recommendations in the last report from the committee, including on child rights assessments and education, are ones we did not support when we were in government and still do not support in opposition.
Amendment 469 would bring an additional child rights assessment into all legislation, as recommended by the committee in its 2023 report. We simply do not believe that this is required; in fact, instead of enhancing a child’s education, it would further slow our ability to legislate and implement effectively.
The wider recommendations in the report are also not proposals with which we concur, including, for example, the recommendation to end academic selection and testing measures to reduce levels of stress on pupils. This has the potential to do real harm, particularly to disadvantaged pupils.
We believe that the huge opportunity before us is not to layer on new statutory duties or reporting mechanisms. To the contrary, it is to ensure that the education system we strive for is one that builds on the successes of the past 20 years, aided by noble Lords on all Benches of your Lordships’ House. An education that offers each and every child the opportunity to realise their full potential—that should be the endgame.
Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)
My Lords, I would like to add one very specific but pertinent comment to the debate at this point. Obviously, we are not going redesign the whole of apprenticeships here on the Floor of the House, but I strongly support the emphasis that the noble Lord, Lord Layard, has placed on 16 to 18 year-olds, and bring to your Lordships’ attention a very strange anomaly in the way we approach this.
When a young person fails to get an apprenticeship and remains in full-time education of some sort, this is paid for automatically as part of the open-ended commitment to pay for classroom-based education, even if it is also vocational or technical education, until somebody is 18 or 19. But apprenticeships for 16 to 18 year-olds have to come out of the levy—of which there is going to be very little money left next year, by the way, but that is a whole other discussion.
At the very least, in the short term, the Government could commit to moving the funding for apprenticeships for 16 to 18 year-olds into a different budget, into the perfectly correct national commitment to fund young people’s education and training until the age of 18.
Lord Storey (LD)
Briefly, I want to reinforce what has been said. What is unspent of the apprenticeship levy gets returned to the Treasury, not to be spent on education or apprenticeships, which is bizarre. It is a double whammy, because businesses, seeing that their money has not been spent and is likely to go back to the Treasury, suddenly start putting staff on high-level courses, equivalent—
Baroness Barran (Con)
This is risky, because I am doing this from memory. I appreciate that in earlier years, significant amounts of money were returned to the Treasury, but in the last year we were in government, it was £11 million—so basically absolutely everything was spent. I say that in relation to my noble friend Lord Deben’s remarks, and I hope the noble Lord, Lord Storey, will put that in context.
Lord Storey (LD)
The noble Baroness is right—the amount that was not spent or did not go to the Treasury was coming down.
Baroness Barran (Con)
No. To be clear, of the many millions of pounds that were raised through the apprenticeship levy, the amount that was not spent on apprenticeships and was returned to the Treasury was £11 million in the last year that we were in government, as I remember it.
Lord Storey (LD)
The point I was also going to make was that companies and businesses that had not spent the levy and did not want to see it returned to the Treasury were using it not for level 3 apprenticeships but for high-level master’s-type apprenticeships. That surely cannot be the right thing to do; it is not in the spirit of apprenticeships.
I was quite shocked that, in my city of Liverpool, Liverpool City Council, which had an apprenticeship scheme over a two-year period, returned £1 million of money to the Treasury. That money could easily have been spent on level 3 apprenticeships. The noble Lord, Lord Layard, gave us all the statistics at the beginning. We need to ensure that there is money for level 3 apprenticeships, because the original hope of apprenticeships was that they would go to the young people who desperately needed to have this opportunity.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 502YM. I will echo some of the comments made by my noble friend Lord Jackson in relation to his amendment. I believe that my amendment complements the comprehensive final-stage procedure he outlined neatly.
Anyone who works in education knows how problematic dealing with complaints is becoming. Of course it is right that public bodies should have a complaints procedure, as is required by law. Of course dissatisfied parents should be able to complain to or about a school, and schools failing in their responsibilities should rectify their errors and omissions promptly. But the current system is complex and, in the main, giving satisfaction to no one.
I remind noble Lords that complaining to government is, typically, a fourth-line action after a series of stages. The first stage is attempting to resolve the issue with the staff member most directly involved, such as a classroom teacher; the second is escalating the issue or making a complaint to the head teacher or another school leader; the third is making a complaint to school governors; and the fourth is escalating a complaint to the local authority or the academy trust.
Yet the number of complaints to government has grown enormously in recent years, although there is not much evidence of a corresponding deterioration in the service offered by schools to children and parents. It seems likely that it is at least partly down to a higher propensity to be dissatisfied in a more fractious world. Furthermore, the use of AI enables parents to generate extremely lengthy complaints, which are time consuming to read, investigate and respond to. Safeguarding will often be invoked to ensure that a complaint is prioritised.
The various provisions in law relating to the consideration of complaints by national education bodies generally require that local routes have been exhausted. The expectation was that escalation to national bodies was a last resort for when serious concerns are ignored or mishandled by those more directly responsible. But, sadly, we see today an increasing willingness to escalate even relatively minor issues if the school’s response is anything other than doing exactly what the parent wants. When more serious concerns arise, such as those pointed out by my noble friend Lord Jackson, the sheer volume can mean that those more serious concerns are drowned out by the volume of very minor complaints.
Furthermore, the patchwork of law and regulation often means that any complaint must be considered in all the places to which it is sent. Each of the government organisations has a different purpose and will apply a different filter to determine whether it needs to act, but all of them must take the time to read and understand what are often long and complex documents, and often must check with the school to establish the facts. This is a huge burden on schools as well as being a wasteful model for government to operate, and it does not appear to be making parents any more satisfied. We need to reset the system and return to the expectation that the vast majority of complaints are considered and closed at local level.
My amendment therefore proposes that a single government complaints system is established, which can triage and direct complaints to the most appropriate body or reply to the complainant to say that there is no further action to be taken. There would need to be discussion about where this should be located. If it was desirable for such decisions to be made by those with substantial school experience, it might be located in Ofsted; otherwise, it might be a DfE team. Either way, the complaints and action taken should be recorded in a single database, accessible to all bodies with regulatory functions, including inspection, so as to minimise duplication, with all the burdens that that imposes.
Such a system should reduce the wear and tear on parents themselves—pursuing complaints is very damaging to parents in their relationships with schools—as well as the wear and tear on schools from protracted and inconclusive complaints processes. In short, this is a pragmatic amendment that would benefit almost everyone.
Lord Storey (LD)
I understand where these amendments are coming from. Personally, I have not formed a complete view about this. I understand what the noble Baroness is saying and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply, because there is an issue here and this is about how we handle that issue.
Education has become a successful business for the lawyers, to be quite honest. Dare I say, you only have to look at special educational needs, which lawyers and solicitors have made a lot of money out of. I declare an interest as my daughter is a solicitor. One also sees solicitors involved in school admission procedures. In some cases, that is a natural route to take, and I wonder about complaints—never mind the bureaucracy involved—if lawyers get involved in that side as well.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, where did it all go wrong? I can look back to those halcyon days where, in primary schools, there were two lessons of PE a week timetabled, and PE covered a whole range of activities, from gym work to games and swimming—children regularly left school being able to swim 20 metres —and after-school sports competitions. In secondary schools, sport was thriving. As we have heard, that was beneficial for the well-being of children and young people and important for their health, with regards to obesity, and for teamwork, working together and understanding each other.
This is not something that can be laid just at the hands of the present Government. In fact, the present Government, in a former iteration, did a great deal of work on sport. People will think that I am a member of his fan club, but the Blair Government brought in some of the most radical proposals on sport that this country has ever seen. Whether it was a mixture of Covid, the recession or whatever, it all suddenly—
Baroness Bousted (Lab)
I am sorry, but I have to interject here to say that the narrowing of the curriculum and the teacher supply crisis was a direct result of austerity, teacher pay falling by 12% in real terms and chronic underfunding of schools, all of which were initiated during the coalition and continued until 2024.
Children absolutely deserve a rich and balanced curriculum, but that becomes much more difficult if they are not being taught by teachers qualified in the subject area but by unqualified teachers. The teacher supply crisis started and became acute during the previous Government. When we have this debate, we cannot ignore the practical consequences of chronic underfunding, chronic undermining of the profession and, from the start of the coalition, a policy of attacking teachers and leaders as being responsible for falling school standards.
There was also a deliberate narrowing of the curriculum through the EBacc to a range of academic subjects, which has meant a precipitous decline in arts and drama and a shorting of the experience that children get in physical education.
I am sorry, but I must put all that on the record. My friend the noble Lord is rightly asking these questions but he is coming up with a different set of conclusions.
Lord Hampton (CB)
My Lords, before the noble Lord continues, I do not recognise, luckily, the dystopian view that he has given. The primary school that both my children were at and the school where I now teach are full for before-school, lunchtime and after-school activities. I put on record in this Chamber that my daughter’s girls team won the under-15 Hackney cup.
Lord Storey (LD)
I am grateful for those comments, believe it or not. I could well have made the noble Lord’s speech, to be honest, and I might have gone on to say some of those things. In some of my other contributions in this House, I have, for example, decried the Government’s stance on the EBacc, which has created problems for the creative industries, as well as for sport and physical education. The noble Lord, Lord Gove, who is not in his place, spoke yesterday, and I referred to the cataclysmic changes that his time as Secretary of State brought about. I was slightly annoyed that he referred to a reasonable request for a national guarantee on tutoring as a sort of publicity stunt by the Lib Dems. That was my reaction to that, as those noble Lords who were present know. I accept everything the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, said.
Politicians—not in this Chamber, of course—sometimes forget what happened beforehand. The country was on its knees because of the recession—it really was; you could see that—and the Government had to step forward and take some difficult decisions. But those difficult decisions did not have to see the dismantling of services that both the noble Lord and I think are really important. As the head teacher of a primary school for 23 years, I recognise what the noble Lords is saying, but it is not in every school.
However, we were talking about PE, so let me move on to one example of PE which I know a great deal about: swimming. I declare an interest as a patron of the Royal Life Saving Society. Swimming is important to us as a nation—we are an island. I do not have the figures to hand, other than the sad figure that somewhere in the region of 250 people drown every year and some 40 of them are children between primary age and 17, and those figures are rising. Why are drownings happening? It is because fewer and fewer schools have the resources to swim. How many schools have a swimming pool they can go to? I remember in those halcyon days in my borough, primary schools would have a small learner pool that you could walk to in every area. We could take even top infants to the learner pool to learn how to swim. Every child had a term and a half of swimming and 98% of children left school being able to swim 20 meters. That does not happen now, for the very reasons that we have heard.
I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan. I thought his speech was absolutely spot on. If we are serious about the importance of sport, everything he said I could not agree with.
Lord Storey (LD)
Did I say agree? I am still recovering from the interventions. To be clear, I agree with everything that the noble Lord said and would support all four amendments. I thank noble Lords for introducing them.
Children and young people get so much from sport and physical education. It is not just about their well- being; believe it or not, it helps them in their other studies. One of the local head teachers in my area used to start the school day not by doing numeracy or literacy but a creative activity—either sport, drama, dance or something like that—because it got people energised and helped with their learning. Sport is important not just for the mind and body but for the well-being and development of the child as a whole.
I thank noble Lords who put down those amendments. I speak for my party when I say we very much support them.
Lord Addington (LD)
My Lords, my noble friend has covered what happens in school, but that is just one area of activity. If it is done properly, school is merely part of a greater continuum that goes out into the community. The school sports partnerships were going to save the breakdown in the traditional links between small clubs, grass-roots sports and school, but they were not there for long enough for us to know whether they would. Many of us in both bits of the coalition Government thought that it was one of the weirdest things possible that they were kept going until the Olympics and then cancelled afterwards when we might have got some benefit. I got a small nod from the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan—a bigger one now—which says, “That’s exactly what we thought at the time”.
We also knew from that and from looking at studies that a big sporting event is great for tourism and volunteering but does not make any difference to grass-roots sport unless you back it up with something—with your inspiration. Schools have to work with the grass roots. In the amendments, we have the start of that structure, which we can go forward with. It is not just in this Bill or with this department. If we are going to lose lots of playing fields in the planning Bill, it does not matter what you do because you will not be playing anywhere else—probably not even at schools. We have to have something that goes forward. These amendments start to look slightly broader.
Lord Wei (Con)
My Lords, my Amendment 502YQ is mainly to probe the Government’s intention in relation to their own use of data regarding this Bill. This amendment addresses an issue that has surfaced repeatedly in our many debates: the scope of data collection about children in education. We have heard a lot today about the role of technology providers, but I want to turn the focus to how we are collecting data within the education system in government.
