Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Cass Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, when I spoke on this Bill at Second Reading—which seems a million months ago, but perhaps it is not quite that long—I said that I was not convinced about having a ban on phones in schools. I think the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said that I should listen to the arguments.

Whether we agree with online content and what children should access from smartphones is, in a way, a separate debate. There are two main arguments tonight which mean that I will support Amendment 215. First, as we have heard, this should be about supporting good educational outcomes. There is no doubt that having phones in schools is a distraction. We should give our young people the best possible opportunity to concentrate and focus for those eight hours in school.

Secondly, Ministers have said that there is guidance which strongly encourages schools to have policies that mobile phones should be put away. When I speak to teachers and heads, they say that, without something a bit tougher, it is very difficult to police, particularly when parents or families come in and say that there is an exception or why it should not apply. Sometimes they are even very aggressive towards teachers and heads who say that the pupils should not have phones. We should take the opportunity to support education outcomes and those who have to police this policy on the front line by supporting this amendment.

[Baroness Cass (CB)]

My Lords, I want to speak to this amendment for two reasons. One is that my name is on it. The second is for nostalgic purposes, because the first time I spoke in this House was in a debate that my noble friend Lady Kidron was leading on smartphones in schools. I stood up and spoke in her shadow—nothing changes, more than a year later. My niece was sitting nearby, observing democracy in action. Afterwards she said, “Well, what happens then? Do you just talk about it and then forget it?” I can tell her that we did not forget it and that it is still a work in progress.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, Amendments 238 to 240 are in my name and those of my noble friends Lady Cass and Lord Russell. I support Amendment 227 in the name of my noble friend Lord Tarassenko. I start by thanking the Minister and her officials for the engagement that we have had since Committee. These amendments, unlike in the previous grouping, are all about a single thing: the uses of technology in our schools. I feel that they are long overdue; we have seen many of them before in our deliberations on the Data (Use and Access) Bill, as well as earlier in this Bill.

Less than a fortnight ago, the Secretary of State delivered a speech in which she said that we are in the middle of a technology revolution in education and that technology is moving so quickly that:

“The world of even 5 years ago is gone forever—already a lost, obsolete age”.

We are in a time of change, but I am very concerned that this uncritical view of tech is difficult for schools. The Secretary of State is dismissing long-standing educational practices, honed by experience and research, in favour of technology, some of which is proven to be unsafe and to invade privacy, and much of which has yet to be tested.

I will go through the amendments quickly. Amendment 238 would require the Secretary of State to prepare a statutory code of practice on the efficacy of educational technology within 18 months of the Act’s passing, and a certification scheme for minimum pedagogical standards for edtech procurement in schools. In December, the Minister wrote to me to say that the Government were developing a new approach to certify edtech products to make certain that they are safe and fit for purpose, through an accreditation service and statutory guidance. It seemed from the letter that she was referring to filtering and monitoring, which I will come to, but I would be grateful if she would clarify that when she responds.

The problem is that the process by which we are interrogating edtech is far slower than the process by which we are introducing it into our schools. Although I welcome the idea that the Government will test novel products and consult a wide group of people, unless I am mistaken, the regime does not offer a certification scheme that guarantees the learning outcomes of edtech.

It is for that reason that I also support my noble friend Lord Tarassenko’s Amendment 227. He and I have worked on a number of issues that seek to apply existing rules to technology to ensure that those who develop it consider the needs of individuals and communities into which it is deployed. Given that my noble friend has given a detailed explanation of his whitelist amendment, I will not reiterate it now, but I commend this amendment to the Government, because it is a model for how we should deal with edtech more broadly: insist on existing standards, make adherence visible and, in doing so, make a well-designed, private, positive use case for tech in schools. Without the existing standards, we cannot see what the edtech is doing.

Amendment 239 requires the Government to set statutory standards for filtering and monitoring systems used in schools. This amendment is marginally different from the one that I tabled in Committee, in that it clarifies adherence to data collection practices, that there is nothing in them that prevents staff carrying out their safeguarding duties, and that the standards would be checked with real-time tests established through a certification scheme with which Ofsted would check that schools complied.

I have been pressing this issue for over five years and yet we have failed to solve the problem. The introduction of generative AI means that we are going backwards and I believe that the Government have turned to guidance again: they have updated their filtering and monitoring standards only this month. I am pleased to see that that guidance now clarifies that barriers to illegal content must be switched on at all times and I believe that the Minister will also commit to consultation.

However, experts at the UK Safer Internet Centre suggest that seven of the 24 filtering and monitoring systems used in the UK do not currently meet the standards that filter for illegal content and only three of them currently provide clear evidence that they can analyse and block generative AI content in real time, as the new standards require. The same experts say that market compliance is uneven, that schools are dependent on providers’ self-assessments and that there is a serious gap between policy intent and consistent implementation. We need to remove the inconsistency, meet basic safety requirements and insist that they are routinely checked. It is not right that schools are left with the burden of working out what the system they have paid for does or does not do. I understand that many school leaders believe they comply with filtering and monitoring standards, but do not. I worry that the Government are overestimating compliance overall.

It is a tragedy that we are discussing this at midnight. This amendment should have been put in front of the House. I remind noble Lords who are in the Chamber or reading this in Hansard that Frankie Thomas lost her life, and her parents, who campaigned fiercely for these amendments, have for five years been told by Minister after Minister that this would be put right, and it still has not been. I ask the Minister to give me some hope that this will be put right in statute at the basic level we require and that experts are asking for. Obviously, there will be no vote this evening.

Finally, Amendment 240 would require the ICO to issue a code of practice for educational settings. On Report of the data Bill, the then Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Vallance, gave firm commitments that the Government would use their powers to require the ICO to publish a new code of practice. In Committee of this Bill, the Minister said the ICO was under a commitment to produce an edtech code of practice, but the Minister’s letter to me of 16 December said the Government will lay regulations in the second half of 2026 requiring the ICO to begin work on the edtech code. This is political snakes and ladders. I am back at the beginning. In the old world—which is gone for ever and obsolete—it was not doable that every movement, emotion and learning outcome of a child could be taken by a commercial company from school and pushed into the commercial world to be exploited.

Amendment 240—which I have been promised twice by two different Ministers—would set a clear time limit of six months after the Act’s passing within which an ICO code of practice for education must be established. As set out in the Minister’s letter, it will be more than 18 months from when Ministers first committed to it that it would be started. Can she speed that promise right up?

Each of these amendments asks the Government to set the standards so that tech can do the technology, the teachers can do the teaching and the children can flourish. Anything less is putting big tech ahead of children.

[Baroness Cass (CB)]

I will be brief, given the time. I will talk about only two things and try to keep noble Lords awake with them: academic passion and the gut microbiome. That will keep noble Lords on their toes.

On academic passion, when I was president of the paediatric college, we thought we did not have enough female professors of paediatrics. I adhered to that view until, one day, two of them were in my office at the same time, tearing strips out of each other so aggressively that I thought: “Yes, we need more of these people, but we should never let two be in one room at the same time”.

I saw similar passion at an educational conference; the passion of those educational academics was quite something. There were arguments about whether assessment drives learning, between those who believe in it and those who do not. Similarly, there was an equally colourful argument about teaching children to read with phonics versus other methods.

The striking thing about these academics is that, while years have gone into academic research and there are all sorts of controversies, the point is that everyone who is in this field is interested in educational outcomes, not commercial incomes. That is the difference with what we are seeing in the technology we are serving up to our children.