Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 20th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Eaton (Con)]

My Lords, I too speak in support of the purpose clause tabled by my noble friend Lady Barran. I declare my interests as a member of Beckfoot multi-academy trust and of the Leeds Diocesan Learning Trust.

It surprises me greatly that adoption does not form part of the Bill. Despite improvements in the adoption system, evidence highlights significant gaps in support. Last year’s Adoption Barometer showed that the proportion of adoptive families facing severe challenges increased from 30% in 2022 to 38% in 2023, which is the highest over the six years of reporting. Also, the number of prospective adopters has declined.

There are particular issues with support for contact between adoptees and members of their birth family, and with transition to adulthood. Some 4,000 children per annum are adopted—of those, 80% have suffered abuse, neglect or violence, and 11% come from dysfunctional families. Many spend up to 15 months in care with several foster families before being adopted. Adopted children are more than twice as likely as other children to have special educational needs.

The virtual school has different remits for different cohorts. Adoption UK evidence shows that where virtual schools go above their statutory duty, which is limited to previously looked-after children, there are positive results. The Bill potentially produces an inequality in the wording around the remit of virtual schools for different cohorts of looked-after children.

One in 10 adopters home-educated their children in 2023. In the majority of cases, that is because the school system is not set up to support their child’s needs. Adopted children have lower attainment, higher rates of SEND and higher evidence of autism and ADHD. The Bill presents the opportunity to consider the barriers that lead parents to home-educate in the first place, and to review the support that local authorities offer to adopters.

Parents of adopted children are not the only group who feel that state education is inadequate for their children. The Bill demonstrates a shift of power from families to the state. As my noble friend Lady Fraser said at Second Reading:

“The powers in Clause 30 … override the rights of parents and families to decide what is best for their children”.—[Official Report, 1/5/25; col. 1408.]


On improving safety and standards in the education system, which is included in my noble friend Lady Barran’s proposed new purpose clause, I welcome the efforts of my noble friends to ban the use of smartphones in schools. Policy Exchange has done incredible research on the impact that smartphones have on children in school. It is striking that where smartphone bans exist, students in those schools are achieving GCSE results one to two grades higher than those in schools with a more laissez-faire policy. I hope the Government will accept the amendments tabled by my noble friends that seek to implement a universal ban on smartphones in schools.

My noble friend’s proposed new purpose clause is key to defining the objectives of the Bill. It is the duty of us all to bring about positive changes to the Bill if there is to be any possibility of improving the well-being of children.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly and will save most of what I want to say for the specific amendments. I listened to the entire Second Reading debate below the Bar, but at that point I was not able to speak in this House.

I support my noble friend Lady Barran, who has rightly drawn attention to the need to have express purposes linking through to the improvement of provision for children. I support all four proposed new paragraphs and I share some of the concerns that have been expressed, especially by my noble friend Lord Balfe and the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, for example, about conceiving this from the starting point of children and thinking about their experience in the round.

When I read the Bill I was struck that the Long Title does not mention the word “well-being”, despite the title, and I could find no thread through to explain what it meant. For me, it is the likely outcome of loving a child, caring for them, looking after their health, educating them and making sure they have peers, good relations with the adults around them and the opportunities to discover where their strengths lie. Many such things contribute ultimately to well-being.

We need this test around improvement because there are—I will not go into this now—a number of clauses where it seems to me that there is clear, direct and sometimes quite recent experience to make us believe that it is more likely that the clauses will do harm than good. I want to make sure that in debating the amendments there is enough space for us properly to consider the true likely impact and that that will be recognised and taken into account by the Minister.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 20th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran. These proposals are clearly well intentioned but there are reasons why this has not been done before, and her desire to explore how these amendments are intended to work is absolutely right.

Just to put it in context, in a typical local authority, there are 400 or 500 schools and nurseries. This goes beyond anything that can reasonably be characterised as a “partnership”. So, how will it work? How much capacity will it absorb in each of those? What will it add?

The core documents that all these providers must work with in keeping children safe in education and working together, get bigger and bigger each year. Many schools and childcare providers are close to the limit of complexity that they can manage.

I should have declared an interest at the outset, as a former chief inspector of Ofsted.

Most schools that fall down on safeguarding at inspection are small—typically primaries, often standalone primaries, and special schools. The vast majority take safeguarding seriously but some are struggling with the complexity. We need to be very sure about layering on safeguarding partnership responsibilities and, later in the Bill, corporate parenting duties, on top of all the existing duties. It may not add anything to safeguarding and, in some cases, could be the straw that breaks the camel’s back and drives good staff out, or forces early years providers to close.

Generally, layers of duties that make everyone responsible tend to blur who has the primary responsibility in any given situation. There will be the greatest value in these provisions if they work to achieve maximum simplicity and clarity, so that they are workable in the hands of normal, well-intentioned people.

[The Earl of Effingham (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak after such knowledgeable contributions from all noble Lords. It is fair to say that all the amendments in this group are wrestling with the same issues, which have been raised by the Children’s Commissioner and by the independent review into child social care, led by the honourable member for Whitehaven and Workington.

We want to include education and childcare agencies in safeguarding arrangements. Indeed, schools already play a huge part in this area and make a significant percentage of safeguarding referrals where they have concerns about a child. But in practice it is hard, because of the number of organisations and their differing size and capacity.

We have heard from all sides on this, with many calling for full statutory partner status for education and childcare—such as in Amendment 24 from the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield—while others are worried about workability. We fear that we may err on the side of caution regarding how full statutory partner status could work in practice, although we will of course reflect on the points made by all noble Lords.

We support the aims of Amendments 21 to 23 from the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, who has such a depth of experience and understanding of these areas in general and of family hubs in particular. Amendments 20 and 25, from the noble Lords, Lord Hampton and Lord Bichard, aspire to have an inclusive and non-bureaucratic approach to these arrangements. Naturally, we fully support Amendments 26 to 28, from the noble Baroness, Lady Barran.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 22nd May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O'Neill of Bexley (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Barran on Amendment 30, which builds on the previous conversation in seeking to confirm that local authorities can use their discretion in how the multi-agency child protection teams are implemented operationally in their areas.

In addition to the contributions previously made about the pilots and having the information about those pilots, I want to add two very good reasons why it is imperative to ensure that local decision-making will become effective: how there could be confusion over legal accountability, and how the Bill could weaken local authority leadership.

The statutory responsibility for safeguarding will still rest with the local authorities, as has previously been said, not with the partnerships or multi-agency teams. If all functions are located within a multi-agency team, it may become unclear who is ultimately accountable, especially in the case of a serious case review or legal proceedings. As was referred to previously, current DfE guidance, through Working Together to Safeguard Children 2023, emphasises that, although functions can be delegated, accountability cannot be transferred.

I have previously referred to the issue of budgets from other partners, especially police and health, and how that might impact their involvement, but we also need to consider the fact that not all agencies are coterminous. In my area, our police, under the leadership of the Mayor of London, are a tri-borough relationship. The NHS is a six-borough relationship. I quite often get notices from the police identifying a child in Lewisham, and I have to ask my team whether there is a connection to Bexley. There is a potential confusion there and, of course, with that confusion comes the ownership. This could create issues in determining not least the ownership but also the cost implications.

The other risk is weakened local authority leadership. Overconsolidation into multi-agency spaces could disempower directors of children services or the lead members, who are the statutory leads for safeguarding. There is a risk of fragmenting the governance. For those reasons it seems sensible to trust the local authority to use its discretion in how the multi-agency child protection teams are implemented locally in their own area. I support my noble friend Lady Barran’s amendment.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, for several reasons I support Amendment 37 from my noble friend Lady Barran. She and others have spoken about the enormous amount of change being imposed on the sector, both to current structures and prospectively with local government reorganisation and with many processes through these reforms.

We have now heard from enough people here and outside to think that there is good reason to be concerned about poor decision-making arising from the blurring of early help, targeted support, work with children in need and child protection. There are potentially parallels with the SEND reforms a few years ago, when a new model was expected to simplify and reduce costs, and reduce numbers in the system, but has, sadly, done the opposite. On the points that have been made about the blurring of accountability, there is again reason to be concerned.

I was part of a national implementation board after the care review and, in that process, I was struck, more than in most government processes I have been involved with, that many people seemed to find it hard to say what they really thought to Ministers. They perhaps pulled punches a little bit. It is incredibly important to make sure that there is a report that all can see and that is really transparent about how these reforms are working in practice.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

We have come on to more understandable consideration of how the teams will work in practice, particularly with respect to local authority responsibility. Multi-agency child protection teams will be effective only if they are truly multi-agency. There is an understandable concern here about the significance of the role of local authorities, but it is probably also worth remembering, as we discussed on Tuesday, that safeguarding partners—local authorities, health and police—have joint and equal responsibilities for safeguarding in legislation. Through the multi-agency child protection teams, we are trying to ensure that day to day, in operational terms, with respect to individual children and cases, there is a practical way for those responsibilities, and the information that those agencies may have, to be brought together in that full picture about the child.

I spoke earlier about the findings from the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel on child protection. To tackle the issues it identified, we need, as I have suggested, multi-agency experts in a room together, sharing information and bringing their different perspectives to decisions that protect children. It is important that we ensure the right people are deployed to those teams so that expert, swift and decisive action is taken to protect children, and we recognise the importance of safeguarding partners reporting on the impact of their arrangements to make sure that is happening. We need to base that, as has been the argument on other parts of the Bill, on the best possible evidence, which is both the professional work that constituted the Child Safeguarding Practice Review Panel and, as others have mentioned, the independent review by my honourable friend Josh MacAlister.

Of course, we also need the evaluation that noble Lords have talked about. It will come in more than one stage. There will be evaluation of the process and some of the practicalities of setting up the process that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, referenced, and, later, of the impact of the teams.

Amendment 30 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seeks local discretion in multi-agency team membership and organisation. Requiring safeguarding partners to nominate a minimum team reflects partners’ collective duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children in their area. They will also have, as I outlined in the previous group, flexibility to add other agencies or individuals, reflecting local needs and to tackle local harms. We know from Families First pathfinders that these teams are already making a real difference. In Ofsted’s recent inspection of children’s services, Dorset, one of the pathfinders, received an “outstanding” judgment. The report noted that when children are at risk of significant harm, strategy meetings are well attended by partner agencies and that effective information-sharing and analysis of risk lead to children receiving the right intervention and support. It is right that we celebrate the success of and learning from pathfinders and, as I suggested previously, learn from where things have been more challenging. On the resourcing, as I said on Tuesday, this transformation journey is being supported from our £500 million Families First Partnership Programme funding.

The noble Baroness, Lady Barran, made a couple of specific points. On whether this is doing away with an independent chair, one of the main purposes of multi-agency child protection teams is to have a fresh pair of eyes coming in at the point of the Section 47 inquiry. The new lead child protection practitioner role will work—in fact, is working in pathfinders—in a very similar way to the current independent chairs. I take her point about the need for a fresh view and independence, but that is built into the design of the teams.

On whether this would mean children having more than one social worker, children and families will stay rooted in family help throughout. Multi-agency child protection teams will lead the child protection functions, working with and wrapping support around children, families and the family help lead practitioner. The multi-agency child protection team brings expertise and a fresh focus on significant harm. The lead child protection practitioner will be an experienced social worker but will not be the case lead. In other words, the important ongoing relationship, which I know children feel strongly about, with a person they can understand, work with and gain a relationship with, will remain in place, but additional expertise will be brought to this from the multi-agency child protection team.

On Amendment 37, which would place in the Bill a requirement for the Secretary of State to report annually on the team’s impact and activities, I completely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the noble Lord, Lord Addington, that it is essential that we understand how multi-agency teams are leading to better outcomes for children and that that learning be shared across the system. That being said, safeguarding partners already have a statutory responsibility to publish annual reports on their multi-agency safeguarding arrangements. This will include reporting on multi-agency child protection teams once the teams come into force. Statutory guidance, Working Together to Safeguard Children, already sets out the information that should be included in yearly reports, and that will include evidence of impact. Guidance will be updated to include the reporting requirements for these new multi-agency teams. There will be, at the level at which it really matters, a responsibility to account for and report on the nature and success of the multi-agency safeguarding arrangements.

On that basis, and with those assurances, I hope that the noble Baroness feels able to withdraw her amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 53 in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Tyler of Enfield. It is designed to ensure timely implementation of the single unique identifier, otherwise known in the Bill as the consistent identifier.

Timely access to high-quality and personalised education, health and social care services is fundamental for good childhood outcomes and reducing inequalities. Important information on children’s needs and outcomes is, as we know, held by many different services across health, local authorities, police, education and beyond, but so often these services have not communicated with each other and crucial parts of the jigsaw around a child’s life have not been fitted together by professionals interacting with the child. Sometimes that results in tragic cases, as the Minister mentioned earlier.

Clause 4 inserts two new sections into the Children Act 2004 on information sharing. This includes a provision to introduce a consistent identifier for children, which is to be welcomed. Many Peers from around the House, including my noble friend Lady Tyler, argued strongly for the introduction of a single unique identifier for children during the passage of the Health and Care Act 2022, in which I also took part. We know that too many serious safeguarding case reviews—especially the heartbreaking and harrowing ones that hit the headlines—have said that better data sharing between services is urgently needed to properly safeguard children and improve their wider health and well-being outcomes. This very welcome clause is intended to provide a clearer legal basis for sharing information to promote the welfare of children and prevent them falling through the gaps. Through the introduction of this unique consistent identifier, it will be much easier to match records and share information confidently.

Implementation within this Parliament of this crucial measure, as promised in the Government’s manifesto, is paramount. We cannot run the risk of it being lost in a subsequent Parliament if it is no longer considered a priority. That is why many in the sector, particularly children’s charities, are working together to scrutinise the planned timescales and implementation plan.

As things stand, there is a risk that full implementation of this identifier will not take place before the next general election. The NHS and local authorities might be using a common identifier by 2029, but schools, early years settings and the police might not. Partial implementation would fundamentally undermine the benefits of a single identifier. Either all services should be supported to use it soon, or the purpose will be lost and children will continue to be at risk. Hence Amendment 53 would ensure that full implementation of this part of the Bill takes place before the next election, as set out in the Labour manifesto.

I will say a brief word about some of the other amendments. I also have concerns about other possible vulnerable members of the family, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, raised. I look forward to hearing reassurances on that from the Minister.

On Amendment 69 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, which has not yet been introduced, it sounds to me like a good idea that the data should be consistent, so that those accessing it will understand exactly what it means. I am concerned it might turn into a tick-box exercise, although I hope that would not be the case. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 69 would make provision for a common open data standard for those with responsibilities for individual children. I will start with a couple of wider comments. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, as chief inspector at Ofsted, I reported each year, for many years, on the concerning shift of local authority spend into acute services and away from early help and targeted support. The reasons why that was happening seemed fairly simple: resources were constrained and these were the statutory services, so it was logical for local authorities to prioritise their spend on those.

I was therefore surprised when the Minister cited this concerning shift as a reason for the changes proposed in the care review and in the Bill. There are potentially much simpler solutions, such as rebalancing the obligations or providing funding. Yet this Bill creates a lot of additional structures, duties and complexity, which could unintentionally take more resources and time away from front-line work, which I know everybody would like to prioritise. I would like to get more sense of the thinking as to how the Bill can enable all the players in an extremely complex system, rather than simply direct and control from the ministerial office.

A particular missed opportunity is data and the value of a common open data standard to help facilitate sharing at individual level, but also to make it easier to aggregate and analyse. Every service working with vulnerable children has its own data system. Typically, a number of proprietary systems are available in each sector; each of those is set up and works in different ways. There are no common data standards for the bodies involved. This makes it genuinely hard. There have been obligations to share data between the different parties for very many years, yet every serious case review points out failures in data sharing, almost without exception.

It is right that we have privacy by default, so it is a hard decision each time you decide it is important to share information and override privacy. The process of sharing is itself time-consuming and expensive, because these systems do not work to any common standard. There would be potential improvement in the management of individual cases if we can reach the kind of common open data standard that is being developed and used in other sectors.

In the care review, everybody realised quite how hard it often is to put together a national picture with data about social care. The understandable protection around individual children, and the kinds of disconnect that have already been referred to, mean that information about those who are causing harm, or the children or others who are collateral damage in the same situation, is not necessarily neatly joined up. It is genuinely hard to find out about types of abuse and all its different aspects, and who is implicated. This is a real problem; it should not be down only to journalists armed with FOIs to go hunting for things that we should already know about and be acting on.

As chief inspector, I served until the end of 2023 on the national implementation board for the care review. I was sitting alongside the eminent professor, Sir Anthony Finkelstein, who is a data systems expert and gave me valuable input into the framing of this amendment.

Data was an important strand of the initial care review and the report, and an important part of the initial plan for its implementation, but it seems to have got largely lost. So, I have put forward this amendment to bring this strand to the fore. The Minister should make sure that this opportunity is not lost to enable all the players in this complex system. By making this provision now, she will have the flexibility to set a sensible, reasonable and proportionate timescale for all these proprietary providers to start creating the kinds of alignment that can help us going into the future to do the best for all children.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 9th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab)]

My Lords, I always think there is something rather sad about an amendment that sits on its own and forms a group of its own. It looks almost afraid to speak its name. However, I prefer to think of group 4 today as being small but perfectly formed, and I will speak to Amendment 69AB on that basis. The purpose of this amendment is to ensure that the same kind of parental care expected within families applies to corporate parents and the children’s care system. In that sense, it has echoes of Amendment 107B, which I spoke to earlier.

Section 31 of the Children Act 1989 provides that a court may make a care order in respect of a child only if it is satisfied that the child is suffering, or is likely to suffer, significant harm and this is attributable to the care received by the child not being what would be reasonable to expect a parent to give to them. There are all sorts of issues, and we have heard many of them this afternoon and evening, about the failures of birth parents. None the less, this amendment would equalise the position of looked-after children and children who live with their parents with no social care involvement. Corporate parents would be required to provide the kind of care which it would be reasonable to expect a parent within the community to give to their child. Surely it is reasonable to expect that the state’s care of children should be at least to the level expected of parents. It should certainly drop no lower.

Under the Children Act 1989, a local authority must safeguard and promote the welfare of every child in its care—that is, those who are the subject of an interim care order or a care order—and every child for whom it provides accommodation for a period of more than 24 hours. Amendment 69AB would add the requirement that the local authority—as the child's corporate parent—must provide care that it would be reasonable to expect a parent to give to their child. This would strengthen and give legal clarity as to the primary duty of local authorities in their vital and privileged role of corporate parent: to safeguard and promote each child's welfare and to provide care that would be reasonably expected from a parent.

Statutory guidance issued in 2018 for local authorities on implementing the corporate parenting principles in Section 1 of the Children and Social Work Act 2017 says:

“A strong corporate parenting ethos means that everyone from the Chief Executive down to front line staff, as well as elected council members, are concerned about those children and care leavers as if they were their own. This is evidenced by an embedded culture where council officers … do all that is reasonably possible to ensure the council is the best ‘parent’ it can be to the child or young person”.


