Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Bichard Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bichard (CB)]

My Lords, by any measure, this is a landmark Bill and I welcome very many of its provisions. However, in the very short time available today, I will focus only on the part of the Bill that concerns child protection and safeguarding, in particular in Clauses 2 to 4. I will do that because child safety remains the first priority of schools, the education system and the Government, and we should never forget that.

Schools themselves are safer places than they were back in the days when I chaired the Soham inquiry. The vetting and barring scheme, more rigorous staff interviews, designated safeguarding leads and better training for all staff have played their part in that. But, as the Children’s Commissioner said recently, schools also play a wider and

“fundamental role in keeping children safe and protecting them from harm”.

Children simply trust schools; they trust teachers and they trust teachers’ assistants, and those teachers are often the first to know if children are facing challenges in their lives. So it is important that we ensure that the knowledge that schools have is available to all who are tasked with protecting children. That is why the Bill places a duty on safeguarding partners—local authorities, the police and health—to secure the participation of education settings in multiagency safeguarding to ensure that the education view is heard.

That is a step forward, but I agree with the Children’s Commissioner and others that schools should not just be participants; they should be equal partners to properly underline their status and responsibility in the safeguarding process. I also think that the Bill should recognise and reference faith-based and community organisations in the safeguarding process to avoid gaps in oversight, especially of marginalised children. Well-being and safeguarding are not the sole responsibility of the statutory organisations; they are also the responsibility of community organisations that play such an important part but at the moment are overlooked in the Bill in the way that they can sometimes be overlooked on the ground.

As has already been said, the common thread in the findings of every child abuse inquiry since the case of Maria Colwell more than 50 years ago has been the failure of agencies involved to share information. Your Lordships’ own Public Services Select Committee, which I sat on at the time, concluded in 2021 that data sharing between government departments and between local agencies was a long-standing problem that

“endangered vulnerable children and their families”.

Currently, social care services are not always told when the police arrest a child or when a pupil is on a waiting list for mental health services.

I am delighted that the Bill seeks to address data sharing, and I am especially pleased to see the very long-overdue proposal to introduce a consistent, unique identifier for children. That should make it easier to create a comprehensive profile for a child and achieve smooth transitions when children change schools or move local authority areas. The question for me—one which we should be asking ourselves in Committee—is whether the changes proposed even now go far enough to reverse decades of learned behaviour. I have long argued that our society has prioritised the protection of data ahead of the protection of children. That has to change. This is the chance to change it, and we should take it.