Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Gideon Amos Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Munira Wilson]

Absolutely, and I am very sorry to hear about that case. The last Government did not deal with RAAC in our school buildings, and it was as a result of work that my colleagues and I did, along with Labour Members, to expose some of the shocking extent of it that we finally started to get some traction on the issue.

The Liberal Democrat-led coalition administration in Durham county council introduced auto-enrolment for free school meals in September last year. An extra 2,500 children have been signed up, and there has been an extra £3 million in pupil premium funding for the county. Just imagine the impact that that model could have nationally. I hope that the Government will take this opportunity to expand free school meals and introduce auto-enrolment.

I was disappointed to see no mention of mental health in a “wellbeing Bill.” This was an opportunity to tackle the mental health crisis that we are seeing among our children, and it is crucial that we do not allow that opportunity to slide away. Given that, on average, six children in every classroom have a mental health condition, the Government could have seized the chance to ensure that every school in the country, whether primary or secondary, has a statutory and fully funded duty to provide a dedicated mental health professional. As the Bill progresses, my Liberal Democrat colleagues and I will seek to do just that, and I am sure that we can count on support from across the House.

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent and balanced case for protecting children. Many children with mental health problems and autism are educated at home because there is no realistic alternative. Does she agree that the Secretary of State should be encouraged to ensure that the support given to home-educating families under clause 25 includes free access to examinations, which can cost hundreds of pounds? Children are struggling to benefit from a good home education because of the cost. Does my hon. Friend support that idea?

[Munira Wilson]

I am happy to support that. In fact, when the previous Administration introduced the schools Bill, which they then decided to bin, the Liberal Democrats in the House of Lords tabled an amendment that did just that, and I am sure that we will seek to do the same this time around to help the families who choose to home-educate.

Although this Bill sets out some important reforms to our schools system, the Liberal Democrats would like to see greater ambition. The attainment gap has widened significantly in recent years, and it is unacceptable that outcomes for less affluent and more vulnerable students are getting worse. We believe that one piece of the puzzle would be a tutoring guarantee for every disadvantaged pupil who needs support. When implemented correctly, tutoring has proved its worth time and again. Seven in 10 parents whose children receive tutoring at school say that it has raised their child’s attainment. We know that it also boosts young people’s confidence, and tutoring can help tackle persistent absence, which is a huge issue in our schools. I hope the Secretary of State agrees that a tutoring guarantee, introduced via this Bill, would be a powerful tool in narrowing the attainment gap and ensuring that every child gets the high-quality education they deserve.

Let me reiterate that this is a Bill that we must get right. Now is not the time to play politics. Now is the time to work to keep our children safe, to give them the chance to flourish. That is our task across this House, and it is the mission that my party will pursue as the Bill progresses.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Gideon Amos Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 18th March 2025 Commons Chamber

I am determined to use my time in this place to do all I can to help give every child the best possible start in life. No child should be left behind, and if we are going to achieve that, voting for this Bill is a good place to start.

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

There are good elements in this Bill. In line with Professor Jay’s recommendation, I agree that the House must urgently make it a duty to report abuse. As new clause 50 in the name of my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson) sets out, we also want a new authority established to deliver national and local inquiries into rape gang culture and the like. I fully support breakfast clubs, especially following the invention of free school meals—a few years ago—by a Liberal Government.

These are good measures because they put the interests of the child at the centre of everything, and the Bill goes wrong where it puts ideology ahead of the interests of the child and loses sight of those interests. I do not support adding taxes to education, which is outside the scope of the Bill, and I am concerned about the effects on academies as well.

Any conflation of children being educated other than at a traditional school with safeguarding concerns is not borne out by the evidence. It is also an ideological position that is an insult to the parents and families of the 110,000 children—our constituents up and down the country—who are doing a great job in ensuring that their children are educated, whether they are home tutored or educated otherwise. In fact, according to local authority data published in academic research that has been submitted to the Education Committee, only 11% of section 47 child protection inquiries into home-educated children result in a child protection plan. That rises to 26%—more than double—for the average of all predominantly school-educated children. Child for child, those educated at home are the safest and least in need of protection, so the overwhelming weight of new bureaucracy and legislation tackling home education as a sector is not justified. My hon. Friend’s new clause 48 is therefore quite right, because we should remove the burdensome and highly intrusive sanctions on such families.