It was the late and much missed Frank Dobson, in his role as Secretary of State for Health, who first articulated the legal and moral responsibility of being a corporate parent. In a letter sent to every local authority councillor in September 1998, he said:

“For children who are looked after, your council has a legal and moral duty to try to provide the kind of loyal support that any good parents would give to their children”.


That applies no less today than it did all those years ago.

Despite many important amendments made to the Children Act 1989 over the years, aimed at improving the wellbeing and future life opportunities of looked after children and care leavers, it may surprise noble Lords that there is still no clear, unambiguous requirement that looked-after children receive the same level of care from their corporate parents as would be deemed acceptable for them had they remained with their birth parents. The High Court in March 2022, in a judicial review brought by the children's rights charity Article 39, found there is no provision in the Children Act 1989 which requires

“care to be provided in situ or as part of a placement”.

A child can be the subject of care proceedings through the family court until the age of 17 where they have suffered, or are at risk of suffering, significant harm and this is deemed attributable to their parents’ care not being what it would be reasonable to expect a parent to give to them. Yet once they are removed from their parents and become looked after, there is no express duty on their new corporate parent to provide care within their new placement, which is their new home. How can that situation be defended? I do not believe that it can. It is the equivalent of a local authority saying, “Don’t do as I do; do as I say”, and it must not be allowed to continue. Were that to happen, it would help to transform the children’s care system.

If my noble friend cannot give me a positive answer today, I ask that she consider what I have said and perhaps come forward on Report with a proposal. I believe this is a lacuna, which this Bill has the opportunity to fill. I beg to move.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I speak to oppose Amendment 69AB, well-intentioned though it clearly is. I have several levels of concerns about the imposition of yet another duty. I believe that the expectations for looked-after children are generally well understood—whether they are actually carried out in practice is another matter. This particular amendment has some obvious holes. For example, there are kinds of intimacy in normal, healthy parent-child relationships that absolutely would not be appropriate between local authority staff and children.

More generally, there has been a proliferation of duties in legislation in recent years. For example, I became chair of Ofqual 14 years ago. After a particular duty was raised in my first board meeting, I asked my legal director for a session to talk me through all the duties that applied. To my astonishment, I discovered that we already had 28 duties, with a handful more in the pipeline; I am sure it is a lot more since then.

This imposition of duties as the go-to solution has several problems. First, it creates problems of overload. Normal human beings simply cannot hold so many different duties in their thinking simultaneously. Secondly, they get imposed in isolation. They are usually added without reference to previous duties, with which they often overlap but sometimes push in different directions. How do you reconcile them? They can lead to skimping. If duties that have been imposed need resource but are not funded, you can end up with everything being done less well—not only the thing that the duty is aimed at but all the other functions—which reduces the quality at the receiving end. It takes away the ability of public services to prioritise intelligently. It can divert resource away from the main purpose that the duty is intended to protect and towards the kinds of activities that demonstrate compliance with the activity.

Finally, if there is a surplus of duties and an impossibility of giving full effect to them all, a sort of cynicism builds up that can corrupt an organisation’s culture. When everybody knows that they are really only paying lip service to an enormous list, people stop believing in the ability of the organisation to fulfil its real purposes.

Tempting as it is to think that another duty is the great solution that will protect children from all the awful harms that have been talked about today—they are a great salve to all our consciences—we need to resist and make sure that we get to the essence of the things that will do the most to help children.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly to this group of amendments. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, again reminded the Committee that vulnerable children in the care of a local authority do not always receive the care that they deserve. We should never lose sight that that should be our goal. My noble friend Lady Spielman put it very well in her remarks and I will pick up on what she said. Local authorities understand their duties in this area. The noble Lord himself cited some of the legislation and guidance on the spirit of their responsibilities. The question, as ever, is around implementation, and I share my noble friend’s concerns about adding yet another duty to local authorities.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bird (CB)]

I second the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Young. I am very interested in foster caring, largely because when I was in care as a young child, it was largely because I did not really have a family. I had a mother and a father, and I had brothers who were taken away in one direction. My parents were not very grown up; they had not really got used to the idea of having six children when they could probably afford only one.

I find this amendment so interesting because it backs up my experience as a young boy. When our family finally reconnected in Fulham in south-west London, the place was littered with foster-children. It was very interesting. I got to know people who went to my school, and they were fostered. They were not blood brothers or sisters or related to their family. I found that so interesting because most of those children, dare I say—I do not want to appear as a classist—ended up being quite middle class. They ended up getting the education of a lot of us who passed through care. It was interesting that, in this area of Fulham, there was this great mixture of very working-class children with a bit of a middle-class aspect, yet the children who really excelled were the ones who had the all-round relationships.

I would love to see a strategy that got behind those circa 130,000 people who want to foster. I would like to see a shrinking of the numbers of local authority homes, having been in a Catholic one, which was not an awful lot different from any other kind. The idea of institutionally raising children is not good news. The idea of raising children who were separated from their loved ones—as I was—is bad news. Therefore, I suggest we follow the example from the noble Lord, Lord Young, and create a proper strategy so that we can share out the loving relationships that we need to to our children, who are in desperate need, especially at the time when their own kith and kin cannot provide them with what they really need.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 134, 143 and 178. Fostering is critical to the provision of good care for all children who need it, and it is a really tough job.

In Committee so far, not very much has been said about the very large proportion of looked-after children who have significant special needs—it is more than 90% of all children in children’s homes, and it is over 70% of all looked-after children. Many of those are problems that have arisen as a result of post-birth experience, but there are quite a lot of instances where these are problems that children were born with and will be with them for life. Some children are in foster care precisely because their birth parents have not been able to cope with their significant needs, so we ask a tremendous amount of foster carers.

The measures in the amendment to improve on the current position are very welcome. But the Government could go further in some very practical ways, which is why I support my noble friend’s amendments. Room sharing is not always appropriate, but for some children it will be suitable. Similarly, foster carers need more authority to make more of the decisions and do more of the often everyday things that parents do.

I support the comments made about the need for streamlined recruitment processes and a foster care strategy that really thinks about the support services, training, respite and wider services that help foster carers to do it well, to feel that they have the capacity and that they can sustain the tremendous effort of foster caring through the whole period that any given child needs it. There is an opportunity here.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 143 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, to which I added my name and to which the noble Lord, Lord Bird, spoke so powerfully. I thank the Nationwide Association of Fostering Providers for its help on this.

As we have heard, this amendment aims to ensure that the challenges within foster care services are both recognised and addressed. With a well-defined strategy in place to oversee necessary reforms to the system, we can ensure that local authorities are no longer burdened by the unstable expense of children’s social care.

Many foster-children feel that their new home has given them a new chance, and they feel like a genuine part of the family. Foster carers overwhelmingly say that being a foster-parent has had a positive impact on their lives, as they provide love and support to vulnerable children.

Independent fostering agencies—IFAs—play a huge role in providing high-quality care for children: some 96% of IFAs are rated “Good” or “Outstanding” by Ofsted.

While the Government’s commitment to the foster care system since the general election is a positive step, it is vital that any interventions go beyond short-term fixes. This is why we need to see the introduction of a dedicated foster care strategy to provide strategic oversight to the tactical pledges made previously.

There are welcome measures outlined in the Bill to regulate and introduce oversight of independent fostering agencies. However, given that these IFAs make up a significant proportion of the sector, without a dedicated foster care strategy, which provides insight into the Government’s ambitions for the sector, this already precarious sector is unable to plan effectively for the future. Ultimately, without addressing the underlying causes of pressure in children’s social care, such efforts risk falling short of delivering lasting impact.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 17th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. Having been sent to a boarding school for some years from the age of 10, it seems to me that the last place that somebody should go if they are a looked-after child, and therefore already displaced, is a boarding school. They would be shunted to one place and rejected again and shunted to another. I would be very strongly concerned that looked-after children should not be sent to a boarding school.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

I shall speak to several amendments—to Amendment 170, on a capacity plan, and to Amendment 134B, on planning. I declare my interest as a former Ofsted chief inspector, where I spoke repeatedly over seven years about the issues with sufficiency in many parts of the country, and the urgency of taking action to enable homes to open in the places where they were needed.

I support what my noble friend Lady Evans just said, and I will not cover the same points about planning. I will say that the most acute need is partly in the most expensive areas, for obvious reasons, and partly for the children with the highest needs, for whom it is most difficult to configure, recruit, train and get a home open where we need it, when the children are there. We need planning for high needs. I stress that capacity planning should pay particular attention to the very high-needs children, whose care accounts for a startlingly large proportion of the total spend on care, and whose needs, in the main, are predictable, if not from birth then from very early in life. There is a high level of certainty of that being needed all the way through their childhood, and many of them will, sadly, also be in care homes in their adult lives. We need that focus and urgency to do everything that can be done, and to think intelligently, sufficiently far in advance, to enable homes to open so that, at the point and age at which children need them, they can move to somewhere within a reasonable distance of home.

I reassure the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler- Sloss, that the existence of children in unregistered accommodation is a serious concern to Ofsted. We spent a significant amount of our resources on putting pressure on those accepting placements of children to register as children’s homes, as they should.

I will speak briefly on a couple of other points. I support the boarding proposal for those for whom such schools are genuinely the right place; it is a way to create stability and a strong partnership with foster parents to make something more stable and enduring—in certain cases. The principle that it should at least be considered is important. I also support Amendment 165. As others, including my noble friend Lady Sanderson have said, that seems so obvious that one cannot imagine that it is not happening everywhere already.

[Lord Nash (Con)]

I support Amendment 119, in the name of my noble friend Lord Agnew, about the availability of boarding places. I do so as a former south London boy who was, rather unexpectedly, because of family circumstances, sent away to a boarding school—with, I believe, considerable financial help. Pretty much every child in care I have ever spoken to, when I have asked them, as I tend to do when I meet them, what the biggest issue facing them is, replies that it is the lack of a constant adult in their lives—the revolving door of people responsible for them. This leaves issues of lack of trust, which can stay with such children all their lives.

In a boarding school, a child has a constant adult—often a housemaster or mistress. I accept that it might not be appropriate for all children, but I agree that children should be offered it. It can be a very inexpensive way in which to look after these children, although obviously that is only a secondary consideration. I have seen the benefit of this in many cases of young people who have experienced boarding, thanks to the Royal National Children’s SpringBoard Foundation.

I support the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and others about unregistered settings and about children being sent away many miles from their home.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I realise that, quite often, we are very privileged in this House that, when there is a Bill, we get showered with briefings from all sorts of organisations. Of course, we read them, and then we say, “Oh my goodness, I did not understand this. I did not know about that”. Then, when we come to debate in the Chamber, we get real expertise, as we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Meston, and the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, who bring that added understanding and information. In fact, I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, who mentioned Learn with the Lords, and when I do a Learn with the Lords session, and they ask, “Why are you in the Lords?”, I say it is because we have got real people who are experts in the field, and when you listen to them, you say, “Wow”. That is not just in this debate.

When I looked at the briefing from the Nuffield Foundation, I was just absolutely shocked. It was not something in my understanding or that I particularly knew about. I do not want to repeat the figures—the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester said we should not repeat things—but when you read the briefing, perhaps they do need to be repeated because they are quite shocking. The number of children being deprived of their liberty through the High Court is rising and rising—102 in 2017, and in 2024 it had gone up by 1,100%. These were meant to be last-resort measures, but there were 10 times as many applications to deprive children of their liberty to the High Court as there were applications for secure accommodation orders between July 2022 and March 2023. We have talked a lot about the voice of the child. It has sort of been a mantra of this part of the Bill, and yet only 10% of children were present at hearings considering their case. So where was the voice of the child? The other figure which quite alarmed me was that 89% of parents or carers were not represented at hearings.

Of course, these children are not only the most vulnerable children but also, in most cases, very difficult children to manage and to support. You need highly trained and professional people to be able to do that. Sadly, those numbers of people are not always available. The final part of this briefing, I noticed, said that costs are escalating—not that costs are everything—but outcomes are not improving. You would think if costs were going up, the outcomes would be improving.

Finally, I want to deal with one point that was made by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, because it quite surprised me. She talked about children in handcuffs. The reason I was surprised about that was that I remember that, during the coalition period, one of our MPs sent a letter around saying, “If we have achieved anything, it is to stop the use of handcuffs on children”. I was quite shocked to hear that, and I went to ask my noble friend Lady Tyler if I had got this wrong and she said she thought I was right. I do not know where this is happening, and we need to find out. I really look forward to the Minister’s response on this.

I added my name to Amendment 132, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, on expanding the legal duties of the independent review officer.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to speak to Amendments 119 to 124 very briefly. We have touched on some very important points, and there is something that still needs to be crystallised. As others have said, these are some of the most troubled children in the system. They are also the ones whose care is probably the most expensive of all. Such specialised arrangements have to be made. We have touched on the tensions here between local authorities, the health service and the justice system. One of the reasons for the increase in the number of orders is the reduction in the number of justice secure beds and also tier 4 mental health beds. We have this terrible lacuna around children whom the health system deems to have, for example, untreatable personality disorders but who very clearly need to be looked after somewhere where both they and others can be kept safe and to have everything that we can do to improve their lives and to help make life work for them on a permanent basis in a healthy, humane way. This is an enormous challenge. I would very much like to hear the Minister explain how the health functions of government are also going to be tied into making the deprivation of liberty scheme work.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My Lords, as others have said during the course of this important debate, Clause 11 is about provision for some of the most vulnerable children in the country and the importance of ensuring that adequate support and necessary safeguards are available to them. The measures in Clause 11 brought forward by the Government seek to bring more children, who would otherwise be deprived of their liberty under the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court, into a statutory scheme where they will benefit from enhanced safeguards and protections. I will say more in response to specific amendments about those enhanced safeguards and protections.

The clause provides a statutory framework to authorise the deprivation of liberty of looked-after children in provision other than a secure children’s home where there are not enough places, and which cannot meet the needs of all this cohort. Noble Lords will be aware of the pressing need to ensure that these children are provided with sufficient suitable placements to meet their various needs, including in Scotland.

This brings me to government Amendments 125 and 128, which will allow local authorities and others in Scotland to seek authorisation in Scottish courts to deprive children of their liberty in relevant accommodation in England. As noble Lords will be aware, relevant accommodation will have the primary purpose of care and treatment and will also be capable of being used to deprive a child of his or her liberty if required in connection with the provision of care and treatment. We are also making a consequential change to amend the language from “restrict” to “deprive”, to ensure consistency with existing amendments to Section 25 of the Children Act 1989 provided by Clause 11. These amendments will ensure that Scottish local authorities can access all forms of accommodation to enable a child to be deprived of their liberty in a placement that best meets their needs.

Amendment 119A, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, addresses important issues around how best to support and protect another vulnerable group of children by seeking to allow children who have an education, health and care plan and who are in residential schools to be deprived of liberty in those settings under this legislation. The primary purpose of a residential school is to educate the children living there. Each child’s EHCP will have specified requirements to meet the child’s educational needs. In contrast, Section 25 is a specific legal route for placing looked-after children in specific accommodation where there is a need to avoid absconding or injury to the child or another person, often due to complex trauma. Clause 11 will not require any child to move from a residential school that is meeting the child’s needs. Where deprivation of liberty is required for a child living in a residential school, mechanisms other than Section 25 can be considered. For older children, that might include an application to the Court of Protection.

Amendment 119B seeks to remove “injure” from the clause but, as the noble Baroness spells out, is probing what is meant by the terms within the criteria under Section 25 of the Children Act. I am grateful for the opportunity to clarify that “injure” in this context has a wide meaning, including physical, mental or emotional injury. The criterion for an order under Section 25 is long-standing and has been well tested by the courts. I confirm for the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, that Section 25 orders are issued by the family courts. I am confident, given the long-standing and well-tested procedures for Section 25, that it will continue to ensure that children can be deprived of their liberty to keep them safe where appropriate and necessary.

Amendment 120A seeks to ensure access to education for children in the new relevant accommodation outlined in Clause 11. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, that access to education for our most vulnerable children is of the utmost importance to ensure that they can thrive and get on well in life. That is why there is substantial existing legislation in this regard, setting out the legal duties on local authorities to promote children’s educational attainment and include educational needs within care plans, as well as regulatory requirements for children’s homes to meet children’s educational needs. The intention behind “relevant accommodation”, which will be registered children’s homes, is to focus on ensuring that the child obtains the relevant treatment, which may involve depriving them of their liberty, but where they may also be able to have, for example, continued access to the community, including for education. It is also more likely to provide the closeness to the community and to their homes which several noble Lords have rightly said is an important right and need of children that must be continued.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, there seem to be two issues here. One is social media and the other is the smartphone, and the two of them are accessed via each other. However, we should remember what a smartphone is: it is a platform for using technology.

The reason I raise this is that—and this is in my declaration of interests—I am someone who believes in and uses assistive technology, and one of the easiest ways to get that is, increasingly, through your smartphone. As a dyslexic, I access literature, often with complicated local accents in it, via technology. Initially, it was an abridged book on tape. You can use it that way, so there is potential here. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, talked about caveats, but there is the potential to benefit people, including in the education environment.

It is one of the oddities that we refer to our phone as something which is a tool. It is a tool for much of the deaf community because they text. Texting is easy when somebody has not been in an environment where they have been taught to write properly, because that is what happens in the deaf community. They become addicted to text speak. Let us be a little more selective about this.

I salute the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for starting this debate and starting it so well. But remember, do not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Make sure this is something you can use as a platform. There will be other ways, and there may be ways around this, but I just say that everything has a price, and this is one. Please remember it. You might be excluding groups that we will be talking about in this Bill and future ones, who use it as something to support learning. I felt I had to say that to throw it into the argument, because it is an important thing to bear in mind.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and the noble Baroness, Lady Penn, in the amendments they have proposed. I also agree very much with the comments made by others, such as the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, who made some important points, especially about the risk of overloading schools. My noble friend Lady Shephard made some very important points about safeguarding. When, as chief inspector, I reported on sexual harassment and abuse in schools, it was notable how much of that we found to be linked to smartphone use.

I would like to clear up a bit of confusion, because I think we are not properly distinguishing between personal and school-controlled devices. I think the noble Lord, Lord Addington, was heading in this direction a moment ago in his remarks. Every school has many school-controlled devices—computers and sometimes tablets—and it is much easier to maintain the framework of safeguards around devices that are owned and controlled by schools than it is around personal devices.

These devices are suitable for teaching media literacy and many other things or in teaching children how to use technology. They can also very effectively provide technology. The dividing line here is between devices schools are able to control fairly fully and devices that essentially remain children’s property and in the children’s control, and where there will never be the level of supervision needed to make them safe—at least not in the foreseeable future.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I am interested in what the noble Baroness said—that the laptop and tablet learning devices that schools have would be sufficient for teaching media literacy. Does she suggest, therefore, that they should install social media apps on those devices, and teachers would have to create profiles and personas that would start to mimic children so the algorithms would then think of them as children and start to feed them the sort of stuff the noble Lord, Lord Russell, was talking about? Is that really what she is saying? Would it not be easier for the purposes of media literacy for the personal devices that children are looking at, with the personalised feeds those children are seeing, to be used in order to educate them?