My amendment would ensure that personal data may be collected, retained or processed only where it is strictly necessary to protect a child from significant harm, as defined in Section 31 of the Children Act 1989. Why is this needed? The Bill as drafted gives wide latitude to local authorities and the Secretary of State to demand data on children not in school—an area that I really care about—as well as potentially on others. In particular, the data demanded of children not in school—we have already heard about the amount of data that is already collected on children in school—is off the scale. We are told that this is for safeguarding, but safeguarding has a very specific meaning in law. It is not a licence for limitless information gathering; it is a duty to act when a child is suffering or likely to suffer significant harm.
Clause 31, for instance, invites local authorities to gather information far beyond what is necessary. Names, addresses and dates of birth are sufficient to identify a child and discharge oversight duties. However, the Bill’s wording allows for much more, including details of parental and children’s beliefs, educational philosophy, supplementary providers and even protected characteristics. This, to me, is mission creep, not proportionate oversight. As the department has itself acknowledged in past consultations, the bare minimum of data suffices to track children and ensure that no one falls through the net. To demand more because it might be helpful is not lawful data processing. Data protection law is clear: collection must be limited to what is necessary for the purpose. Helpful is not enough.
The risks of excessive data collection are not theoretical. Families have already seen sensitive information stored indefinitely, cross-referenced with other records and sometimes shared with agencies in ways that they did not consent to or even know about. One military family with whom I have interacted recounted how their local authority repeatedly contacted the father’s workplace about his children, despite clear instructions not to do so. Another home-educating mother described how, after deregistering a child with special needs, she was followed in public after being wrongly referred to social services. These are not safeguards; they are intrusions to undermine trust.
We must also remember that not all parents in the system are confident or well resourced. Some are vulnerable, fleeing domestic abuse or suffering with SEND bureaucracy. For them, intrusive data demands feel less like protection and more like surveillance. If the state is perceived as hostile, families may retreat from engagement altogether, making genuine safeguarding harder, not easier. That is why my amendment would tie permissible data collection to the Section 31 threshold of “significant harm”, which is already the bedrock of child protection law. It is the line that our courts have drawn between parental primacy and state intervention. Aligning data powers with that line ensures consistency, legality and proportionality.
Proposed new subsection (2) in my amendment would ensure proportionality by limiting data to what was essential for the specific risk identified. If the concern is neglect then collect information relating to neglect; if the concern is radicalisation, focus on that. Do not use safeguarding as a pretext for wide-ranging dossiers on families’ private lives. Proposed new subsection (3) would close off another danger: profiling. We should not be gathering data to build long-term behavioural profiles of children or to monitor families against vague benchmarks of compliance. That is not safeguarding; it is social engineering by stealth. Proposed new subsection (4) would require the Secretary of State to publish clear guidance within six months, so that local authorities, schools and parents know the limits of permissible data collection. That guidance should provide clarity, consistency and accountability.
Some might worry that the amendments would tie the hand of professionals. On the contrary, they would free them to focus on what matters. Instead of drowning in forms and files and data, they could concentrate on children at genuine risk. Excessive data is not neutral; it diverts time, money and attention from where it is most needed.
International law supports this approach. In MM v the UK in 2012 the European Court of Human Rights held that the retention of excessive personal data without clear necessity breached Article 8, while in Ali v the UK in 2015 the court stressed that decisions must be informed by accurate, relevant and proportionate information. We cannot claim compliance with Article 8 if we allow the indefinite harvesting of families’ and children’s private details “just in case”.
The amendment is not only for home educators, though their experience has highlighted this problem in the Bill. It would protect every family in the education system. It would ensure that schools are not turned into data collection points for the state and that local authorities are not saddled with the impossible burden of storing, processing and protecting sensitive information that they do not always need. Above all, it would protect children from being profiled, stigmatised, or surveyed in ways that bear no relation to genuine safeguarding.
In passing the Bill, we must not create a database state by accident. We must legislate with care, remembering that data is not neutral—it is power. It is the new oil, in fact. Used well, it can protect; used badly, it can harm. Amendment 502YQ would ensure that that power was exercised with clear limits, tied to the statutory threshold of significant harm. That is fair, proportionate and faithful to the principles of our child protection law. I commend it to the House.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, Covid was certainly the rocket fuel for the growth of educational technology in our schools, which is now accepted as part of the school learning landscape. The UK’s education tech sector is the largest in Europe, spending, as we already heard, an estimated £900 million a year. However, there are real concerns that these amendments seek to address, which is why we will be supporting Amendments 493, 494, 502K, 502YH and 502YI.
The edtech sector is exempt from the Online Safety Act, and adherence to GDPR is inconsistent, to say the least. Large multiuse platforms such as Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams can enhance teaching and school management, but the absence of clear statutory standards leaves children’s education and school cybersecurity often at risk. We surely need a regulated framework to safeguard children’s rights, protect the data and prevent the commercial exploitation of children. We sleepwalked into the development of social media. Now that we see the harm that has been caused, we rush to try to do something about it. There is a strong case for developing a regulated framework to safeguard children’s rights and support schools in making informed and sustainable choices.
I want to respond to what I thought was a very thoughtful contribution by the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman. It made me think that six years ago I had a Private Member’s Bill on essay mills and contract cheating. That is now all for naught, because there are other ways of cheating, and AI helps that considerably.
I had an intern who one day said to me, “Lord Storey, here’s a speech for you”. I said, “Ooh, let me have a look”. I read the speech and thought, “Wow, this is great. I’ll use this”. He told me that it was AI generated. “Really?”, I said. I wondered whether in five or 10 years your Lordships’ House might be a very different place for speeches. Might we all succumb to using not our own thoughts and experiences but AI to generate speeches? Would anybody know in five or 10 years’ time, when the technology will be absolutely spot on?
I want to deal briefly with the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. Amendment 502YU concerns reception baseline assessments. The Minister will recall that I raised this in an Oral Question. There is something a little perverse about the youngest children—five year-olds—doing their assessments on a screen. I have a degree of sympathy for the noble Baroness’s amendment, and I hope the Minister can shed some light on it.
Regarding the other two amendments, I know that SEND exceptions are mentioned, but as my noble friend Lord Addington said in his hugely important contribution, it is not either/or. We have to think through these amendments carefully, as there are other issues, not just special educational needs, that we need to be aware of. We do not want to agree something that creates problems for the future.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, this is yet another important group of amendments, which seeks to bring, frankly, some common-sense principles to the use of edtech, children’s data and screens. Amendments 493 and 494, in the name of my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond, seek to introduce what would in effect be quality standards for the use of edtech in schools. There are existing standards and guidance for schools in relation to hardware and data, but I was unable to find any specifically in relation to edtech, so it feels as though my noble friend has identified a real gap.
Similarly, Amendment 502K, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, would introduce a code of practice on the efficacy of edtech. I suggest that, in all these amendments, we need to be very clear that any standards or principles focus not just on some of the data and related safety issues that we have talked about; we must make sure that they are absolutely based on the latest research in cognitive science and the best understanding of pedagogy, so that they deliver learning. We need them to be safe—that is necessary but not sufficient—and effective.
Last year, a thorough report by the Education Select Committee on the impacts of screen time on educational well-being found that the proliferation of edtech platforms made their overall benefit hard to quantify. It pointed out that only 7% of edtech providers had conducted randomised controlled trials on their products. The report noted that there are more than half a million apps claiming to be educational but, as yet, no quality standards for assessing educational content. The report judged as poor the evidence base for assessing which, if any, of these apps are most effective.
Amendment 493 includes a requirement for transparency in relation to the use of training data, AI and third-party use of data. It shares the spirit of Amendment 502YI, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, which would introduce a code of practice in relation to the processing of data in connection with the provision of education to children—an area where the introduction of AI could expand how children’s data is shared and used. Understanding how our children’s data is used is extremely important, as we have heard from noble Lords across the Committee, but it is important that we can use it. One of the biggest data sources that could move the needle on, for example, AI marking systems for formative assessment, is held in our national exam scripts. We need to be very intentional about the areas that we focus on.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lord, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and to share in her concern about the need to prepare pupils in this age of shocks where we literally do not know what is around the corner. I have often spoken in your Lordships’ House about the need for first aid education in schools. This amendment is broader than that.
We need education that prepares people for life and not just for exams. I note that recently some basic questions about first aid have been introduced into the driving licence test, which shows that there is some recognition by the Government of the need to act in this space.
I shall speak chiefly to my Amendments 502YB and 502YK and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, for her support for them. Amendment 502YB, which would require a review of climate adaptation in schools, very much fits with the noble Baroness’s Amendment 502P, but her amendment is focused largely on the physical fabric of schools while mine is focused to a large degree on how schools behave and are arranged. It is more of a behavioural kind of question.
I note that the UK Health Security Agency has published updated guidance about heat for schools and early years settings. That guidance allows schools to relax uniform policy in the heat. It suggests that students should wear loose, light-coloured clothing and sun hats with wide brims, stay in the shade as much as possible, and wear sunscreen with high sun protection factors, et cetera. It also says that teachers should encourage students to take off their blazers and jumpers. But all that is in terms of encouragement and suggestions.
I put it to the Minister and the Government more broadly that we are in a situation now, particularly when we have so many schools with an unreasoning and almost religious attachment to rigid uniform policies, where there should be rules that say that schools must act to keep pupils safe. I note that the National Education Union suggests that 26 degrees should be set as an appropriate point at which to identify additional measures—so let us make some rules about taking action to protect our children.
On the broader point about climate resilience, the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, referred to a London study; I shall refer to a London programme that may have followed from that, Climate Resilient Schools. In 2022-23, the Mayor of London funded measures in 100 schools to make them more resilient, but when we look at the website, we can see that that programme has now ended. Surely, we need an ongoing programme to make our schools more climate resilient.
I come now to Amendment 502YK, about the prevention of the transmission of respiratory and other diseases in classrooms and schools generally. I was looking at Amendment 502YH in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, which would introduce a new clause headed:
“Statutory standards of filtering and monitoring systems deployed in schools”.
I thought, “Oh, this might be similar”, but, no, that is an amendment about computer or digital viruses. We have just had a very long debate focusing on those digital safety issues, but, somehow, even despite the Covid pandemic, we have rather less focus on biological virus risks—mine is the only amendment that does that.
You might call this the Covid amendment, and certainly I speak in the context where it is very clear that Covid is not over; a new variant, Stratus, is spreading fast and raising levels of concern. That means that Covid is still spreading and that more and more people are not just becoming ill in the short term but, as we know, getting long Covid. The pulmonologist, Binita Kane, has recently started an NHS long Covid clinic and notes that there has been a refusal to acknowledge the problem of long Covid, and the continuing problem. If we look at the history of the world’s medical treatment of so-called chronic fatigue syndrome, or myalgic encephalomyelitis, we see that there has been a refusal to acknowledge the issue of broader post-viral syndromes and the fact that people get ill for a long time.
There was a study out at the end of last year whose headline said that after two years 70% of the children who had shown the symptoms of long Covid were no longer displaying them. That means, of course, that 30% of the children who had been diagnosed a couple of years ago with long Covid still have it, and it is still affecting their lives. That is something that we cannot ignore about Covid—but, of course, this is not just a Covid amendment. Just because we have had a Covid pandemic, that will not have any impact on the continuing acute risks of a flu pandemic, something that the world has known much of in the past.
Ventilation and air filtration are also good for pupil concentration. It is good for general health to have fresh air in the classroom, and we need to be able to look after the health of pupils. I have a direct question for the Minister—I shall understand if she wants to write to me on it later. In 2021, England spent £25 million on providing all state-funded schools and colleges with a portable CO2 monitor for every two classrooms. There was further funding in November 2022 for the remaining 50% of classrooms. The recommendation is that CO2 levels should be kept below 800 parts per million, with indoor air at 600 to 800 parts per million being a relatively good level of ventilation. Can the Minister tell me now or in the future how many of those monitors are still in use and what kind of results they are showing?
Lord Storey (LD)
The hour is late, so I will be very brief. I make three observations. First, we react to situations; we do not prepare for them. Secondly, we then set up a particular programme or campaign but we do not embed it; we do it until people have lost interest or media attention has moved on to something else; thirdly, schools or parents often come up with something, following a particular event occurring in a school and it starting a campaign—it is a pity that this is not shared.