Unless amendment 221 tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) is agreed to, the Bill will enable grandparents reading to their grandchildren at weekends or in the evenings on a regular basis to be served with a notice, demanding a response on pain of a monetary penalty, by a council officer who chooses to issue one. These powers are really extreme and extraordinary. Instead, we should be supporting the interests of the child.

We should be supporting home-educated children and allowing them to sit exams without charging them hundreds and hundreds of pounds for the privilege. New clause 53, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham, would do exactly that. Without such a provision, can Ministers conceive of anything in the Bill that supports home-educated children? There is plenty to regulate them, control them and expose them to rigorous inspection, but there is not a single clause in the whole Bill that supports children being educated at home. Why the parsimonious Treasury cannot be persuaded to simply allow them to sit exams without paying hundreds of pounds is beyond me. Forgive me, but I cannot fathom why a Government would not want to provide for children to sit examinations.

In Somerset, our council has much a much better and proportionate approach, and it has developed a protocol in partnership with home-educated families. I am worried that that constructive approach will be swept away by the more confrontational approach that this Bill ushers in. At worst, there is the prospect of a disabled child being forced back to school by a local authority officer when they have good reason to be frightened of going back to that school, which really cannot be right.

Turning to my Taunton and Wellington constituency, I pay tribute to state schools such as those my children attended, and the independent ones in Somerset, where, as I have said, the local authority has a more constructive and positive approach to working with schools and families. I particularly pay tribute to the pupils at West Monkton primary school, who have written to me about their amazing plastics pollution campaign. I completely support their bid to ban single-use plastics, which they have written to me about. For those schools and the 5,254 children with an education, health and care plan who cannot get a school place, such as the family who came to my surgery on Friday, may I urge the Government to do more to help families with children with special educational needs? It is crazy that the system is preventing them from attending school when they want to. We need more projects like the great special educational needs centre being developed at Hatch Beauchamp school, which I visited recently. We need to be driven by the interests of the child, not ideology.

Finally, until the Government address the fact that £2 out of every £3 of council tax in places like Somerset is going on care—a national responsibility, in my opinion—then local services, schools and communities will see less and less investment. Social care funding must be tackled. It affects the whole of local government finance, including schools. That is not good for our environment, not good for jobs and not good for the growth of our economy.

[Sarah Smith]

It is a privilege to stand again in support of the Bill. If we are to improve our school system for the benefit of all children, regardless of their background or educational needs, their welfare and interests need to be at the heart of any reform. Opposition Members’ suggestions that that cannot be done without sacrificing standards in education could not be further from the truth. It is because the Government are ambitious for all children that the commitment to excellence in education is the driving force behind the measures in the Bill. Labour knows that when standards in schools drop, it is working-class children and those whose attainment levels may already be lower on paper but who are no less impressive due to overcoming additional learning challenges, who will suffer.

The Bill represents a cultural shift in how Government approach educational reform through delivering change in the sector through partnership and child-centred policy. The prioritisation of a child’s wellbeing and a focus on inclusion are not woolly concepts, but the bedrock of stability that will enable all children to thrive educationally.

It is not contentious to say that we currently have a fragmented school system that is letting down far too many children. That needs to change. Children need to feel like they belong in their school. Every setting, regardless of type, must be given the freedom to drive up standards in a way that meets the needs of its pupils and communities. The Bill goes back to the original purpose of academies, which was to share best practice and encourage collaboration in the best interests of our children. Allowing councils to open new schools will ensure not just that more school places are available, but that the places are the best ones for local families and where they are needed. This is a very positive step forward. A focus on school structures alone will not help families, children or teachers.

I support the roll-out of breakfast clubs, which will lead to every child having access to a healthy meal to start the day. As the impact assessment states, clubs will help to boost children’s attendance, attainment, behaviour, wellbeing and their readiness to learn. I commend my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) for highlighting, through amendment 2, the need for any provision to take into consideration the needs of all children, particularly those with special educational and disability needs. Inclusion is at the heart of this policy, so adjustments will need to be made to provide the food, transport and staffing for pupils in both mainstream and specialist provision. I also support new clause 1 and the auto-enrolment of children for free school meals. The two amendments support the Government’s mission to tackle child poverty.

Unfortunately, special schools fall behind mainstream ones in the offer to parents and pupils outside the conventional school day. Recently, a school close to Hyndburn and Haslingden that serves many of my parents and families has shortened the school day by a whole hour against the wishes of parents. In all honesty, I found the reasoning quite unconvincing. It will cause chaos for families and it would not have been tolerated in a mainstream school. We must do better with SEND schools to ensure that their children get the same school standards and excellent provision that the Government are working to achieve.