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

It is perfectly possible for children to log in on different devices. They can log into a social media account and the school can use broader control facilities to ensure that all information is wiped, or all personal details are wiped, at the end of a session. That contains the range of what children are doing in any given session.

To give another analogy, we do not teach children about the risks and harms of drugs with drugs and the paraphernalia for using them in their hands or on their desks. More generally, I am afraid that the history of teaching children about risks and sensible and safe behaviour do not have that much to show that they can be successful.

One of the saddest reports that we published during my time at Ofsted was on child obesity. It showed, sadly, that the schools that were doing the most to promote and encourage healthy eating did not have measurably different obesity rates from the schools that were doing the least. So I think there is reason to fear that simply an educational approach, as has also been advocated here, might not be all that effective.

Finally, I will explain why, although I agree with so much of what the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, said, I have come to the opposite conclusion. It is important that we think about how to reinforce the authority of head teachers and teachers in this difficult space. With legislation, they would not have to argue the toss with parents to sustain a school policy that will always be disliked by some parents. What we have seen and heard, including expressed so eloquently in this Chamber today, shows that mobile phone use by the young is likely to be at least as harmful to them as smoking, and we have no difficulty with having a ban on smoking in schools. I believe that a ban will reduce arguments and give time back to schools—to heads and teachers—as well as helping children. So I hope that this amendment will be included in the final Bill.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I added my name to Amendment 458 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and my noble friend Lady Kidron. I have spoken on this issue several times in your Lordships’ House, and I will not repeat those speeches here. I am a teacher and have taught for 10 years, but never in a school that allows students outside the sixth form to carry phones to or in school. My noble friend Lady Cass says about mobile phones that the stakeholder view and desire for action in this area is overwhelming. I will talk not about the separate issue of whether smartphones themselves are harmful but rather about whether they should be in school at all for the under-16s.

Students who do not carry phones do not get mugged for phones. In schools that do not allow mobile phones, students talk to each other at break and lunchtime, or play games or go to clubs, rather than staring at their phones. So I am about to be rather brave here: for the first time I am going to disagree with the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley—at the same time. I do not think that an exception for educational purposes would be workable. You cannot teach these students how to use phones; they know far better than we do. What you can teach them are the dangers. Again, I am going to do a first here and say that it might be rather better on a PowerPoint slide than doing it practically. I really worry about 30 students in a room with their mobile phones—what carnage could happen there? But this is back of a fag packet stuff.

The excuse quite often is that carers need to communicate with people. Actually, carers do not need phones; they need time away to be children. Quite often, the people they are caring for can be very demanding, and sometimes too demanding. Schools are very good at getting messages to students in emergencies. If it is not an emergency, perhaps the child does not need to know right away. Parents do not need to know exactly where their children are at every given moment. If there are emergencies with transport, they can go to a responsible adult and ask for a message to be sent or to borrow a phone. We managed over 100 years in education without mobile phones in schools—why start now?

The Minister said recently that it is up to school heads to make the decision. At a time when, with this Bill, decisions about uniform, pay, admissions and the curriculum are being taken away from school leaders, I think a lot of them would be secretly delighted to have the Government take this decision away from them and take the lead on it, allowing them just to police the phone ban without getting the blame.

Children need time to be children: to learn, to play, to interact and to build and rebuild friendships, face to face. Leaving aside the view of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, which I can see—but schools can provide the technology themselves—none of these is improved with a mobile phone.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, on the spur of the moment, having read through the amendment, I have decided that I would like to hear the Minister’s answer.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

I was hoping to speak to this amendment.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

I have to move it otherwise you cannot speak to it.

The linkage between the criminal justice system and those in it and special educational needs, neuro-divergence and many disabilities is something that a lot of us have known about for a long time. This amendment suggests that we get early recognition and assessment of such conditions upon first contact with the justice system. There are lots of schemes that suggest this will help. Indeed, the Metropolitan Police and Merseyside Police have autism awareness badges that provide information so that the police can interact properly with people. It is becoming more and more apparent that, if you have problems with written work or communications, you are going to struggle with the criminal justice system. It is blindingly obvious when you give it a little thought.

We also know that, for people from certain economic backgrounds who might struggle with the education system, criminal activity becomes, to put it bluntly, more of an acceptable career path. I want nothing more, nothing less than to see that the Government are thinking about this and the approach to it. I look forward to hearing what the Minister says.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I want to express some concerns about Amendment 183CD. Its intentions are clearly excellent, but there are nevertheless some real concerns to take note of here.

Diagnoses of special educational needs are made by educational psychologists and experienced clinicians. To ensure there is consistency in diagnosis and treatment, it is important that that continues to be the case. By contrast, “neurodivergence” is a term with no clinical definition or standard. In a world where stigma about mental health conditions has been reduced, or in some cases even reversed, it is, as we all know, increasingly common for teenagers and adults alike to assert their neurodivergence. Sometimes, that leads, in essence, to a claim, by or on behalf of the individual, that they should be able to self-identify into additional services or special treatment.

In the case of the criminal justice system, the hazards of that are obvious, and, if children, parents or their lawyers see an opportunity, they will have a strong incentive to take it, irrespective of whether they have a true diagnosis that warrants that treatment. So, although it is of course sensible for police to obtain information about a child’s diagnosed health or educational conditions that are relevant to their detention and treatment, and so to make proper inquiries, that is one thing, but to set up a parallel diagnostic system leaning on a concept that does not have a clinical definition is another, and is clearly wasteful and risky. Those concerns should affect any consideration that is given to this amendment.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I do not think that the amendment says that it should not be qualified practitioners who carry out the assessments. We already know, in general terms, that 85% of young offenders have special needs. It is important for their future journey that the type of special need is identified by a qualified practitioner.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 3rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash (Con)]

My Lords, I fully understand the Government’s desire to limit the cost here, but I support the principle behind most of these amendments, particularly those of my noble friend Lord Agnew and the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. The noble Lord, Lord Hampton, made an excellent point, which was supported by the noble Lord, Lord Watson, that if uniform is not standardised, parents with students who can afford it may well “show off” through the clothes which their children wear. That is why we ban trainers in the schools in the multi-academy trusts that I chair, and why they are banned in most schools. We want all our children to feel equal.

As the Minister previously responsible for the school cadet programme, and as for the point that my noble friend Lord Young made, if the clause works as he says it does, this would seem to me an obvious and easy give by the Government. I hope that the Minister can reassure us on this point. As for the amendments from the noble Baronesses, Lady Parminter and Lady Bennett, I thought they made an excellent case for more, rather than less, uniform, because that would be the easiest way to regulate and monitor what it is made from.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I apologise for being a minute or two late arriving in the Chamber. I support Amendments 196 to 199 proposed, respectively, by the noble Lords, Lord Hampton and Lord Young, and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and Amendment 201, from the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed. If these are not accepted, the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, and Amendment 195 from the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, also have considerable merit.

Every autumn, there is a rash of stories about children being sent home for not being in the correct uniform. However, most often, these disputes are about not branded items but a child’s reluctance to wear something in the style that has been approved for all pupils. It is encouraging to note that household expenditure on clothing and footwear as a proportion of household spending has fallen substantially over the past 50 years. In historical terms, it has probably never been cheaper to clothe a family, though I note the concerns that have been expressed about cheap synthetic fabrics and finishes.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Lords Chamber

My last point is that when that information is provided, against what is a judgment being made? If it is being sent to somebody like me, who has a very particular understanding of what education is like, or if it is somebody who already has a background in home education, our judgment will be different. I am not clear whether this is provide it so we have it or provide it and a judgment will be made about whether it is appropriate. If it is so that a judgment will be made, presumably by a local authority, what assurance can we have that it has sufficient understanding and experience to judge it not just against the criteria of what formal education usually constitutes?

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I declare an interest: I am now a member of the Northern Ireland Curriculum Taskforce Advisory Committee. I support amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran, and I support and echo some of the comments made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, my noble friend Lord Young and others.

To put it in context, we are one of the most permissive countries in the world on home education. We have a strong default presumption that parents should be able to home-educate if they choose and no expectation of tight supervision of that. When I was chief inspector, my counterparts in other countries were often astonished at the degree of freedom that parents in this country have. There are countries where home education is simply illegal, and there are many countries where there are quite significant controls on quality.

To take just one example, in Belgium, I recently talked to the Flanders chief inspector. Parents must have their child do the end of primary school test. If they fail, they have one further opportunity; if they do not pass either time, they must be registered in a school. Similarly, there are provisions that if parents repeatedly refuse to allow a local authority employee to visit them at home, the child must be registered at school. I am not advocating these things specifically, simply putting it in context.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, made a important point that this is not a single community. People have referred a number of times to communities. There are communities of what you might characterise as the archetypal home-schoolers, many of them excellent, which include many parents of children with special educational needs of various kinds. They are strongly represented in forums, support groups and lobbying, and they are valuable and important people. There are also many parents who do not take part in these kinds of forums. They are the parents of children in illegal schools where children are nominally home-educated but actually in illegal institutions. They are parents of children who have been essentially forced out of school and off-rolled, who typically have substantial behavioural problems and often significant educational needs, whose parents are disproportionately unlikely to be able to give them a suitable education. There are parents who have simply withdrawn their children to avoid prosecution for non-attendance, and there will always be a few sad exceptional cases, but I will not go into that.

My Ofsted work made me strongly supportive of a register, and I spoke regularly about this over many years, but it is important to be clear about a couple of things. My understanding is that this is not reversing that historic presumption that parents are free to home-educate. So, if we draw out the questions that a register helps local authorities to answer, they are, first: “Is there any reason to think that this child will not be getting a suitable education?” It is not microassuring that, yes, it is definitely suitable; it is slightly the other way. Secondly and similarly, it is not aiming to provide absolute certainty around safeguarding; it is asking, “Are there warnings or flags that suggest that some more work might be needed?” Thirdly, it is about gathering some of the administrative data that central and local government need in order to understand what they need to provide and where rules and incentives need to change.

Quite a lot of what we have heard today has been on the assumption that this is about completely reversing that presumption and moving to microjudgment of the quality of what every parent is doing at every stage. I do not think that that is there, but it would be helpful for it to be explicit that that is not the case. It is important that this does not become just a register of concerns. The requests for exemptions are, sadly, a little misguided because they would narrow this down to being a register of concern. Broadly, it is much clearer if it is simply an objective that the register of children in school plus the register of children not in school adds up to the totality.

I started today intending to support the pragmatic amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran around limiting the information that has to be collected to the things that genuinely support those purposes. What I have heard has led me to think that there is a simplification that the Government might consider that would help to draw together and streamline the thrust of the points that have been made on carers, for example, and those made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. It is that if it is information that we would normally expect to be collected in the administrative data section of a school register, it should also be in the not in school register. We are perhaps over- complicating it.

On what is collected about the education itself, I have another point. It is important not to push this too far. To the extent that this register contains subjective information about how children are being educated and about how much time children who are being educated with flexible models spend on maths, English or whatever it might be, it will not work well. Different parents will interpret it very differently. It is the kind of information that it is hard to do well even when constructing a research study. I suggest that there is room to take this back a bit in the light of the purposes I outlined and to commission research studies and sample studies where appropriate.

Similarly, lovely as it would be, the register will never provide all the information that a social work department might need to decide that an investigation is necessary. We need to think about what is straightforward to collect and not subjective to answer and what will help to create the join-up we expect, while not creating an administrative monster with information that turns out to have relatively little value in practice.

That is all I wanted to say. I support this register strongly, as I said, but one iteration further could be done with these provisions to make the register as clean, effective and supportive as it should be.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I wish to follow on; in fact, my noble friend has given an introduction to the comments that I wanted to make in relation to Amendment 260 in the names of my noble friend Lady Barran and the noble Lord, Lord Hampton. She mentioned phrases such as “not push it too far” or “take a step back from this”, and the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, outlined on a previous group that this should be proportionate reporting and information collection, which is really important.

On Amendment 260, we get down to the clauses— I am a lawyer by training and have been in government as a Minister, and I know that government loves such clauses—which require the collection, if it is reasonable to obtain it, of

“any other information about the child’s characteristics, circumstances”

or needs. The only caveat to that is that those should be included in the register

“for the purposes of promoting or safeguarding the education or welfare of children”.

My first point in relation to that is that that is new paragraph (m), so we have already asked for an awful lot of information before we have our lovely “scoop it all up” clause. But is “characteristics” limited to protected characteristics? That is a separate paragraph in Clause 31, so I suspect it is not. What kinds of characteristics will be asked of families in relation to their children, what kinds of circumstances and what limit on that or on their needs? Obviously, we are not talking about special educational needs because that, again, is somewhere else. It is an enormously wide power for them to be able to reasonably obtain this information.

The only limit on it is

“for the purposes of promoting or safeguarding the education or welfare of children”.

Part of that limitation is well known. It apes the Children Act, which says that we are there to promote and protect the safeguarding of the welfare of children. But here it is about the safeguarding of education, a slightly new concept that is there as a key limitation, in the way the paragraph is put together, on what local authorities can ask of families.

So I strongly support Amendment 260 on that kind of “scoop it all up” information about parents in these circumstances, particularly parents who may have, for good reason, withdrawn their children. I can see all kinds of headlines and problems if this kind of information, on such a broad basis, is asked of parents by the local authority. I think that there will be legal challenges to define such a broad clause that the Government seem to want, and that it will be the subject of complaints of intrusion. Although I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, obviously this is not to take back that presumption that it is the parents’ right, but such a wide clause that gives the local authority such extensive powers to ask for basically any other information risks changing that presumption, or at the very least it creates a perception for parents that it has been changed.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, the concern of those who have spoken against Amendment 427C in the names of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and the noble Lord, Lord Glasman, is, if I have understood right, around whether these pupils are being safeguarded. Proposed new paragraph (h)(iii) says

“where the institution demonstrates to the Local Authority that it provides the required safeguarding measures”.

That is important. If it did not say that, I would be joining those who do not want this amendment.

The noble Lord said that it is wrong to call these schools and to think that they are providing education, and that the education being provided is in home-schooling. In terms of safeguarding, the amendment is very clear: the local authority must be satisfied that safeguarding measures are in place. Therefore, for me, the arguments fall away because the drift of them was about whether there is sufficient safeguarding for these pupils.

Because the amendment is quite sensitive, I was not going to speak to it or support it. Having heard the arguments, I am persuaded that proposed new paragraph (h)(iii) answers the question. Therefore, I am bound to support this amendment.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I want to speak to this group of amendments on the poorly understood world of unregistered provision, including the types of religious institution that have had a lot of discussion already, as well as looking more broadly. I support two of the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Lucas—Amendments 427 and 427B.

Clause 36 is a constructive attempt to put sensible controls in place around the oversight of educational provision for children outside schools and colleges. It creates a wider category of independent education institution to supplement the narrower concept of an independent school. This is a complicated and messy landscape. I could draw out at least four strands—there are probably others—and they overlap. There are the alternative provisions, most often for children with severe behavioural problems. There is a huge patchwork of provision there. Some of it is registered and inspected, so it has a level of quality control, but much of the weakest is not, and there are no neat cut-offs.

A school puts two children in a volunteer-run community garden for one afternoon a week. That would be best viewed as part of the school’s educational model, and the school would be accountable for the child’s experience. However, if those same children are at the garden four days a week and are barely attending school, it is unrealistic to ignore the fact that the gardens become the children’s main source of education —though it is clearly an incomplete education—and that school registrations become a fiction, perhaps to avoid recording an exclusion.

It is often assumed that alternative provision is or should be a brief stint to prepare a child for reintegration into a mainstream school. However, the reality is that few children who move into alternative provision will successfully reintegrate. Hardly any such children take their GCSEs in a mainstream school. AP needs to be seen as a mode of education, not just as respite care.

Then there is provision for children with psychological problems, such as school refusal. Again, unregistered provision is often born out of excellent local initiatives. If a child makes use of such a programme for a short period as part of a plan to help them acclimatise to a suitable school, direct oversight might be overkill. However, if it becomes a de facto permanent placement, it has become that child’s main place of education and it needs to work to the same standards as other schools.

As has been touched on, there are programmes for children who are home-educated, including sports, music, art and other worthwhile activities. Parents are entitled to home-educate, and sports, music and art are all part of a rounded education, but, if an organisation is running five different programmes, one each day, and a child attends all of them, the reality is that, at that point, the organisation is best viewed in the round as having the characteristics of a school—or at least an independent education institution—in taking responsibility when parents are not present for a large part of the week. It is hard to see why such an entity should sit outside the legal framework that protects children’s education and safeguarding.

Finally, I need to talk about illegal schools. It is depressing that they exist, and even more depressing that some of them operate knowingly and intentionally outside the law. Ofsted has a small budget to investigate suspected illegal schools and to warn those that are outside the law that they must register with the Department for Education. It has successfully prosecuted proprietors of such schools, at least one of them twice; I should day that I do not think any of those prosecutions related to a Jewish-affiliated institution. Current legislation just is not equipped to deal with bad-faith operators. It dates back to a time when it was almost unimaginable that a school that had omitted to register would not do so when it was pointed out.

It has been extraordinarily easy for operators to sidestep the law. There is a kind of artificial separation. An operator running multiple illegal institutions, teaching the same group of children in one location in the morning then bussing them to another location to be taught in the afternoon, may claim that they are separate institutions and that neither reaches the threshold to be considered as a school, but, clearly, the reality is that it is a single school. That is why I support my noble friend Lord Lucas’s Amendment 427B. There needs to be a sensible ability to take a holistic perspective so that avoidance does not readily happen.

We have had a lot of debate about institutions that rely on the fact that children are not being taught subjects such as English and mathematics, but only an exclusively religious programme, to say that they are not schools. It is a shocking fact that there are British citizens reaching adulthood without the most basic education that they need in order to play their full part in British society and the workplace, if they choose to do so, as adults. They may not choose that, but pre-emptively taking away their capacity to do so should concern us deeply. It seems unreasonable that an institution that is part of such a model should want to be outside the scope of any meaningful scrutiny. We know from IICSA and from many previous cases that, sadly, a strong religious affiliation is not a guarantee that children will be completely protected from the kinds of harm that adults can inflict on them.

It is worrying that so many people do not want to acknowledge or discuss this problem and its tensions. There is widespread hesitancy to venture into sensitive areas linked to faith or ethnicity; we have seen this where other issues have arisen recently. I can see the temptation of offering an opt-out, as proposed by my noble friend Lord Lucas, yet I also know that the better path is to carry on working to try to find models that do a better job of reconciling the desires of a faith group and the important rights of children. I know that many of my colleagues, including my noble friends Lord Nash, Lord Agnew, Lady Morgan and Lady Barran, worked hard in their time in government to try to find those next steps and better accommodations. An opt-out is just not, in my view, sensible or workable. At the point when this country has become simply a patchwork of self-segregated communities, cut off from each another, there will not be much of a nation left.

