Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, even though I am speaking so far down the list, I am still unsure what the purpose is of the “Schools” part of this Bill. The Bill prioritises tinkering with governance, focusing on fixing a problem that does not exist—namely, stripping academies and free schools of the autonomy that has allowed so many of them to thrive—yet it avoids problems that need fixing, such as the huge challenges of discipline and behaviour in classrooms or the growing SEND crisis.

How can we scrutinise whether the Bill will fix problems when one of its key solutions is to impose a centralised new curriculum on academies before we know what that curriculum contains? It is a cart-before-horse move. The Government are not publishing their own curriculum review until the autumn, long after the Bill is due to pass. This curriculum review matters. When any Government outline what is taught, politicians reveal what they think schools are for. Are they places where we, as adults, pass on the historic body of canonic knowledge to new generations as an entitlement, regardless of background or cultural identity and notwithstanding important arguments about what constitutes the best that is known and thought? Or is this new curriculum a skills-based or therapeutic model in which knowledge is a mere second-order vehicle for the main goals of social mobility or social engineering?

Recent curriculum overhauls by devolved Governments should act as a warning. These allegedly child-centred experiments in interdisciplinarity—the Curriculum for Wales, and Scotland’s Curriculum for Excellence, if ever there was a misnomer—have both led to a disastrous collapse in attainment.

I am not reassured by Professor Francis’s interim review, with its focus on educating pupils through a social justice lens to reflect contemporary diversities. It sounds like a recipe for an EDI curriculum on stilts. Recently, government advisor Professor Lee Elliot Major described school trips to

“museums, theatres and high-brow art galleries”

as elite “middle-class pursuits”, condescendingly suggesting more relevant art forms such as grime, rap and brass bands—what?—for us plebs. Of course, I am speculating based on my political preoccupations and prejudices, but I have no choice but to speculate because we do not know the facts. Should we not know before we impose that curriculum, with no opt-out, on all schools?

We always need to study the detail when Governments start issuing central diktats on what is taught. We need to guard against schools being used for politicised stunts or ideological manipulation. For example, was the Prime Minister’s TV announcement that every school must screen the drama “Adolescence” really educationally motivated, or even appropriate, especially as it will potentially mislead pupils about an important distinction between fact and fiction? I am equally critical of the previous Government’s carelessness in allowing another fact/fiction conflation to become classroom orthodoxy. Children of all ages have been taught as fact that a person can literally change from one sex to another, due partly to poorly worded, centralised 2019 RSHE guidance. Worse, parents’ reasonable concerns about such lesson content has led to them being chastised by teachers as bigots.

This leads to my final point. I am genuinely baffled about why the Bill uses such disproportionate, draconian regulatory powers to target home-schooling. Unlike others, I am less of a fan of home-schooling per se—it sometimes seems a bit odd—but I am more worried about the Bill undermining important principles and freedom. The state does not own children. It needs to be wary of overreach and mission creep into families, which is why, historically, parents have the right to choose how their children are educated.

I am afraid the Bill’s intrusive data collection and monitoring, which insultingly conflate home education with safeguarding risks, is a bit of a cheek. I remind noble Lords of the terrible safeguarding record of the state acting as a parent in children’s homes. I also mention the grooming gangs. I would not trust the state. I do trust parents. I hope that in this Bill we look very carefully at that undermining of parental autonomy.