Giving Every Child the Best Start in Life

Lord Weir of Ballyholme Excerpts

Monday 7th July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is right about the investment in special educational needs, and disabilities in particular. I know she will recognise the additional £1 billion into high-needs funding that this Government have invested already; the £740 million-worth of capital that is going into creating extra spaces, particularly in mainstream schools, for the inclusive resource centre provision that enables children to remain in those mainstream schools; and the investment in more training for teachers.

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

My Lords, I welcome the Statement. The Government are right to identify education as being the great life changer for many young people. It is right to place emphasis on the power of development through reading and to focus on early intervention. It is often the case—sometimes Governments can be reluctant on this—that the dividends of that early intervention may be decades down the line, but that is all the more reason for ensuring that it happens.

It is often the case that many children who are in greatest need of that early intervention come from families who are disengaged from formal education—sometimes perhaps because of parental bad experience with formal education themselves—who are slightly disengaged from society as a whole or from the local community, or who are disengaged from involvement with government agencies. Can the Minister outline the Government’s strategy to ensure that those who might be described as hard-to-reach children are able to benefit from early intervention and are not left behind?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

As I was suggesting, in some of the initiatives we have focused on ensuring that, for example, the additional financial incentive for early years educators will start in the most disadvantaged areas, to make sure that the areas where children most need support are the areas where we are improving and increasing the numbers of teachers who can teach there. Lots of children will benefit from the extension of evidence-based interventions to support early maths, literacy and language skills. From next year, we will provide additional funding to extend the early years pupil premium in areas most in need, ensuring that children most at risk of falling behind receive high-quality, evidence-informed support.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Weir of Ballyholme Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Longfield (Lab)]

I feel the need to add some thoughts of my own to this conversation, which I am very pleased that we are having. I declare my interest as the executive chair of the Centre for Young Lives. I thank noble Lords for their kind comments on that.

This is a really crucial area of policy, and I am delighted that we are expecting an early years strategy and that we have consensus across the House on this—indeed, with the evidence as well. In the spirit of moving on, I hope that there is cross-party consensus going forward on the importance of this, not only for individual children and their families but for the country as a whole, in terms of employment, growth, crime reduction and health.

I could go on for an awfully long time on this, but I shall not. But I wonder whether my noble friend the Minister might say something in her closing remarks about the conversations that she is having with the Department of Health, because that partnership is obviously particularly important for early years and early years development.

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP)]

My Lords, I support the group of amendments before us, which are well judged. I appreciate that they are essentially probing in nature, but I will make a couple of brief observations.

First, the amendments are important because they focus our minds on long-term strategy. It is often the complaint about government—about any Government; I do not want to be partisan in that regard—that Ministers will often look at what is in tomorrow’s papers and what is going to lead the politics shows on Sunday. At most, if they have particular levels of vision, they might look at what will get them through to the next election.

We know that there must be a much greater focus within government on long-term strategy. The perils of short-termism are no more acute anywhere than in the issue of education. We know that when we look at interventions, particularly early interventions in education, the true dividends of what we provide and invest in may not manifest themselves until 10 or 15 years down the line, but that is no great reason for us to shy away from them. Indeed, it is something that we need to embrace.

Secondly, as other Members have said—I will not repeat the figures—we know that early interventions can create massive dividends for society. Whether that is on the basis of diversion of young people away from future social problems, from justice issues, or of foregrounding, from a societal point of view, in terms of their education, what I think will become an increasing problem, which is the need for early identification of special educational needs—we have seen the explosion in terms of the cost within that. Those are all, if we take it from a very cynical, crude point of view, massive societal gains for a level of investment in early intervention, but on a personal basis, the biggest single intervention is in changing the lives of those individual children. Because I believe that in a society, education can be the great life changer, it can be the great deliverer for young people as individuals.

