Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Cash Excerpts

Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, I fear that what the noble Lord, Lord Knight, has suggested is indeed happening: private schools, grammar schools and schools in wealthy areas are doubling down on their success by pursuing smartphone bans. Schools in areas of deprivation, where family and community ties are the weakest, are being left behind.

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, I had not planned to speak to this group of amendments, having tabled an amendment that we will debate in the following group. But as I have interests in the founding of Parent Gym and in the early years in particular—about which I hope to speak later—it would be remiss of me not to add a few comments, given some of the very esteemed contributions made in this debate.

I support all the amendments in the group with the exception of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, for the reasons that have been outlined. My noble friend Lord Bethell touched on an important point in his intervention: we have a real issue around the different types of parenting and families, from those who are aware of the dangers to their children to those who deploy smartphones as substitute childcare. I fear that all the evidence—as very eloquently put by my noble friends Lady Jenkin and Lord Nash, who cited at length the reports and data around all this—show us that there are families who do not have the resource or means to engage in this daily battle.

I declare another interest: I am on that front line daily with my 14 year-old daughter; I hoped that she might have been here this afternoon, but she has conveniently not made it. It is a daily battle. What children will tell their godparents, when you are not around to hear it, is that they actually agree that you are right and that they wish they did not have their phone. They wish that phones did not exist and that they were not part of their life; they want them because their peers have them.

The report by the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, published last week, has very notable commentary about the safety of some of the girls who were groomed by gangs. She talks with real concern—it is in an early section, for those who have not read the entire thing, as I have—about the fact that online activity means that we no longer know what is going on for children. We literally do not know who is in their bedroom at night. Who are they engaging with? Who can forget the case of Molly Russell—the terrible case that an Instagram post led to? There is one place where we can surely assume our child should be safe: at school. It is not an unreasonable request that we, as a society, look seriously at this to care for the health and safety of our children.

I am very aware of the comment by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, but it is the opposite to asking schools to police the use of phones. I completely empathise with the concern about asking schools to do more, but this is removing from them the need to police phones. It gets them off the premises, or at least locked up within the premises, so that bullying cannot happen online, grooming cannot be going on, boys who are being recruited into county lines cannot be harassed or intimidated while they are meant to be learning at school, and on it goes. Your Lordships have heard plenty from others on the various points.

I end on another note. Let us look at what the people who invented these things are doing. We all agree; no one has disagreed with the fact that they are addictive—we all feel it every day. What do the people who invented them to be addictive and who use behavioural science and neuroscience to do that, do with their children? They have screen-free schools—completely screen-free, incidentally: no tablets or laptops—and screen-free homes. What is China doing? It is hoovering up our children’s data to understand everything about our society and drive their behaviours in the most destructive way possible. If you ask AI, “If I were China, what would I do to destroy the West?”, the answer is exactly what it is doing: to destroy and undermine the mental health of whole generations of people. What does China do with its children? It gives them one hour a day, and it drives them to watch science and maths videos. I support these amendments.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I was not going to speak on this group—I was a minute or so late, for which I apologise. I wanted to hear the arguments of those who oppose Amendment 177 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and I will just address a couple of those.

I think the noble Lord, Lord Knight, said that we cannot warn children of the danger of smartphones if they are not using them in schools, but let us be more realistic. The school day is only seven or eight hours, and there are 52 weekends and 15 weeks’ holiday. They are going to use these awful things, whatever we do. But at least schools provide a safe space if they cannot use them—we heard the point from the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, about not being mugged on the way to school. I see it in my own schools where, although we have bans, the kids get around them. If they have hair similar to that of the Minister, the noble Baroness, Lady Smith, how do we know whether they have AirPods in their ears? With the so-called magnetic pouches, you can buy a disabler on the internet to get rid of it. The list goes on and on.

I agree with the point from the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that you cannot uninvent them, but they are very toxic. We look back on tobacco and sugar, yet we are allowing these things to go on while people cogitate, when it is so obvious that we should be bringing a much more vigorous ban of these devices into schools as soon as possible. I support the noble Lord, Lord Nash.

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Finally, returning to my five amendments, will the Government now accept my argument that, whatever they mandate and or indeed fund, it is the least we can do to ensure that every parent in those fragile and fraught early days, weeks and months knows what support is available and how to access it? I beg to move.

