Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Caroline Nokes and Andrew Cooper

Wednesday 8th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Cooper]

I absolutely agree. Primary school children, who typically wear polo shirts, need five days’ worth, plus PE kit. This measure will make an enormous difference. Although it has been great to see organisations such as the Winsford Uniform Exchange in my constituency grow and provide people with lower-cost and greener alternatives, bringing costs down for families is absolutely the right priority. The measures on breakfast clubs and school uniforms may be the two most visible in the Bill, and I hope that they will be part of the Government’s lasting legacy of supporting all children to achieve and thrive.

The Bill covers a vast array of measures across the spectrum of children’s social care and schools policy, as we have discussed this afternoon. I will focus my comments predominantly on the schools side, although I want to take a moment to say something about the single unique identifier for children. In Lord Laming’s report on the death of Victoria Climbié in 2000, he recommended that the Government explore the safeguarding benefits of a national children’s database—effectively a single unique identifier—to address poor communication and data sharing between agencies.

In report after case after report after case, the issue of weak multidisciplinary working continues to arise. The measure proposed in this Bill, alongside the clarification of the legal basis for information sharing and the creation of multi-agency child protection teams, will undoubtedly help, but they are the start of the story, not the end. The success of this measure will be in ensuring that the single unique identifier is consistently captured in reforming working practices so that information sharing is part of the culture, and in making it clear that local authority boundaries, health authority boundaries, police authority boundaries and, in my part of the world, national boundaries are not a barrier to good safeguarding practice, which has become more important as children travel further to appropriate education or care settings.

I want to cover the reforms that the Bill makes to academies in the minute or so that I have left. I am not ideological about the academy system. I have seen multi-academy trusts that provide an outstanding level of support for their schools; equally, I have seen MATs that have not worked and that have provided local leaders with few levers to push for improvements on behalf of their communities. The reality is that the previous Government left us with a school system that has become increasingly fragmented and lacks coherence at local, regional and national levels.

The governance model is rarely the key determinant of whether a school will provide good outcomes for children; as someone once said, this is about standards, not structures. On that basis, many of the reforms proposed in the Bill are entirely sensible, such as the requirement to teach the national curriculum, the requirement to employ qualified teachers, and giving the schools adjudicator the final say on admission numbers. All of these measures will get us closer to some consistency and common standards across the sector.

I will leave it there. I just want to say that this legislation—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

Order. There is a time limit.