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Sadly, there are too many cases where children who are classed as home-educated are actually attending the illegal settings that I set out earlier, or are simply not receiving any education at all. In the worst cases, like that of Sara Sharif, we have seen children removed from school in order to prevent detection of abuse. It is only with this Bill that that can be tackled. The introduction of registers for children not in school is crucial in ensuring that children do not fall through the net.

[Gideon Amos]

Does the hon. Lady accept that, in the tragic case of Sara Sharif, which my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr Forster) has been pursuing, the murder happened in the school holidays and Sara was already known to social services? There is not much evidence that the parents said they were going to home-educate in the first place. Given all those facts, does the hon. Lady accept that there is actually no correlation in the data between home-educated children and children who are ultimately judged to need a care plan?

[Lizzi Collinge]

I acknowledge the complexity of that case and that the absolutely unacceptable failings before Sara’s death were abject across many organisations. However, she was removed from school partly so that her parents could prevent the detection of the abuse. I have recognised, and will continue to recognise, that that obviously does not speak to the vast majority of people who home-educate their children. However, as parliamentarians, we have a duty to protect the most vulnerable, and sometimes that includes regulating the majority, who are decent, honest people.

I want to reassure parents that the new regulations, such as registers for children not in school and the capacity to compel school attendance in certain cases, are not aimed at limiting home education as a whole or about policing how people choose to educate.

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I am also concerned about the excessive reporting requirements for the register—other than the reference to ice creams. While basic information is useful for future planning, proposed new section 463C(1)(e) goes much further, requiring the details of all individuals involved and a full list of all activities. That not only places an unrealistic burden on families, but is impractical for local authorities to manage. If we break down what is being asked for, it would mean that parents must report a neighbour who teaches their child to cook or sew and a local farmer who introduces their children to the environment through hands-on experiences, as well as swimming lessons, museum visits and even regular nature outings with other home-educating families.

[Gideon Amos]

In that vein, does my hon. Friend accept that, as I mentioned, grandparents reading to their grandchildren could be considered as providing home education and should be inspected and reported on, and vital home education groups providing services free of charge could be driven out of business by the scale and weight of reporting they will have to provide?

[Vikki Slade]

I think a lot of people who do not know anything about home education miss the fact that there is a whole community of home educators, and home-educated children spend plenty of time with their peers, but they are just different peers—others who prefer to have their education outside a school environment—and there is a risk of such organisations being driven underground or lost altogether.

Under section 7 of the Education Act 1996, parents already have a duty to ensure that their child receives a suitable education, whether through school or otherwise, and local authorities can already conduct informal inquires and issue school attendance orders if they believe a child is not receiving an appropriate education, so this is simply overkill. A formal register would help to ensure accountability, but this is overreach. My amendment 221 proposes a more practical solution of requiring only those who provide more than six hours per week of education or activity to be included in the register. That strikes a reasonable balance by ensuring that key educators are identified without overwhelming families or local authorities.

While there are genuine safeguarding concerns, local authorities already have the power to intervene under section 47 of the Children Act 1989. The Victoria Climbié Foundation stated that the provision proposed in the Bill would have done nothing to help Sara Sharif because the local authority had already decided that the child was not at risk.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Gideon Amos Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Wednesday 15th April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Olivia Bailey]

I apologise, but I am going to make some progress.

I turn to Lords amendment 106, which deals with phones in schools. The amendment is unnecessary, as this Government are already crystal clear that mobile phones have no place in schools at any point during the school day. We have strengthened the weak guidance provided by the Conservative party to make it absolutely clear that schools should be mobile-free environments by default. We have written to every headteacher in the country to tell them that phones should not be in their schools. We have asked Ofsted to ensure that phone bans are properly enforced, and we have rolled out targeted support, through our attendance and behaviour hubs, for every school that is struggling to make that ban a reality. The Conservative party seems to be deliberately ignoring those facts. Of course, if the consultation tells me that making the guidance statutory will make a difference, we will do it—our amendment in lieu makes that possible—but my honest opinion is that the issue is not whether or not the ban is on the statute book. Rather, the problem is with the clarity of the guidance, and the quality and enforcement of policies, and we have already acted to fix all three.