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 183B is in my name and I support the other amendments in this group. First, I draw to the Minister’s attention that this is a probing amendment. It is very long and detailed but none the less intended to generate a discussion of something I feel is very important in a children’s well-being Bill. To exclude the early years seems a lost opportunity; the intention is to generate that conversation.

It is almost 20 years—I have shocked myself by saying how long it is—since I stood as a candidate in Westminster North for the Conservative Party. As an inner-city seat, it was a challenging environment in which to work and to meet people. Deprivation was not uncommon. I remember vividly knocking on a door on the Brunel Estate. As the door opened, the fug of cigarette—and, probably, cannabis—smoke surrounded me. Through the haze, there was what looked to be a very young girl with a baby, probably six months old—now I know better—on her hip. In my shock, in the smoke that emanated from the flat, I said to her, “Is your mum at home?” But she was the mum.

By coincidence, I had just come from an excellent Sure Start drop-in centre around the corner set up by the last Labour Government. I had this moment of clarity, of thinking, “That baby is never going to get to that Sure Start centre”, and that it did not matter who was in government and what was offered—unless we had a proper strategy around early years and a way of reaching that mum, that child’s chances were going to be severely impeded.

I have declared my interest previously, and I declare an interest now, as this was the inspiration for founding Parent Gym, which has run across the country in all the years since it launched in 2010. The intention of Parent Gym, like so many other programmes now like it, was to reach young mums who probably had not had any parenting themselves. The aim was to provide support that was not otherwise available, when reaching out for that support was usually taboo because it came via social services, and they were hostile to the whole prospect of it.

At around the same time, because of my interest in all this, I realised that the beginnings of research were being published into the effects of early life experiences on children. I am delighted to stand in this Chamber today, almost 20 years later, knowing that there is a consensus now around the importance of all the early years and their impact on children—in particular, the first 1,001 days, as we call it—which are so very formative.

We also know now that it is not just those very important years after birth. There is a wealth of research showing the effects of prenatal stress that a mother undergoes. There has been incredible research done in disaster zones, such as after flooding in Puerto Rico, where they have measured the telomeres of the cohort of babies born from the mothers who were in those natural disasters. Telomeres are part of the chromosomal profile that predicts your longevity and your health outcomes. They have found them to be shorter in those babies born in the wake of disasters. We know now that the environment—the family environment, the multigenerational environment—is so very important.

As noble Lords know, I have been involved in some earlier parts of the Bill. We have had important debates about looked-after children and foster care strategy, and so on, but we have not talked at all about the strategy for these families and these very young children. There is such a such a range of evidence now. There is the scientific evidence, but there is also the economic evidence that what we invest in these families comes back multifold for society.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Professor James Heckman did the analysis and found that the returns on early years intervention far exceed those from the remedial action, for which we all bear the cost much later in life. He found returns of $7 to $12 per $1 invested in preventive steps taken.

In this country, in 2018, the Early Intervention Foundation estimated that England and Wales alone spent £17 billion every year—I am afraid that I do not know the current figure but it has grown since then—on late interventions; for example, in social care, youth offending, mental health, special educational needs and criminal justice services. These are many of the things that we have been talking about in this Bill, in this Chamber, and yet we have not discussed, until today, the opportunity here to prevent some of these issues arising.

The numbers are not abstract; they relate to real lives: lives impaired, opportunities lost, families rent asunder, and public resources consumed by crises and situations that could have been prevented. We have looked at the numbers of children in care. We have looked at the numbers of child protection plans. We have not talked quite so much yet—it is in Part 2 of the Bill—about the persistent educational attainment gap that opens up before formal schooling even begins. Only 46% of disadvantaged children achieve expected language and communication standards at age five, compared with 69% of their peers. That is the Department for Education’s own data.

If it is a question of affordability, we are asking the wrong question. The right question is whether we can continue to afford not to do anything. There is plenty of evidence of what works, and we know that there are already plenty of charities and programmes out there, including some of the government programmes that we have heard referred to today, like family hubs and, previously, the Sure Start programmes. Governments always look at this and try to use piecemeal, locally funded, sticking-plaster solutions, but there remains a postcode lottery as to whether there is an infrastructure for these young families and these children who, through no fault of their own, begin life at a disadvantage.

There are a number of things that we know work. Parenting training works, not just in the programme that I founded but in many others: the Family Nurse Partnership, home visiting by trained nurses, health monitoring done by parenting training in the Incredible Years programme, parent-infant psychotherapy—we do not have any shortage of interventions to refer to about what works. I have not tabled the amendment to be directional about which intervention the Government ought to mandate or explore further, but to facilitate a conversation on ensuring that there is a universal approach to all the children in this country to ensure that they are given the right start and right support in life.