Thirdly, I believe it is the right focus. We will, in this Committee and other places, spend a lot of time debating the importance of getting qualifications right, getting school transfers correct at different ages, getting the right provision of schools and dealing with curriculums. All those are, I think, very important educational subjects, but the biggest single intervention that helps to determine how successful a child is in education happens before they walk through the school doors in the first place. That is not just my opinion. When I was Minister of Education for Northern Ireland, we commissioned a report entitled A Fair Start, which gathered experts in the field, whether they were academics or people who had direct life experiences. Their strong conclusion was that the biggest single thing that government can do to tackle educational underachievement and raise attainment levels is in that intervention before a child even reaches school.

Fourthly, I say, without entering into the turf war on Sure Start, that it worked well, and when I was Minister in Northern Ireland, I sought to enhance and support it. However, it is also the case that if we are looking at early interventions, we know that there will be families that are at risk of raising children with low educational achievement, and we know that there are communities out there where socioeconomic barriers create problems. Again, from experience and from talking to a lot of people, I think that if we are to have the best early interventions, we need a sense of co-operation and buy-in, particularly from the communities where we are targeting those interventions. If a community in whatever part of the United Kingdom feels that this is simply a top-down solution which is being imposed upon them, and they are being talked down to, the ability for that community to change and to have a level of ownership of education is greatly reduced.

It is important, I think, whenever we look at early interventions that we not only get it fully supported but get it right, which is why I think that the amendments focusing on a strong sense of strategy and taking a very clear look at this are very important.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, we very much support the amendments in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, and the noble Lords, Lord Farmer and Lord Russell of Liverpool. If we were putting together an early years strategy, we have all the ingredients in this Chamber. Everybody has mentioned the ingredients that will be part of that strategy, from good toilet training on. To my mind, what is really crucial is early identification of problems and then early intervention in those problems. That is the key. We have talked a lot about Sure Start. That was a very good government policy and I pay credit to then Labour Government for introducing it. I know that, in my city, we introduced a number of Sure Start centres in deprived areas. Sadly, they were so successful that the more prosperous parts of the city wanted them as well.

The important thing about Sure Start centres was that they were not just for the children, they were also for the mums and dads. They gave support to those mums and dads in all sorts of areas, from financial support to employment ideas and health: a whole menu of things that were important to parents. Also, which nobody has mentioned, there was outreach provision as well, so that staff from the Sure Start centres could go out into the community, visit parents in their homes and give that advice and support.

We have to be honest with ourselves and remember that there was a world recession and we were all scrabbling around to try to find out where the money was coming from. Perhaps in the UK, in some areas, we made some of the wrong choices, but it was left to local authorities to decide, and many local authorities decided that although there had been a huge reduction in the funding for local authorities, they would keep their Sure Start centres. Sadly, some of them closed. But let us not go back there now; let us celebrate that time but also remember that we have family hubs. Family hubs are perhaps the son and daughter of Sure Start centres and maybe they can, over time, take on some of the other roles that were provided in those previous centres.

Importantly, the amendments say, quite rightly, that there should be two elements. One is that local authorities should make sure that parents are aware of the facilities, information and support that is available to them. It is not just statutory or local authority information; it could be from charities as well. The second is that they can get that information quickly. The Secretary of State must also produce a report that is available to parents and carers as well.

I thank everybody who spoke in this debate: I think it has been really important and useful. There are two things that were not mentioned. The first in fact links to the debate on—dare I mention it?—smartphones. One thing I see that really upsets me currently is parents who, to keep their children quiet or occupied, hand them an iPad. I have seen two and three year-olds with an iPad in the back of a car. I am sure that family hubs will be saying to parents, “That is not the best use of an iPad” and “That is not the way to develop your children”.

The noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, reminded us of going into a primary school where the head teacher said, “I can look at a two, three or four year-old child and see that they might become a problem in the future”. Tony Blair said exactly the same thing some 30 years ago, and there was an absolute furore when he said, “I can go into a nursery and can see the potential criminals of tomorrow”. What he actually meant was that if we do not, as a society, deal with the points that the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, has made, then, yes, that is a probability.

