Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Layard Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Layard (Lab)]

My Lords, children’s well-being is referenced in the title of this Bill, and so it should be. Obviously, children’s well-being matters, but it is also the best predictor of how happy the child will be in their subsequent life, predicting it far better than the qualifications which they obtain. However, the only outcome of education which we measure is those qualifications—and, of course, what you measure becomes what you treasure. Exam results have become the only touchstone of a school’s success, which is a catastrophe. There is only one way to change this, and that is to measure well-being as well, to put something else into the balance.

That is what happens in many countries. It happens in the Netherlands and in South Australia, and in England it now happens in Manchester, as has been mentioned, and in Hampshire. The system is quite simple, and I think it is what we need. The Government design the questionnaire and hold it on a central platform. If a school wants to participate, it arranges once a year for the students in the school to complete the questionnaire, which takes about 20 minutes. The results are analysed centrally, and the findings are sent back from the centre to the school. From this, the school gets vital information about how well it is doing on progressing the well-being of its students. It is left up to the school how it uses its information. Participation in the survey is voluntary for both the school and the individual, and the individual responses are totally confidential to the individual.

This is a change which could transform what happens in our schools. It would give them the incentive to do more for the well-being of their children, and the justification, which most of them want, for paying more attention to it. There is no conflict between doing more for well-being and improving academic performance. All the evidence shows that extra time devoted to life skills improves not only well-being but academic performance—or certainly does it no harm. Our children are subject now to all kinds of new pressures, and their mental health has demonstrably suffered, so we have to do something about well-being. That is the reason why a cross-party group of us will be moving an amendment to state that the Government should introduce a measurement system of the type that I have been describing. It might be said, and it is true, that it is already possible for a school or schools to measure well-being—it happens in Manchester, However, it is a huge effort to make it happen, and if we want this to become the norm, we have to make it as easy as possible. That is what we owe our children, and that is what the system that I have described would do.

Finally, I turn to our greatest educational failure, which is how we treat people after school who do not go to university. One-third of our young people get no education or training beyond the age of 17. It is really shocking. The number of apprenticeships for young people has more than halved in the past 10 years. To rectify this, the Government need to take on for these young people the same obligation that they take on for young people wanting to go to university; namely, ensuring that there are enough places for qualified applicants. In 2009, the apprenticeship Act put that obligation on the statute book. It was repealed by the coalition Government, and I believe it should be reinstated in this Bill.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Layard Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 18th September 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Layard]

483: After Clause 62, insert the following new Clause—
“Apprenticeship provisionThe Secretary of State must promote sufficient provision of apprenticeship places up to level 3 to ensure that every qualified applicant aged 16 to 18 receives an offer of a place.”

[Lord Layard (Lab)]

My Lords, this amendment aims to remedy one of the greatest injustices in our whole education system: the acute shortage of apprenticeships for young people not going to university.

If you qualify for university and want it, you can expect to find a place. However, if you qualify for an apprenticeship and want it, you have no such luck. On the Government’s matching scheme for apprenticeships, only one in three people applying finds a place. There is a more shocking fact, from which all thoughts about post-school education should start: by age 18, one in three of all our young people has ceased to receive any education or training. That one in three is of course nearly two in three of the people not going to university. That is how we are treating them—they are either NEET or in a dead-end job without training, heading for low productivity and low pay. The main reason for that is the shortage of apprenticeships.

This situation is a disaster for the economy—it is the major reason for our low economic growth—and it is a disaster for our young people. It is the prime duty of the state to give everybody a proper start in life and we are simply failing: we are not doing it. We have talked about this problem for years, but the scale of apprenticeship opportunities for school leavers today is no better than it was in 2009.

However, in that year, the previous Labour Government took a major step to remedy the situation. They passed the apprenticeships Act 2009, which obliged the Government to ensure that there were enough places for all 16 to 18 year-old qualified applicants for apprenticeships up to level 3. That would have changed everything, but, unfortunately, it was almost immediately repealed by the coalition Government.

--- Later in debate ---

I hope I have managed to convey our absolute conviction that apprenticeships are a vital part of our journey to creating more opportunities for young people. There is an enormous amount of work to do in this space and I am very pleased that the Government are putting steps in place to achieve the right outcomes. For these reasons, I kindly ask the noble Lords not to press their amendments.

[Lord Layard (Lab)]

My Lords, I am most grateful to everyone who spoke in this excellent debate. The noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, got us off to a good start on the economics, which is, of course, a central part of this—but economics can appear to look just at the whole economy rather than at the fates of individuals. Ultimately, of course, the economy is about the fates of individuals and especially the fates of these young people who are headed for lives of such poverty and also, in many cases, inactivity, at a cost then to the rest of us.

I am very grateful for what I think was the main theme, which came out of almost all the contributions—from the noble Lords, Lord Deben, Lord Storey, Lord Hampton and Lord Addington, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Barran, Lady Wolf and Lady Coffey. It is that we have taken our eye off the needs of these young people at the lower levels of skill. How do we get people to levels 2 and 3 as the top priority for the use of the levy money? What has been happening, as we know, is that the levy money has been increasingly diverted, I would say, to supporting older people—often existing employees—and to higher levels of qualification. That would be all right if it were not being diverted from the needs of young people, whom employers have increasingly been turning their backs on. That is what we have to reverse, and it requires a major policy decision by the Government and the setting up of a major administrative structure to reverse this whole trend. I think it is encouraging that the survey by the CIPD showed that employers are up for this if some leadership and support is given to make it come about.

We are worried that the levy is being diverted. We should revert to the principle that its main purpose is to get people up to levels 2 and 3—when it comes to levels 4 and above, there are many other potential sources of funding. There is obviously the student loan. It is not so obvious that essentially the taxpayer, through the levy, is funding higher-level education for people taking levels 4 and 5 or degree apprenticeships at level 6, when most of those studying at levels 4 to 6 are on student loans or alternative sources of funding. Obviously, if the employer wants to get a bright young person quickly, they can contribute to the cost. We must re-establish the idea that the central—the first—overriding claim on the levy is young people doing levels up to level 3.

I am very grateful to the Minister for what she said and for the sincerity of her concern about all this. We would very much like to meet and see how this can be carried forward and, in the light of that, for the moment I would like to withdraw the amendment.

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Garden of Frognal) (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord, but we are debating Amendment 483A, so I need to ask the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to withdraw that first.