It is not quite the same, but I think of the example of EpiPens and defibrillators in schools. In Liverpool, a poor boy aged 11 had a cardiac arrest in the swimming pool and tragically died. His family and immediate friends started a campaign, the Oliver King Foundation, to get defibrillators into every school in Merseyside, and that happened. All these amendments are certainly worth consideration.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, this is a diverse group of amendments.
Amendment 502M, tabled by my noble friends Lord Young of Acton and Lord Brady of Altrincham, is on the duty to keep schools open in person during civil emergencies. I think that we can all agree on the importance of this principle. We saw vividly during Covid that schools are crucial centres of learning but also places of community, which form an important part of the foundation of childhood. I support the principle behind the amendment that schools should remain open and that closure should be considered only ever in the most extreme circumstances. I am slightly less clear, looking at the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, whether the Children’s Commissioner is the right person to advise the Government, but it will be interesting to hear what the Minister has to say on that.
Amendment 502P, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, and my noble friend Lord Gascoigne, on the creation of a safe and resilient schools plan, rightly highlights the importance of ensuring that our school buildings are resilient to climate change and responsible when it comes to emissions—maybe a building cannot be responsible but those building it can be. The previous Government set out in our Sustainability and Climate Change: A Strategy for the Education and Children’s Services Systems in 2023 a commitment for all new school buildings to be net-zero in operation, designed for a 2 degree rise in average global temperatures and future-proofed for a 4 degree rise. I am slightly confused by the noble Baroness’s amendment because I assume that the Government will continue with those objectives. If that has changed, can the Minister clarify?
Future buildings are a huge challenge, not just in funding but in the capacity in the building industry to deliver—although maybe the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, is working her magic in construction and green skills.
Amendment 502YA, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, is on civil preparedness training for pupils. Again, I am not convinced that there is a need for this amendment. There is already guidance and online training materials about how to respond to terrorist and other major incidents and I am not sure that we need more than that. Schools are pretty well equipped already.
Finally, Amendment 502YB, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, is on the review of climate adaptation in schools. It is not helpful to focus on just one aspect of school buildings, as opposed to many other aspects, including the safety and security of the construction materials that they are built with. We should trust local authorities and school trusts to fulfil their safety, suitability and climate resilience responsibilities.
The noble Baroness then went on, I think, to suggest—maybe I am being harsh at this late hour—that the Government should be more directive towards schools on relaxing school uniform. The idea that the Secretary of State will not only count how many ties we have in school but now instruct schools whether to loosen them is just going too far.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
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Baroness Thornton (Lab)
My Lords, I will make very few remarks. I am an active humanist and I would like to identify my support for the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, and my noble friend Lord Watson. I hope that the Government will take heed of what these rather modest amendments propose. If there is something that needs to be discussed, I ask that my noble friend the Minister calls together those of us who are interested and committed to this to talk about it.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I will speak to a number of these amendments and I want to do it from my own experience. First, I will start with the cap on faith. If your Lordships remember, this was originally introduced by the Tony Blair Government for any new schools. I thought at the time, “How sensible is that? If we live, as we do, in a multifaith, multicultural society, isn’t a good thing that children mix with children of different faiths?” Speaking on day nine in Committee, I referenced the fact that my daughter went to a Jewish school. It was wonderful for her to be able to have Jewish, Hindu, Christian and Muslim friends, because that was the ethos of that Jewish school. If you just put the Catholics there, the Anglicans there, the Jews there and the Muslims there, you divide people. I do not want a divided society. I want children to celebrate their faith and their culture, and the best place to do that is in school when they are learning and growing up. You only have to remember what happened in education in Northern Ireland.
Secondly, I want to talk about faith schools in terms of admissions. I am speaking to Amendment 456 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, on the 50% cap, and I cannot add anything further to his excellent contribution, so I turn to my noble friend Lady Burt’s Amendment 457. Faith schools do a fantastic job—I must stop using the word “fantastic”. They do a very good educational job. I look again at my own city, where the four Anglican schools are oversubscribed and are very popular. The way children are admitted raises real questions in my mind. Suddenly, the local Anglican churches, which are in the neighbourhood of that school, fill up their congregations, because when people apply to the school, they have to have a reference from the vicar.
Lord Storey (LD)
The Minister, when referring to Amendment 456 from the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said there were no plans to make a change “at this time”. What does she mean by that? Does that mean that the Government will consider it in the future or that it is not going to happen at all?
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
I think I was pretty clear about the position that the Government take with respect to the admissions arrangements of faith schools, and it is not intended to change that.
Lord Storey (LD)
I will pick up that last point, which was very incisively made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. My primary school was a two-form entry primary school. It was a popular school, and we wanted to increase the size to three forms of entry. The local authority initially said, “No, because if you do that, you’ll take children from the two other primary schools in the locality, which will weaken those schools”. At the time, I was a bit miffed about this, but I thought, “Okay”. The local authority said, “What we need to do is to build up the numbers and the esteem of those two other primary schools”, which it did very successfully. Then, guess what: it agreed that my school could become a three-form entry school.
It is not just about size; it also about schools working together. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, quite rightly paid tribute to the role that the noble Lords, Lord Agnew and Lord Nash, played as Ministers in establishing multi-academy trusts. One area which has never worked, to my mind, is that you can have the headquarters of the multi-academy trust at the other end of the country. It has never worked for me that a multi-academy trust can have schools in Devon and Cornwall but also in the north-east. Where is that community feel about them?
The trouble with expanding schools is that you can get to a situation in which schools just want to grow and grow, because they get more money. They can get too large for the existing children and families. I think of the school that my wife worked at, a seven-form entry comprehensive which was allowed to increase its size to 11. It became completely unmanageable. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, rightly said, by taking children from one school, in many cases you are almost putting a close notice on that school. The way to deal with it is not by moving children or allowing schools to grow but by providing the resources and expertise and making that school popular, putting in real expertise to change its character and educational purpose.
I put my name to the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, and I have also put an amendment down myself. Let us first understand the definition of a managed move. It is a permanent move of a child from one school to another for reasons not related to family relocation. It is important to put that into context and to remind ourselves that currently 1.49 million children are persistently absent from school and 171,000 children are severely absent from school.
The Who is Losing Learning? report of 2025 uncovered a deeply concerning trend; that
“for every child that is permanently excluded, 10 more invisibly move”
between schools or are off rolled entirely. These moves are unregulated and unmonitored, meaning that too often even the Department for Education does not know where or even if those children are being educated following a managed move.
Managed moves, when done correctly, can have great success for both the pupil and the school. That is why these two amendments, which are very similar, are so important. We need a fair access protocol to make sure that, when we carry out those managed moves between schools, we know how it is happening. I like the notion that the local authority should perhaps report on this—not creating more bureaucracy but just giving confidence to the system. I hope the Minister when she replies will tell us how important it is to get this right.
Baroness Spielman (Con)
My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Barran’s amendments to Clause 56 and my noble friend Lord Agnew’s Amendment 454. I have heard much around the Committee this afternoon that is extremely important, but I think there are some wider points to make.
There are many romantic expectations of school admissions—that there is a perfect world in which every child will go to the school that they and their parents choose, in which every mainstream school can provide well for every child no matter how extreme their needs, and in which no child will ever cause harm to any other child or adult in a school. In this perfect world, the romantics expect children to be distributed perfectly evenly between schools on any measure by which we choose to analyse the population. But this is a dream, and chasing dreams rarely improves children’s experiences in the real world. Sadly, it is entirely possible that the extended powers to direct admissions will backfire, especially with policy pressure on local authorities to keep even the worst behaved children in mainstream schools irrespective of the consequences.
Consider a child for whom an LA is trying to find a managed move. If several schools decline to accept the child, it may mean that they are all shirking their responsibilities, or it may mean that they have correctly assessed that the child’s needs are too great for that school or any mainstream school to manage the child safely. One shocking case I saw as chief inspector related to a girl who was raped by a boy who had come to her school on a managed move and, worse, the receiving school had not been informed by either the LA or the sending school of the boy’s known history of serious sexual misconduct. No school should be levered into putting other children at risk in this way.
If the LA directs the child to one of its own schools, it still has direct responsibility for the child, but if it can direct the child to an academy, it has offloaded the problem, at least in part. There is an obvious incentive for local authorities to use this power to offload the most difficult children and leave academies to shoulder a disproportionate responsibility for the most difficult and even dangerous children, and to inflict the greatest risk on the other children and staff in those academies.
Let us also consider the point that, while a decision will relate to a single child, good schools also have to consider how many children with behavioural problems they can manage and support properly without destroying the very strengths that make them able to work effectively with such children. I have seen already how difficult this is for local authorities in the context of SEND. Local authorities control EHCPs, which name a school to which that child should be admitted. In theory, it is parents who choose that school, but in practice, local authorities have significant influence over those parent choices, and some local authorities have perhaps on occasion found it convenient to encourage parents to choose academies rather than maintained schools, or at the very least to not discourage them from doing so.
As a result, some popular and successful academies have at times found themselves facing real difficulties. I know of cases where local authorities expected a school to fill more than one-third of its year 7 places with children requiring intensive individual support, many of them for behavioural problems. This would have turned those schools into de facto special schools without the wider infrastructure and support that we expect of special schools.
It is in fact extraordinarily difficult for local authorities to be impartial between mainstream schools and academies. For this reason, I strongly support my noble friend’s Amendment 452ZA, requiring local authorities to act impartially between maintained schools and academies. It will still be difficult in practice, but the principle should be explicit in the Act.
Similarly, my noble friend’s Amendment 453A to Clause 56 and Amendments 457A and 457B seek to ensure that changes to school admission numbers are made in the interests of children and parents, rather than the administrative convenience of the local authority. Again, these decisions will always be hard and will never please everyone, but it is right and important that children’s needs are explicitly put first: otherwise, it is sadly all too certain that, with the shrinking birth cohort, some excellent schools will see their admissions restricted while mediocre schools carry on. My noble friend Lord Agnew’s Amendment 454 gives some protection to this principle. I hope the Government will see how unfortunate this would be and will take steps to guard against it.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, as I had to go out and take an urgent phone call during the debate, I think it would be wrong for me to comment.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, this third group of amendments relates to the opening of new schools, including new maintained schools, academies and free schools, and the financial governance of maintained schools—but not to the noble Lord’s amendment about local elections, so I will not respond to that.
Clause 57 relates to how new schools are opened, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, opposes it standing part of the Bill. The clause ends the legal presumption that new schools should be academy schools. It requires local authorities to invite proposals for academies and other types of school when they think a new school should be established and gives them the option to put forward their own proposals for new schools. The current system allows local authorities to propose new schools only as a last resort or in very limited circumstances. Local authorities hold the statutory responsibility to secure sufficient school places in their area, and it is right that we give them greater ability to fulfil that duty effectively. These changes will enable consideration of any local offer that meets the needs of children and families.
Amendment 480, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, relates to the opening of projects in the free schools pipeline. I understand the noble Baroness’s desire—and the passion and enthusiasm of the noble Lord, Lord Harris, who, as others have said, has played an enormously important role in improving the quality of schools for many of the children who need it the most—to ensure that the approved free school projects open as planned. I know that trusts and local authorities commit significant time and energy to supporting these projects.
However, noble Lords will also understand the need to consider carefully the use of a limited amount of school capital. Agreeing the amendment would commit the Secretary of State to opening all projects in the current pipeline, regardless of whether they are still needed or represent value for money. That is why the department is giving careful consideration to these proposals in relation to the need for places, their value for money and the extent to which they provide a distinctive local offer. It would be wrong to spend funding on new schools that cannot be financially viable while existing schools urgently need that funding to improve the condition of their buildings.
Amendment 481, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, would require local-authority-maintained schools to have an annual external audit. In response to the noble Lord’s contribution, I am afraid I must clarify that he was wrong to state that maintained schools do not have to publish salaries over £100,000 and that they do not have to submit three-year budget plans. Those requirements were introduced by the last Government in 2021 following a consultation put out by the noble Lord as a Minister. He has had more of an impact even than he realises.
I nevertheless understand the points the noble Lord made about the responsibility on all school leaders to ensure that public money is being spent as effectively as possible in order to maximise the amount that can be spent directly on supporting and educating our children. However, the Government do not believe it is necessary to mandate all maintained schools to have an annual external audit. Maintained school accounts form part of local authority’s accounts. A sample will be audited each year as part of the local authority audit process. Any maintained school that wants a separate audit has the right to commission one. We can argue about whether, as the noble Lord has suggested, auditing would save money. However, we are clear about how much it would cost. School audits can cost £10,000 or more—the total cost of separate audits for all maintained schools would be at least £100 million a year.
