Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Nash Excerpts

Tuesday 20th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wigley (PC)]

My Lords, I sat through almost all the Second Reading but deliberately did not intervene in it because I was trying to ascertain how much of the Bill was to do with Wales and how much was not. In the context of her amendment, I ask the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, to clarify subsection (1)(c) of the proposed new clause, where it says, and I select the words deliberately,

“improve … standards … in schools in … Wales”.

Education in Wales is a totally devolved subject. I know that the Welsh Government and the Senedd have asked for certain provisions to be made via the Bill for application to Wales. I am sure the Minister can confirm that. Those are specific provisions that have been asked for and not a matter of generality. As I read the proposed new clause, there is a suggestion that it applies to the generality of standards in schools in Wales. The noble Baroness spoke of autonomy and accountability. That goes to the heart of the administration and provision of education in Wales, which is a devolved matter, and we must be clear in our minds why we are choosing those words.

Clearly, the term “England and Wales” can arise quite rightly when we are talking about the jurisdiction or the legal aspects of it. But here we are talking about the administration of education. Specifically, we are talking about schools and schools in Wales, and the Senedd has the right to know to what extent amendments such as this are meant to apply to them.

[Lord Nash (Con)]

My Lords, I will not repeat my Second Reading speech. I draw attention to my interests on the register, particularly the fact that I am chair of a multi-academy trust.

Regarding subsection (1)(a) of this proposed new “Purpose” clause, the Long Title states that it is to make

“provision about the safeguarding and welfare of children”.

Nothing that we could do to further that endeavour could be greater than to restrict access to social media to those aged over 16. That is why I have tabled Amendment 177 to that effect. Despite what the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, for whom I have a huge amount of respect, said, this is so central to the overriding purpose of the Bill that I will take a few moments to elaborate.

I think we all know naturally that social media is very harmful to our children, but there is now an overwhelming body of evidence to support this. I recommend that anybody who has not done so reads the excellent book The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. We want our children to be brought up confident, able to engage in deep thought, reflective and able to concentrate, to exercise judgment, to see the other side’s point of view, to be compassionate et cetera. We also want them to get a good night’s sleep. Smartphones and social media set up exactly the opposite behaviours.

In the 2022 PISA assessment, our children were in the bottom 10 of 31 countries in areas such as curiosity, perseverance, emotional control, stress resistance or grit, empathy and co-operation. There is now a strong body of clinical evidence on the harm that excessive use of smartphones and social media is doing to our children’s brains and eyesight.

Adolescence is a period of life in which our sense of self undergoes a profound transition. As teenagers become more conscious of how others see them, they often experience increased self-consciousness and self-criticism. Social media and the algorithms attached to them serve only to amplify this.

We also know that the adolescent brain is particularly susceptible to addictive behaviour. Constant exposure to fast-paced, highly stimulating content can condition the brain to expect frequent, rapid rewards, making it harder to sustain focus and concentrate. Numerous studies have shown the causal link between screens and the use of social media and sleep and depression.

A recent UCL study corroborated the link between social media and eating disorders and found that young people with eating disorders are more likely to be shown harmful content by social media algorithms. Samaritans research has shown that young people frequently see self-harm and suicide content across all social media sites, some of which display particularly graphic and triggering content, and almost three-quarters of teenage girls think that social media creates more pressure for them to look a certain way. Nearly one in five people arrested for terrorism-related offences in the past year was a child under 18. The Metropolitan Police has attributed this rise to social media, saying:

“You have the combination of the overt social media and then closed messaging apps”.


Social media has significantly expanded the reach of criminal drug networks, particularly among teenagers and young adults. Numerous studies in the UK have shown that gangs view social media platforms as essential tools for drug trafficking and gang recruitment. Parentkind tells us that more than 90% of parents think that social media is harmful to children and that more than 80% of parents feel that the age limit of 13 for signing up is too low. Australia has raised the limit to 16, Ireland is considering doing so and the EU is now considering similar measures. Bill Gates has described what Australia is doing as “a smart thing”, and we know that many people who work in the tech industry severely restrict their children’s use of social media and smartphones and often send their children to very screen-light schools.

