Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Moynihan of Chelsea Excerpts

Tuesday 20th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Moynihan of Chelsea (Con)]

I support this amendment, and I hope to illustrate to the Government that this proposed purpose clause will help them and will be of benefit to the debate in reaching an effective and clear Bill. Like the noble Lord, Lord Meston, I do not have a Second Reading speech; I am focusing only on this amendment.

The noble Baroness on the Government Back Bench, the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, for whom I have the greatest respect, and other noble Lords seemed to be saying, “We don’t need no education Bill purpose clause”. I suggest that many Bills, including this one, would benefit from a purpose clause. It provides clarity, as the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, said, and the ability to check each clause against it to ensure that they would indeed meet the purpose of the Bill. It also provides needed clarity to the debate.

The principle can be seen in any organisation that is trying to think through a change in direction and how to implement it. It starts with the strategy, which is the purpose. Having decided the strategy, it moves on to the tactics—the other clauses are the tactics that fulfil the purpose. Otherwise, you are not quite sure why a whole range of clauses are there. You cannot fit them into the overall plan; there is no strategy, there are only tactics, with the ability for people to cram all sorts of things into a Bill that do not actually meet whatever that strategy was.

The purpose clause, as written, is not controversial. If a further clause in the Bill does not meet purposes (a), (b), (c) and (d), then it can be more swiftly disposed of or amended so as to meet whatever the Bill’s purpose is—which is of course for the Government to decide and accept. However, a purpose clause goes beyond that. Such a clause on the front of the Bill will, for that regrettably small part of the electorate who will read this Bill, provide clarity as to what on earth those hundreds of pages are up to. As we all know, any Bill is quite difficult to read. As the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, just pointed out, the Bill becomes much clearer with a purpose clause. For those tasked with the unfortunate duty of implementing the Bill, to know what they are trying to accomplish will reduce the horrors of compliance.

The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Sentamu, spoke about outcomes and having active verbs in the purpose clause. Active verbs lead to outcomes, and my noble friend Lord Balfe pleaded for outcomes, not process, to be the Bill’s purpose. In this House, we very often seem to focus on process—how something is going to be done—rather than outcomes: what on earth we are trying to achieve.

I meant to say when I was addressing the good remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, that he should be comforted by the fact that around half the amendments that he complained were taking up so much time in the football Bill came from his side of the House. Therefore, as to his reprehending the length of time—which I also had to sit wearily through—when one points a finger forward, there are three fingers pointing backwards.

My noble friend Lord Balfe, in pleading for outcomes, put his finger on what is wrong with a Bill without a purpose clause. Whatever outcomes the Government wish to achieve, let us know what they are, let us be able to test the Bill against those proposed outcomes, and let us have this purpose clause, as my noble friend Lady Barran has advocated.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton (Con)]

My Lords, I speak in support of the purpose clause, in particular, subsection (1)(a) and (c), improving

“the safety and wellbeing of children”,

and improving

“standards”,

to

“remove barriers to opportunity”.

I also refer to my interests in the register.

As the Minister will have gathered from some 188 pages of amendments, there are serious concerns with the Bill. I am sure she will dismiss many of these as distractions, but I want to assure her that having spent nearly 15 years trying to improve the education of young people, mostly from areas of deprivation, and therefore the opportunities for them, that is not my purpose.

I first give credit to the Government for tackling the issue of kinship care. The educational outcomes for children in care are shockingly bad. If there is any cohort of children in our society that has been dealt a cruel hand, it is those children. Kinship care is often an obvious and decent solution; however, many of these children have been traumatised by several years in severely dysfunctional families, and the task facing the new carer is formidable.

That is why I have always been such a strong advocate for offering boarding school places for those children. Not only does this provide a safe and stable environment but it has shown a dramatic improvement in their outcomes when the data has been analysed. In December 2017, when I was the Minister responsible for this, we launched the boarding school partnerships service. The aim was to link local authorities with the relevant children’s charities and boarding schools themselves.

I will not repeat the data cited by the noble Lord, Lord Nash, on the Royal National Children’s SpringBoard’s Care-Experienced and Vulnerable Children programme, or indeed the comments from the Nottingham University report. However, there is one statistic that he did not mention. Not only are the outcomes for children in boarding care compared to those for a similar cohort extraordinarily higher but the costs are of a magnitude lower. In the sample that the noble Lord, Lord Nash, talked about, the cost for the cohort going into boarding schools was £3.6 million versus £8 million when they were retained in foster or residential care. The additional and perhaps even more important advantage is that it takes pressure off the kinship carers, as the intensity of their role is reduced. Common sense would suggest that this route would make it a much less daunting task. Indeed, how many times in politics do we get a chance to use an innovative measure that is both much cheaper and far more effective than the opportunities being pursued at the moment?