I hope that, given my explanations, the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw her clause stand part notice, and other noble Lords will not move their amendments.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, this debate has been very thought-provoking. I always want to listen to what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, has to say; she always challenges my own thoughts.
We all know the saying, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never harm me”. But, of course, words can harm you—sometimes tremendously so. They can almost “destroy” a pupil’s resilience and well-being. I think about a little girl called Millie, who was eight years old and a very good footballer. Her grandad took her to play football every Saturday morning on the fields by Otterspool Prom. Because she was so good, the other girls became quite jealous of her, so they contrived among themselves never to pass the ball to Millie. Millie just could not understand that; she wanted to take part in the game, but together they bullied her by not passing her ball.
She went to the parent who organised and refereed the football; one of his girls was part of this little group saying, “Let’s not pass the ball to Millie”. He said to her, “Oh grow up. Go away. You’re a footballer, come on, you can take it”. She went home feeling completely “destroyed” and chose not to play football again. I tell that tale because we actually forget the bully in that situation; the bully needs help and support as much as the person who has been bullied. We often do not consider that in school policies on anti-bullying.
I just want to say to the Minister that when we briefly discussed bullying in another group of amendments, she mentioned that schools have behavioural policies. I was arguing that we should have separate anti-bullying policies, because—I think I am correct in saying this—not every school has to have them.
This amendment simply says that we should know where we are. I will perhaps criticise myself a bit—as did the noble Lord opposite. All these amendments are seeking more information, quite rightly, on racist incidents, bullying and so on. But who has to collect that information? The school. Who in the school has to collect it? The teacher. When we talk about workload pressures on teachers, let us be aware that, all the time, we are creating more workload pressures for them. Nevertheless, some of these things are important. Certainly, information on racist incidents should be collected; we should know exactly what is happening with that. We should also know about bullying incidents, so that we know how to react and where we should go next.
My noble friend Lord Addington made an important point, picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, that while we might be good at collecting information, we are not good at sharing it—and it is a fat lot of good collecting the information if we do not share it with other people, particularly other agencies. I was going to share the details of why we want to do this, but the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, very eloquently spelled out the information that we were supplied by the Anti-Bullying Alliance. Those figures are quite shocking in respect of the number of children in our education system who are bullied.
Bullying comes with all types of events. I mentioned football but I could equally mention the sly little pinch every day from one child to another. I could mention a whole host of things. I think of my own friends, now are in their 60s and 70s, who were affected by bullying as young people and it formed part of how they behave and react to things. We need to address this issue, but we can do so only if we know how serious it is. So, despite more workload pressures for teachers, I hope the Minister might agree that this is an important route that we should follow.
I want to mention briefly, as time marches on, the amendment from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester. It is important: teachers and head teachers may not be aware of how many children have parents or a parent in prison. We had thought it was somewhere around 31,000 but, in fact, according to figures, the number of children with a parent in prison is nearly 193,000. That is something that we need to address. I do not want to go into all the details but I very much support the right reverend Prelate’s amendment as well.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)
My Lords, we have had a good, wide-ranging debate on this group, which concerns how schools deal with acts of violence against their staff, pupil behaviour management, and tackling bullying in schools, including incidents that are racist or faith-based.
Violence and bullying in schools are never acceptable. No teacher should feel unsafe or face violence or abuse in the workplace. The department will always support teachers to ensure that they can work in safe and calm classrooms.
All schools must have a behaviour policy to regulate the conduct of pupils, to help ensure that teachers and pupils are protected from disruption and, most importantly, that they have a safe school environment in which to work and learn. When misbehaviour occurs, schools can use sanctions as a measure to improve behaviour; in the most serious cases, exclusion may be necessary to ensure that all pupils are protected from disruption and can benefit from the opportunities provided by education. To provide some assurance to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, we believe that pupil referral units have an important role to play in this.
To reiterate the importance with which the Government view this, we have recently announced the launch of new RISE attendance and behaviour hubs, focusing on supporting senior leaders to develop safe, supportive school cultures with high expectations for attendance and behaviour. Their role will include using data to identify and address areas of concern. We have now appointed the first 21 lead schools in this programme.
Amendment 459, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, would require schools to report acts of violence against staff to the police. I want to be completely clear that, as I have already said, all forms of violence against school staff should be taken seriously. It is never acceptable for anyone to be harassed, intimidated or attacked.
The primary duty to take reasonable care for the health and safety of all employees rests with the employer. The employer is responsible for doing what is reasonably practicable to ensure the health, safety and welfare at work of all employees and should take appropriate action where they are aware of any matters that could detract from that. Where violence is involved, schools should take immediate and appropriate action. Should the incident constitute a potential criminal offence, it would be for the school employer to consider involving the police, having followed the advice in WHEN TO CALL THE POLICE Guidance for Schools & Colleges from the National Police Chiefs’ Council, written in partnership with the department and the Home Office. Given those provisions and that guidance, we fear that this amendment would be likely to impose additional burdens on schools without necessarily strengthening protections for staff.
Amendment 464, in the name of my noble friend Lady Whitaker, would place a duty on local authorities to require schools to record and report racist incidents or faith-based bullying, and the action taken. I wholly support the views of noble Lords who have identified how reprehensible these incidents are and how important it is that action is taken within the school to identify and educate students about the significance of that element of bullying.
Under the Equality Act 2010, every school in England has an existing legal obligation to not discriminate unlawfully on the grounds of a protected characteristic. We have confidence in the seriousness with which head teachers take any incidents that breach this requirement, as these would. Further reporting requirements for schools would risk creating a new burden and risk unintended consequences, as some noble Lords have touched on, discouraging children and staff from disclosing to school leaders due to privacy concerns and increasing the threshold at which schools may identify and respond to incidents due to perceived risk of reputational damage. We want children to be as open as possible within the school environment so that head teachers and teachers can determine the appropriate action.
I will take Amendments 501 and 502E together as both aim to address the importance of tackling bullying in schools and recognise the profound impact it can have on children’s lives. Amendment 501, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, seeks to introduce a duty on the department to collect and publish national data related to pupils’ experiences of bullying in schools. The department already monitors young people’s perceptions of bullying through the annual National Behaviour Survey, and I can confirm to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, that that survey will continue. It enables us to develop our understanding of bullying prevalence and trends.
Amendment 502E, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, seeks to mandate the appointment of an anti-bullying lead in schools to develop an anti-bullying strategy. In my introduction to this group, I referred to the legal requirement for schools to have a behaviour policy. In response to the question from the noble Lord, Lord Storey, the law is clear that a school’s policy should include measures to prevent bullying. Schools are held to account by Ofsted and the Independent Schools Inspectorate on that.
School leaders are, and should be, free to tailor their approach and this can include deploying a lead for anti-bullying. Mandating how schools meet their obligations to prevent bullying, particularly in terms of staffing, does not recognise the need for flexibility in schools to ensure that approaches can be tailored to meet the needs of different settings and cohorts of pupils. This in no way suggests that we do not take this issue seriously and that is why the Department for Education is launching a procurement for an expert- and evidence-led review into best practice on preventing and tackling bullying. The learning from that best practice review will inform the support to be given in the longer term by the new attendance and behaviour hubs that I have already mentioned. This approach has been informed by recent engagement with a range of stakeholders, including teachers, parents, academics, charities and young people, to understand more about the issues around bullying.
Amendment 502N relates to a very important topic and it is right that the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, raises it. The department recognises that the misuse of seclusion in schools can have a significant and long-lasting effect on the pupils, staff members and parents involved, and we are committed to minimising its use in schools. Earlier this year, we held a 12-week public consultation on the draft Use of Reasonable Force and Other Restrictive Interventions in Schools guidance. We have listened to the views of the sector and taken the decision to pursue secondary legislation that mandates the recording and reporting of the use of seclusion in schools to parents. This important work is already under way. It is a significant and positive step forward for pupils and their families, and will support schools to have consistent, transparent policies on the use of reasonable force and restrictive interventions which aim to safeguard everybody within the school community.
Lord Storey
“National tutoring guarantee(1) The Secretary of State must, within six months of the passing of this Act, publish a report outlining the steps necessary to introduce a national tutoring guarantee. (2) A “national tutoring guarantee” means a statutory requirement on the Secretary of State to ensure access to small group academic tutoring for all disadvantaged children who require academic support.(3) A report published under this section must include an assessment of how best to deliver targeted academic support from qualified tutors to children—(a) from low-income backgrounds,(b) with low prior attainment,(c) with additional needs, or(d) who are young carers.(4) In preparing a report under this section, the Secretary of State must consult with—(a) headteachers,(b) teachers,(c) school leaders,(d) parents of children from low-income backgrounds,(e) children from low-income backgrounds, and(f) other individuals or organisations as the Secretary of State considers appropriate.(5) A report under this section must be laid before Parliament.(6) Within three months of a report under this section being laid before Parliament, the Secretary of State must take steps to begin implementation of the recommendations contained in the report.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment requires the Secretary of State to publish a report outlining the steps required to introduce a national tutoring guarantee, and to begin implementing its recommendations.
Lord Storey (LD)
I thought we might be breaking at quarter past, so you caught me unawares.
My Lords, Covid seems a long time ago, and I remember very well the virtual meetings we had as Members. We carried on our business, but for schools it was a very challenging time. Perhaps one of the successes of that time in terms of education was the national tutoring programme—I think it cost £1 billion—so that children could carry on their learning with a dedicated tutor online.
This amendment suggests that we look at introducing a national tutoring guarantee that is particularly aimed at children and young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. The gap between children is growing and growing, and this might be one way we can accelerate children from disadvantaged backgrounds’ learning and help them overcome that deficit. It is, if you like, the rocket fuel that will ignite their educational needs. It is easy to do. It is effective, as we found during Covid. The amendment is just asking that we look at whether this is feasible. I beg to move.
Lord Storey (LD)
I thank the Minister for her detailed reply and all Members for their contributions. I was particularly taken by the comments from the noble Earl, Lord Effingham, who said that no child should be left behind—he is absolutely right. It was a very measured response to the amendments.
It was good to receive a contribution from the noble Lord, Lord Gove. As a coalition partner, he did work on education. I was a bit surprised that he thought the idea of a tutoring programme was a Lib Dem publicity stunt. During his time as Secretary of State for Education, he focused on the attainment gap, particularly for those with special educational needs, but that dial hardly shifted—for all the work he did in that cataclysmic period, the attainment gap hardly shifted.
The noble Lord asked how poorer pupils could catch up with wealthier pupils. Sadly, if a wealthier pupil is behind—guess what?—someone might hire a tutor to help them catch up. That is what the national tutoring guarantee scheme would have done. Despite some of the comments, I still believe that it is an area that we need closely to look at—not for all children and not for ever, but as a catch-up programme for young people and children from disadvantaged backgrounds. With that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)
My Lords, I declare an interest in that I am chair of Sport Wales. I strongly support Amendment 472 in the name of my noble friend Lord O’Donnell, and I agree that it is one of the most important things that we can do. At Sport Wales, we carry out a school sport survey, and we had responses from 116,000 children who gave their opinion on sport and well-being. We do not use it only to focus the funding; it is to help them to be part of the solution, to think about how their well-being might be improved.
I have my name on Amendment 500. I make a plea for physical literacy, and for giving it the same status as literacy and numeracy. We know that, if we teach children good physical literacy skills, it helps their mental well-being. The reason why we need to do this is that we are in a time of crisis. UK Active data shows that we have a generation of children who are more likely to die before their parents because of inactivity. A press release issued by the Department for Work and Pensions on 18 June 2025 stated that one in eight young people is not in education, employment or training. I realise that that cuts across age groups and is looking at something different—but we have up to 93,000 young people between 16 and 24 on personal independence payments. This is not to criticise the Government, but the system is not sustainable in this current format. We cannot keep just pushing young people on to benefits, so we have to do something differently. This group of amendments is part of the solution to helping young people. In a Bill that has well-being in its Title, it would make sense that we measure well-being.
Lord Storey (LD)
The hour is late, so I shall be brief. This group of amendments has brought out the best in your Lordships. How people have spoken on each of these amendments I have found truly caring.
