Home Schooling

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Thursday 19th December 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

My Lords, there are many different parts to this. To answer the noble Baroness’s question, reforming social care is critical to giving hundreds of thousands of children and young people the start in life they deserve, whichever ethnic minority they come from. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill follows the publication of Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, which sets out the Government’s commitment to whole-system reform of children’s social care. Additionally, the Budget announced £44 million to support kinship and foster carers. This includes the largest ever national investment in kinship care. We have also just announced half a billion pounds for the next financial year in direct preventive services, to help fund local authorities to fulfil this work. If the noble Baroness would like to have a specific discussion about how we can make sure that this is getting to every community and no one is excluded from it, I look forward to meeting her.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, does not the case of poor Sara indicate the urgent need for removing the legal defence of reasonable chastisement of violence against a child? Surely doing so would send out a message that it is never reasonable to beat a child.

[Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent (Lab)]

I personally agree very much with the noble Baroness but, in terms of what we are doing, this Government does not condone violence or abuse of children in any form, and there are laws in place to protect children from this. We are looking closely at what is happening in Wales and Scotland and will continue to build our evidence base but have no plans to legislate specifically for smacking at this stage, which I believe the noble Baroness was alluding to. We want to consider further evidence carefully ahead of deciding whether a change in law is required. We want to make sure that the voices of children, parents and trusted stakeholders are fundamentally at the heart of this discussion, and that will feed into any amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.