Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I declare an interest as deputy chair of governors at King’s College London Maths School, which is a high-achieving 16 to 19 academy. We are very grateful to this Government and previous Governments for their support, and we are aware that the school’s existence, and that of other university maths schools, was made possible by academy freedoms.

In that context, while welcoming much of this Bill, I echo concerns raised by other noble Lords about reducing these freedoms. Academies’ funding agreements already give the Secretary of State major powers, so I do not really understand why, for example, the Secretary of State needs major new statutory powers to intervene just because they are satisfied that the proprietor of an academy is “likely” to breach a relevant duty at some unspecified time in the future. I hope very much that we will return to this in depth in Committee and get some clearer understanding of why these powers are being introduced.

My main concern is the Bill’s emphasis on ensuring that teachers are all qualified—which of course does not in any way refer to their mastery of their subject but only to whether they have a teaching qualification. The vast majority of teachers, including in academies, as the noble Lord, Lord Harris, pointed out, and in the independent sector, do have teaching qualifications, and these play a very useful role in preparing people to teach effectively in many contexts. However, I have spent a large part of my life working on skills and vocational education, and I am concerned that this direction of travel is misguided and potentially harmful for vocational and technical subjects. These are, obviously enough, best taught by professionals with first-hand knowledge of their occupation and extensive practical experience. Over decades, I have seen many professionals, craftspeople and experienced practitioners inspire young people and teach them effectively, not only by giving them particular skills but by transforming their attitude to learning and to their futures.

Some people like that will, in mid-life, switch to full-time teaching and do a teaching qualification, typically in further education, but many will teach part-time and for a short period, and we need more of these people. Moreover, the more the labour market demands their skills, the harder and harder it becomes for schools or colleges to hire expert practitioners, and the more important it becomes to find ways of encouraging them to do some teaching and not place barriers between them and our classrooms.

This is not, as the noble Lord, Lord Aberdare, reminded us, a Chamber full of people who believe that all education should involve highly academic, non-practical subjects—indeed, rather the opposite. I know that many noble Lords will have memories, as I do, of past educational reforms that set out to make more varied technical options available in schools. All too often these failed and were undermined because of a total lack of expert staff. Drafting in qualified sports teachers to teach leisure and tourism, or qualified biology teachers to deliver engineering, is not where we should be, but all too often it is where we have ended up.

Fourteen years ago, I published a review of vocational education for the Government. At that point, under the Education Act 2002, schools could bring in experts. However, one of my recommendations was that the Government should:

“Clarify and evaluate rules relating to the teaching of vocational content … Many schools believe that it is impossible to bring professionals in to demonstrate … even part of a course without requiring the presence of additional, salaried teaching staff”.


This was not true, but, sadly, many schools thought it was. In recent decades, academy freedoms have made far more schools aware of their freedoms. I really worry that we are pushing in the wrong direction on this one and that we will come to regret it.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 18th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Deben (Con)]

My Lords, this is a rather crucial amendment. The reason is that we are a nation that is inclined to talk about education as if it is always academic education. If I have criticisms of previous Governments—and I have of those from both sides—they are that we have emphasised education as if it is the only way, rather than part of a grouping of educational opportunities.

We are also rather inclined to not support technical education, and the comparison with our competitors is notable and historically of very long standing. I recently read a report about such education by a committee of the House that remarked that Prussia was much better at it than we were. The Committee will immediately see how long ago that report was produced. Curiously, we have always found this a difficulty in the way that we think about things and in many of the changes that we have made, such as the insistence that polytechnics should become universities, as if that somehow improved the circumstances and that there was something less good about having something that was aimed specifically at talking about the issues that we are discussing. We have to change the atmosphere.

I much approved of the comments just made by the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, about what the Government could do if they did not have the money. However, there is quite a lot of money in that fund, which seems to have gone back to the Treasury rather than being used in quite the way one would have hoped. However, if they do not have the money, it is very important to make the statement that this is important, and that it is part of the way in which we help those who need it but who, once having had it, will be making a real contribution.

This is why I come back to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Layard, that the Treasury will get the money back. There is a real truth in this. We need it; we have not had it. I am not blaming any particular Government for this, because, after all, this was a pretty late decision of that Labour Government, even though it was changed afterwards by the coalition Government for reasons that I cannot now remember. However, it is important that we recognise that this is an essential part of a modern educational system. We have not got it, we ought to get it, and the Government need to come to terms with a change in the way we think.

[Baroness Wolf of Dulwich (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to add one very specific but pertinent comment to the debate at this point. Obviously, we are not going redesign the whole of apprenticeships here on the Floor of the House, but I strongly support the emphasis that the noble Lord, Lord Layard, has placed on 16 to 18 year-olds, and bring to your Lordships’ attention a very strange anomaly in the way we approach this.

When a young person fails to get an apprenticeship and remains in full-time education of some sort, this is paid for automatically as part of the open-ended commitment to pay for classroom-based education, even if it is also vocational or technical education, until somebody is 18 or 19. But apprenticeships for 16 to 18 year-olds have to come out of the levy—of which there is going to be very little money left next year, by the way, but that is a whole other discussion.

At the very least, in the short term, the Government could commit to moving the funding for apprenticeships for 16 to 18 year-olds into a different budget, into the perfectly correct national commitment to fund young people’s education and training until the age of 18.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

Briefly, I want to reinforce what has been said. What is unspent of the apprenticeship levy gets returned to the Treasury, not to be spent on education or apprenticeships, which is bizarre. It is a double whammy, because businesses, seeing that their money has not been spent and is likely to go back to the Treasury, suddenly start putting staff on high-level courses, equivalent—