Stupidly perhaps, earlier on I was saying how the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, made me consider more closely particular issues, but I have to say that on this issue I think she is wrong. For me, the most important thing in schools is not just getting children learning; it is about how they learn about themselves, and their well-being and mental health is so important. The sooner they can get the feeling of a sense of well-being and get any mental health problems sorted, the more their learning will accelerate—not as the noble Baroness suggests. We know that about ourselves; when we feel good about something, we give of our best, do we not? I know that I do. If I feel down and miserable and things are not going right for me, I do not give of my best. So it is important to get mental health issues sorted.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
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“Review: factory shutdowns and school attendance(1) On the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must order a review of the effect of factory shutdowns on local school attendance.(2) The review must consider the merits of varying local school holiday dates to minimise the impact of factory shutdowns on school attendance.(3) The review must be published within six months of the day on which this Act is passed and must be laid before both Houses of Parliament.”
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, this is a simple amendment. I will preface my remarks by saying that, obviously, it is important that a child is in school as often as possible because when they are not in school, they are not learning. Equally, it is important that they have quality time with their parents. The opportunity to be with their mum, their dad, with both parents, is hugely important, and they learn so much from that opportunity.
As a very young teacher in Prescot, I was conscious that three large factories closed down for a period so that the factory workers could have a holiday. It often did not coincide with school holidays. As a school, we were relaxed about that because, again, we thought it important that children should be with their parents. That practice is very limited now. There are not many factories nationwide, but there are some, particularly in the north, that close down for a set period. I hope the amendment is clear that we take cognisance of that in terms of attendance issues.
On Amendment 499, there is not much to say; it speaks for itself. It is correct that all the available attendance information should be complete, accurate and consistent, and that it should always be available to parents.
I beg to move Amendment 426B.
Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and to give a nod to his amendment. I rise to speak to my Amendment 499 in this group, the purpose of which is incredibly clear: every child is entitled to an excellent education, but that does not mean that every child should receive the same education. The great joy of being born human is that we are born with rich, bright, beautiful diversity from the moment of entering this human world.
The difficulty with the Bill as set out is that it does not fully appreciate this fact or the difficulties parents have in achieving that excellence of provision for their children. In no sense is that a criticism of anybody in the system. Teachers do tremendous work, day in, day out, often in the most pressing, difficult of circumstances. This amendment is all about recognising the particularity of individual provision—not least for children and young people who may be disabled or have special educational needs—the difficulty for parents in trying to get an EHCP, and the often prohibitive cost involved, even if they can go through that time-consuming and terribly intense process.
The amendment simply asks the Secretary of State to produce a focused, “support-first” attendance code of practice that understands the particularities of those circumstances and that does not have an almost forced presumption that school is necessarily the best and only place for excellent educational provision. As I say, the amendment speaks to children, young people and parents across the piece, but it is often children who are disabled, who have special educational needs, and the parents of those children, who find themselves at the sharpest end of this current situation. That is why Amendment 499 suggests a support-focused, support-first attendance code of practice. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Lord Lucas (Con)
My Lords, I support the thrust of both my noble friend’s amendments. The Department for Education has an important role to play in helping local authorities drive up the quality of their relationship with and service for the home-educating community. The department can provide leadership on this by giving local authorities the feeling that the Government understand what they are doing, and that is the direction that the Government wish to take. That needs to be transmitted. Doing it in a way which celebrates the achievements of local authorities, and draws out the best of what is happening and makes a good example of that, is a motivating and constructive way to do this. I hope that the Government will take this direction. Local authority home-educating departments tend to be small, a bit isolated and stuck at the back end of safeguarding, and subject to all the pressures that come from that activity. The department has an important role to play in helping get things right.
On my noble friend’s second amendment, as the Government will know from my previous amendments, this is a direction I very much support. We should be looking at the child first and punishing the parent second. I listened to the Secretary of State’s speech at the launch of the Children’s Commissioner’s recent report, and that was very much the spirit that I heard then. I hope it will be reflected in the Government’s answer today.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, on Amendment 426D, the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, is right. It is important that good practice is shared between home educators and local authorities, and that the quality of home education is the best it can possibly be, and local authorities have a huge role to play in ensuring that happens. We already know—many noble Lords have mentioned particular examples—the sterling work local authorities have done with home educators.
I have a slight problem with the idea of the Secretary of State doing an annual report. We have seen dozens of other amendments decrying the fact that more information is required, but to put this annual report together would require doing exactly that—asking for all that form-filling and more information to come to the centre. There might be good practice where local authorities might wish to do a report—the amendment suggests an annual report—on the work that is going on with home educators and which could be shared with other home educators. To me, to put it in a formal way and say that the Secretary of State will produce an annual report is bureaucracy gone mad.
I am, in a sense, surprised by the second amendment. Schools are incredibly sensitive to the needs of children, particularly, as has been mentioned, those with neuro- diverse issues such as autism. They pull out all the stops to support those children. This amendment might create problems for the attendance policies of local authorities—policies that have been developed by the previous Government and this Government. We should recognise the work that goes on currently. Despite concerns, I can tell noble Lords that, in all the dealings I have had with schools, head teachers and teachers, they are more than sensitive to the needs of those pupils.
Lord Elliott of Ballinamallard (UUP)
My Lords, briefly, I have a query about proposed new subsection (2) to be inserted by Amendment 426E. I am wondering who would make the judgment around whether legal action would be required if it were to
“harm … a child’s welfare, or … on balance, … greater harm … a child’s education than if the legal action was not pursued”.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Storey. In my experience, schools have been very good at making the assessments and dealing with young people’s difficulties. The difficulty sometimes is in the relationship between the school and the authorities—I find that that can be problematic.
I am not clear about supporting the amendment because of that proposed subsection, as I am not sure who would make that judgment. Who would make the judgment as to whether the child or young person is doing that deliberately, or whether it is due to their mental health state or some other reason? I am keen to know who would make that judgment.
Baroness Berridge (Con)
My Lords, I had not anticipated speaking until the next group. I declare an interest as a senior research fellow at Regent’s Park College, Oxford, which is researching freedom of religion or belief in the UK. A number of Peers have entered into talking about this human right without, I think, fully appreciating its impact.
In relation to the “institution”, as it is referred to in the amendment, if this amendment were accepted, can the Minister outline where it would sit with the other out-of-school settings work that is going on, because I think it would sit as an out-of-school setting? I do not think that they are charities, otherwise they would already have safeguarding responsibilities. Could there, in some respects, be good unintended consequences of the amendment, in that we take an out-of-school setting and bring it into the safeguarding world, with DBS checks, et cetera?
Freedom of religion or belief is not an absolute right. It is sometimes put into a debate as if it cannot be curtailed. It is important to remember that the children to whom we have been referring also have the right to freedom of religion or belief. Parents have the right to bring up their children in the faith that they wish them to have, but that does not mean an immersive experience that does not allow a child to exercise their right to know, through a broad and balanced curriculum, about the world and nation that they are growing up in and about other faiths and humanist and other belief systems. This is a very difficult world—not just in the Jewish context but in the context of Christianity, other faiths and some atheistic traditions—in which to try to shield a child from knowledge so that they never choose a different type of Jewishness or a different religion for themselves.
I hope that, whatever situation we end up in with regard to these schools, we bear in mind that these children have freedom of religion or belief and should have an education that enables them to exercise that right fully. I hope that that will be part of the considerations and the engagement with the community, as we come to a position on these institutions. It is accepted in the amendment that they are institutions of some category, not some kind of faith space.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I was head of a Church of England primary school and my daughter went to a Jewish school. I am conscious that, in my home city of Liverpool, one-third of the schools are faith schools. I want to reflect on what various noble Lords have said, and I want to speak very carefully because I am still considering everything that has been said. I have found it, at times, quite challenging.
Let me deal with an issue that I do not find challenging, which is my Amendment 451. Children who are suspended from school are the responsibility of the school, while pupils who are permanently excluded from school are the responsibility of the local authority. Secondary schools that have pupil referral units, called PRUs, are often able to put suspended students into the referral unit. I have visited many of them and been astounded and impressed by how they have supported students. Instances of expulsion—permanent exclusions, as we now say—are very limited.
Let us remember that young people who are permanently excluded from school often have severe behavioural issues, which perhaps could have been picked up when they were younger and perhaps could have been supported in a different way. Many of them have severe behavioural problems.
Many—quite a high percentage, I think, and certainly over 80%—have special needs. They are the very young people who should not be excluded from school; they should be in school but, clearly, schools have a right to teach, and pupils have a right to learn. When they are excluded from school, local authorities may put them into what we call alternative provision. There are two types of alternative provision. There is alternative provision that is registered, which means that it is inspected from time to time by Ofsted. I have visited two alternative providers and been incredibly impressed by what I have seen. Many local authorities choose to put permanently excluded pupils not into a registered provider but into an unregistered one. Why? Because it is much, much cheaper. That is no way to treat a young person, no way at all.
Some of those unregistered providers do not keep a register. The young person comes and goes. There are no proper qualifications among the so-called teaching staff, et cetera, et cetera. As I have mentioned in debates in this Chamber, that is not to say that some unregistered providers are not very good, but it is still no way to treat a young person. This amendment is very simple. All it says is that any alternative provider—those schools or units, because when we talk about a school, we are probably talking about a school of 20 pupils—should be registered. We should know that there are qualified staff, qualified support and quality learning for those pupils. We should know that all the things we expect take place and that there will be, from time to time, Ofsted reports on those schools. I have looked at many of those Ofsted reports and been incredibly impressed by the work those alternative providers do. That is the simple request: that we should not allow the most vulnerable children and young people in our society to be treated in this way. They have the right to go to a proper institution—a proper school.
I now come to the other amendments. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris—it used to be “I agree with Nick.” I am sorry, I am not comparing the noble Baroness with Nick Clegg. I want children—young people—to have an education, whether in a school or, in some cases, at home, which is broad and balanced, which equips them for life, which they enjoy and which brings out their best qualities. I hope that the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, does not mind me mentioning this, but I remember that several years ago, she came to me in a discussion about a particular faith school—a Christian school, actually—where the pupils were treated in quite a challenging way. One boy, for example, happened to tell the school that he was gay, so he was pushed into a cupboard and locked in there until he came out and announced that he was not gay. I am not going to mention the school, but I think it employed its own inspection regimes. Because it was in charge of its own inspection regimes, that company—
Baroness Berridge (Con)
I am not sure that the noble Lord is remembering the situation accurately, so it would be best in future to consult before referring to something that I think was many years ago. I say that with no disrespect to the noble Lord’s comments.
Lord Storey (LD)
I raise it only because it is a shocking condemnation of a schooling situation where young people cannot be themselves or have a proper education. I respect different religions and their rights; as I say, my daughter goes to a Jewish school where there are Hebrew lessons, the children are taken out at various times and there is a whole range of different faiths. The children’s faiths are respected and there are opportunities for them to develop learning and an understanding of their faith. That is all good and positive.
I do not have an issue with any particular faith bringing up children and young people in that faith, but I do want to see those children and young people have schooling that is registered and/or inspected. That is all we should ask for as a society. Anything that does not carry on the tradition of this country—one of the most successful multicultural and multifaith nations in the world—or develop what we believe in, we need to legislate against.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, I will keep my comments brief. We have had an excellent debate and these Benches support the aims of this clause: to ensure that children learn in settings, where they provide all or the majority of a child’s education, that are safe and regulated. I have a couple of technical points of clarification that might win the prize today for the most boring question asked of the Minister. I confess that I have read and reread the Bill and the policy notes and still do not quite follow it.
Section 92 of the Education and Skills Act 2008, which this clause amends, includes institutions that offer part-time education within the definition of an independent educational institution. I am unclear what the status of those institutions will be in future and why they do not form part of the revised definition. If the Minister wants to write, that would be fine. I am sure there is a simple and obvious answer that I have missed.
The regulation-making powers in this clause, if I have understood them correctly, are much wider than those in the 2008 Act. New Sections 92(3)(c) and 92(3)(d) seem to give the Secretary of State unlimited flexibility to redefine full-time education without proper scrutiny in Parliament. I suspect the Minister will tell me that it will use the affirmative procedure, but all of us know that that is very restricted scrutiny.
I am very pleased that my noble friend Lord Lucas has raised unregistered alternative provision, which benefits from neither safeguarding nor educational oversight, in his Amendment 427. It is extraordinary, as other noble Lords have reflected, that, rather like unregulated provision, we put very vulnerable children and young people in unregistered provision without any safeguards available. I agree with him that we would ideally have no unregistered provision but, at a minimum—this also applies to Amendment 451 from the noble Lord, Lord Storey—we would have some safeguarding regulation of those settings, even if children were going there for a short period. There is always the infamous “Dave the car mechanic” with whom some children apparently spend time. We should at least have appropriate safeguarding checks and I am interested in what the Minister thinks about that.
