Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, I am not sure that I am really the right person to talk about the Bill, but I thought it might be worth giving a few reflections. I cannot even count how many education Acts have taken place during my lifetime, but it is a very considerable number. It is absolutely clear that there is no final solution. The reason why is that each child is unique, and when we talk about children in the plural, we have a tendency to forget that what actually faces us is each individual child.

I was brought up with a classical education, and know that education means to draw out, not to shove in—educare being the Latin word. That is a great challenge. Education starts extremely early, and, as my noble friend Lord Young of Cookham said, it is better to get into it straightaway. Indeed, parents are the primary educators. By the time a child reaches the age of five, something is being delivered that is pretty well formed already. We are talking about the journey of a child finding out who they are and of what they are capable. Very often, when we talk about, for example, the care system, which has 86,000 looked-after children at the present moment, we are talking about a time when, to a large extent, the horse has bolted. That is a huge problem.

It leads me to say that there will never be any centralised answer to these problems, There is a place for professional independence, which my noble friend Lord Hill laid emphasis on, and a place for experiment, in trying things that work and responding to what happens.

Thinking about the first part of the Bill, on the care system and the no doubt welcome sophistication of the existing system, I am impressed that, nevertheless, there are now more looked-after children than there have ever been before. What we are looking for is some way of tackling this particular problem, so that we achieve improvements.

On the second part of the Bill, whatever the rights and wrongs of how much control there should be over the academy system, it has proved to be a great success, as have the technical education initiatives of my noble friend Lord Baker. We should be very careful not to go backwards.