I note that there is an evolving picture internationally around the same issues that we have been seeing in schools in England. As chief inspector, I talked to my counterparts in countries such as France and Sweden, which are seeing parallel trends. This is something that needs discussing, not just domestically but internationally. I believe that it is impossible—and, indeed, undesirable—to try to make tidy regulatory categories covering every kind of provision outside school. They quickly become obsolete, as would any micro-precise thresholds.

Overall, the extension of scope in Clause 36 is important and justified, but it is also important that the regulations that are made are clear and well understood, and that enforcement is adequately funded, with enough resource for Ofsted to carry on its investigatory work and for the DfE to act where it should. There has to be a high level of transparency about the work, to help stave off pre-emptive attempts to brand this difficult work as biased or unfair. We must carry on doing all that we can to make the intrinsically knotty subject matter here fully discussable.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

My Lords, I add my support to amendments 444A to C, 445 and 445ZA to ZD, in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran, which seek to rein in the sweeping new powers currently set out in Clause 49 for the Secretary of State to intervene in academy operations. As my noble friend said, of course the Secretary of State should have the ability to ensure that academies comply with their statutory duties, but the powers currently included in Clause 49 are so broad that they will undermine trust in school leaders, significantly reduce academy autonomy and create a top-down bureaucracy with potentially over-restrictive government insight.

The clause as currently drafted, for instance, allows for the Secretary of State to give directions they consider appropriate to academies if they are deemed to have acted unreasonably or to be proposing to act unreasonably. To my mind, the effect appears to be that a trust could be punished for actions it has not yet taken, with a central direction initiated simply on the basis of speculation from a Secretary of State. I may have misunderstood but, if this is the case, it surely cannot be right.

In this context, the use of the word “unreasonably” is a further cause for concern. It is a vague and subjective standard, left undefined in Clause 49 as it stands, and it seems to open the door to overreach and potential political interference in individual schools and trusts from Whitehall. Without clear guardrails, it would enable Ministers to meddle in decisions that surely must properly belong to academy trustees and head teachers.

As my noble friend has just said in her opening remarks, the drafting of the clause runs the risk of creating a micromanager’s charter. And the problem does not end there. The powers granted under Clause 49 are not only overly broad; they are also unchecked and have no independent review or appeal mechanisms built in—something which Amendment 445A, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, would specifically address.

The group of amendments tabled by my noble friend, along with the amendment in the name of he noble Lord, Lord Knight, would bring some much-needed balance into Clause 49 by restoring proportionality and fairness into the process while maintaining the Secretary of State’s powers to ensure that trusts do not breach their statutory duties, funding agreements or charity law. I hope the Minister will think again about the breadth of powers that the Government are proposing.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I too support the amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran. As she and my noble friend Lady Evans have pointed out, it is again not obvious why these powers are needed. The existing legislative framework and funding agreements provide ample levers to enforce and hold academy trusts accountable. If there is an implied shift, as there appears to be, away from accountability and towards direct control and management, it is important to remember what we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, this afternoon: he laid out very clearly those underlying principles about high autonomy, balanced with strong accountability, and referred to the problems and weaknesses of some local authorities, which made it necessary and desirable to move to the model that served us well for many years. It would be deeply unfortunate if we end up with a central government that is attempting to manage the entire school system, rather along the lines of one of the weaker local authorities of 40 years ago.

I am worried about the strain that this will place on the Civil Service. I have concerns about people trying to read tea leaves and decide whether a breach is likely. As others have said, it feels like a system that is almost certain to create more contention and disagreement, and more time wasted on legal disputes and challenges to action, than it is to help children by resolving problems early. I support the set of amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran.

[Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lady Barran. I have not spoken in Committee and apologise for not being available to speak at Second Reading. Although I supported many of the arguments earlier today in respect of teachers’ qualifications, curriculums and so on, I chose to speak on this group of amendments because these clauses go to the essence of the academy and negate much of what an academy is about and what it wishes to do.

These amendments are particularly important. It is a bit disappointing that there are so few of us loyal troopers in the Chamber tonight to address this extremely important issue about the core of how academies are run.

I will disclose my interest in a second, but I was propelled to speak because I heard from one sponsor whom I know well that, if these clauses come through, he would want to hand “his academy”, as he calls it—the academy that he sponsors—back to the state. I cannot believe that this is what the Government want to achieve, but inclusion of Clause 49 may well lead to that. It would be a tragedy for our children’s education.

I am a huge admirer of academies. I was a trustee of the London Academy in Edgware and am currently a member of the Leigh Academies Trust in Kent. A member is a peculiar status within an academy, but that is what I am. I am not a governor or a trustee; along with the county council, I am a member.

The first, the London Academy in Edgware, was one of the original sponsored academies. It replaced a failing school in Edgware and was sponsored by the philanthropist Peter Shalson. In 2023, thanks in no small part to the excellent head, Paddy McGrath, it became one of the top 55 schools in the country. Importantly, over 50% of the students are eligible for the pupil premium and the admission policy prioritised students eligible for free school meals. This was a fantastic achievement. It has been obtained not least because of the flexibilities that it has been afforded and the freedoms which have been granted to it by its academy status.

As I mentioned, I am also a member, along with Kent County Council, of the Leigh Academies Trust. Under the leadership of Simon Beamish and Frank Green, it has grown from being one of the original CTCs, which some may remember—for full disclosure, it was originally sponsored in the 1980s by my uncle, Sir Geoffrey Leigh—to now being a MAT of over 30 schools. It is widely respected for its tremendous achievements.

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I would be the first to admit this is not a complete legal outline of the way forward, but it is a start. I would be delighted—I live in hope—to meet the Minister and discuss how this framework might be achieved. It would provide the possibility; it would not force anything to happen. The evidence is not just that many schools want an out from the disempowering tangles in which they have been enmeshed in the anti-democratic systems brought in over recent decades; more than that, not giving them this route means going against the evidence of what works for schools, communities and, of course, the pupils. I look forward to our further debate.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I want to speak briefly on academy orders and to support Amendments 445B, 446 and 446A. My noble friend Lady Barran rightly said that I did not support the extension of academy orders to those schools that require improvement. I remember writing to the then Secretary of State to warn him that, among other things, it would place inspection under impossible pressure, and I think that my assessment was borne out.

This Government were quick to change their regulatory policies to remove their dependence on overall inspection judgments, so that those judgments could be removed. What we have seen over the past year is interesting, because it has shown that the sector also dislikes opaque and unpredictable processes, such as are now operating. With the loss of clarity, every intervention decision potentially becomes just the opening salvo in a long war of attrition.

I experienced quite a few of these sadly sometimes misguided parent campaigns to defend a school that was in fact in a desperate state and where the parents simply did not realise quite how bad it was. I know how debilitating some of these situations can be for all concerned and how drastically they can delay the kind of work and action that is needed to sort things out for children. Getting things sorted out for children typically also sorts things out for staff, making their jobs doable again.

We also now have years of experience of RISE teams and their predecessors. None has been found to be fully satisfactory. Each incarnation starts by recruiting school or MAT leaders but, over time, tends to morph into being a team of generalist officials who are not themselves equipped to provide support and, sometimes, struggle to identify the most appropriate alternative sources of help. I therefore support the proposals for improvement made by my noble friend and urge the Government to think hard about how to make sure that the consequences of failure—it is important that we can recognise failure—are clear, brisk and well implemented, with the maximum certainty and the minimum delay, limbo or uncertainty for all concerned.

[Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)]

To get the current situation on the record, I looked around for evidence and found a quote that is helpful in our deliberations on this issue. The quote is:

“I have serious concerns about the proposal to change the pathway for turning around failing schools. I know from bitter personal experience that any change to the status of a school can become highly political. The current system, in which failing schools automatically become academies, provides clarity and de-politicisation, and ensures a rapid transition. I fear that making that process discretionary would result in a large increase in judicial reviews”—


as has been mentioned—

“pressure on councils and prolonged uncertainty, which is in nobody’s interests”.—[Official Report, Commons, 8/1/25; col. 902.]

I think that encapsulates the situation quite neatly. It is from Siobhain McDonagh, speaking on 8 January 2025. It can be found in column 902 of the relevant Hansard; I am providing the reference since my earlier remarks were challenged. So I will put them on the record as well: they came from the Spectator on 5 February. I believe that Siobhain McDonagh summarised the situation very fairly.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I will pick up that last point, which was very incisively made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. My primary school was a two-form entry primary school. It was a popular school, and we wanted to increase the size to three forms of entry. The local authority initially said, “No, because if you do that, you’ll take children from the two other primary schools in the locality, which will weaken those schools”. At the time, I was a bit miffed about this, but I thought, “Okay”. The local authority said, “What we need to do is to build up the numbers and the esteem of those two other primary schools”, which it did very successfully. Then, guess what: it agreed that my school could become a three-form entry school.

It is not just about size; it also about schools working together. The noble Baroness, Lady Morris, quite rightly paid tribute to the role that the noble Lords, Lord Agnew and Lord Nash, played as Ministers in establishing multi-academy trusts. One area which has never worked, to my mind, is that you can have the headquarters of the multi-academy trust at the other end of the country. It has never worked for me that a multi-academy trust can have schools in Devon and Cornwall but also in the north-east. Where is that community feel about them?

The trouble with expanding schools is that you can get to a situation in which schools just want to grow and grow, because they get more money. They can get too large for the existing children and families. I think of the school that my wife worked at, a seven-form entry comprehensive which was allowed to increase its size to 11. It became completely unmanageable. As the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, rightly said, by taking children from one school, in many cases you are almost putting a close notice on that school. The way to deal with it is not by moving children or allowing schools to grow but by providing the resources and expertise and making that school popular, putting in real expertise to change its character and educational purpose.

I put my name to the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, and I have also put an amendment down myself. Let us first understand the definition of a managed move. It is a permanent move of a child from one school to another for reasons not related to family relocation. It is important to put that into context and to remind ourselves that currently 1.49 million children are persistently absent from school and 171,000 children are severely absent from school.

The Who is Losing Learning? report of 2025 uncovered a deeply concerning trend; that

“for every child that is permanently excluded, 10 more invisibly move”

between schools or are off rolled entirely. These moves are unregulated and unmonitored, meaning that too often even the Department for Education does not know where or even if those children are being educated following a managed move.

Managed moves, when done correctly, can have great success for both the pupil and the school. That is why these two amendments, which are very similar, are so important. We need a fair access protocol to make sure that, when we carry out those managed moves between schools, we know how it is happening. I like the notion that the local authority should perhaps report on this—not creating more bureaucracy but just giving confidence to the system. I hope the Minister when she replies will tell us how important it is to get this right.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Barran’s amendments to Clause 56 and my noble friend Lord Agnew’s Amendment 454. I have heard much around the Committee this afternoon that is extremely important, but I think there are some wider points to make.

There are many romantic expectations of school admissions—that there is a perfect world in which every child will go to the school that they and their parents choose, in which every mainstream school can provide well for every child no matter how extreme their needs, and in which no child will ever cause harm to any other child or adult in a school. In this perfect world, the romantics expect children to be distributed perfectly evenly between schools on any measure by which we choose to analyse the population. But this is a dream, and chasing dreams rarely improves children’s experiences in the real world. Sadly, it is entirely possible that the extended powers to direct admissions will backfire, especially with policy pressure on local authorities to keep even the worst behaved children in mainstream schools irrespective of the consequences.

Consider a child for whom an LA is trying to find a managed move. If several schools decline to accept the child, it may mean that they are all shirking their responsibilities, or it may mean that they have correctly assessed that the child’s needs are too great for that school or any mainstream school to manage the child safely. One shocking case I saw as chief inspector related to a girl who was raped by a boy who had come to her school on a managed move and, worse, the receiving school had not been informed by either the LA or the sending school of the boy’s known history of serious sexual misconduct. No school should be levered into putting other children at risk in this way.

If the LA directs the child to one of its own schools, it still has direct responsibility for the child, but if it can direct the child to an academy, it has offloaded the problem, at least in part. There is an obvious incentive for local authorities to use this power to offload the most difficult children and leave academies to shoulder a disproportionate responsibility for the most difficult and even dangerous children, and to inflict the greatest risk on the other children and staff in those academies.

Let us also consider the point that, while a decision will relate to a single child, good schools also have to consider how many children with behavioural problems they can manage and support properly without destroying the very strengths that make them able to work effectively with such children. I have seen already how difficult this is for local authorities in the context of SEND. Local authorities control EHCPs, which name a school to which that child should be admitted. In theory, it is parents who choose that school, but in practice, local authorities have significant influence over those parent choices, and some local authorities have perhaps on occasion found it convenient to encourage parents to choose academies rather than maintained schools, or at the very least to not discourage them from doing so.

As a result, some popular and successful academies have at times found themselves facing real difficulties. I know of cases where local authorities expected a school to fill more than one-third of its year 7 places with children requiring intensive individual support, many of them for behavioural problems. This would have turned those schools into de facto special schools without the wider infrastructure and support that we expect of special schools.

It is in fact extraordinarily difficult for local authorities to be impartial between mainstream schools and academies. For this reason, I strongly support my noble friend’s Amendment 452ZA, requiring local authorities to act impartially between maintained schools and academies. It will still be difficult in practice, but the principle should be explicit in the Act.

Similarly, my noble friend’s Amendment 453A to Clause 56 and Amendments 457A and 457B seek to ensure that changes to school admission numbers are made in the interests of children and parents, rather than the administrative convenience of the local authority. Again, these decisions will always be hard and will never please everyone, but it is right and important that children’s needs are explicitly put first: otherwise, it is sadly all too certain that, with the shrinking birth cohort, some excellent schools will see their admissions restricted while mediocre schools carry on. My noble friend Lord Agnew’s Amendment 454 gives some protection to this principle. I hope the Government will see how unfortunate this would be and will take steps to guard against it.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, Clause 53 covers the role of schools in general and academies in particular in relation to pupil place planning. As we know, in the vast majority of cases, academies co-operate and fulfil their role in helping the local authority to meet its sufficiency duties, as the Bill says, so far as is reasonable. Clause 54 gives the local authority new powers to direct admission of individual pupils, despite the fact that those powers already exist for the Secretary of State to use within the funding agreement for all academies.

The policy notes say, slightly quaintly:

“Schools and local authorities’ interests may not always be aligned, and they are not expected to agree on all admissions and place planning matters. However, it is expected that they will behave reasonably and collaboratively, for example, considering the other party’s views, being willing to meet and discuss differences, and sharing information in a timely manner”.


All this is fine, but presumably the point of the clause is to get quicker decisions and to address a problem of academies apparently unreasonably refusing to accept these pupils. But where is the evidence that that is true? In the academic year 2023-24, there were just under 11,000 exclusions. Looking at the data on the department’s website for exclusions and suspensions, including repeat suspensions, one sees incredible differences, in the rates of permanent exclusion in particular, even in neighbouring local authorities. This is true for local authorities where almost all the secondaries are academies and for those where there are predominantly maintained schools.

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[Baroness Grey-Thompson (CB)]

My Lords, Amendment 502N, in my name, would insert a proposed new clause after Clause 62, which raises the issue of seclusion in education, particularly in the form of isolation rooms.

Isolation rooms have serious implications for the emotional and psychological well-being of children, especially disabled children and young people and those with special educational needs. This is a probing amendment that would introduce a statutory definition of seclusion. It would empower the Secretary of State to regulate its use through consultation. If regulations are made, my amendment requires minimum protections: banning seclusion as discipline, notifying parents, recording incidents and ensuring internal safeguarding oversight.

The experience of seclusion impacts too many children today—children with speech, language and communication needs—whose communication may not be understood, recognised or supported in that moment. Children with ADHD may find it hard to regulate strong emotions without timely support, and yet instead of being supported they are removed, placed alone and not free to leave, in rooms with such labels as isolation, calm, breakout room, nurture space or any other number of euphemisms. What they experience is seclusion, whether it happens in a locked room, a space with a closed door, or an area where the child is simply not permitted to leave. The impact is the same: a loss of connection and potential safety.

Disabled children and those with special educational needs are disproportionately affected. Some children are removed daily, and there is no guarantee that parents will be told. These experiences can be isolating, traumatic, and deeply damaging to a child’s sense of safety and belonging. Other sectors, such as healthcare and secure settings, already regulate seclusion and deprivation of liberty. Education should not be an exception.

The Department for Education acknowledged the issue in its 2020 guidance, but guidance alone does not close a legal loophole. This proposed new clause invites us to act thoughtfully and proportionately, to close a legal gap that has persisted for far too long. It is not a radical proposal. It is a proportionate, enabling amendment, grounded in evidence, shaped by lived experience and guided by the principle that no child should be left unsupported or invisible in the name of behaviour management. Seclusion happens in our schools, even if we do not call it that. This proposed new clause would not ban it but would give us the tools to see it, define it and scrutinise it. At the very least, we should agree that when a child is confined and not free to leave, we ought to know and we ought to care.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendment 502YF, proposed by my noble friend Lord Nash, and Amendments 502YV to 502YYA, proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran.

There has long been a lot of discomfort about permanent exclusions. No one likes the idea that there are children who cannot thrive in mainstream schools or who are too likely to harm others to be allowed to attend them, but last year’s youth justice statistics show 12,000 convictions of children for offences of violence, 3,000 for knife-related offences and 1,400 for sexual offences. Serious misconduct does not begin only once children have left school. There is also a lot of hope that keeping children in mainstream schools, no matter what they may do, will avert later criminality, but in fact excluded children are more likely to have come into contact with youth justice services before they are excluded than after. Because we have been remarkably successful in reducing the number of children in custody, there are more children with very serious behaviour problems in the school system who might once not have been there.

What I saw at Ofsted is that the vast majority of schools work extremely hard to keep children in mainstream schools. Relatively few exclusions are unjustified. Many parents, especially those with children who have been harmed by other children, believe that there is too much pressure rather than too little on schools not to exclude. The vast majority of exclusions are a culmination of a long period in which a school does all that it knows how to do to support a child and help them to progress academically and socially.

As a result, I believe that we have a problem of a different nature. Many teachers will tell you that it is often possible to spot the children who are most likely to fall out of school as early as reception year, or even earlier, but the pressure is always to keep them in mainstream schools, even when that school can do little more than warehouse a child with teaching assistants until this becomes manifestly unhelpful for the child and the parent succeeds in obtaining an EHCP and a special school place.

We do not start contingency planning for those children as early as we should and could, which contributes to there not being enough specialist provision. Even at the point of permanent exclusion, our laws and processes are focused on the legitimacy of the exclusion and the process that has been followed. What is not part of any of those processes is a pragmatic assessment of what kind of education to adulthood will give the excluded child the best chance in life, by which I mean reaching adulthood with basic skills in place, functioning within social norms, being willing and capable of holding down a job and, in the longer term, being capable of sustaining a marriage or stable relationship. The amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Nash will help to concentrate minds on how best to do what it is in the power of the state to do to help excluded children to the best possible future.

My noble friend’s Amendments 502YV and onwards in this group would also help to direct attention appropriately. They reflect a pragmatic recognition of the circumstances in which the harm to other children from reinstating a child is likely to exceed the benefits to the excluded child of reinstatement. For example, it is well known that sexual offending tends to be a persistent pattern of behaviour, and I referred to one such case in an earlier group. I add that the bullying survey suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, might be useful in showing how much fear and unhappiness can be induced in many other children by a very small number of their peers.

