Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bousted Excerpts

Thursday 22nd May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Longfield (Lab)]

Perhaps I might add a few thoughts from my experience. As Children’s Commissioner for six years, I found that the greatest level of responsibility was around children in care, and I looked in detail at the experience of children in care throughout that time. One of the things that was absolutely clear to me was that the ability of local authorities to focus on early intervention diminished hugely during that period. The amount that was spent on early intervention halved during that period, while the amount that was spent on crisis doubled. You do not need to be a great mathematician to realise that the more you spend on crisis, the less you will have for early intervention.

At the heart of Josh MacAlister’s review and recommendations, which were incredibly and extensively consulted on with people at all levels, from expert practitioners to leaders of children’s services and care-experienced people themselves, was that we had to move and reset the system towards early intervention, and do so boldly in a timely manner, because it was unsustainable for the public purse to do anything other. As important, if not more important, is that more children were being left without support.

Everyone needs to be alert at any time to the consequences of any move towards increasing harm for children. What we now know and have known for some time is that more children are coming to harm now because they are not getting that support early, so it is absolutely essential that there is an urgency about that. As I said on Tuesday, those directors of children’s services that I speak to want to see that change urgently and are very much in line with the proposals that are being put forward. There will always be things that directors of children’s services will want to amend locally and test out—that is absolutely right—but what they want to know is that there is a framework nationally for them to work within and clear guidance. So, it is so important that this is here. That is not to say that those individuals will not have their own expertise in delivering.

When there are experts involved in delivering these expert practitioner roles, they are actually going to use their judgment all the time. It is not going to be about process; it has to be about children and about those families. Anyone who is just following a process because the process is there is not the expert practitioner in that role that we have the ambition for. They are going to be looking at children’s lives and responding to individuals, but at the heart of it, we have to move boldly forwards, to—

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

Boldly go?

[Baroness Longfield (Lab)]

Yes—I apologise for that on many levels. We have to move forward at pace, but also with confidence and determination, while also checking along the way that we are giving support where it is needed.

Finally, we need to ensure that investment is there, but we have to get to the point where we are investing money to prevent rather than to just pay the costly bills when things have got to acute status.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, having read both these amendments, I think it is reasonable to ask the Government what resources are required. When it comes to teachers, we have often dealt with the question of what is required and, if it is a new skill, how they will acquire it. Having enough awareness to call in an expert is another thing we have often talked about in other fields—I certainly have on special educational needs.

If you do not have that training in place, it is a matter of where you go to get that support. Asking for that is one of the things we should do here. I hope the Minister will give us a reply that at least starts to push us towards looking to where these resources are and, more importantly for the people on the ground, where they can look to for support and help, or be trained to do so. Without that linkage, people who are only now being brought into this process on an official basis will fail if they do not know what they are doing.

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, I was not going to speak to this amendment, but I have to say that the idea that schools have not been at the centre of child protection and safeguarding over the last 20 years is just ludicrous. Under the last Government, the central grant to local authorities decreased by 40%. Real-terms school funding decreased by 9%. In that period, schools became the fourth emergency service as children’s social work, child protection and all the safeguarding systems around the child were absolutely decimated by austerity.

Schools have become extremely good at identifying children in need of safeguarding and protection. They have become extremely good at providing information, support and training to their staff, and they did this very well at a time when the last Government were reducing real-terms support to schools. They have had to become experts in child safeguarding and child protection because the other services that should have been there to work with schools simply were not. Multi-agency professional teams, legally responsible for working with schools to support them to protect children, will strengthen child safeguarding and child protection. CPD, or professional development, is always helpful, but the idea that schools need extensive CPD on this, that they have not been doing this, and that it will be a new thing to them is, frankly, ridiculous.

[Lord Nash (Con)]

Although I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Bousted, about schools becoming very good at child protection in recent years, there will be a cost to engaging in this activity. I support my noble friend Lord Agnew and his point about the cost for schools. All schools are facing a very severe funding shortfall, and I am concerned that they will have to make a lot of redundancies. None of us wants to see that but schools are telling me that it is the only way they will be able to balance their budgets. If the Government’s worthy target of getting 6,500 new teachers into the profession is a net figure of leavers and people coming into the profession, then redundancies will make them miss that target. I support the point about money being needed to support this activity.