Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Glasman Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Oxford]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, and to associate myself with his remarks. I speak to Amendment 427C on behalf of my colleague, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, in whose name the amendment stands. He very much regrets his inability to attend today’s Committee debate. His amendment offers a reasonable and practical solution to the finely balanced tension between freedom and regulation in education provided by religious bodies.

As things stand, the Bill recognises two types of full-time education: education undertaken in either a school or an independent educational institution. The latter would need to be registered according to the 2008 Act and the requirement to register would apply to education that is more than “part time”. The need to include education provided by religious bodies in national mechanisms for oversight is well understood by all. The Church of England, for example, has taken enormous strides forward in both safeguarding training and safeguarding processes in local parishes that welcomed an average of 95,000 children each week in 2023.

We welcome the Government’s goal to strengthen educational oversight across the nation but, in relation to education provided by religious bodies, there are three issues with the Bill as it stands. First, as the National Society for Education wrote in its response to the Government on safeguarding in out-of-school settings:

“Compulsory state registration for religious activity involving children would significantly extend the role of the state in civil society and represents a considerable and major change to the nature of religious freedom”.


Freedom of religion and belief is a precious human liberty and legislators should think very carefully about the unintended consequences, as well as the intended ones, before enacting regulations that might inadvertently threaten that freedom and inhibit religious diversity.

The possibility of unintended consequences brings me to my second point. There is a risk that imposing extra bureaucratic burdens on many volunteer-run out-of-school settings would have an unintended chilling effect. Those unintended consequences might easily follow from a new burden to tot up religious educational activities, such as choir practice, for fear of exceeding the part-time hours below which registration is not required. This is to say nothing of the practicalities of securely and safely holding all the personally identifiable data that registration and keeping details current would impose on the Government as well as the religious educational institution.

Thirdly and finally, there are the difficult edge cases such as yeshivas that do not quite fit any of the categories that the Bill proposes. No one disputes that such out-of-school cases demand adequate scrutiny to ensure that children are being educated both broadly and safely, in addition to any religious component of their education.

This brings me to the amendment proposed by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester. It would offer a balanced and proportional route forward by ensuring that the provisions of the Bill can be met where a setting such as a yeshiva limits itself only to religious education; that the local authority has been clearly notified that an attendee has suitable out-of-school education separately and with sufficient time set aside to allow children to receive that broader education; and that the provider of that religious education demonstrates to the local authority that it provides the required safeguarding measures. I commend the amendment to the Minister and the Committee.

[Lord Glasman (Lab)]

My Lords, I first thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester for tabling this amendment. I respect his gentleness and his nobility—it is very much appreciated.

I begin with just a couple of remarks. I very rarely speak in the House and, when I got here, I was given very sage advice that the more you speak, the less people listen. I therefore beg the attention of the Committee in this case, as it is a matter of great importance to me. It may come as a surprise to my fellow Labour Peers but, in the 14 years that I have been here, I have never once voted against the party. Party loyalty is a crucial part of our constitutional system. I therefore just say that this is a very important matter to me. It is not a matter of conscience—Clement Attlee used to say to Ministers who publicly rebelled, “I thought that conscience was supposed to be a still, small voice”—but a matter of obligation.

I am the Lord of Stoke Newington and of Stamford Hill. Stoke Newington does not really matter in this case, because people there do not care, but Stamford Hill is the centre of the last remnant of European Hasidic Jewry. Their origins mainly lie around 17th-century Ukraine but also Poland. Of the 6 million who were murdered by the Nazis, 3.5 million were Hasidic Jews. They were absolutely devastated by that.

They are a very strange bunch—very mystic, spiritual and absolutely not involved in Zionism or things like that. Those who live in Israel refuse to serve in the Israeli army. They are non-violent, and very committed to exile and a kind of redemption through prayer. For those here who are Muslim, I would say that they are very close to the Sufi tendency. For those who are Christian, I would say that they are probably closest to the Amish. In the film “Witness” with Harrison Ford, there is actually that mistaken identity moment with the child.

I was brought up close to them but not of them. Obviously, my story is different. At the age of 14, I became a socialist and an atheist and my troubles began—and the party’s troubles also probably began at that moment. I have always had a relationship with them, both family and personal. To me, they are a very precious remnant of a destroyed culture. It is a glory to our country that this very peculiar religious community could exist only in our country. It only survived in our country in all of Europe.

I could tell you stories I was told when I was young. They had no idea that all their rabbis, community and family were in Ukraine, Poland, Hungary and those areas. After the war, there was no one there. I met people who went on delegations to find their family and find out why their letters were not being answered. All were destroyed. I have personally travelled through Ukraine and gone to the villages and towns where Jews made up 60% or 70%. Nobody is there. It is all gone. The synagogues are ruined; the cemeteries are desecrated. In only our country did this community survive.

They are a historical anomaly. They should not really exist; they should have been wiped out. It was not only the Nazis; the Bolsheviks—the communists—absolutely laid them to waste. They abolished religious education and yeshivas were illegal, so we should take great pride that our country is unique in Europe in having some kind of continuity of presence for this community and in the way things were sorted out with the yeshivas.

I heard very carefully what the noble Lord, Lord Lucas, said, and I share completely this desire to try to find some accommodation and understanding of how this works. It is a ridiculous state of affairs that I have to be in Stamford Hill and defend Bridget Phillipson from the accusation of being a Bolshevik. This is an insane circumstance. I assure them that she is absolutely not, but the historical memory of the community is precisely reminiscent of the Soviet Union: suddenly, their education will be banned, their way of life will be criminalised and they will be packing their bags. It is a very moving situation. As I say, I speak as a matter not of conscience but of obligation.

The arrangement we came to in the 1944 Act was very wise, in my opinion. It is absolutely vital to say that the accommodation was based on this: the yeshivas are not schools; children are home-educated. However, they spend an awful lot of time in these yeshivas, studying the Talmud and these things. I assure noble Lords that I was very grateful not to be part of that, but that is what they do. So the children are, technically speaking, home-schooled.