For many years, there has been a strong presumption that children should be reintegrated in mainstream schools as soon as possible after exclusion and policy and processes have been designed on this basis, but there is good data that shows that pupils who have been permanently excluded and returned to a mainstream school very rarely stay in mainstream to age 16. Nearly all will be moved into alternative provision subsequently, with or without another permanent exclusion, or drop out entirely. It would be useful to know what proportion of managed moves are in fact effective in the long run and which kinds of children and problems are most likely to be effectively dealt with in this way. My noble friend Lady Barran’s amendments, relating to a presumption against reinstatement for certain children, dovetail with my noble friend Lord Nash’s amendment to steer schools and local authorities towards constructive and realistic planning for the children with the greatest difficulties in their lives.

I echo some of the concerns expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. The last thing we need is more measures that could be weaponised and potentially cause more divisions in schools and society. When two young children fight, labelling the tussle as racially motivated may not help those two children get along and may in fact encourage factions in the class. Promoting and focusing on what we have in common and should value together is at least as important, and probably more important, than labelling and division if we are to achieve the social cohesion that we all aspire to.

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[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, no one stands to speak here or anywhere else about SEND without preparing for a social media barrage from one direction or another. But unless we can discuss the underlying problems and tensions openly and honestly, there can be little hope of getting to a better place than we are in at the moment.

From the parents’ point of view, some are happy, but others say that theoretical entitlements do not translate into the support they believe their child needs. From the schools’ perspective, they are loaded with enormous expectations and have inadequate resources to meet them. From the funders’ perspective, eye-watering amounts of money are already being spent on SEND.

If you do the sums, the average household in England already contributes £450 a year just for the cost of the high needs funding block, on top of the other money it contributes for education. Yet local authorities, and behind them the taxpayer, must meet almost unlimited demand from this large but finite resource, with few levers to direct that resource to the activities where it will make the most difference.

As my noble friend Lord Gove said in a previous group, the SEND category has expanded and diversified to an extraordinary degree in recent years. Among other things, I think we are mixing up the children who have conditions that will always affect their lives with those who really only need some catch-up teaching or some extra encouragement, and who should be able to lead unimpaired adult lives. They are really quite different things.

Clearly, this situation cannot go on, and that explains the raft of amendments relating to SEND proposed for insertion after Clause 62, as the Bill does not contain any direct proposals for SEND. In aggregate, what I take from these proposed amendments is a hope that if only we can find a few more ways to extend and push harder, everything will be better.

There are certainly ideas that deserve attention within these amendments. We do need a national body for SEND, but what we need is the SEND equivalent of NICE: a body that collates and, where necessary, commissions evidence of the effectiveness of and value for money of SEND interventions, and that determines which treatments can be paid for out of the public purse and which cannot be justified. Someone needs to set and hold that line.

We need better join-up between schools and youth justice services. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, has an alternative educational plan for children involved with youth justice that parallels my noble friend Lord Nash’s amendment discussed in a previous group. We have already pushed identification and labelling to the point where they may be doing more harm than good to some children at the margins. Even though a label may feel reassuring, it can also do real harm if it lowers the child’s own expectations of what they can achieve, or their teacher’s expectations of them.

Neurodivergence is a term that has no clinical definition. In essence, it invites people who do not meet clinical criteria and thresholds to self-identify into services and funding streams intended for those who do meet those criteria. The definitions that float around for neurodivergence often sound like most young people’s adolescent experience. I suspect there are few of us who did not feel awkward, socially inept, and often just out of things in that period of life.

Good schools understand the adolescent experience and work to make a culture and framework in which teenagers have the structure and encouragement they need for most to succeed and emerge into adulthood without ever needing to be labelled as abnormal, and reserving specialist support for those who really need it.

The Government must take great care not to create incentives to segregate children within schools into SEND and non-SEND categories. With very few exceptions, children with rare physical needs need to learn the same things, and cognitive science shows us that they learn in the same way, though some may need the learning broken down into smaller steps with more repetition and reinforcement along the way. Most children with SEND will do the vast majority of their learning in their mainstream classrooms. Concentrating on getting that core classroom experience right for all children, with a strong, coherent, well-sequenced curriculum taught effectively, must come first, because doing this well minimises the number of children who come adrift, which is never a pleasant experience for the child, and it enables the expert SEND practitioners to concentrate on those who will always need their help. If, for example, we expect SEND funding to be spent on things that are specific to children with SEND, those mainstream classrooms will be neglected and starved of resource.

I look forward to the Government bringing forward their reform proposals for SEND and to proposing amendments in this vein in due course.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much support Amendment 502W from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. We need a much better standard and a much better quantity of data in this area. We need to start with some clear understanding and definitions of the terms we are using. There seems to have been a lot of drift and expansion in definitions, and we need to get back to something that is clear, commonly defined and commonly understood.

Then we really need to understand what works for these children. We need to track what we are doing and when and why it works. This is a really complex area, so we will not get the answer out of small studies and small amounts of data. We need to track every child who has been fingered as SEND, and then we will get enough data to start seeing some patterns. Perhaps we can add other categories, such as young carers and those who are in care, where there are known difficulties with their education that are not associated with SEND but which may well share some common characteristics. If we get better at data, we will really start to understand how to do better by the children and work the cost down at the same time, and that is important.

I am with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, in the spirit of some of the other things that he is doing but I hope that, if this amendment ever came to be enacted, there would be alongside it a recognition of the interests of the other children in class.

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[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendment 502YG, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, and other noble Lords. Your Lordships may well have seen the helpful briefing from the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, of which I have the honour to be a parliamentary ambassador. For those noble Lords who have not had the chance to read it, I will share some brief highlights, given the hour.

Two children per class suffer from food allergies, on average. If your allergic reaction to milk, cheese, nuts or anything else triggers an anaphylactic shock, you need an immediate dose of adrenaline injected with an EpiPen, also known as an autoinjector. Half of all of England’s schools have not got one—that is 10,000 of them. Two-thirds of teachers have not had any formal training on what to do if a pupil suffers from an anaphylactic reaction or shock—and that is in the buildings outside the home where children are most likely to have an anaphylactic shock, unsurprisingly, since they spend six hours a day, five days a week, 38 weeks a year there.

I am confining my remarks on this amendment to the support of all elements relating to EpiPens and autoinjectors, but I support all of the amendment. Your Lordships can see from my comments that requiring all schools, not just half of all schools, to have an EpiPen and someone who knows how to use it has the potential to save lives and reassure countless parents that their children will be safe at school.

Your Lordships might be wondering why so many schools are completely unprepared for this sort of emergency. Schools have a vital day job to do. It is hard enough teaching maths to children who are not interested—please insert your own least favourite lesson if you happen to be a mathematics enthusiast—so is it fair to load this responsibility on to them as well? I gently say that all that is being asked at this point is that an EpiPen is in the school reception and that there is someone who knows one end of it from the other. I am not joking—I am afraid that there has been at least one incident of a member of staff injecting themselves with adrenaline rather than the pupil in shock.

Another argument which might be used against the amendment is that it is surely the responsibility of the pupils at risk to carry their own EpiPens and of their parents to make sure that they do. This is true, but I imagine that my noble friend the Minister agrees that it is not realistic to assume that every child will follow the rules every day without fail. The evidence shows that pupils are most at risk when they are 15 to 17 years-old, precisely the age when they are most likely to take risks.

I have spoken in this House on this issue before, as the mother of a now 17 year-old pupil who has suffered two episodes of anaphylactic shock. Yes, she has two EpiPens in her bag and yes, I try to make sure that she always does. But just like any other mother, I know that things do not always go to plan. I live with that fear just like so many others.

Shortly after my daughter’s first anaphylactic shock, 10 years ago, her doctor at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital, just across the river, asked for my phone after her emergency treatment. To my astonishment, he then took photos of my pale, limp and silent daughter as she lay in my arms. He explained to us that we should print out these photos and give them to her grandparents, her friends’ parents and anyone else who was a bit doubting that severe peanut allergy is really dangerous, and keep one for her first boyfriend in years to come, so that everyone who might have to treat severe allergies would understand that this is what can happen, and that the adrenaline in EpiPens is life-saving.

It is well worth requiring schools to keep them and for them to know how to use them. They save lives.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will be fairly brief. I mainly want to commend the Government on the restraint that they have shown in this Bill in clauses relating to mental health and well-being.

Despite the Bill’s title, there is a welcome absence of clauses that imply that well-being and activities that promote it are separate from, or even antithetical to, good education. In reality, they are strongly correlated. For most children, well-being is a likely outcome of being well taught, well supported, discovering and developing their wider interests, and forming good relationships with peers and with adults—developing a sense of belonging.

Further, there is a growing recognition that spending too much time talking about mental illness to young people who are not ill can be counterproductive. We may need less mental health awareness training in schools, not more. For those advocating more universal mental health interventions in their amendments, I recommend reading the findings published by DfE earlier this year on the effectiveness of several school mental health awareness interventions. These tests of established programmes found that they did not reduce emotional difficulties in the short term, and in the longer term appeared to be associated with greater emotional difficulties and decreased life satisfaction.

Those who have been around in education long enough may also remember the evaluation of the then popular SEAL programme; I think it was “social and emotional aspects of learning”. This study of the programme, which was for primary schools, showed not only that the positive outcomes expected did not materialise, but also that there was an unwelcome side-effect in that, to paraphrase, it taught the mean kids to be better bullies, using the techniques of emotional manipulation that the programme taught them. These findings are a valuable reminder that sometimes less is more.

A word of warning: much of what is proposed in these amendments is hugely well intentioned, but I am particularly nervous about some of the ideas around measurement. If we do not want measurement processes in themselves to harm children, we should not collect data by constantly asking children who are not unwell about their well-being, and especially about their negative emotions. I have seen so many dreadful examples in schools where even very young children are constantly prompted to express emotions and invited to say that they are experiencing negative emotions. You can see the change; they start to believe they are sad or worried or afraid, where this had not even occurred to them. Nothing could fit the phrase “throw the baby out with the bath-water” more accurately than to make children unhappy through well-intentioned measurement processes.

I therefore urge the Government to prioritise advice from expert clinicians in this field and to allow schools to do only—

[Lord O'Donnell (CB)]

I will just say one thing. The noble Baroness mentioned all the things on which she has been able to talk about the evidence because there was data. I just remind noble Lords that this amendment is talking about one annual survey. It is not asking people every couple of minutes how they are doing, just to be absolutely clear.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

Children are very frequently surveyed from different directions; another one would actually add to an extensive load of surveys that they already complete.

The wider point is that there are many ways of measuring indirectly. If we want to measure, we should look for indirect routes that do not involve constantly asking children to self-assess. We should make sure that schools are doing only what is genuinely likely to be helpful for children. The Government should resist the urge to launch crowd-pleasing but ultimately wasteful or even harmful initiatives.

[Baroness Sater (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of Amendment 472 and everything that has been said by the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, and my noble friend Lord Moynihan so passionately. I cannot agree more with what the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, just said.

I frequently touch on themes of well-being, especially with regard to sport, physical activity, mental health, inclusion and financial security. The term “well-being” means different things to different people. If we do not define and measure it consistently, we leave it to drift and risk missing the opportunity to improve children’s lives in meaningful and measurable ways.

We all recognise that young people today face mounting pressures, whether increased anxiety or reduced physical activity, yet we lack a consistent national framework for measuring how children are really doing—not just academically but emotionally and physically. That is why I look forward to hearing how initiatives like the Be Well programme are progressing. Be Well is an example of what can be achieved when universities, charities and local authorities come together to prioritise children’s well-being. It can offer valuable lessons on how data, gathered and shared sensitively, can inform targeted support and drive better outcomes. Anything that improves children’s well-being and strengthens the evidence base behind policy has my full support.

This amendment, as we have heard, proposes an annual, voluntary and confidential national survey. It would equip schools, local authorities and policymakers with the data they need to understand and respond to what young people are really experiencing. Better data leads to better policy and ultimately to better outcomes. Back in 2023, Youth Sport Trust chief executive Ali Oliver said that “fewer than half” of children in the UK meet the Chief Medical Officer’s guidelines for the minimum recommended activities. She said:

“This is contributing to a nation where too many children are missing out, have poor wellbeing and lack a sense of belonging. The evidence is clear: unhappy and unhealthy children do not learn”.


Well-being is closely linked to educational attainment. When children feel better and more supported, they are much more likely to engage in learning and reach their full potential. Understanding that connection and measuring it properly is vital.

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[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, first, I want to reassure the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that the World Health Organization has a clear definition of well-being:

“Well-being is a positive state experienced by individuals in society … Well-being encompasses quality of life and the ability of people and societies to contribute to the world with a sense of meaning and purpose.”


So this is not about self-focus; it is clear that it is about people being in a position to contribute. The WHO goes on to say that a society’s well-being can be

“determined by the extent to which it is resilient, builds capacity for action, and is prepared to transcend challenges”.

Perhaps most of us can agree that that is something society needs to do much better.

I am afraid that I disagree entirely with the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman. The noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, said that the Dutch score particularly highly, along with Denmark, in the recent PISA figures on children’s well-being, and we score astonishingly badly. I was looking at a publication from a few years ago, The Dutch Way in Education. The publisher of that notes how the Dutch system measures not only academic achievement but also the well-being and involvement of students. I can reassure the noble Lord, Lord O’Donnell, that I have raised the study he referred to a number of times. I would like to raise it tonight, but in the interests of the Committee making progress, I will not. Every time we are told how much progress our schools have made, saying, “Look at the exam results”, I say, look at the state of well-being of our pupils. I say particularly to the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, that if we measure only the exam results, that is what we are going to judge our schools on. That is what we have been doing, and it is what has got us into this position.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

Ofsted, where I was chief inspector, took personal development, including children’s well-being, very seriously; it was one of the judgments there. I have never suggested, nor would ever suggest, that academic outcomes were the only thing that mattered for children.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 18th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

The noble Lord, Lord Russell. There we are—promotions are good. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Russell, even though he pre-empted one of my lines: imagine having on the front of every Bill a statement that says, “This complies with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child”—what a step forward that would be.

I want to return to the comments made by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, about listening to children—indeed, this is where the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, started us: nothing about us without us. The noble and learned Baroness referred to how important it is to listen to children. She said that children have really good ideas and a clear psyche. It is important that we follow Article 12 of the UN convention and ensure that we follow the right of children to be listened to and taken seriously. That is crucial for children’s mental health and well-being. The sense of agency really is important; a lack of that sense of agency is a problem across the whole of our society, but particularly for our children.

Turning that round, children have really good ideas. We are facing a polycrisis: we are exceeding our planetary boundaries and we are damaging our health with the state of our world. Children have ideas, with very clear sight of how to tackle those things—fresh ideas that we would all benefit from listening to.

On the specifics of the rights impact assessment proposed by Amendment 469, I will take us back to 2010. I declare an interest here that I was on the board of the Fawcett Society. In 2010, it took a judicial review over the lack of a gender impact assessment on the Budget that year. In the classic way of these cases, the Fawcett Society lost the judicial review but it won from the Government an acknowledgement that there should have been a gender impact assessment on various aspects of the Budget. Creating this right would force Governments to think harder to do the proper impact assessments that the noble Lord, Lord Russell, referred to. This could have real impact. It is not a panacea; it will not suddenly fix everything if we put it in the Bill, but it is an important step in ensuring that questions are carefully examined, not just brushed aside.

We have already heard from a former Children’s Commissioner, but I note that, in the last few days, the current Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, carried out a national census of school leaders and found that schools are being left to plug more and more gaps. Children are not getting the right to the services that they should have and schools are trying to fill in the gaps. I refer to that because I suspect there might be quite a few people out there listening to our debate who think that Britain is a good, developed and successful country and that we must therefore be meeting all our obligations under the convention on children’s rights. But of course we are not, demonstrably.

Our very respected Joint Committee on Human Rights, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, who is not currently in his place, is starting an inquiry into the human rights of children in the social care system in England, having identified that there is a problem. I will cross-reference our recent debates on the Mental Health Bill—an attempt to deal with the needs of some of the most vulnerable people in our society. We have improved the law there, but there was broad agreement that we have not got the resources to deliver the improvement in the law. Ensuring that we are signed up to this convention is crucial.

I will briefly cross-reference an earlier amendment of mine which called for a place efficiency duty for local authorities. One of the less noted elements of the UN convention is Article 31.1, which states that:

“States Parties recognize the right of the child to rest and leisure, to engage in play and recreational activities appropriate to the age of the child and to participate freely in cultural life and the arts”.


An academic article in the Human Rights Law Review of June 2025 by Dr Naomi Lott sets out how we could deliver on that. This takes a global perspective, but it is still highly relevant to the UK.

My final point is a large one and takes a global perspective, thinking about where the world is today—this is particularly relevant in the light of a certain ongoing state visit. As the noble Lord, Lord Banner, says, signing up to the UN convention was done by the Thatcher Government. The principle of respecting human rights and the rule of law has been embedded in British society over decades. However, on a global scale, human rights and the rule of law are under threat like never before. Previously leading countries in defending human rights, to at least a degree, are now stepping out and expressing opposition to them. We often heard from the previous Government, and we hear from the current Government, a desire to be world-leading. Wales and Scotland have been world-leading here. It is time for England and Westminster to step up to the plate.

This matters terribly for practical reasons of human rights and the rule of law and impact assessments and all those things within the UK, but it also matters on a global scale if we are to be leaders and say that human rights and the rule of the law apply to all citizens. The noble Lord, Lord Meston, referred to the right of a child’s identity. As he was speaking, I was thinking of the Ukrainian children kidnapped into Russia and being denied their identity. We cannot stand up for this unless we stand up for ourselves on our own soil. This is a globally important debate, as well as crucial for the children of England.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I oppose Amendments 469 and 470. I recognise that they are proposed with the very best of intentions and at first blush sound wonderful, yet it is blindingly obvious that they would be likely to do more harm than good in practice. They embody a fundamental misconception that children have no real rights in the UK except to the extent that they are specified in supranational charters and conventions. This is simply not the case. We have a long and generally positive history of acknowledging and protecting human rights, including those of children, and recognising the ways in which children need to be treated differently from adults. We do an enormous amount to give children a voice.

I will turn to the negatives. First, the amendments would create a vast and costly administrative burden for very little additional value. The amendments specify that children’s rights impact assessments would have to be published for every single ministerial decision, including operational decisions. Scotland and Wales have been repeatedly cited as models to follow, yet it is genuinely hard to find ways in which children in Scotland and Wales are doing better than children in England and easy to find ways in which they are doing worse. I am afraid that the educational comparative studies, on record for all to see, show very big gaps. The impact of lockdowns was no less harsh for children in Wales and Scotland. All countries have experienced a spike in persistent absence post-lockdown. Whereas the latest persistent absence figure in England is 23%, when I looked it up a couple of months ago, in Wales it was 31% and in Scotland it was 37%. I may have got those two the wrong way around but one is 31% and one is 37%. It is not obvious that those two nations provide a clear example of why we should adopt this approach.