I now turn to the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Lucas, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and the noble Lord, Lord Glasman, all of whom have raised issues that can arise for children whose parents choose an educational path that aligns with their religious tradition. The Minister and the whole House have heard both sides of the argument very clearly today and the valid concerns that have been raised by faith groups about the impact of the Government’s legislation on their communities. Those were eloquently put in particular by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford and the noble Lord, Lord Glasman—who I promise we will still listen to however much he speaks.
I close by aligning myself with my noble friend Lady Morgan of Coates. We want to retain what I think the noble Lord, Lord Glasman, described as the “precious” tolerance that many of us, including my own family, have benefited from this country welcoming us with, but also to ensure that the rights of every child are upheld. I hope very much that the Minister will put her not inconsiderable abilities to the task.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
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Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, is right: there is a crisis in the supply of teachers, not just the numbers but also, as he said, in specialism. There is also the great worry that we are seeing the lowest number of people wanting to go into teaching and the highest number of teachers leaving early. But his solution is not my solution.
I have said in this House on many occasions that the most important thing in a child’s life is the quality of their teacher. We do not, as a society, value teachers. Having a qualification does not make you a good teacher. We can remember that, in the 30s, 40s and maybe even the 50s, someone with a university degree would come out of university and think they could teach. You cannot always. Occasionally, they could do it. Those who could not do it at secondary modern schools quickly tried to transfer to grammar schools, where they thought it might be easier. As the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, rightly said, if you have in the playground or on the sports field some challenging pupils haring around and you do not have an understanding of child development or behaviour management, you cannot cope. You would not, for example, expect someone who has a law degree to suddenly step into a court; you just would not have it. We have to work out how on earth we can ensure that people want to become teachers.
It is not just about training to become a teacher; we have to support them when they are in teaching. It is not just about salary, although that helps. It is about continuous professional development. It is about the campaigns about workload that many of us have constantly gone on about. I think that is a simple thing to solve. Teachers have said to me any number of times, “If I could just get on with the job of teaching without having to do all these other tasks”.
That does not stop visitors coming into school. It does not stop experts who have a particular knowledge being linked to a school and coming in from time to time to talk to the children. By the way, high-level teaching assistants can teach in schools. Teaching assistants at level 2 can teach, as long as they are supervised by the teacher. Maybe we should be encouraging teaching assistants to go on to become qualified teachers. We cannot have in our schools a situation where qualified teachers are undervalued and where we increasingly think the answer is to bring in unqualified so-called experts.
Turning to my amendment on bullying, I am a bit surprised that it is in this group—I think that the issue is covered in one of the later groups as well. It is worrying that currently 35% of 10 to 15 year-olds have experienced bullying of some sort. In 2023, 1.5 million children suffered bullying. Bullying happens in all sorts of ways. It can be physical, it can be emotional, it can be verbal and it can be cyberbullying. We seem to think that the important thing is to sort out mobile phones, which will stop bullying and make pupils more attentive to learning. I have a great deal of sympathy with that, as we probably all do, and mobile phones can increasingly be used for bullying pupils as well.
When a pupil is bullied, a number of things happen. It is not just physical, where there might be bruising or whatever; it is also emotional, of course. It leads to increasing absence from school. Children are frightened to go to school, because the bully might be there, so that affects their school attendance and we have talked at length about how important school attendance is. It will affect their grades when they come to do their exams. They will not be handing in homework, and so it goes on. We have to ensure that we take the whole issue of bullying seriously, which I know the Government do, and the amendment spells out some of the things that we need to do. I hope, when we come back to this at a later stage, to be able to look at it in more detail.
Baroness Barran (Con)
My Lords, this group has elicited another excellent debate and, like other noble Lords, on these Benches we remain unclear what problem the Government are trying to solve. The Government’s own data shows that the percentage of teachers without a formal teaching qualification has been pretty stable in both primary and secondary schools for the past 10 years. It sits at about 1% in primary and between 1.5% and 2% in secondary, which is about 6,000 teachers out of a workforce of over 450,000. We are talking about tiny numbers, largely in specialist subjects, which has not changed over a very long time. I could not find—and I did look—any evidence that suggests that teachers without a formal teaching qualification provide lower-quality education.
That is not to disagree in any way with any noble Lord who has spoken already. We know that the quality of the teacher at the front of the classroom is the single biggest and most important influence on the education that a child receives. The Government have argued that one would not want to be seen by an unqualified lawyer or dentist. As other noble Lords have said, any of us, if asked, “Would you like your child to be taught by a qualified or unqualified teacher?”, would say, “A qualified teacher”. But as the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, said, if asked, “Would you like to be taught by someone with a physics degree and 10 years in the industry, or someone with a degree in English and QTS?”, I think, to be fair, the answers might be different. Amendments 437 and 437A in the names of my noble friends Lord Holmes of Richmond and Lord Agnew of Oulton have my support, because they just apply common sense, focusing on the combination of specific subject expertise at degree level, in the case of my noble friend Lord Agnew’s amendment, and demonstrable competence in teaching.
Now, having listened to the debate, I am beginning to wonder whether, given the tiny number of unqualified teachers in the system, this whole clause is not a bit of a red herring. We have a number of routes: there is the assessment-only route to get QTS, where a school or initial teacher training—SCITT—is able to award qualified teacher status to someone who has GCSEs in English and maths and a degree, and who demonstrates suitability; they obviously read my noble friend Lord Agnew’s amendment. If we have an assessment-only route, we have higher-level teaching assistants, which the noble Lord, Lord Storey, referred to, and we have teachers from FE colleges with QTLS, rather than QTS, who can currently teach in secondary schools—if all those routes are followed, maybe we can close what I argue is an inconsequential gap in a way that will allow the Government to say that everyone now has QTS, but it does not really change anything on the ground.
The noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who is not in his place, talked earlier about what the public care about. I think they care about Governments focusing on real issues rather than this, which feels like a slightly confected problem.
My amendments in this group follow a familiar pattern. By calling for the clause not to stand part of the Bill, I am offering the Government the logical, simple course of action. There just is no need for this clause, unless the Minister can give us evidence of the harm being done or the lower outcomes for children from teachers without QTS.
The other amendments seek to limit the damage done to schools from the clause as drafted, particularly the schools that we all care about, which the noble Baroness, Lady Bousted, and my noble friend Lord Agnew talked about: schools in the most disadvantaged communities. My Amendment 436C would exempt shortage subjects from the constraints of the clause, and my Amendment 436B would give schools five years rather than one, in which time a teacher would have to achieve a teaching qualification. That is particularly important—I hope the Minister will comment on this—for special schools, where the percentage of teachers without a teaching qualification is often higher.
I have added my name to Amendment 436A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, which limits this measure to core subjects in the national curriculum. The noble Baroness spoke with enormous experience and insight into the potential impacts of the measure, particularly in relation to technical and vocational qualifications.
The noble Lord, Lord Storey, gave the Government the answer to at least a start on reducing bullying in schools by introducing a smartphone ban, which I am hoping the Minister’s new ministerial colleague will persuade her of, because apparently in another life he thought it was a good idea.
The issue that the clause raises is a point of principle, again, about autonomy and accountability. Like all the others, it is easy to say that the clause on its own will not be too harmful; that may or may not be true, but, overall, the Bill is fundamentally centralising and will undo the ingredients that have improved English education so much over the past 14 years. We on these Benches deeply oppose the principle of clawing back the discretion that we have given to school and trust leaders. We remain baffled why the Government want to undo what has worked well and do not focus instead on areas that deserve their attention. We would rather see the expansion of freedoms to maintained schools than their withdrawal from academies.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Sewell of Sanderstead, gave us an inspiring scene-setter for the next groups of amendments that we are discussing. It was a taster of why the decisions that we make on this Bill matter to so many pupils and young people. This is why I urge the Government not to throw the baby out with the bath-water and, in many instances, to think again. I have my Amendment 506A in this group, which simply says that, before the Bill is passed or enacted, the Government’s own curriculum review needs to be published and consulted on.
The legislation before us requires that all schools follow the national curriculum, yet there is no agreed national curriculum. Instead, the Government want to review that curriculum, which is fair enough, but that review will not even be published before we are asked to vote “blind”. It is simply wrong for a Bill to force schools to follow a particular curriculum when we have not been told what is in it: cart before horse and all that.
More broadly, we have spent a long, long time on this Bill so far. Outside of here, the Bill is informally known as the Schools Bill, yet we have managed not to discuss the whole reason for schools—to educate children into the world of knowledge—until this point. Educating children requires us to agree on what the content of that education consists of. The curriculum is not, or should not be, an afterthought. It is key: the raison d’être for schools as vehicles used by one generation to pass on to the next the canonical knowledge of humanity. When taught well, it is our greatest tool for social mobility. It is neither a fixed body of knowledge nor frozen in aspic. It changes over time. It is often contested and can be challenged, but it is a key component of educating the young.
The argument epitomised by this group of amendments asks whether every school needs to follow the same curriculum that every school must follow, yet we do not know what curriculum we are talking about, despite how important the curriculum is. The Government recognise that, which is why they set up the review. Taking three of the amendments we have here gives us some sort of meat on what the curriculum bone might be or what the arguments might be. One calls for financial education in primary schools, which we have already heard motivated. There is one to come on education for growing food and food preparation and another on education for voting.
You might say that those curriculum-related amendments are “hobby-horse” amendments. I am not saying that in an insulting way: they suggest the interests of the people putting them forward. They could all be creative and positive in a particular head’s hands with certain groups of pupils, depending on how they were used. If you get any group of teachers, parents, adults or indeed pupils together at any time and ask what should go into the curriculum, there are always very lively and creative discussions about priorities, what should matter, and so on and so forth.
The point I am making is that, even at the best of times, the curriculum is something that is a source of dispute. It can be liberating, transformative and inspiring, but it can be—and we all know this to be true—overly ideological, propagandist, politicised and used as a device for social engineering. As I said at Second Reading, I worry when Professor Becky Francis says that her curriculum review will look at what is taught through a “social justice lens”, with an emphasis on inclusivity. I am afraid I think of some of the more divisive aspects of identity politics and some of the arguments that have been had over critical race theory in schools, decolonisation and so on. It fills me with dread.
This Government have already had to pick up the pieces of curriculum mis-steps in relation to RSHE, as parents across the UK have become shocked to discover that their children were covering highly sexualised and age-inappropriate content and that some schools were affirming children in their chosen gender identities, a form of social transitioning now broadly discredited. I commend the Government for tackling that and taking it on: the point I am making is that all of that was inspired by centralised curriculum diktats. I therefore think we have to consider what the centralised curriculum diktat for all schools will be after the curriculum review.
Professor Francis has apparently said that the review will look at the alleged problem that the curriculum is too heavy. My problem is that we are now being asked to vote on legislation in a “curriculum lite” way, with the curriculum absent, despite a hugely significant mandate that all schools must follow this curriculum.
We are told that the curriculum review will address barriers to attainment, but so far the hints we have been given into the review look to be blaming exams and a curriculum that is overly academic for creating too much stress and anxiety for pupils—something that I completely disagree with. This hints at a new assessment regime that will be less stressful, and I am afraid that that fuels genuine concerns among educators that the curriculum review might amount to a recipe for lower academic standards. As we have seen in both Scotland and Wales, which have completely upended their curriculum in recent years, attainment has plummeted, sometimes below the OECD average.
I have not yet decided whether the Bill’s Clause 47 is totally wrong-headed and should be dropped, although I thought that the noble Baroness, Lady Evans of Bowes Park, made a very good case that was worth considering. I am sold on the idea of a common entitlement for all children, and I am not opposed in principle to a national curriculum for all. But the Government should not be rigid and there should be more flexibility. Amendment 444 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, would allow for that, so I am very interested in that.
However, none of this is the point of my amendment. This Bill says that all schools follow a national curriculum but will not tell us what is in it before we are being asked to rubber-stamp it. It reminds me of one FE student I taught. He was a bit of a cheeky chap. He missed a deadline for his GCSE and he said out loud in the class: “Can’t you just pass me, miss? I’ll show you the essay when I’ve written it later”. I thought that was a bit of a cheek, and I am afraid the same cheek is being displayed by the Government. I urge them to get their essay in on time, or at least to allow us to not have to vote until we have seen the essay.