The national curriculum seems to be a wholly unnecessary imposition on a sector that has spent more than 10 years developing curricula that work for their schools and the communities that they serve. It is extremely important to clarify to everyone in this Chamber that every school in England has an obligation to deliver a broad and balanced curriculum; it is not a free-for-all. This is a fundamental tenet of any Ofsted inspection in all phases of education.

Having experienced at first-hand almost dozens of inspections over the years, I know that, in every instance, Ofsted requires to see the materials used and asks teachers to give them feedback on the effectiveness of them from a teaching point of view. In the case of the academy trust that I founded, we have painstakingly built an all-through curriculum for all phases. It has been colossally expensive and time-consuming, but it is working. Children arriving from feeder primary schools into our secondaries make demonstrably faster progress, as they are on a familiar path. In our maths curriculum, we have developed a 70-block building stack which goes from year 2 up to A-level.

Here is a summary of what an Ofsted report said about the curriculum in a recent inspection of one of our schools:

“The school’s curriculum is ambitious. The knowledge pupils need to know to succeed in the future is set out clearly and in a logical order. As pupils, including those with special educational needs … progress through the curriculum they use what they have already learned to understand new information”.


However, it also pointed out weaknesses. That is why, although the school got an overall “Good” with an “Outstanding” for personal development, it did not get an “Outstanding” judgment across the board, and we have addressed those perfectly fair criticisms.

Last year, that school had one of the biggest improvements in its Progress 8 score in the country. When we took it over, it was in such a mess that a campus capable of educating over 1,800 children was down to educating 400, such was its abandonment by the local community. As I speak today, the confidence has returned to the extent that a whole new school building is under construction, and I thank the Minister and her department for that.

My point is: why tear that up? A far more sensible approach would be to require any school failing an Ofsted inspection on its curriculum to then be required to follow the curriculum imposed by the DfE—deal with the 20% at the bottom of the system and do not drag the good ones down pointlessly.

I turn to admissions with the local authorities. I completely accept that there needs to be proper joined-up thinking between local authorities and schools, which should of course include academies. However, it must be for the right reasons and not for the administrative convenience of the local authorities. By that, I mean forcing outstanding schools to reduce their pupil admission numbers just so a failing local authority school does not have to bite the bullet in addressing its own failures.

That happened recently in one of my trust schools in Norwich. Norwich is a zombie zone for primary education. Some 19 of its 24 primary schools last year failed to achieve the national standards at key stage 2. We run two of the five that did. One of them is an outstanding school, but we were asked to halve the pupil admission numbers. The only way a school can do that is by merging year groups with a commensurate drop in standards, as teachers try to teach across an excessively wide age range. We were able to decline that request, but under this new legislation it will be a different story. That was one more act of self-immolation in the battle to raise standards.

Turning to qualified teachers, I believe that this terminology is a complete misnomer. Apparently, someone with a subject-specific degree in, say, maths or science is less qualified than someone with a degree in a different subject than the one they are teaching—but that is fine, because they completed a nine-month course which it is almost impossible to fail. In 2023, only 8% of applicants failed to gain qualified teacher status, and mostly because they dropped out. How can that make any sense? We keep hearing from the Minister how she trusts “great headteachers” and “brilliant schools”; if that is the case, why can she not trust them to hire the people they consider will have the best chances of success for their children?

That is before we get into the reality on the ground, which is that it is becoming increasingly harder to recruit teachers. The rates of exodus from the profession seems to be accelerating, particularly among younger teachers. The Government have even admitted that, in the past few weeks, their much-vaunted additional 6,500 teachers, paid for from the tax on private schools, is proving virtually impossible to achieve. This is just another example of what sounds like a convenient political slogan bearing no relation to what is going on in the real world.

I will end on this point. We continually hear from the Government about all the wonderful things they will do, but their words are in complete contrast to what they are actually doing. It is the cruellest of ironies, which I simply cannot reconcile in my own mind, because the people who will suffer are the children in the poorest communities, where it is extraordinarily difficult to hire good teachers. I thought that a Labour Government sought to represent these communities, but I see nothing in this cheap political manoeuvre that will in any way help those disadvantaged children.

I understand that Ministers are surprised by the level and range of pushback on the Bill, but they should not be. It was rammed through the Commons over Christmas—without a Green Paper or a White Paper and without any consultation—in a Chamber with literally hundreds of new and inexperienced MPs who were not equipped to give it proper scrutiny. That scrutiny now falls to us. The Government should not play fast and loose with the futures of millions of children, who get but one chance for their education. I urge Ministers to show some humility over the next few weeks in the passage of the Bill and adopt, as government amendments, many of the practical and useful suggestions that have been tabled. If we are to be ignored, rest assured that the avalanche of amendments will continue, as I, for one, will not go down without a fight.