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In conclusion, these amendments are a defence of the rule of law. They would give teeth to the will of Parliament and would better equip the Secretary of State to ensure that the Government’s own policies are given effect. They seek to re-establish a proper chain of accountability. I ask the Minister to consider this proposal in the constructive spirit in which it is offered. It means a fix for a broken system, to restore parents’ trust, and that the law of the land is upheld in every school. I beg to move.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 502YM. I will echo some of the comments made by my noble friend Lord Jackson in relation to his amendment. I believe that my amendment complements the comprehensive final-stage procedure he outlined neatly.

Anyone who works in education knows how problematic dealing with complaints is becoming. Of course it is right that public bodies should have a complaints procedure, as is required by law. Of course dissatisfied parents should be able to complain to or about a school, and schools failing in their responsibilities should rectify their errors and omissions promptly. But the current system is complex and, in the main, giving satisfaction to no one.

I remind noble Lords that complaining to government is, typically, a fourth-line action after a series of stages. The first stage is attempting to resolve the issue with the staff member most directly involved, such as a classroom teacher; the second is escalating the issue or making a complaint to the head teacher or another school leader; the third is making a complaint to school governors; and the fourth is escalating a complaint to the local authority or the academy trust.

Yet the number of complaints to government has grown enormously in recent years, although there is not much evidence of a corresponding deterioration in the service offered by schools to children and parents. It seems likely that it is at least partly down to a higher propensity to be dissatisfied in a more fractious world. Furthermore, the use of AI enables parents to generate extremely lengthy complaints, which are time consuming to read, investigate and respond to. Safeguarding will often be invoked to ensure that a complaint is prioritised.

The various provisions in law relating to the consideration of complaints by national education bodies generally require that local routes have been exhausted. The expectation was that escalation to national bodies was a last resort for when serious concerns are ignored or mishandled by those more directly responsible. But, sadly, we see today an increasing willingness to escalate even relatively minor issues if the school’s response is anything other than doing exactly what the parent wants. When more serious concerns arise, such as those pointed out by my noble friend Lord Jackson, the sheer volume can mean that those more serious concerns are drowned out by the volume of very minor complaints.

Furthermore, the patchwork of law and regulation often means that any complaint must be considered in all the places to which it is sent. Each of the government organisations has a different purpose and will apply a different filter to determine whether it needs to act, but all of them must take the time to read and understand what are often long and complex documents, and often must check with the school to establish the facts. This is a huge burden on schools as well as being a wasteful model for government to operate, and it does not appear to be making parents any more satisfied. We need to reset the system and return to the expectation that the vast majority of complaints are considered and closed at local level.

My amendment therefore proposes that a single government complaints system is established, which can triage and direct complaints to the most appropriate body or reply to the complainant to say that there is no further action to be taken. There would need to be discussion about where this should be located. If it was desirable for such decisions to be made by those with substantial school experience, it might be located in Ofsted; otherwise, it might be a DfE team. Either way, the complaints and action taken should be recorded in a single database, accessible to all bodies with regulatory functions, including inspection, so as to minimise duplication, with all the burdens that that imposes.

Such a system should reduce the wear and tear on parents themselves—pursuing complaints is very damaging to parents in their relationships with schools—as well as the wear and tear on schools from protracted and inconclusive complaints processes. In short, this is a pragmatic amendment that would benefit almost everyone.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I understand where these amendments are coming from. Personally, I have not formed a complete view about this. I understand what the noble Baroness is saying and I look forward to hearing the Minister’s reply, because there is an issue here and this is about how we handle that issue.

Education has become a successful business for the lawyers, to be quite honest. Dare I say, you only have to look at special educational needs, which lawyers and solicitors have made a lot of money out of. I declare an interest as my daughter is a solicitor. One also sees solicitors involved in school admission procedures. In some cases, that is a natural route to take, and I wonder about complaints—never mind the bureaucracy involved—if lawyers get involved in that side as well.

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I am not sure I totally agree with the amendment, but we recognise that certain groups have to have technology to take exams, even if others are expected to take them with a pen. I hope we will get a coherent answer on this, or at least a look at the direction of travel, because if we throw the baby out with the bathwater, large groups of our society will take a step back in their interactions not only with the education system but with most of modern society.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I have listened to a number of Lords speak movingly and wisely about the risks, concerns and things we need to guard against in the use of technology. I want to talk about the risk to learning itself. I have forgotten their name, but somebody recently wrote an excellent piece that illustrated this very vividly.

We all understand that when we send our children to school and when we teach them, the point is not simply for them to have a thing they can say they have done; it is the process that they go through that really embeds it and enables them to use that knowledge and those skills in future.

We have all seen it in the kinds of problems that have arisen with coursework. If a coursework essay or a homework assignment is produced for a child or university student by AI, then that child or student has not done the thinking, they have not learned what the assignment was set for, and the education will not achieve its purpose. There is a real risk at the moment that a lot of education in a lot of places is being quite significantly undermined because young people do not recognise that they are harming themselves by taking the shortcuts. Perhaps we have all been a little bit slow to recognise this risk.

There is a helpful distinction to be made here. I recently read a piece which distinguished between cognitive offloading and cognitive bypasses. The use of assistive technology, such as that which the noble Lord, Lord Addington, has referred to on occasion, might be described as cognitive offloading, where the point is to help the child with the additional challenges they are experiencing without losing the point of the lesson or what they are meant to be learning.

If we get to the point where the technology becomes a way of simply bypassing the learning, we are actually destroying education. The enthusiasm for technology—which has understandably invigorated us all; there are clearly tremendous opportunities—and the incredible energy and power of the tech firms, which of course concentrate immense efforts on Ministers to bring their products and services into schools, mean that there is a massive job for government to do to find that balance and to really understand the risks, not just around data and to children’s well-being but to education.

[Lord Tarassenko (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 493, 494, 502K and 502YI, as someone with an interest in the use of educational technologies, including AI, both in schools and universities. I declare my interest as chair of the Maths Horizons project, funded by XTX Markets, which earlier this year reviewed the maths curriculum in England from five to 18, and briefly investigated the use of edtech to support the teaching of the subject.

I speak as a supporter of the deployment of educational technology in the classroom as I believe it can and should have a positive impact on the education of children, and not just in maths. But this must be done within a framework which protects children from its misuse. We must balance innovation in education through edtech with appropriate regulation. The regulations listed in subsection (2) of the proposed new clause in Amendment 493 would support the adoption of edtech in our schools rather than hinder it.

In this context, what has happened with chatbots based on large language models is a salutary example of the early release of AI products without proper safeguards, especially with respect to their use by children. Tragically, this week the parents of the American teenager who recently took his own life after repeatedly sharing his intentions with ChatGPT told a Senate judiciary sub-committee investigating chatbot dangers:

“What began as a homework helper gradually turned itself into a confidant and then a suicide coach”.


Ironically, we are now told that OpenAI is building a ChatGPT for teenagers and plans to use age-prediction technology to help bar children under 18 from the standard version. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, wrote in a blog this week just before the Senate hearings—and then coming to this country—that AI chatbots are

“a new and powerful technology, and we believe minors need significant protection”.

The risks associated with the use of edtech may not be on the same scale, but they are nevertheless real. In many cases, edtech products used in schools rely extensively on the collection of children’s data, allowing it to be used for commercial and profiling purposes. The recent report from the 5Rights Foundation and the LSE, which has already been mentioned, highlights that some popular classroom AI apps track users with cookies from adult websites and may provide inaccurate and unhelpful information. Most worryingly, a popular app used for educational purposes in the UK generates emulated empathy through sentiment analysis and so increases the likelihood of children forming an emotional attachment to the app. I therefore support Amendments 493, 494 and 502K, which together would ensure that edtech products provide children with the higher standard of protection afforded by the ICO’s age-appropriate design code.

In addition to the safeguards introduced by these amendments, there is a need for research to establish whether educational technologies deliver better educational outcomes for children. Most edtech products lack independent evidence that they lead to improved outcomes. Indeed, some studies have shown that edtech products can promote repetitive or distracting experiences with minimal, if any, learning values. By contrast, there is a growing body of evidence on the positive side that edtech can effectively support vocabulary acquisition, grammar learning, and the development of reading and writing skills for students for whom English is the second language, particularly when these tools are used to complement a teacher’s instruction.

To establish a causal relationship between the use of an edtech tool and a specific learning outcome, we need to design randomised control trials—the gold standard for demonstrating the efficacy of interventions in the social or medical sciences. Longitudinal data will then be needed to track student usage, time on task and completion rates. Crucially, the trial must have enough participants to detect a meaningful effect if one exists. This is unlikely to be possible using the data from a single school, so data from several schools will need to be anonymised and then aggregated to obtain a statistically meaningful result.

I am satisfied that Amendments 502K and 502YI would allow this methodological approach to be followed. Indeed, subsection (4)(c) of the proposed new clause in Amendment 502K would ensure that the code of practice enabled the development of standards to certify evidence-based edtech products and support the testing of novel products. This would provide UK- based companies with the opportunity to innovate in edtech within an appropriate regulatory environment.

As English is the lingua franca of the digital world, there is the opportunity for the UK to become a leader in edtech innovation and certification, for the benefit of children not only in the UK but in many other countries. These amendments should be seen by the Department for Education not as an attempt to overregulate the edtech sector but instead as a mechanism for the promotion of existing evidence-based apps and the development of a new generation of products, some of which may be AI-facilitated, using—no pun intended—best-in-class trial methodology.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 14th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to the amendments proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran. We have heard from a number of Members of the House about the changes that this part of the Bill is making. A fundamental rebalancing of responsibilities in social care is being carried through in the pilots. It is putting much more on to the shoulders of less-qualified staff. The reforms are intended to streamline the system and manage rising costs but, as my noble friend has pointed out, there are many concerns from experts such as Professor Eileen Munro and from many practitioners about the implications of inexperienced staff finding themselves doing child protection work, which, paradoxically, could lead to more Section 47 investigations, not fewer, which was one of the aims of the reforms.

Taking one step back, the hypothesis behind the reforms was the idea that the social care system had become weighted too much towards individual children in isolation rather than children in the family context, and that more of the support available should be diverted to families rather than given to individual children. However, little account was taken of the profile of the children most likely to be in the care of a local authority. They include children with severe disabilities and special needs, often children who are most likely unavoidably to live in social care as adults. They are children whose parents simply do not have the capacity to manage at home, even with extensive support. Indeed, the strain of trying to manage a child’s needs has sometimes fractured parental and other family relationships. More family support and more kinship care is often simply not a solution.

Then we have to acknowledge that there are some children who simply do not have a decent parent nor any other decent adult in their family and realistically never will have. It is horrible, but true, that there are children who simply do not have a family member able and willing to give them the care, attention and love that they need. We have somehow to recognise and face this.

A substantial minority of looked-after children are unaccompanied migrant children, typically boys in their late teens. These children are not here because they have a dysfunctional family network that needs support and intervention by our social workers. They need help, but other kinds of help. There are, of course, risks to these children, and there are also risks to others from some of them.

Together, these kinds of children account for a substantial proportion of the social care caseload, yet the reforms that are being pushed through do not acknowledge their particular needs. For all these reasons, considering all these kinds of children, Amendment 17 in particular, which would defer carrying through the full reforms until the full findings from the pilots and pathfinders are published, discussed and understood, and any necessary changes reflected, is important. It would be unsafe to proceed.

[The Minister of State, Department for Education and Department for Work and Pensions (Baroness Smith of Malvern) (Lab)]

My Lords, creating new multi-agency child protection teams through Clause 3 is not, as the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, suggested, about saving money; it is about bringing together social workers, police, health and education colleagues with experience in child protection to take swift and effective action that protects children from harm at the earliest opportunity. I hope that I will be able to respond to the points raised in this short debate, as we did at length in Committee and have continued to do since then through engagement, which noble Lords have acknowledged, including, in my case, directly with directors of children’s services.

Government Amendments 12 and 14 broaden the range of police staff who can work in these teams to include police officers and other police staff experienced in child protection. The need for this amendment arose as we talked more closely with the National Police Chiefs’ Council and the College of Policing to make sure that we were providing the scope for the correct representatives from policing to be on these teams. We are confident that this will improve front-line operational capacity through the right people with the right skills working in the team. Regulations will be clear that individuals must have appropriate levels of experience, seniority, qualification and expertise. I will come back a little later in my remarks to how we will ensure that those appropriate levels are delivered.

Noble Lords have heard me speak before in Committee—in fact, at some length—about the Families First Partnership programme, where we are investing £2.4 billion over the next three years to change the way that we help, support and protect children. One element of that—introducing new multi-agency child protection teams—brings a sharp focus to better multi-agency working, information sharing and decision-making. I therefore welcome the opportunity to address amendments relating to these new teams, to clarify what we are learning through the national rollout and how this will inform the future legislative framework on day-to-day operations.

I turn first to Amendment 6 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, on the important matter of child protection for very young children in legal proceedings. Of course, as the noble Baroness identified, these are children who are widely represented in the system and for whom we need special care. However, Amendment 6 would require specific senior sign-off for the decision to end a child protection plan when proceedings have been initiated or care or supervision orders are issued for children under five. As I have outlined before, these plans should end only through a child protection conference, when multi-agency practitioners are confident that a child is no longer suffering or likely to suffer significant harm, and not automatically when proceedings are initiated.

I know the noble Baroness is concerned that children in these circumstances may fall between teams or services deciding whether staying at home will keep them safe from harm. I want to reassure her, and other noble Lords, that I am confident that reforming the system of family help, with new multi-agency child protection teams wrapped around, is about exactly this: making sure the whole system holds the safety and well-being of children as the number one priority.

I will now speak to Amendments 11, 13, 15 and 16, also tabled in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. These amendments focus on the operation and delivery of the new multi-agency child protection teams. Amendment 13 seeks to ensure that the new teams would operate within the existing statutory framework, Working Together to Safeguard Children 2023, and that these teams have sufficient access to health safeguarding expertise, specifically in relation to the NHS intercollegiate document, Safeguarding Children and Young People in Care: Competencies for Health Care Staff.

I reassure noble Lords that these teams, as part of the safeguarding partners, will absolutely be required, under the existing duties in Sections 16E, 16G and 16K, to comply with the expectations set out in the working together statutory guidance and local arrangements. We are working closely with health, police and local authority national leaders to ensure that practitioners in the teams have the skills, expertise and knowledge they need, or need access to, to deliver effective child protection interventions.

On the specific point about the police, I want to be clear that the intention of broadening the category, as we have done in the government amendments, would not suggest that a volunteer special constable would be suitable for one of these roles, but we could envisage police staff who would be appropriately qualified. In fact, as I have said, regulations will set out the requirements for the skills and qualifications, including police representatives.

The College of Policing’s professionalising public protection programme is developing resources to make sure that the police workforce has enough of the right professionals, with the right competences, qualifications and experience, to work in multi-agency child protection teams. There are good examples of police forces providing expert staff for child protection work: Thames Valley Police deploys experienced senior police representatives to its local multi-agency safeguarding hubs, including detective sergeant equivalents. They are decision-makers and offer expertise to support their police representatives at all levels. Thames Valley will take this approach to staffing multi-agency child protection teams as well.

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[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I too support the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, on her amendment. In the Church of England, we had trouble with giving and passing information—having ways of doing certain things. What most people have been looking for is practical outworking of these policies. As the noble Baroness said, people could give information, but more is needed than just that: they need to be empathetic and to step into the child’s shoes in order to say what needs to happen practically for that child. The passing of information is important, but there are other consequences. If the children being safeguarded feel that the system has still not caught up in its internal ways of working, we are going to fail those children yet again.

The Government are on to a good thing, but can they, through this amendment, recognise what needs to happen? At the end of the day, a lot of children, particularly those in care, need far greater attention and more resources. It will be helpful if the Minister, when she responds, explains the practical outworking of this. What are the expectations and how will we know that they have been delivered?

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak only very briefly. I express my most sincere thanks to the Minister for Amendment 21, concerning an information standard. It directly reflects an amendment that I proposed in Committee, which, in turn, drew on the work of Professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein in his capacity as adviser to the social care review steering group. I am delighted to see that provision and glad that the Government are taking the opportunity to introduce that power.

I express my support for the amendments proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, above all else that concerning the explicit use of the NHS number. Information sharing is hard. In the thematic and joint inspections we carried out at Ofsted—the joint targeted area inspections and the area SEND inspections—time and again information sharing came up as a theme. Whether we like it or not, data protection legislation has not made it easier to do that, so everything the Government can do to make it as straightforward and uncomplicated as possible in the situations where it is needed is deeply welcome. Therefore, I support the amendments, and Amendment 23 in particular.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

I will speak to the amendments in reverse order. We very much support having a single unique identifier. Unless the pilot of using the NHS number causes some unforeseen problems—we hope that that would not happen—we believe that it makes absolute sense to use the NHS number to link health and education. It is also important for children’s safeguarding: we need to know where they are, what is happening to them and when they change schools. It rightly brings added responsibility to schools, headteachers and governors.

We also believe that Amendment 19 is important. When there is a multi-agency approach, it is important that information and understanding are shared between different teams when cases are passed between them. This amendment rightly highlights the problem and comes up with a way forward.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 28th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 114 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, and my noble friend Lord Young’s Amendment 117. It is clearly a better solution to have a monetary limit than a number—that just seems obvious. As for gifted items, I could not agree more with my noble friend. Are we really saying that if I manage to secure for my multi-academy trust some free gifted strip from a football club, I have to say to those people, as a charity, “I’m sorry, I know I’m a charity, but the Government have passed a law which requires me to say no, I can’t take your benefit in kind. I’m sorry”? It is potty, because I am clearly going to have at least three other items apart from a tie. It is clearly daft, and I very much look forward to the noble Baroness’s explanation as to why they are so insistent on this point.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 117 in the name of my noble friend Lord Young of Acton, to which I have added my name. Although it may seem a small point, it matters. The draft guidance perfectly illustrates the consequences of poor policy-making: the cart was put before the horse and an announcement was made about reducing the number of branded items but without the clarity about the policy goal that should have informed the drafting of the legislation.

I will not repeat the examples given by others, but it is unfortunate that the draft guidance is so unequivocal. It is the kind of Kafkaesque rule that brings officialdom into ill repute, and it probably will not save parents a single penny. I add that if the policy goal is narrowly to save all parents money on school uniforms, this could be better achieved through Amendment 114, which would give schools more flexibility and avoid the problem that Amendment 117 is intended to address—although I believe that an automatic inflation adjustment should be incorporated to avoid the messiness of an annual review.

If this limit is enacted, will the Minister ensure that two particular impacts are fully evaluated. First, what is the social impact on children? In demonising branded clothing, the Government have lost sight of part of the value of uniforms. Uniforms are not only about badging and encouraging identification with an institution but about having all children wear clothing that is genuinely identical in quality and cut, not just broadly similar in appearance. We all know how sensitive the young are to status markers, such as having the right—usually expensive—trainers, even when the differences are all but invisible to the adult eye. Fewer school-branded items may mean more pressure on children to have the highest-status version of the unbranded items, which will inevitably bear hardest on the poorest children, so this should be evaluated.