Teaching unions have strongly pointed out the dangers of social media. The president of ASCL has said:

“It leaves a trail of harm—safeguarding concerns, fractured friendships, bullying, anxiety, and the spread of extremist ideologies. And increasingly, it is being weaponised against schools and teachers, with disgruntled parents using it as a platform to target staff”.


The general secretary of the NEU has said:

“We have to view the online world, social media and mobile phones in the same prism as we view the tobacco companies. These are harmful to our young people and they need regulating”.


The general secretary of NASUWT has described mobile phones as “lethal weapons”. Why should we let the consequences of this fall on our hard-working teachers, who have enough to do as it is?

The movement in support of the thinking behind my amendment is growing rapidly. We now have Health Professionals for Safer Screens, Smartphone Free Childhood, the Safe Screens campaign, the Unplugged Coalition and many other organisations.

Speaking to subsection (1)(b) of the proposed new clause and turning to improving

“the regulation of children’s homes, fostering agencies and other settings”,

I will sound just one note of caution. I am totally in favour of cutting out the cowboys, but the Government should exercise their powers to restrict profits and impose unlimited financial penalties with caution. Residential settings for children and other groups are very out of favour in the private equity space, and further restrictions on their financial flexibility can only reduce capacity. The public sector has no money, as we all know, so in order to increase capacity, private sector professional operators must be encouraged.

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

This is a Second Reading speech, but it is very interesting. Does the noble Lord accept that the charitable sector and social enterprises probably have quite an important role to play in the delivery of residential care for children and that flexibility will help with the finances of that because they are not in the business of making excess profits?

[Lord Nash (Con)]

There are many in the charity sector that are professional, but there are many others. I do not think we disagree about this.

Turning to other settings, I am an adviser to the Royal National Children’s SpringBoard Foundation, which works with more than 200 independent and state boarding schools across the country to support care-experienced and vulnerable children into often fully funded school bursary places. A significant proportion of the almost 300 children supported since 2021 are either with foster carers or in kinship care arrangements. Those in kinship care arrangements have achieved a 100% stability rate, which means that they have not needed to change carers, and those in foster care a 98% stability rate. Independent research by the University of Nottingham shows that they are four times more likely to achieve good GCSEs when compared with a matched control group, and 75% of them are going to university versus just 13% of care-experienced young people nationally. RNCSF is working hard to expand this provision, and I would be grateful if the Government could consider meeting its representatives to discuss how they can help it to do this further. Perhaps the Minister could indicate that she or one of her colleagues is prepared to meet them. They are good people.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord, whom I respect and enjoy debating with, but does he accept that if all 80 of us who made Second Reading speeches—and I enjoyed his four minutes—speak for nine minutes, as he has done, ranging across the whole of the Bill, it will make a nonsense of the work of this House?

[Lord Nash (Con)]

I have a great deal of respect for the noble Lord, Lord Knight. I do not think all of us are going to make a nine or 10-minute speech, but I will wrap up now and hope that keeps him happy.

[Lord Meston (CB)]

My Lords, I was unable to speak at Second Reading and I will resist the temptation to make a Second Reading speech now. Rather, I wish to concentrate on Amendment 1.

Any consideration of a proposed purpose clause should take us all back to the Renton report, in which it was said that sometimes such clauses can be useful and sometimes they can be unnecessary, and that they should be used selectively and with caution. On one view, the scope and effects of this Bill are clear enough and there does not appear to me, at least, to be any complexity for which a purpose clause would help interpretation.

However, there is perhaps some value in this amendment, which uses the word “improve” three times, emphasising the intention of the Bill—and the Bill as amended in due course—to achieve improvement in the areas specifically mentioned, and not to maintain or simply tweak the status quo. For that limited reason, I would support Amendment 1.