Lord Storey (LD)
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, for that. It has made me think, and I will come back to some of the points she made.
In the 1970s, we did not have a national curriculum and schools could teach whatever they liked. There was only one subject they had to teach, and that was RE. Along came the William Tyndale School in London, which decided that its curriculum was going to be progressively radical and its teaching methods very child-centric. Relationships at the school broke down completely between staff and children, and the Government of the day had to step in. Then came along a Mr Ken Clarke—the noble Lord, Lord Clarke—with his national curriculum, which said that we as a society have a duty to spell out what we expect our school children to learn. The national curriculum was born. But it is not a national curriculum, because it is not taught in Northern Ireland, Scotland or Wales, and, as we know, it is not taught in over half of our schools, because they can choose what they want to teach.
These amendments make us question what we should teach. Do we think we should teach financial education in school? I think we should, but why should it be left to an individual school to decide that? Should we not, as a society, decide that? I firmly believe that water safety should be taught in schools, but it is not down to me; it is down to individual academies to make that decision. Should we insist that every primary school pupil should have swimming lessons and be able to swim 25 metres before they leave primary school? I think that is really important—I wonder how many other people think that is important. But it is not down to us; it is down to individual academies.
I welcome the curriculum review. I did not put down an amendment saying that water safety should be included because I am not carrying out the curriculum review, but the organisation I am a patron of has written and given evidence as to why that should be the case, as I think a number of people have for financial education. We wait to see what the review suggests.
I believe that one of the strengths of academies has been that they have built flexibility into the curriculum of their choice. I am just making the case—it will not be for me to decide—that there could be an opportunity for all schools to have some flexibility when deciding their curriculums.
I will end by discussing what the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, said. She is right, but each individual academy that is deciding its own curriculum does not come to us and ask whether we agree with it. They just get on with it—they are just allowed to do it. Maybe the noble Baroness is right that there should be a political decision about what is taught in our national curriculum. That is a very interesting thought, and I will leave the Committee with it.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
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Baroness Bousted (Lab)
My Lords, I do not want to prolong the debate, but I have to answer the charge that it is simply the academies that are improving standards in education, and maintained schools are not. Research in the area does not show that to be the case. Since 2017, I think, the Education Policy Institute has had a yearly look at the performance of academies and state schools. Last week I looked at the one for this year and, although I cannot remember the exact figures, the general conclusion was the same that it has been every year: there are some very good academy chains and there are some poor academy chains; there are some very good maintained schools, and some are doing less well. When you look at the results in the round, there is no premium, overall, for the academy sector.
The noble Lord may shake his head, but I will happily write to him with the research. I do not want to prolong things, but I just could not sit here and take that remark again. I thought we had discussed it over dinner; now I am saying it in the Committee so that it is on the record. It is simply untrue to say that all the improvement is in one sector of schools and that there is no improvement in maintained schools. That simply is not the case; the evidence and the research simply do not support that.
Lord Storey (LD)
I shall briefly talk generally about all these amendments, which I and my party are not supporting. I ought to declare an interest as a governor of the King’s Academy, Liverpool. I was there at the beginning, when academies were started for a particular reason by the then Labour Government in very deprived communities and were then seized on by the coalition Government, including by David Laws from my party. We would sit through endless meetings, where there were always attacks on the maintained sector, about how wonderful the academies were. I never, during those early days—or even recently—heard the noble Lord, Lord Nash, who is not in his place, or the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, who is not in his place, say, “This academy is doing a really good job but, guess what? This maintained school is doing a really good job”. I never heard any criticism of any other academy. People can nod their heads, but if you look at the record, that was the case.
I remember us pushing, for example, that we should inspect multi-academies. Oh no, we could not do that. I remember trying to suggest that we have an external look at the finances of multi-academy trusts—“Oh no, you can’t do that”. Thank goodness, we have moved on considerably since those days, and I pay tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, because, during her time as Education Minister, she went to visit maintained schools, and her language and the language of her party has changed considerably. I very much appreciate that. If there is a breach—I am not sure how serious or how weak the breaches are—the Secretary of State should be looking at it and making the final decision. It should not be just left to the academy or the multi-academy trusts themselves.
One recalls that “Panorama” documentary about how proprietors of academies—it was a limited number, thank goodness—were ensuring that some of the work for their academies was going to companies that they owned and that were their own companies. So a repair or construction company would get the work from that academy. It would not go out for tender. There was a big scandal on “Panorama” about it. If that is wrong, action needs to be taken. I do not know what these breaches are, or how serious or wide they are, but it should not be just left to the academy to sort out. It should be sorted out by the Secretary of State and by her Minister in the House of Lords.
The Minister of State, Department for Education (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)
My Lords, I turn to the amendments in this group tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. Before I get into the detail of the clause and the amendments, I say to her that we believe that she may have been reading from an old version of the policy notes, because they were updated when they came to the House of Lords, and the policy notes are therefore correct in relation to the items that she was talking about. If she wants to check whether that is the case and drop me a line, I would be more than happy to follow that up if it is not the case.
This group covers the clause relating to ensuring effective oversight and accountability of academy trusts. Clause 49 introduces a power for the Secretary of State to issue a direction to an academy trust where it is failing to comply with its legal duties or acting unreasonably when exercising these powers. Currently, when a trust is in breach of a legal duty, the Secretary of State can only issue a termination warning notice, which may be disproportionate for significant but isolated breaches. This measure will allow the Secretary of State to direct academy trusts to ensure that they meet their legal responsibilities and to address instances of unreasonable conduct where necessary.
It offers a clear and proportionate route to ensure compliance. If a trust does not respond to a direction, the Secretary of State may apply to the courts to ensure the matter is resolved, reflecting similar powers already in place for maintained schools. This will be used, where appropriate, to help implement key provisions in the Bill, such as those relating to curriculum, admissions and uniform, if necessary.
Most academy trusts perform well and meet their legal obligations. However, where they fall short, the Government must be able to act in a targeted and proportionate way. Clause 49 allows for early engagement, proportionate intervention and enforcement through the courts only when necessary.
Amendment 445ZB, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, proposes a statutory requirement for an annual statement to Parliament on the use of this power. The Government are of course fully in favour of transparency but already publish directions and other notices on GOV.UK in a timely and detailed manner. I put on record the Government’s commitment to maintaining this approach to transparency. An annual report would duplicate this process and add no further value, while adding an unnecessary administrative burden.
Amendments 444A, 445ZC and 445ZD, all in the name of the noble Baroness, propose replacing the Secretary of State’s direction-making power with a notice procedure. These amendments replace the Government’s clear and authoritative direction-making power with a more convoluted system of self-policing duties and a notice procedure. In practice, it risks delaying intervention.
Effective oversight cannot rely on academy trusts policing themselves. The Secretary of State must retain the ability to act swiftly and decisively when serious concerns arise, particularly where trusts fail to meet their legal obligations or act unreasonably when exercising those duties. The notice procedure is very similar to the power as drafted, except it does not include the ability to issue a direction in cases of unreasonable exercise of a power. Therefore, the clause as drafted is more effective than the proposed notice procedure. When the Secretary of State writes to a trust before she decides to issue a direction, it will outline the breach, the rationale for intervention and the suggested actions to remedy the breach, and will seek representations.
Finally in this group, Amendments 445, 444B, 444C and 445ZA tabled by noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seek to limit the scope of Clause 49. These amendments propose to restrict the Secretary of State’s ability to issue directions to cases where a specific legal duty has been breached. In doing so, they would remove the ability to intervene where a trust acts, or proposes to act, unreasonably in the exercise of its powers, even if no explicit duty has been contravened. This would narrow the intended reach of the clause.
The Government’s intention is to ensure that a proportionate intervention is possible not only when there is a clear breach of duty but also when a trust’s conduct in the use of its powers is manifestly unreasonable. However, I have heard concerns raised by noble Lords about this clause—particularly the concerns that these amendments seek to address with regard to the broad scope of the clause. I am considering potential solutions that would preserve our ability to intervene effectively while respecting the autonomy of trusts, and I look forward to bringing a solution back on Report that addresses these concerns.
On that basis, I hope the noble Baroness will feel able to withdraw her amendment.
Lord Ashcombe (Con)
My Lords, I, too, would like to speak in support of Amendment 448A, which I believe represents a significant step forward in promoting fairness within the teaching profession. Just as there are many reasons why an individual may choose not to join a political party, there are likewise numerous legitimate reasons why a teacher may opt not to join a union. Although I fully support the right of teachers to join trade unions, it is deeply concerning that many feel they must do so merely to secure access to appropriate representation when facing formal proceedings. No individual should feel compelled to join a union solely for the legal protection it affords, yet evidence from representative surveys indicates that many teachers do precisely that, joining primarily for legal support in the face of allegations.
At its core, this amendment is about one fundamental principle: teachers’ access to support in formal disciplinary or grievance proceedings should not be contingent on their politic beliefs or union membership status. At this juncture, I should declare an interest, in that my wife, who is the chair of a board of governors for a foundation school, is currently in the process of a disciplinary procedure.
The issue before us is the basic right to be accompanied. At present, this right is extended only to union members or those who can identify a suitable colleague. But what of the many teachers—an increasing number—who, for entirely valid reasons, can access neither? These are not theoretical concerns. There are teachers who prefer independent forms of support; teachers who are uncomfortable sharing sensitive or personal information with colleagues; and teachers who, as is their right, choose not to participate in collective structures. Tens of thousands of such professionals exist in our education system. They are not exempt from the formal process, yet they are expected to face them alone. This is a question of fairness.
We already recognise this principle in other sectors. Under the NHS’s maintaining high professional standards framework, doctors and dentists are entitled to be accompanied by representatives from defence organisations such as the MDU or the MPS. This has not undermined the role of unions in healthcare; rather, it has ensured that highly scrutinised professionals are not left unsupported at crucial moments. It is only right that teachers, who work to and conduct similar levels of public and institutional scrutiny, should be afforded the same basic protection.
We debated a similar issue during the passage of the Employment Rights Bill, and I anticipate that the same concern may be raised again today—namely, that widening accompaniment rights risk “lawyering up” disciplinary procedures. With respect, that is a mischaracterisation of both the amendment and the current legal framework. The law already imposes clear limitations on the role of a companion in such hearings, and this amendment would not alter those parameters. It would not introduce legal representation into the room.
Indeed, it is worth noting that, under the current law, a teacher who is a union member may be accompanied by a lawyer, provided that individual holds union officer status, without the need for employer approval. Yet a teacher outside a union has no statutory right even to a trained non-legal companion. That is the imbalance this amendment seeks to address.
As unions themselves often emphasise, far from escalating matters, the presence of a trained companion often helps to prevent conflict, reduce procedural errors and resolve issues before they spiral. This is about fairness, not formality; it is also about extending protection, not creating confrontation. It is not about undermining unions; it is about extending a basic protection to all teachers regardless of their affiliations.
This is a modest and reasonable proposal that would not diminish the role of unions. Rather, it acknowledges that freedom of association includes freedom not to associate. No teacher should be disadvantaged for choosing an alternative form of professional support. If we believe in individual liberty and procedural fairness, we should not turn a blind eye to a group of professionals facing complex, often career-defining moments, unsupported.
This amendment would impose no additional financial burden on schools. On the contrary, it is likely to result in savings in both time and resources that would otherwise be spent on facilitating teachers to bring colleagues to hearings.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 448A in my name. I do so as a former membership secretary of the NUT and a former member of the National Association of Head Teachers. I could not have said it any better than the noble Lords, Lord Hampton and Lord Ashcombe. This is not an anti-union amendment, far from it. It is an equal opportunities issue, where the teacher has the right to choose who they want to accompany them if they have to face a disciplinary hearing.
Kickstart Scheme
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Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)
We are encouraging employers to make opportunities available for vulnerable young people. Our Jobcentre Plus work coaches are identifying those people and working with them through a support package to make sure that they are not excluded in any way from taking part in the Kickstart scheme. Of course, we have our wonderful stakeholders and partners working particularly closely with these young people, who we are working with too.
Lord Storey (LD) [V]
My Lords, the Minister will be aware that many unemployed young people have a particular career interest and the financial support from their family to take on an unpaid internship. This is not an option for young people from deprived communities. Have the Government considered making the Kickstart programme available to these people so they too can take an internship in their chosen career?
Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)
I think I answered that question when I answered the question of the noble Baroness, Lady Stuart. As I said, I will take that back to the department, write to the noble Lord and the noble Baroness and place a copy in the Library. However, as it stands, there are no plans to change the eligibility.
Child Poverty Unit
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Lord Henley
My Lords, on the measures that the previous Labour Government set forward, we found that in a recession the number of children allegedly in poverty went down, and when incomes were rising, it went up. They were not measuring the right thing. On current measures, using households below average income surveys, we have seen 100,000 fewer children in relative low-income households and 300,000 fewer people in relative poverty. Those figures are before housing costs. We are making progress, and I made it clear in my original Answer that the original measures were not the right way forward and that the child poverty unit was not the right approach.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, the Minister surely agrees that no child should live in poverty. He might not have any figures but the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimates that we will see a 50% increase in child poverty in the UK. That is a shocking figure. Perhaps I could be helpful and turn to my area of responsibility: education. The pupil premium has been immensely successful in helping disadvantaged children. Would the Minister let us know, perhaps in writing, whether the electronic eligibility checking system has increased or decreased the number of children who have now been given the pupil premium? I realise that this is not his area.
Poverty
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Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Bird, for arranging this debate and for his powerful and passionate speech. It is good to have passion and long may he do so. I also echo all the sentiments expressed by my noble friend Lady Sharp. When I made my maiden speech in this House it was my noble friend who spoke after me, so I am pleased that I am here now to speak after her. Her contribution in the debate was, in my view, a master class in education; she absolutely nailed it—the secondary school curriculum, vocational education and, of course, the constant churn and changes of policies from successive Governments.
Many noble Lords have said how fitting it is that we have this debate, as yesterday our new PM, on the steps of Downing Street, made some very important commitments. Poverty is real but not essential—yes, we can do something about it, but we must tackle the root causes. To reduce poverty, there is no magic wand; no single response will succeed on its own. Jobs, housing, health, home circumstances, and the choice of individuals themselves all play a key part. But, for me, it has to be education and—as the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said—it has to be early years. I have always believed that if we can get education and parenting right, ensure that we develop the talents and abilities of children at a young age, ensure that our education does not leave anyone behind, and identify at an early age any special needs that children might have, then we are on the road to an inclusive society where we can be rid of poverty.
I want to focus on education and home life as the most important factor in reducing poverty. I agree with noble Lords who have spoken before me and decry the prevalence of poverty in this country as a completely unacceptable state of affairs. I am glad that we are able to have an open and frank discussion about poverty and its causes and effects. Not only is it a terrible indictment on the UK that almost a quarter of the population are living in a state of relative or absolute poverty, but it is simply not acceptable. It must be acknowledged that having so many people in Britain living in a state of poverty is a tremendous strain on resources. Not only would reducing that number be a great success in terms of human value and living standards, it would—as the noble Lord, Lord Bird, intimated—reduce resources for other needs.
Poverty is a vicious cycle, and one that will require concerted effort and careful planning to break. Overall poverty levels have stayed fairly flat for the last 25 years but are predicted to rise if we do nothing. In 2015, the Government reported that 2.3 million children are living in poverty. Some, such as Barnardo’s, claim that this is a rather conservative estimate. A Joseph Rowntree Foundation report on child poverty talks of 3.9 million children in 2014-15 being in poverty. However, even if we are to accept the government figure as accurate, 2.3 million is an inexcusable number of young people facing a very difficult start in life. The poverty of these children impacts on their education and school lives greatly, leaving them at a significant educational disadvantage. In fact, there is a 28% disparity between the number of impoverished students achieving five A* to C grades at GCSE level and their wealthier peers, according to Department for Education figures. This is not to mention the other challenges that children from poverty-stricken families face: a higher rate of chronic illness, far fewer opportunities to engage in extra-curricular activities, and pressure to earn money to the detriment of their education, to name but a few. A recent report on the use of crisis support grants claimed that more than half of children receiving these grants believed that their situation was affecting their physical and mental health. It went on to say that two-thirds of families receiving these grants had to cut back on gas, electricity and food, which will of course affect the children even further.
Let me highlight how, through education—particularly in early years—and supporting parents, we can start to reduce poverty. If a child, at the age of four to five years old—the age that they start compulsory education and enter reception class—is academically behind or, say, a complete non-reader, that academic gap, that social gap, gets wider and wider as they progress through mainstream education. As we have seen, they are less likely to do well in their GCSEs, less likely to go on to sixth form or college, less likely to have a successful apprenticeship and, of course, less likely to go on to university and less likely to get a job, let alone a well-paid job. There we have the vicious circle—it starts, and then their children, and their children, often face the same problems. But if you break the circle through education and parenting, you create not a vicious circle but a virtuous circle.
The early years of a child’s life are critically the most important factor in their development and have a significant impact on their future life chances and well-being; poverty has the greatest influence on children’s outcomes. Positive early-years experiences and education give children their best start in life. A positive home environment can have a significant impact on reducing poverty; the home environment is probably the most significant aspect of a child’s early life, and it decides a child’s future path. Midwives, health visitors, GPs, children’s centres, family and parent support workers, outreach workers, child carers and teachers all have a key role in supporting families during childhood. High-quality, early childhood services have wide-ranging benefits for children and are among the most important determinants of positive outcomes for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Well-resourced, high-quality provision for children and their families during early years has a huge influence on a child’s developmental outcomes, including their attainment when they go to school and in their future adult life. It is also cost-effective: the New Economics Foundation found in research that it carried out that, for every pound invested in Sure Start centres or children’s centres, £4.60 of social value is generated. Well-planned and appropriate early intervention helps to promote social and emotional development, which improves mental and physical health, educational attainment and employment opportunities.
Probably the most important thing we did as a country to support parents and help them in nurturing and supporting their children was the development of Sure Start centres—a complete package for children and families. They were originally set up in the most deprived and disadvantaged communities. They were enormously successful, and children’s centres became the order of the day. Along came the recession, leading to massive cuts to local government funding and the functions and provisions of the centres got reduced or they were closed. In hindsight, what folly.
If there is one thing we can do to reduce poverty it is to ensure that the most disadvantaged communities once again have full-blown Sure Start centres. As the Children’s Commissioner says in her excellent discussion paper Changing the Odds in the Early Years—a must-read for everyone—
“Government has the potential to play a powerful role in encouraging and challenging local authorities to put forward proposals to strengthen support for children, including to reduce poverty in the early years. From the Northern Powerhouse to seaside towns there is an opportunity to put support for children to improve outcomes at the heart of regeneration and devolution”.
I say, “Hear, hear”.
Scotland: Underoccupancy Charge
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The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (Lord Hill of Oareford) (Con)
It is the turn of the Liberal Democrats.
Lord Storey (LD)
My Lords, I was shocked to discover that on Merseyside councils have left unused hundreds of thousands of pounds of discretionary housing payments. Will the Minister comment on that? Does he think that perhaps that money could be rolled over to future years or used in authorities where it would be used?
Lord Freud
My Lords, we are currently looking very hard at what the support should be in the next year and possibly beyond so that we will have a smooth transition for this policy. One interesting thing is that there is a real economic mismatch, which I have talked about, in what we are building for people: we have 60% of people requiring single bedrooms and we are building only 13% in any one year. There is an economic mismatch so the signals must be corrected and that is one thing that this policy does.
Queen’s Speech
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Lord Storey
My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley of Knighton, on his witty, excellent and informative speech. I very much agree with his comments about the importance of regional arts organisations, not just as a seed bed for national organisations but for success and outstanding contributions in their own right.
Almost a century ago, Lloyd George’s coalition Government of 1918 had the foresight to legislate for the establishment of nursery schools. Fast forward to the present, and this Government are making one of the biggest measures ever introduced to help parents with childcare costs, providing almost £1 billion in extra support for families. Today, we are about to witness this coalition Government bring about significant changes in early-years education, as outlined in the consultative document, More Great Childcare. These policies will make significant improvements to enhance the quality of childcare and early-years provision. But of course, as is always the case when a report is published for consultation, we all home in on one aspect of that report—in this case, the staff-to-child ratios. In the clamour to be heard, other important proposals in the document seem to be lost. Indeed, we reached the absurd situation where it was even suggested that opposition to enlarged ratios was in fact about leadership battles and not about sound educational and early-years development. I believe that I heard the phrase “showing a bit of leg” had been used.
The childcare report has picked up on many of the recommendations in Professor Nutbrown’s excellent independent review, Foundations for Quality, published last summer. Almost a year later, the Government are responding to that report. Raising the status and quality of early-years provision is one of the most important educational developments we can undertake.
I personally have never been comfortable with the term “childminder”. Childcare is not about minding children, it is about providing qualified people to deliver opportunities for young people to explore, play and learn. In medieval times, when agricultural workers went out to work in the fields, they were provided with a basket in which to place the baby and a peg from which to hang it. Childcare is not a peg on which to mind a child: rather, it is an opportunity to provide education while parents and guardians are at work.
In this way, the question of ratios should be discussed and considered in a rational manner, with decisions being made on an educational basis. I have learnt that so far the majority of the responses to the consultation from individuals and the main professional organisations say how important it is educationally to preserve the status quo in terms of existing ratio structures. In my view, just as class sizes improve learning, child ratios in early years and childcare improve the quality of that provision. I am not interested in league tables which show what other countries do; I am more interested in what is best for our children. Improving quality education does not come from increasing ratios. In a pre-school or nursery setting, you only have to have one child with special needs or special learning difficulties for the staffing ratios to become very apparent.
The Children and Families Bill will come to your Lordships’ House in the next few weeks. Again, this is a hugely important piece of legislation. Indeed, it is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to deal with a number of important issues. I congratulate the Government on bringing forward the Bill. I particularly praise the former Minister of State for Children and Families, Sarah Teather, who did much of the spadework when she was the responsible Minister. The Bill will have a huge impact on improving the lives of children and families from adoption to flexible working and special educational needs provision.
Turning to mainstream schooling, the public consultation on the draft national curriculum has been completed and we await the outcome of that process. For me, any national curriculum must ensure first and foremost that children and young people are numerate and literate. Yes, children must learn to spell correctly from an early age and, yes, grammar is important. In mathematics, children must know their number bonds and their times tables—yes, even up to the 12 times table. A love of language and literature has to be nurtured. Guess what? Surprise, surprise, a recent study on children’s reading found that early readers are always a level higher in their overall schooling.
I welcome a slimmed-down national curriculum as it means that teachers and schools can respond with their professional expertise and pupils’ interests can be nurtured. We are forever quoting international league tables for literacy and numeracy, but we ought to look also at league tables showing how our pupils develop creatively. Schools should be working to get the best from all pupils: we need to be pupil-driven, not target-driven. The issue with our national curriculum is that everyone wants it slimmed down, but, of course, every subject interest group then wants to fill it up again. We have trumpeted the fact that our academies have the freedom to diverge from the national curriculum, but it is not very “national” if increasing numbers of schools are not required to follow it by law.
My own view is that a national curriculum should be as it says on the label—truly national, and should apply to every school in the country. A slimmed-down curriculum will give schools the time and space to pursue their own priorities. On these Benches, we appreciate that every child deserves an education tailored to their abilities and interests. We need to identify barriers to learning at an early age, then intervene to put those things right.
As a House, we showed our concern for personal, social, health and economic education to be maintained as part of the national curriculum. Indeed, during a very important debate initiated by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, Members from across the Chamber spoke of its importance for young people on a host of issues. We highlighted how important sex education is as part of PSHE. Members spoke with great knowledge and passion. I am happy that PSHE is to be retained as part of the national curriculum, yet as things stand, PSHE in general, and sex education in particular, do not have to be taught by academies.
The Government have put education at the core of their programme. The pupil premium, which currently stands at £900 per lower-income pupil, has been a game-changer for schools and pupils. As I have said on many occasions, the most important resource in education and schooling is the quality of the teacher. Maybe the time is right to look at a royal college for teachers, as the noble Lord, Lord Puttnam, said when he was talking about the demise of the General Teaching Council. I would be interested to know what the Minister thinks.
Teachers should be well trained and highly motivated, regarded and respected. Every pupil has the right to be taught by a qualified teacher. I find it regrettable that, in some of our settings, we allow unqualified teachers responsibility for our children’s education. Sadly, this is an increasing reality.
Every child should receive an excellent education from an excellent teacher. We want to unlock children’s potential and ensure that they can succeed in life. I hope that we go some way in this Session to doing so.