The evaluation should also consider whether parents spend less money not only on school uniforms but on children’s clothing overall. If the change reduces spend on branded items but leads to poorer families being pressured into spending more rather than less overall on children’s clothes, it should be counted as a failure. I hope the Minister can reassure me on those points.

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[Lord Crisp (CB)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister that the Government have moved on some of the concerns raised by me and others, particularly about some of the detail required on the register. However, I of course want to press her to move further. A lot of new and significant amendments have just arrived. I want to make two general points relating to those amendments and then comment on several of them.

I believe that the Government need to revisit their whole policy on home education. We are debating a significant set of amendments very late in the day which are creating a new regime, but I do not think the full implications have been thought through. Let me give one example which is relevant to this group and to other areas. As many noble Lords will know, most local authorities—I believe it is most rather than just many—hold annual meetings with or request annual reports from home-educating parents in their area. These are done regularly on the basis of case law, which says that local authorities are entitled to ask for an annual meeting or an annual report, which involves quite a lot of work.

I do not understand why these have been ignored and the additional requirements for meetings, information and monitoring are not built around them. There seems to be inconsistency in developing the policy. I would be grateful if the Minister would explain—either on this group or on one of the groups to do with information on activities on the register—why the Government have chosen to ignore this annual reporting system which exists in so many places. Presumably, it was an explicit decision to do so. Can I also ask her to confirm that parents will still have to comply with requests for annual reports or meetings? Or can they now just say, “Look at the register”?

Home education has changed enormously in the last few years and policy certainly needs to reflect this, but it needs to be based on a detailed examination of what is going on. Most importantly—we have not really spent time in Committee on this—we need to understand in some detail the causes of the big increase in the last few years, driven by parents who believe that schools are failing their children, many of whom have special needs and require special hope. These are big questions, and it is important that the Government take this beyond this Bill and look at the wider policy. After all, those parents are taking on emotionally and financially demanding responsibilities. Why do so few head teachers use their powers of flexibility to accommodate children in the way that their parents would want them to? Some of those issues are around mental health and other things that we have touched on, but they are also about how schools are governed and the increasing requirements placed on them.

Another question that needs to be considered is: how many parents are trying to home-educate for all the wrong reasons? What proportion do we think this is? I know from listening to education officers that it is quite small, but it demands attention. Let me be clear that I understand the concerns about safeguarding and educational standards. They are real, just as they are real in schools, and they need to be dealt with proportionately. In terms of safeguarding, Peers who like data may want to know that the only figures I can find are that home-educated children add up to about 1.4% of the population of schoolchildren and they account for 1.2% of serious case reviews. As noble Lords will know, those are reviews where children are seriously harmed or die. These figures suggest that home-educated children are no more at risk than children at school and conceivably less so. My point is that home education should be seen as a risk factor only for those with a record of abuse or where there is an existing concern, but not for the generality of parents, yet the approach we see in the Bill suggests that all home-educating parents are viewed with suspicion. That is certainly what they feel.

Looking ahead, once proportionate checks are done at the beginning of a relationship between parents and the authorities, I believe the approach should be one of partnership, as the Minister said. It is strange that it is not, given that in other policy areas government is considering more partnership with parents. In health, for example, it is now becoming accepted that parents know their child better than any professional can. As the Minister knows, I am working with a group of home-educating parents together with a home education officer and my noble friend Lord Hampton to look at alternative policy ideas for the future, and I am grateful to her for facilitating access for discussions with her officials about this.

Let me turn to specific amendments. Government Amendment 120 gives authorities the power to withhold permission to educate, or to decide whether they can educate, from parents of children who have been the subject of action under Section 47 in the last five years —i.e. things that have to do with safeguarding issues. To that extent, it seems proportionate and in line with what I have just said about risk factors. However, I have one significant concern. Many adopted children will end up being caught by this, because those children may have been the subject of such proceedings earlier in life before adoption. Noble Lords will know that adoption is a one-year or two-year, rigorous process. Do we really think that local authorities should second-guess parents who have been though that process about the best education for the child that they have just been entrusted with? Are they really a source of risk? I would be enormously grateful if the Minister would exempt them. My Amendment 120A makes that specific point.

However, Amendment 121A from the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seeks to change the five-year period into a lifetime requirement and include proceedings under Section 31, where children have been taken into care, and Section 17, where children have ever been in need. I believe this is disproportionate in its impact. It will draw many people into this group. Do we really want to treat disabled children differently simply because their parents have asked voluntarily for some help, or because they were in care before adoption? I know of cases where children were taken into care at the request of the wife during proceedings against an abusive husband.

Amendment 121B tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, is potentially extremely dangerous for that last group of parents, who are seeking to avoid abusive ex-partners, as it will reveal their location and possibly their address. I cannot make this point strongly enough. I know women who are in this situation. The amendment says that all parents should be consulted. The Minister will also know that where such partners discover the authority or address, they may well bring allegations against their ex-partner under Section 47, causing as much damage as possible. I note in this context that deregistering a child from a school requires only one signature, not the signature of all the parents involved. This seems inconsistent.

However, Amendment 123 by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, seems eminently sensible in requiring that local authorities should spell out reasons for refusing permission to deregister children in special schools. My Amendments 122 and 124 would serve similar purposes. They are about holding authorities to account for their decisions. The wording of Amendment 122 relates to local authorities judging that staying at a school is in the child’s best interests. There needs to be some appropriate mechanism for confirming or challenging this, and I propose that it should be confirmed by a court. My Amendment 124 addresses cases where parents appeal against an authority’s decision; it asks that the Secretary of State or Welsh Ministers issue guidance on how they would judge an appeal. This seems to me a very straightforward ask. People will need to know how their appeal will be judged. I hope the Minister agrees. The more transparency here, the better.

I agree with the Minister that government Amendment 125, about meetings at the point of deregistration, seems generally sensible and worth taking forward as a pilot. I believe they should also be treated as exit interviews, asking why the relationship between the school and the child has broken down—if that is the case, because it may not—and making that information available to the education committee and Ofsted. Schools and authorities need to use that information to improve their services, and that is the purpose of my Amendment 125A, which I believe from my correspondence the Minister agrees with.

I turn to government Amendment 131 along with Amendment 131A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, about requesting meetings in the child’s home. This is the most controversial area, and I suspect other Peers have had more correspondence about this than anything else, raising a whole range of issues about access to people’s homes. I note that this is not mandatory, although there are implicit penalties for not complying. What relationship are they trying to establish? This is problematic legally, but I am not going to dwell on that; my earlier comments on Amendment 121 by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, apply here: do the parents of adopted children have to apply?

I have two further points. First, I am not clear what this inspection is about. What criteria will be used? The home as such is not a proxy for the standard of education. Surely we need to know the criteria that are involved. The only criterion that I can possibly think of is that the child has some quiet space at home or elsewhere to study, although that raises questions about Travellers.

Lastly, even more importantly, why should the child be subject to two meetings in 15 days? This is a real issue, involving the invasion of what is, for many of them, their safe space. This is very problematic for many children. We need only think of adopted children, many of whom are terrified by any officials and live in a constant fear of being rejected or taken away again. This amendment requires more debate and more answers. I certainly feel it is important that the child should be at one or other of the two meetings that are proposed in the first 15 days, but two meetings with officials in 15 days seems excessive.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 121A, relating to local authority consent for the withdrawal of certain children from school, and to Amendment 131A, empowering local authorities to make home visits to children who have ever been subject to a care order or on a child protection plan. Both amendments have been proposed by my noble friend Lady Barran and are supported by other noble Lords on other Benches.

Broadly, I have welcomed the provisions in the Bill strengthening protections for children not in school or removed from schools, and I am grateful to the Government for the amendments that they have tabled since Committee, but I do not believe that is enough. We need to recognise more clearly that, in some circumstances, the declared intention to home-educate can in itself be a signal that some risk or harm has resurfaced.

No safeguarding system can ever be entirely comprehensive and infallible, and indeed safeguarding work should always be proportionate, but schools are an important part of that system, especially for children at higher risk. Social work always involves a difficult balance. A care order is a drastic intervention. Maintaining a child protection plan is expensive and intrusive into family life. We do not keep children in care or on protection plans by default, and it is normal for the level of intervention to be adjusted in line with circumstances. So, while a child is of school age, schools provide an important continuing residual line of sight to the child and are responsible for alerting local authorities if they believe that a child’s circumstances have deteriorated.

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Finally, this amendment raises no issues of legal representation or ECHR compliance. Other professions operating under heightened regulatory duties already have bespoke procedural protections. Teachers do too, and this amendment simply reflects that reality. If the Government cannot accept the amendment today, I ask the Minister at least to commit to strengthening departmental guidance to signal professional accompaniment as good practice, and to ensure that the forthcoming Section 10 review explicitly considers teachers and school staff. Supporting school staff at their most vulnerable moments should not be controversial. Amendment 191A simply seeks to ensure access to appropriate support when it is most needed. I commend it.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 243D, which is unchanged from the amendment that I tabled in Committee. It is late and I shall be brief. We are in a world where we all have a much greater propensity to complain in great numbers and are doing so very frequently. AI is making it easy to complain at great length, with minimal effort, and service providers of all kinds are quite simply drowning in workload. Talk to any head teacher and you will hear this.

I propose streamlining the current messy patchwork of statutory provisions to create a single streamlined model in which complaints will be triaged and considered only by the most relevant body, with information available to others when necessary. I believe that this would improve schools’ capacity to respond to serious concerns.

The Minister’s response was that the issue was being considered by the Improving Education Together group of unions and other stakeholders, with which the Government are committed to co-developing policy design and implementation. Indeed, this consideration seems to have happened, because guidance was recently published, both for parents by DfE and for schools by Parentkind. The content is entirely sensible, but it does not address the major structural problem: that a minority of parents can and do spray complaints at every conceivably relevant entity, including Ofsted, DfE, the Teaching Regulation Agency, as well as school governors and MATs or local authorities. A proportion of parents do not desist, even when they get fair and reasonable responses, and these volumes are drowning out the serious complaints that absolutely need attention. And despite this guidance, there are still those different legal frameworks and best practice guidelines for maintained schools and academies, which continues to create confusion.

I think schools will have hoped for greater acknowledgement of the scale of the issue and the impact it is having both on staff well-being and more generally on school capacity to respond, especially in relation to AI-generated complaints. I think they will now be hoping that the schools White Paper will provide for root and branch review of the system, including a co-ordinated system to triage complaints, such as this amendment would provide for, and perhaps also some powers for school leaders to act where there is unreasonable behaviour that goes beyond what is contemplated in this amendment. With apologies to my noble friend Lord Jackson, I think that rationalising the current problems to release the capacity that needs to be there for serious complaints is perhaps more likely to help than adding an additional layer. I therefore hope that the noble Baroness will be able to reassure me that the Government intend to go beyond mere advice as to how all parties can use the current legal framework better.

Finally, Amendments 190 and 191A are also important in establishing some important principles of fairness for school staff as well as for parents, and Amendment 191 would close a small but significant loophole.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak very briefly to Amendment 191A, to which I would have added my name had I been slightly more organised. I have been a member of teaching unions in the past but I am not any longer. Many teachers are not members of a union. These are personal decisions, whether cost or philosophical. Trade unions play an important role in the workplace, but not being a member should not put you at a disadvantage when facing a formal allegation. It is all very well bringing a colleague along but, apart from the moral support, they might not be much help.

Doctors and dentists are permitted to be accompanied at disciplinary hearings by representatives from professional defence organisations under the NHS’s maintaining high professional standards framework. This has not undermined trade unions or weakened safeguarding: it has simply ensured that highly scrutinised professionals are not left unsupported at critical moments and has helped to ensure that due process has been followed. Teachers and school staff operate under comparable levels of public scrutiny and regulatory oversight. Amendment 191A is a modest, sensible step that reflects the reality and promotes fairness and consistency in how disciplinary processes are conducted. It does not even go so far as arrangements in medicine but is a step in the right direction and I strongly support it.

Amendment 243D, to which I did actually add my name, is very simple. I know from first-hand experience how complicated school complaints can be, with different complaints being sent to different organisations, often duplicated. They could be going to DfE, Ofsted, TRA, the school and the LEA. This is a very simple, overdue and badly needed amendment.

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[The Lord Bishop of Portsmouth]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 193A, 193B and 193C and declare my interest as chair of the National Society for Education. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, for her support of Amendments 193A and 193B. I will address these two first and together.

These two amendments are about good communication. They would require the chief inspector to include the relevant religious body along with the academy proprietor and the Secretary of State when a report is circulated at the conclusion of an inspection of a multi-academy trust that contains a school with a religious foundation. For example, in the case of the Church of England, the relevant body would be the Diocesan Board of Education.

Under the DBE Measure 2021, DBEs have a range of duties and powers, including advice-giving, data analysis and information gathering in relation to their schools and academies. Timely receipt of a multi-academy trust’s inspection report will enable the fulfilment of these duties and powers.

I seek the Minister’s assurance that these straightforward amendments, enabling good communication and the delivery of statutory duty, will find their way into the Bill.

Amendment 193C in my name would ensure that where multi-academy trusts contain schools with a religious designation, these are inspected on and held to account for their ethos, religious education and collective worship.

At present, over 42% of Church of England’s schools are academies, amounting to over 20% of all academies in England. When we include Roman Catholic academies and those with other religious foundations, the total percentage rises still further to approximately one-third of the entire academy estate.

All these academies will fall under the proposed new requirement for the inspection of multi-academy trusts. However, at present there is no provision for the specialist denominational inspection of those multi-academy trusts that have direct responsibility for the leadership and governance of academies with a religious foundation. This contrasts markedly with current arrangements, in which individual schools and academies with a religious foundation are inspected by the relevant religious body under Section 48 of the Education Act 2005 and by the contractual provisions of an academy’s funding agreement.

There is no provision within the Bill as drafted which would mirror Section 48 provision and deliver expert, individual, school-based evaluation and accountability for multi-academy trusts containing schools of a religious character and foundation. This is an omission or oversight with potential to affect adversely the quality of accountability and inspection for approximately a third of the academy estate.

Amendment 193C addresses this omission by seeking to mirror current Section 48 provision and good practice for multi-academy trusts containing schools with a religious foundation. Led by the inspectorates of religious bodies such as the Statutory Inspection of Anglican and Methodist Schools, inspections would combine, as they do most effectively today, the application of expert religious knowledge with inspection expertise to ensure that the accountability regime for the proprietors of academies includes all significant elements of the life, leadership and governance of schools in their purview. I thank the Minister for engaging with key partners in educational delivery within the National Society for Education and the Catholic Education Service ahead of this debate. I trust that the Government will continue to work with us to find a way forward and to address this omission.

To conclude, Amendments 193A and 193B are intended as friendly, simple, straightforward insertions to enhance lines of communication and to keep the relevant religious body informed when one of its schools is inspected. On Amendment 193C, however, I remain deeply concerned that, without the provision outlined in the amendment in my name, providers of schools of religious character will be left with wholly inadequate inspection arrangements. This is an entirely avoidable state of affairs which, if unaddressed, as I said in earlier comments, will affect approximately a third of the academy estate and represent a backward step from current inspection arrangements under Section 48 of the Education Act 2005. Can the Minister give assurances that she will bring forward proposals to address the omission I identify and work with the National Society for Education and the Catholic Education Service to bring forward proposals or pilots that address our concerns prior to Third Reading?

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, a substantial new chapter is being added to the Bill on Report by the Government’s Amendment 193, which provides for the inspection of multi-academy trusts. This has considerable significance for the regulation of all academies, and I must therefore make some wider points before I turn to Amendments 193D and 193E in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran, to which I have put my name. I must also declare my interest as a former Ofsted chief inspector who has advocated strongly for MAT inspection for many years.

Everyone is familiar with school inspection. For more than 30 years, this was unequivocally framed by government as a public accountability mechanism to defend the interests of children and parents. The very last strands of support activity were removed from Ofsted more than a decade ago so as to avoid any blurring. Published inspection judgments and reports with real consequences are a powerful regulatory force, precisely because they have real traction. This model has long been the subject of relentless hostility and efforts to undermine it by some within the sector.

But the law relating to school inspections has not kept pace with the evolution of sector structures over the past 20 years. The academy trust model, which now goes back 20 years, places legal responsibility for a school unequivocally with the trust board, not with a school-level governing body or an individual head teacher. Successive Governments chose to keep inspection to school level while evolving a separate regulatory approach for trusts. That separate approach broadly consists of private review within DfE of published and other data and periodic private discussion between each MAT and the DfE regulatory team, with escalation to Ministers where necessary. In the main, trust-level concerns are dealt with privately, except where the most serious failings justify terminating a funding agreement or acting against an individual. This mechanism is highly susceptible to producer capture of government —I know of more than a few examples—and it creates an imbalance; it feels unfair to many heads and those beneath them, as individual schools are publicly reported on.

There is also no clear dividing line between schools and trusts. Trusts may choose to centralise many activities, including the choice of curriculum, lesson planning, teacher training and professional development, assessment, pastoral approaches and behaviour policies as well as back-office functions. A centralised MAT with 60 schools will have around 15 inspections a year. In each of these, inspectors must ask questions about decisions, some of which are not taken at school level, to form a rounded view of the quality of education and safeguarding in the school. A judgment of school quality may have to encompass aspects that are not under the control of a head teacher, which of course feels unfair to those heads. The current model also makes it particularly hard for government to intervene when a MAT is slightly underperforming across the board but no one school is severely failing. All this makes clear that a refresh is sorely needed, and here I am only repeating what I have said publicly in the past. I genuinely welcome the Government’s decision to act.

Turning to the detail, Clause 193 in effect creates a skeleton containing the powers and obligations to put in a system of MAT inspection, but no policy proposals have been published to explain the set of purposes. MAT inspections may be purely to facilitate accountability to government and to justify inspections at MAT level. They may be intended to increase transparency for parents. They may be intended to function partly or entirely as a support mechanism for trusts. But we do not know. Nor do we know how they are intended to interact with school inspections, whose purposes have also become blurred. The Government no longer link defined consequences to overall inspection judgments, which I believe, and hear from many, has increased uncertainty and anxiety in the school sector.

The Government have also not clarified whether the policy purposes of school inspections have changed. I infer that true education quality is not the highest priority for the Government because they have accepted the current school inspection approach, which has startlingly removed all but a cursory scrutiny of education itself so as to make more time for specific government priorities such as attendance, belonging and now, of course, mobile phone policy enforcement. In so doing, government and Ofsted have intentionally, and in my view unwisely, made themselves blind to all the many ways that good education can be limited and compromised if school quality judgments are predicated too narrowly on outcomes. This watering down of school inspection makes it even more important that the MAT inspection model is well conceived, well defined, well understood and likely to be fully effective. It is also highly desirable for the judgments to be made independently of Ministers if they are to have the legitimacy that they need as a basis for government intervention.

