Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Morris of Bolton Excerpts

Thursday 3rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 211 goes to a much deeper part of this Bill: the assertion in lines 39 and 40 on page 51 that those in a local authority are the right people to determine what is in the best interests of a child. For the past 150 years it has been accepted that it is the parents who are the first people to determine what the best interests of a child are, so this is a fundamental change in education legislation, which may run out into all other aspects of the relationship between parents and children. If the local authority is the best judge in this space, why is it not also the best judge of which school a child should attend, or many other aspects of the child’s educational journey—what exams they should take or which university they should go to? Why is the local authority’s judgment being inserted here against all precedent?

Who in the local authority is making this judgment? Local authorities used to be staffed with a big school improvement department and lots of people who knew their way around education. They are much thinner now. How on earth is a local authority staffed to take this decision? Is it guaranteed to have the expertise? Will there be a special cadre of people capable of taking this sort of decision, and trained and experienced in it?

I find it very hard to understand why the Government wish to take this role away from parents. It is a big, fundamental change and something that gives me great cause for concern. Again, it brings me back, as the Minister will expect, to the idea that, if we are to have something like this, there has to be an effective right of appeal to someone who has access to a much wider and deeper pool of information and judgment.

My other amendment would mean that, if a local authority is making the judgment, it must make it as a real judgment—how the school they are thinking of placing the child in actually does for children like the child concerned. It must be a careful, individual judgment, and not a judgment in principle from someone in a local authority who believes that, in almost every circumstance, education in school is better than home education. There are people in local authorities like that.

I find these two lines in the Bill really disturbing and I hope the Government will reconsider them. I beg to move.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Morris of Bolton) (Con)]

My Lords, if Amendment 211 is agreed to, I will be unable to call Amendment 215 by reason of pre-emption.

[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 211A, which is in my name. I very much agree with the comments made by the noble Lord, Lord Lucas. This is one of the biggest issues in the Bill. Why the words

“in the child’s best interests”

have appeared here and not elsewhere seems strange. They seem slightly out of place.

It may be that it is late in the evening, and I am going slightly brain-dead, but it seems that what is written in the Bill is internally contradictory. It says that the local authority

“must refuse consent if the local authority considers …that it would be in the child’s best interests to receive education by regular attendance at school, or”—

going back to my education, I assume this is the law of excluded middle—

“that no suitable arrangements have been made for the education of the child otherwise than at school”.

If it is alternatives, then presumably new Section 434A(6)(b)(i) means that there are cases when suitable arrangements have been made for the education of the child otherwise than in school, but it would be in the child’s best interests to receive education by regular attendance at school. Unless I have that completely wrong, it seems that this is something of a muddle anyway in the presentation of this account.

The bigger point, rather than simply that, is the one the noble Lord makes about who decides what is in the best interests and what we mean by it. I have suggested in my amendment to leave out

“that it would be in the child’s best interests to receive education by regular attendance at school”

and replace it with the actions mentioned further up the page in new subsection (4)(a) where the inquiries

“have led the local authority to conclude that the child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm (within the meaning of section 31(9) and (10) of—”

the Children Act 1989.

In other words, keep this about abuse and about child protection, and do not introduce the wider consideration of

“in the child’s best interest”,

whatever that means, as well as, as I said, the logical inconsistency of the framing that is down on paper.