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

Will the Minister confirm for the record that the ban on mobile phones in schools will not extend to alternative and augmentative communication devices? Laura in Taunton has put those devices to use for her son. That has transformed his life; it provides an autistic child with an alternative means of communication in school. I hope the Minister will join me in congratulating Laura on her work.

[Olivia Bailey]

I do congratulate the hon. Member’s constituent on her work, and can confirm that there is provision in the guidance—which he can show her—for schools to make exceptions for such exceptional cases.

I turn to amendments dealing with school uniforms and admissions. On Lords amendment 41B, I welcome their lordships’ support for tackling school uniform costs. However, the amendment is unnecessary, and risks creating uncertainty for schools and parents about the Government’s intent and the direction of policy at a time when they will be implementing the limit. The Department for Education has surveyed parents and school leaders extensively over many years on school uniform policies, and we will continue to monitor the impact of this measure, informed by the latest available evidence.

--- Later in debate ---

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

I am very pleased that we have proper time for debate today. I record my dismay that our last debate on this Bill was cut so short, when we had so many important amendments to consider. We spent more time walking through the voting Lobby than scrutinising the provisions of law that we are sent here to make.

I want to start by talking about children in care. As we have just heard, their relationships with siblings can be the most important connections they have. Too often, those relationships are being strained or damaged by a system that just does not support them effectively. To that end, I would also like to commend the work of the charities Become and the Family Rights Group, who have sought to keep siblings connected. It is for this reason that I warmly welcome the Government’s acceptance of Lords amendment 17.

The Minister said that it is a travesty that siblings have been separated. I gently say that it was her and her colleagues who made Labour MPs oppose the Lords amendment from my noble Friend Baroness Tyler in the last round of ping-pong. I am glad the Government have had a change of heart, accepted her approach and put forward their amendment in lieu. I congratulate and thank my noble Friend Baroness Tyler of Enfield. She has been championing this issue for many, many years and I recognise her tireless work. I also recognise the tireless work of the hon. Member for South Shields (Emma Lewell), who, as we have just heard, has also been working so hard on this issue.

The amendment addresses a critical oversight in our current regulations, ensuring that the bond between siblings is not severed simply because their care status differs. These relationships are often the only constant in a child’s life. Protecting them provides a vital anchor of stability amid the profound upheaval of new care arrangements.

Government amendment (a) in lieu of Lords amendment 106 requires headteachers only to “have regard for” guidance on smartphones in schools, rather than mandating the existing guidance. Young people themselves say that they want a break from the stress of social media at school. We all know the impact that our phones have on our concentration and focus. If Ministers and other hon. Members in this House cannot resist the temptation to look at their smartphones during a debate like this, how on earth do they expect a 14-year-old to ignore a TikTok notification in a double science lesson? According to Health Professionals for Safer Screens, a quarter of children’s notifications go off during the day. I am deeply alarmed that our children’s educational attainment should be hindered by an issue that is so simple to solve. I appreciate the Minister’s comments about guidance and asking Ofsted to look at it. After they made the announcement that they would include the issue in Ofsted inspections, I met a group of headteachers from my constituency. They said to me, “This is yet another thing you are piling on to the Ofsted inspection. Please can you ask Ministers to just get on and make this law?”

Where schools have managed to ban phones during the school day, they have seen a real transformation in pupils, going from being glued to screens to chatting and playing Uno at break times. Headteachers report significant reductions in incidents of low-level disruptive behaviour and lower in-school truancy, and children and teachers are reporting being happier in school.

However, many headteachers are still battling to get their schools to that place. Our headteachers need proper support to do right by our children, where they are challenged by parents who want still to be able to reach their children even during the course of the school day, to ensure that children have a healthy and safe education free from distraction.

I ask the Minister, and the Secretary of State if she is listening, to make this guidance statutory. Will the Minister support schools with the tools and funding to manage this transition to ensure that every classroom is a space where children can focus, learn and thrive, smartphone free, unless they have a need for a device for medical reasons, for special educational needs or because they are young carers?

It is a strange irony that the Government demand endless evidence before reining in big tech yet refuse a single review of their branded school uniform policy. By rejecting Lords amendment 41B to review the effectiveness of the Government’s cap on the number of branded school uniform items, as opposed to the Liberal Democrat proposal of a price cap, Ministers are effectively asking the British public to trust that they have exactly the right answer. The amendment is a significant concession on what we have previously proposed. It merely asks for a review of the policy after 12 months. We have a shared goal on both sides of the House to tackle the cost of living for hard-pressed families, but Ministers seem to lack the humility to admit that there is a chance that their policy prescription to bring down the cost of uniforms may be wrong. The Schoolwear Association has said that 61% of its members may increase prices based on the item cap.