That brings me to Amendments 193D and 193E. First, these amendments seek to ensure that the necessary work of consultation, piloting and reporting is done before the new sections are commenced and the full inspection regime begins. This period could be used to calibrate the range of judgments needed and the corresponding range of regulatory interventions, and to clarify the purposes. The thresholds also need to be tested against realistic system improvement capacity so that this can be allocated effectively.

Secondly, the amendments aim to create a coherent overall model that reflects the multi-level nature of MATs as well as the variety of organisational models that they deploy. One trust may operate in a highly integrated way, with all major decisions and the finances controlled centrally and local head teachers focused on effective implementation of the central model; another trust—including many of the faith trusts—may operate a highly devolved model, leaving most matters to heads and determining only aspects of faith-related provision and, perhaps, core administrative systems and processes. At the moment, there is only limited evidence on the relative effectiveness of different models, at least as far as I know. The trust inspection may generate some good evidence but, in the absence of stronger evidence, inspections should not force MATs into a particular operating model, as I know some fear.

Thirdly, the amendments ensure that inspection takes account of a MAT’s ability to manage schools efficiently, as well as their education quality and other direct child-facing aspects. This has the potential to simplify and to unify the regulatory arrangements for trusts. There are parallels with the model used in the Netherlands, which has structures similar to multi-academy trusts. There does need to be join-up in the regulatory system. It is hard for government to make and sustain decisions if it is getting conflicting messages from different strands of monitoring. I hesitate to say it, but overall judgments have their place.

Finally, I would value the Minister’s assurance that she will make it explicit that the conception of quality against which inspection is carried out should be grounded in a strong evidential foundation, in trusts as in schools, and that the regulatory framework should be revised whenever the accumulation of evidence points towards a change.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and largely to agree, although I would go somewhat further and say that I think we have reached the situation of a market in schools in which very crude judgments are being applied by Ofsted, and schools are being pushed to game the system. That is why I signed Amendment 230 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and why the Green group will oppose Amendment 199 should it come to a vote.

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, was charitable when he said that there is a strong suspicion that off-rolling is going on. I am afraid I have no doubt that off-rolling is going on because up and down England, particularly in some of the most deprived communities, I have spoken to parents, often parents from very disadvantaged backgrounds themselves, who have said, “I’m trying to home-school my child now because the head teacher said they thought that was the best thing that could happen”. That was not home schooling by choice. That was usually pupils with special educational needs that the school just did not want to deal with. I have some sympathy with head teachers. Having been a school governor, I know how much pressure head teachers are under to keep up with the results. The problem is that we have created a competitive system where schools compete against each other instead of working together to create the best result for every pupil.

Amendment 230 is very modest. It simply calls for a review. I can tell my anecdotal stories, but I cannot say how big the problem is. I have seen it in many places, and I am sure that it is quite widespread. I do not believe the noble Lord intends to put this to a vote, but surely we can ask the Government to look at this anyway. As other noble Lords have said, it is something we should know about because this is one way in which we are failing some of our most disadvantaged pupils. Amendment 199, if it were to be passed, just furthers that sense of competition, which is the last thing we need in our schooling system.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 198 and will touch on Amendment 230 from the noble Lord, Lord Addington. Listening to noble Lords around the House, I find it surprising that they consistently believe that inspection, for which I was responsible for seven years, does not place a heavy emphasis on inclusion. Certainly throughout my time it did. The current framework has increased that focus almost to the point of giving up on looking at education, for which one learning walk and the results are about the extent of the coverage. Inclusion is and has long been taken extraordinarily seriously.

There are two issues that I want to touch on. The first is that however much we might want to believe that every child’s special needs can be coped with, there are times when those special needs consist of problems that inflict real harm on other children. The most awful parental complaints that came across my desk were about children who had been seriously assaulted and harmed, on occasion raped, by another child who had been admitted by a school either conscientiously trying to include a child for whom the local authority was desperate to find a place or that had been directed to take a child. That is agonising to learn about. We have to acknowledge that the interests of other children need to be considered when placing the most difficult children. That is important for children most of all but, of course, it is important for staff as well. If people are trying to work outside their capacity, schools tend to deteriorate, and that is not good for anybody.

Linked to that, I want to make a point about off-rolling, which has been touched on. In my time we put more of an emphasis on looking for signs and pursuing that—inquiring into it—where we found it. One of the things we discovered is that it is extraordinarily hard to characterise definitively whether an individual case is a case of off-rolling. There is typically quite a long history, a deterioration of the relationship between the child and the school. It is not a clean and tidy yes or no. Getting to a point where you could definitively say what the extent was would be extremely labour-intensive. The issue, in my view, is not a lack of regulation to prevent this—inspection is perfectly capable of disincentivising it—but we have to acknowledge that it needs a lot of resource that simply does not exist in Ofsted or anywhere else to dig into individual cases and establish the extent and the remedies.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak on Amendments 198, 199 and 230. I will give some historical background. The word “education” is derived from two Latin root words. The first is “educare”, which means to impart knowledge. For too long, some schools have seen themselves as imparting knowledge. They have emphasised too much that first root of the word, “educare”.

The other Latin root word is “educere”, which means to draw out knowledge. The best schools often do both. They impart knowledge but they also realise that a person is not a blank sheet of paper on whom you simply impart knowledge and do not draw out the best that is in them. In most schools that do both, the pupils all thrive.

That being the case, I think we have gone through a short-term revolution. Her Majesty’s inspectors, as they were then, saw themselves as helping the school to do better. Then Ofsted arrived and seemed to give simple judgments on the school, sometimes on very narrow elements. If the school failed one of its elements, it was totally judged to be a failing school.

I declare an interest here. The Archbishop Thurstan School in Hull had been there for many centuries. It was not performing as it should be and, therefore, there was a decision by the Secretary of State that it should be rebuilt. The council agreed to have it rebuilt and that it should be given a name that would be canvassed for in Hull. To my surprise, the pupils, staff and council decided that it should be called the Archbishop Sentamu Academy. That was the beginning of academisation.

We were very fortunate that the Labour Government, who lost the election in 2010, had agreed to provide the money. I was told by John Prescott, “Be quick, make sure that you get this money, because the new Government may not want this to happen”. Anyway, we got the £45 million and the place was rebuilt; the place was thriving. Students in Hull were thriving and doing excellent work for the first time, going to university for the first time. Four of them went to the University of Liverpool to read maths, which had never been dreamed of.

So the school was doing well but, as it went on, there was a problem in one of the departments and there was an Ofsted inspection, which said, “The school has failed”. If a school fails, the schools commissioner has a job to do: the school has to be brokered and brought into a much larger group, and that is what happened. What shocked me was that Ofsted would not then visit that school for three years. I said, “As a parent, if I had a child in that school and you judged it to be failing, I would like to know whether it had improved by the following year”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall speak against Amendment 199, and I am following the very wise words of my noble friend Lady Morris in doing so. I just do not understand how this amendment would allow the management of school places and the good use of taxpayers’ money. Year 7 places in the capital, London, are expected to fall by 7.6% in the next five years and reception places by 6.4% in the next four years. That means that those schools will see altogether about a £45 million cut in their budget. That cannot just be left to chance.

There needs to be a way of managing the school population, ensuring that taxpayers’ money is well spent and that children are placed in schools that are viable and have enough pupils that they can be offered a full curriculum. We do not want the situation in Northern Ireland, where the grammar schools fill up and the secondary modern schools are left with completely variable roles year on year and are unable to offer a full curriculum or to give the children in Northern Ireland who most need it the education they deserve.

Amendment 199 would take market forces to a ridiculous level and would mean that the Government and the local area could not manage school places to ensure a broad and balanced curriculum for each child. That would be particularly the case with the new curriculum, which will be broader and more balanced and is long overdue. It is important to reject Amendment 199 because there needs to be a mechanism for the most vulnerable children.

I am afraid I have to disagree with the former chief inspector. Everyone knows there are certain schools that do not take the children with special educational needs that they should, and that other schools are then dumped on since they have to take far too many children with profound special needs, to the real detriment of those children and other pupils in the class. Everyone knows that in reality, that happens. The noble Lord, Lord Nash, is nodding—it is true.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

Can the noble Baroness say at what point I said that there were schools which did not take children? I do not think I did.

[Baroness Bousted (Lab)]

If that was the case, let me apologise for saying that. They have got better at inclusion, and the noble Baroness is quite right to upbraid me on that.

However, it is really important that there is a power to direct schools to take pupils in order that they get an education. Secondly, we need a way of organising an admissions system which allows all children within the locality to have a viable education with a full, broad and balanced curriculum.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 207 to create a duty to keep schools open for attendance. The speeches that have been made excellently explained why.

I arrived in this House during lockdown, and I was shocked—genuinely, to the core—by the ease with which people in this House on all sides clamoured to close down schools. It was an extraordinary thing to witness. I could not justify it at the time and argued against it. That argument—which was a minority argument, not just put forward by me—was treated as though somehow those of us who were worried about schools closing were the irresponsible ones; whereas I think it was the other way round. I genuinely think that many of the issues that the Bill is trying to tackle—many of the real problems and challenges that we face with young people today—were created, exacerbated and turbocharged as problems during that period. Schools were closed down, which meant that adults broke the social contract with children—not for their sake but ours—and it was against all the evidence. I am very keen to hear the Minister’s response to this, even if it is not tested in a Division of the House, as I think that this will be a huge, important lesson for us to learn.

I will note a few of the problems that have already been raised. We have a mental health crisis, which we talk about regularly—as we will later and have been throughout the Bill—as though it came out of nowhere, but there is serious reason to imagine that young people’s mental health suffered during that period. But we are also talking about behaviour. A lot of teachers will tell you that once that social contract was breached, it created discipline problems because pupils were no longer in class. We have increasing numbers of parents withdrawing their children from mainstream schools. The habit of going to school was broken. We have spent a huge amount of time in this Bill talking about home-schooling, which is going up, and that is partly because schools were no longer considered necessary. I said then that if you tell pupils that truancy is okay in certain circumstances, it will be hard to get back to normal. If you say, “You shouldn’t come into school”, it will be hard to say, “You must come into school”.

Certainly, as a teacher, I lectured young people—many a time—saying, “There is nothing more important than going to school. There is nothing, nothing, nothing more important than your education”, and then suddenly as a society we said, “Oh, there are lots of things that are more important than going to school or your education”, so they learned a very bad lesson.

We will come on to talk about the problems with smartphones. What did we do when we sent all those young people home? First of all, we told them to look at screens to get lessons—a lot of the time we did not bother even supplying the lessons on the screens—and what they did was spend a lot of time on their phones. They were not out socialising. They became desocialised—anti-social.

The final reason why we have to remember that this is so important is that a cohort of young citizens was told, “If there is a problem, you stay at home, you withdraw”. I think that if we say to young people, “If you feel ill, you aren’t up to coping with going out and being part of society”, we are creating a medicalised fragility and an acceptance of illness as a reason to withdraw that have led to massive social problems. We are now paying for that with a huge welfare bill. Many young adults now lack the resilience to become economically active.

The cost of what we did was enormous and we are yet to come to terms with it. The Bill is trying to deal with a lot of the problems created by that period, and this amendment is therefore important in raising the possibility that we should not, as a default, close schools. The default should be that we do not, that we owe it to children to have their education and that schools are kept open for attendance. There has to be an extremely good reason why schools are closed, and that should be thought through deeply. As someone who was here when we were deciding, let me assure noble Lords that it was not.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I too support the amendment. We have relied through history on a presumption that schools will stay open, even in adverse circumstances such as epidemics or bombardments. But once we closed schools for Covid, we set children adrift because there was nothing in law to balance their interests against those of adults. Children stayed locked up for months, learning little even when schools made great efforts to provide online learning.

I shall not repeat what others have said, but the story of the continuing harm to children—their academic progress, social development, health and happiness—is still unfolding. Ofsted did some of the earliest work on this in autumn 2020, when my inspectors made a series of fact-finding visits to schools and published monthly reports on the impact of Covid on schools and children. They reported that children were lonely, bored and miserable—the advance warnings of the lasting problems that we now see. I spoke about this publicly a number of times, but the tide of emotion was too strong for people to hear.

With hindsight, the existence of a formal duty and a mechanism to ensure that the available evidence, such as the reports I mentioned, is considered and weighed up against the representations of the adults who work in schools, health sector representatives, and so on might have helped to focus minds. I believe that there is an opportunity here for the Minister to get ahead of potential recommendations from the Covid inquiry.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I am sorry if I sound like a dinosaur, but I will. Hindsight is always a harsh, cruel science. It makes us think, “If only we did not do this”. The evidence is very clear; as the inquiry went on, the lessons to be drawn have not yet been concluded, and the nation needs to take those lessons into its lifeblood.

We are talking about legislating for an assurance that if a huge pandemic breaks out—or, let us say, a war—we need to go to Parliament every two weeks to consult. But perhaps Parliament will be permanently shut. I would not want us to reach a stage where we have not fully learned all the lessons. I have grandchildren who, because their parents were working, were seen as those who needed to be supported at school during the pandemic. Even then, there were infections, and shutting down schools looked like protecting children. When something like Covid happens, our first look is to the vulnerable, such as children and other vulnerable people. I would find it difficult to support a measure which thinks that Parliament will always provide security.

Do you remember the Second World War? For their own protection, pupils had to be taken out of areas where the bombs were dropping pretty fast, so let us learn the lessons. We may return to this proposal, but for the time being let us support what the Bill as drafted is doing.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)]

My Lords, I want to share the experience of schoolteachers, particularly head teachers. I and the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, were on a call earlier this week with three head teachers from different parts of the country and from very different economic backgrounds. Their plea was: “You need to help us, because at the moment we have different policies on phones”. One, interestingly, was banning year 7s from having phones but not others. Another was to say: “Put it away. As long as we do not see it, it’s not a problem”. Others have pouches. A lot of their time is being taken up by a small group of vocal and often aggressive parents who demand that their children have their phones at school. Those head teachers are being distracted from their core duties to deal with this, and they were pleading with us, particularly with this vote tonight, to send a clear message to the Government that head teachers want to teach children rather than police smartphones.

The other thing I want to share is about the harms. We have talked a lot about social media, but often phones in schools lead to further bullying. We all saw a few years back the craze of happy slapping, where young people in playgrounds came behind others and slapped them, and the footage would be used and shared.

There is one other thing I want to share that is very personal. When one of my sons first started at a school in Rotherham, he was very keen to fit in—because we are from Sheffield—and he wanted to make friends. Unfortunately, a small group of so-called friends followed him into a toilet a few moments after he had gone in and, while he was sat on the toilet, they kicked the door in and took footage of him on the toilet. He did not tell me or the family. I got a phone call from a local community centre a week or two later to say, “Shaf, we are horrified by what we’ve seen. We’ve seen footage of your son. He didn’t know what to do, he couldn’t get up, and these kids were laughing. We saw it, and we think you should be made aware”. To their credit, the parents of the two young men who were involved came straight to our house when they found out; they were mortified. The school itself tried its level best, but, I have to say, we had to leave that school, and my son had to go to the other side of Sheffield to give him a fresh start.

There are real consequences. That is why, tonight, I will be backing the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the amendment of my good friend and colleague, my noble friend Lord Addington, on the requirements for people with special educational needs.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I want to make just one point, following up on the points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, and the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley. The medical devices exception in the amendment is already provided for. If a more general exception were made for special educational needs—that is already close to 30% of children—the pressure on parents and pupils would be to game this, and the proportion of children with a special needs label would rise to truly stratospheric levels, at which point the phone ban would clearly have no meaning whatever. I urge noble Lords to think about the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, on other ways to provide the assistive functionality that might be needed.

[Lord Elliott of Ballinamallard (UUP)]

My Lords, very briefly, it will come as no surprise that, when I was going to school, I did not have a smartphone, just like many of you here this evening, probably; we did not have that opportunity.

I fully support the principle of Amendment 215. I find a difficulty, though—this is a follow-up to the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan—on the policing of this issue in schools. Doing your homework is a requirement at school; not every kid does it. Bullying and fighting in the playground are not allowed, but it still happens. I fully appreciate that the son of the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, is not allowed a smartphone, but not every young person is accommodating like that: not every young person has the respect for their parents, let alone for their teachers.

It is okay making these laws, but, unless we have some type of policing and enforcement, it will not be of any benefit, because you are going to punish the people who willingly give up their phone when going into school. The noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, says, “It is okay, they will simply be asked to leave their phone at the door”, but they will not all leave their phone at the door. Some will have a phone hidden. How do we police and manage it? That is my serious question, because I absolutely know that not every young person will willingly do it. What do you do? Are you going to criminalise teachers for not taking the phones? Are you going to criminalise parents for allowing children to go to school with their phones? It is not that simple.

I fully support the principle of the amendment. Let me be clear: I wish phones had never been allowed in school. But the management, policing and enforcement of this is something totally different and it is not dealt with in this amendment or anywhere that I can see in this legislation. I am willing to support this amendment, by the way, but it needs a lot more doing to it before it is finished.

Does the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, think that, if those kids had been asked to leave their phones at the door, it would have stopped them breaking into the toilet cubicle with a phone hidden in their sock or down their shirt? This is an incomplete amendment that I am willing to support, but unless something better and deeper is come up with that allows it to be enforced and policed without criminalising teachers and parents, I am afraid it is not going to be of much use.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Spielman Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Wednesday 25th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Meston (CB)]

My Lords, I will confine myself briefly to supporting Motion B. It is commonly agreed now that the pilots of the pathfinder model in selected family courts have been a success and represent the way ahead. This model has been shown to reduce delays significantly and has forced the focus on to making things better for the child concerned, rather than on the parents’ disputes and confrontations. That model has developed sufficiently well, in that the delay in moving it on into the mainstream should really now be avoided. It means that the very recently announced expansion into child-focused courts will be welcome.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will o speak to Motion K1, tabled by my noble friend Lady Barran. The Government are rightly acting to give local authorities the power to prevent children subject to a child protection plan being withdrawn from school. However, the scope of the Bill is clearly too limited, even with the amendment to give effect to a backward extension of five years for child protection plans.

I will briefly remind noble Lords of the characteristics of the children we are talking about. Clearly, they have all experienced abuse or neglect, but even apart from this we are talking about an exceptionally vulnerable group. Nearly three-quarters of children in care have special educational needs—often conditions they were born with that can make them particularly challenging to bring up and to educate—and often complicated physical or behavioural needs as well. Alongside that, these are children of parents whose ability to care for and protect their own children has already been shown to be inadequate, at least for a time. Even after a care order or child protection plan has been discharged, these are, in the main, children with serious challenges and complicated needs, whose parents have limited capacity. They are very often fragile families needing a lot of support and with a strong likelihood of further social care intervention being needed in future.

Therefore, there should be local authority consideration of proposals to home-educate any child who has been in care, had a supervision order or is under a child protection plan: first, to make sure that the child will actually get the education and support they need at home; and, secondly, to make sure that the child can safely be removed from view. Once a child is home-schooled, it may not be seen by any adult from outside the family for years. That may have been exactly the thing that was keeping that fragile family in balance.