Education (Assemblies) Bill [HL]

Lord Weir of Ballyholme Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 7th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP) [V]]

My Lords, I am delighted to be able to speak in this debate. In following the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chelmsford, I assure her that she is not a lone voice in expressing concern over this Bill. I respectfully submit that the Bill in front of us is unnecessary, is overreaching in terms of its provisions and is potentially counterproductive.

I say “unnecessary” because, as the right reverend Prelate highlighted, there is already a high level of flexibility in our system. Indeed, there is a complete and sacrosanct opportunity for any pupil, via their parents or as sixth formers, to withdraw from any assembly. If a religious assembly goes against the religious views of a family, or if they wish to express a more secular point of view, there is that complete freedom to withdraw. This Bill does not remove compulsion from anyone; therefore, it is solving a problem that does not necessarily exist.

On the contrary, although there is at present the opportunity to withdraw if someone has a fundamental objection, I see no provision in this Bill that allows any parent to object to what they may believe to be a humanist assembly. It makes those assemblies completely compulsory, and reduces rights rather than enhancing them.

It is the case that this is a form of overreaching. It does not simply remove the requirement for an assembly with a religious character to it; it actually bans the school from holding any

“acts of worship or … religious observance”.

How do we interpret religious observance or acts of worship? Clearly, that would constitute a prayer or a hymn, for example, or telling a story from the Bible. In a practical sense, what will this mean in interpretation? It could mean that, if a school were holding its annual act of remembrance, there would be a ban on saying a prayer of thanks for the service of those who paid the supreme sacrifice. That would be outside the law under the Bill. If a school wanted to hold a service of remembrance for a pupil who had sadly died, again, there could be no religious overtones to that. Does it mean that an annual nativity play—which is clearly telling a biblical story—would constitute an act of worship? If there were a desire for the pupils to sing “Away in a Manger” or some such like, that would be banned.

Those may seem extreme examples, but let us remember that this is not simply an absolute ban; there is a provision within the Bill that makes it a legal duty on the principal to enforce it. What will happen throughout the country is that many principals will err on the side of excluding absolutely everything, and so religion and Christianity will be something that dare not speak its name.

I believe the Bill is counterproductive for a number of reasons. However much it may be unfashionable to acknowledge it now, we have a country that is based, as is western democracy, on Judeo-Christian values. We owe a great deal to those values and they are equally relevant today, perhaps more so than in the past; such values, as has been highlighted, include teaching the sanctity of human life, and love and compassion—and not simply love for your family and friends, or even community, but the Christian ethos of loving your enemy. It strikes me that a system that moves away from those values into something more nebulous is a retrograde step. There is a danger that that leads to greater segregation within our society. If we are to have entirely humanist assemblies, in which no religious element is allowed at all, we will move to a situation that will push a number of parents into a straight choice between a state school and one that is much more religiously based, and that will effectively segregate people even more.

There are many conflicts within our society, sadly, and at times our answer is to treat the symptoms of those problems within our community; worse still, there are some who will try to scapegoat communities for the problems that we face, which brings the difficulties of looking to pass blame on to outsiders within our society. It strikes me that we need much more inclusive, ethical values that we can all share. I believe those are provided by way of collective worship. We need a level of inclusion, and this measure would disaggregate people into different camps.

The proposer of the Bill has rightly indicated that a situation in which collective worship is abolished leaves a vacuum, and so has sought to provide provision for assemblies that would be spiritual, moral, social and cultural. However, as has been highlighted, we have seen unfortunately within this country over the last number of years a number of culture wars, where there are differences of opinion over issues around gender identification, the environment and socioeconomic matters. This is a recipe for further controversy, because there will be divergences of differences within schools and between parents and schools about the contents of those assemblies. This has a danger of dragging us into a level of controversy.

In conclusion, we need to see more cohesion rather than the division that would be brought about by this Bill. We need to ensure freedom of choice, rather than the compulsory attendance and intolerance that would be inadvertently produced by the Bill. We need to have greater shared values as a wider country, rather than controversy and conflict over the content of such assemblies. Whatever the intentions behind the Bill, I think it is ill-judged and that we would be taking a retrograde step if as a Parliament we ultimately endorsed this legislation, certainly in its current form.