The Government were forced to U-turn on winter fuel allowance for pensioners and on welfare reform for those in receipt of benefits. Why will they not accept the offer of an off-ramp to potentially prevent another forced U-turn somewhere down the line? What do they fear about testing their policy in a year’s time, just in case the uniform suppliers hike their prices in response to this policy, as the industry has repeatedly warned and as a basic understanding of market forces would suggest? The Government cite their manifesto as though it were a shield against better Liberal Democrat ideas, but a manifesto commitment is only as good as its delivery. Parents want action that will actually lower their bills. If the Government are so sure they have got it right, they have nothing to fear from a 12-month review.

On the theme of supporting families, I shall speak to Lords amendment 38. I first offer my belated congratulations to the Government on accepting the merits of part of the Liberal Democrat position in their amendment. Having spent a year opposing our efforts to ban big tech from collecting the data of under-16s, it is heartening to see Ministers finally recognise that we can no longer allow social media giants to treat our children’s personal data as a commodity to be harvested for profit. It is also welcome that the Government have moved towards the Liberal Democrat position of age ratings for social media, by accepting that children of different ages will be affected by the online world in different ways. But the Government have still not gone far enough. Their amendment says only that they “may” make provisions to tackle these issues, not that they will.

The Government’s amendment also remains silent on the predatory nature of addictive design. By ignoring the infinite scroll and the psychological triggers engineered to hijack a child’s attention, the Government fail to recognise that this amendment will leave parents, families, children and indeed the Government fighting against big tech with one arm tied behind their back. The recent US court cases against Meta and YouTube confirm what we already knew. Those apps are designed to keep our children hooked.

[Gideon Amos (Taunton and Wellington) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on her work on this issue. She is right that age classifications that tackle the social media companies, rather than going after children and their rights, are what matters. Recent research by PISA—the programme for international student assessment—on seven internet activities by 15-year-olds in 47 countries found conclusive evidence that life satisfaction is lower at higher rates of social media use by 15-year-olds. Does that not make acting on this issue now even more urgent?

[Munira Wilson]

I could not agree more. There is a plethora of evidence out there showing that we have to act, and we have to act now. I simply cannot understand why the Government are not committing to doing something soon.

Going back to the US court cases, one document revealed that Meta executives claimed:

“If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens.”

That is my 11-year-old daughter that Meta is talking about. Another internal memo showed that 11-year-olds were four times more likely to keep coming back to Instagram compared with competing apps, despite the platform requiring users to be at least 13 years old.

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[Gideon Amos]

The hon. Gentleman speaks to the language delays that are created by these apps. Does he agree that the fact that these additional needs are going to come into the system on top of reforms to the special educational needs and disabilities system—which parents are already worried about—will create extra anxiety and extra pressures, and is going to store up problems for the future if they are not tackled now?

[Iqbal Mohamed]

I do agree with the hon. Member. I sympathise with the Government—there are huge pressures in all policy areas, particularly children’s services, education and healthcare, and now they have to deal with the tech giants. The Government introduced age-gating for pornographic sites so that people under the age of 18 could not access them. That was absolutely the right thing to do; despite the fact that there are workarounds and technical ways for people to bypass that age-gating, it does project the majority of children from exposure to pornography. Now, the Government must deal with the virtual drug dealers. They must implement laws to protect our children from the harms those companies cause, and must also introduce laws to obligate them to change and redesign their platforms in order to design out those harms.

Academic studies have found that 24% of suicides among 10 to 19-year-olds are linked to high-risk use of digital technology. Heartbreaking cases such as that of the 14-year-old Molly Russell, who tragically took her own life in 2017 and whose legacy lives on through the Molly Rose Foundation, have demonstrated that social media use is undoubtedly contributing to rising rates of self-harm among young people. This is not some future risk; it is a real and present harm. We do not need more consultation, delay or half-measures; we need this Government to insist on safety by design to protect children from exposure to damaging content and platforms, and not to implement anything that aims at damage limitation. We need this Government to listen to our citizens, not to the tech giants. As such, I once again join right hon. and hon. Friends and Members across the House in calling on the Government to commit to raising the age of access to social media to 16 and banning the use of all mobile phones in schools, rather than continuing to leave children exposed to systems that are causing irreversible and unnecessary harm.