Many charities are already doing some of this work—the NSPCC, Barnardo’s, Action for Children, the Parent-Infant Foundation—but that is no substitute for a national infrastructure. We know that Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales, through her Centre for Early Childhood and the Shaping Us campaign, is working to draw attention to all this, but we need the Government to take this and grapple with it in a meaningful way to ensure that we have some way of identifying these children, and some means by which we place them all within the safety net of our society, knowing that how we treat our children is really a measure of what all of us are. I have placed emphasis on the exploration of this, and I hope that the Committee can engage today in a sensible debate to find the solutions.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I support the spirit behind all the amendments in this group. Amendment 486 is in my name, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, and the noble Lord, Lord Young, for also putting their names to it.

I am assuming that we are, in effect, pushing at an open door in stressing the importance of early years to the Government. The noble Baroness the Secretary of State—sorry, she is not noble yet, though she probably will be when she stops being Secretary of State. I should say the current Secretary of State, together with the Minister, came to a Cross-Bench meeting before the Bill came to our House. A question was asked about early years, and the Secretary of State was very clear that it is an absolute priority. I am therefore taking that as read, and the question is not “Is it important?” but “What do we do about it?”

I should declare an interest: I was part of the parliamentary advisory team that worked with Dame Andrea Leadsom on the Start for Life initiative under one of the previous Governments—I cannot quite remember which one—which in many ways was a concerted attempt by a Government to do something about early years. Not least, we were trying to undo the unfortunate effects of what happened to Sure Start, which I think everyone across the House, regardless of party, would agree was one of the great achievements of the Labour Administration of the 2000s. With the benefit of hindsight, it was a tragedy that we allowed it to wither on the vine.

Of course, the Labour Party did not allow it to wither on the vine; the people of this country, exercising their democratic ability to vote, which of course we in this House do not have, decided to put in place the Government who decided that there were other priorities, or could say that it was important but not give as much clear support and direction to it as before. Inevitably, what then happens is some parts of the country will continue to think it is incredibly important but others, for reasons that may seem good to them at the time, give it a lower priority. That is how you end up with such uneven distribution across the country. The lesson from that for our new Government is that, if a Government of whatever political persuasion are not crystal clear that this is a priority, and if they do not lay down clearly what that means in terms of what must happen and what is non-negotiable, the same thing will happen again.

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[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

The noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, was not here at the beginning of this debate, so she has asked me to say that it is really important that there is good liaison between education and health.

I really feel that I am in a bit of a parallel universe. We are being told about the importance of integrated early years help, and we had such a programme with the Labour Government, which was enormously successful. Yesterday, I read an Institute for Fiscal Studies analysis that showed that it reduced hospitalisations for mental health among 12 to 14 year-olds by 50%, and that it

“improved the dimensions of school readiness—communication & language and problem-solving”.

It was most effective in targeting the most deprived communities—so the stories about how the children who needed it most were least likely to get it were not true. The first 700 Sure Start centres were set up in the most deprived areas—and, actually, there was a lot of work that showed that it was the universal element that made it so important.

It is like a parallel universe, when we know that, during the period from 2010 to 2024, there was an exponential rise in child poverty, which is at the root of lack of school readiness and childhood illness, as well as family dysfunction. Nine children in every class of 30 on average will be living below the official poverty line, and that exploded under the coalition and previous Governments as a result of austerity. So, absolutely, yes, we need an integrated approach—but I sometimes feel it might be helpful for the Opposition to acknowledge what their role was in destroying that provision, which was there for the most deprived and for all children and young people.

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

I thank the noble Baroness for giving way. I want to clarify, certainly from my own perspective and what I said, that there was full acknowledgement of how successful the Sure Start programme was—and I understood that to be the position by consensus across the Committee. So I am very sorry that the noble Baroness feels that she is living in another universe, but it is not the intention of anyone here to cause dissent on an issue on which it is so important to have consensus. I think that everyone who has intervened in this debate has been coming from a very good place.

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

I absolutely acknowledge that, but it is important to note that such a provision was available and was defunded. The number of centres was decimated, which has had long-term consequences that noble Lords have been so clear about: the effect on the poorest children of that poverty of provision. I think that is really important to note.