Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I declare my interests as a governor of Coram and a trustee of the Foundling Museum, both of which institutions work across adoption, fostering and, particularly, the care system. Overall, I welcome the Bill. I have one cause for regret and sadness, which is that my great friend, the late Lady Massey of Darwen is not here to take part.

I do not intend to get involved in Part 2, I think, but if I sense that children’s well-being and best interests are being drowned out by political and ideological skirmishing, I may not find myself able to remain silent. In particular, I say to the Minister that I wonder what her ex-headmaster, Bill Lucas, whom I believe she and her college colleagues called “Batman”, would think about the tenor and temper of some of the debate about schooling and what is in the best interests of children.

I will concentrate mainly on Part 1, and the simplest way to declare my interest is to say that I will be all over it like a rash. There are some issues with SEND, and I particularly commend the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and my noble friend Lord Carlile on their knowledge, focus and passion for that issue, which I am sure we will hear much more of in Committee. With Clause 17, on care leavers, there is still a danger that there will be a postcode lottery. There is a strong case for having a clear national offer regarding what care leavers can expect, rather than it being left to individual areas. In Clause 10, when it comes to regional care co-operatives, I beseech the Government to learn from what I think we all recognise is the failure of the creation of adoption regionalisation, which really has not worked and certainly does not benefit the children.

On Clause 19, trying to reduce the use of agency workers in children’s social care is very important. In particular, I suggest that the Minister and her colleagues might benefit from talking to the MP for York Central, Rachael Maskell, who is my co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Adoption and Fostering. She will tell the Minister exactly what has happened in York with the new head of children’s social care and the transformation that has happened there extremely quickly. It is an example of best practice and demonstrates what is possible.

We then come to early years, and I suspect that my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, who is speaking after me, will probably mention that in a minute. That is an important part of the Bill. The Minister and her colleague the Secretary of State came to the Cross-Bench meeting last week, and she may recall that the very first question I asked of the Secretary of State was, “Where are early years in this Bill?” The answer was, “It’s really, really important and we’re really focused on it”—but she did not really answer the question.

The question is, how can we increase the mental, physical and emotional well-being of children by the age of entry to primary education? In particular I think of the effect of technology on young minds and the work being done by the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Cass. I was at a meeting last week. My brain is still fizzing and overflowing from the quorum of professors—I am not sure what the collective noun is for a group of professors—and experts, including Jonathan Haidt, the eminent social science academic from New York University. The harm that is being done to our young people is staggering.

In today’s Times there is an article about what is happening in France, where a group of eminent academics and experts have exhorted the Government to try to prevent children before the age of six being exposed to too much screen time. It is absolutely detrimental, and it is happening in plain sight. Unless we do something about it, all the good work we are trying to do, particularly in increasing the effectiveness of primary schools, will be limited and demolished by the poor state of well-being of the children who are going there, unable to feed themselves, not potty-trained, inarticulate and with limited attention. This is happening in plain sight. We have to do something about it. It is more than a rash; it is a life-diminishing migraine.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 9th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sanderson of Welton (Con)]

My Lords, I would like to speak to Amendments 69B, 70, 71 and 72 in this group. It is terrific that kinship care will be defined in legislation for the first time. It is a significant step, and one that we should admit is long overdue. I could never understand why kinship care was always so overlooked when it is very often the best solution to a child’s care. When I say, “best solution”, I mean that very much in the sense of the interests of the child, for one other thing that is overlooked—and underestimated—is the huge sacrifice that family members and friends make when they take on such a responsibility. While many do so willingly, the system does not exactly make it easy for them. That is why Amendment 69B, in the names of my noble friends Lord Effingham and Lady Stedman-Scott, is a sensible one in that it acknowledges the role of the whole family. I also hope that the Government will consider Amendment 70 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton.

Another significant step in this Bill is the duty for local authorities to publish a kinship local offer. However, there is an error of omission in that there is no reference anywhere to the different forms of kinship care. We know that different frameworks have different levels of financial, health and therapeutic support, depending on whether you are kinship fostering or have taken on responsibility via a special guardianship order, and whether the child you are taking on has or has not been in care previously. The only problem is that, very often, the potential kinship carers—for the reasons explained by my noble friend—do not have a clue about any of this. Why would they?

I will give some examples of what this means in practice, and this is courtesy of the very good charity, Kinship. Fiona’s grandson was taken into foster care at birth, and she was told that, unless she applied for a special guardianship order to look after him, he would stay in the care system. She said she felt pressured and pushed into this, because she did not have a clue what her options were. As she says, “I took social services at their word that this was the best for me and my grandson”. That was six years ago, and she was then 59 years old. She had to give up a well-paid career, and now survives on benefits and relies on food banks, eating only child-sized meals herself to get by. She has also struggled to get her grandson the assessments and support he needs, which would have been much easier had she been a foster carer.

Similarly, Sue, a former social worker, now 60, took care of her three granddaughters and one grandson. She was told by the local authority that she had to sort out all the court work and pay for all the solicitors’ fees to arrange the care of the children and get a special guardianship order. She and her husband were on benefits, but as guardians, they were means-tested and they received £17 per week per child. Sue, now a widow, had to complain to her local councillor, the Children’s Commissioner and the ombudsman before receiving an uplift.

Finally, Rebekah, 63, is raising her two grandchildren on benefits after the death of their mother, but what she did not realise was that she would not get any support from the local authority because the children had not been in care. She is now struggling and in debt. As she says, “Fortunately I’m resilient and resourceful, but it’s been a huge challenge. We’ve been flying by the seat of our pants, with no support or guidance or anything”.

The upcoming pilot on a financial allowance will, I hope, address some of these inequities, but it seems essential that potential carers are given explicit information on any legal support available. I think we can all see from the examples given that it would have probably helped the three women I have just mentioned.

I really hope that the Government will consider Amendment 70, which is a small change but could have a big impact. Can the Minister give us any further details on the pilot, which is an incredibly good thing but obviously comes too late for this Bill?

I hope the Government will also consider Amendment 72 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, which also covers the issue raised in Amendment 71 from my noble friend Lord Effingham. As the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, has said, it would simply put the kinship care offer on a par with other offers, such as for SEN and disability. I am interested in the requirement in both amendments to guarantee the involvement of children and carers in the development of kinship care offers.

Working with the Grenfell community, the victims of child sexual abuse and infected blood over the years, it has become clear that local and national government is just not always very good at meaningful engagement. I once asked a civil servant what engagement they had had with regard to a specific policy, and I was explicitly told that there had purposely been no direct communication because it was incredibly important to keep a distance between those developing the policy and those who would be affected by it.

Things have improved since then but probably not as much as they should have done, and so I genuinely believe that embedding engagement into legislation, where appropriate, is the only way that we will drive the necessary culture change. We should not forget that a really important benefit of that engagement is that it builds empathy into the system. Too often, empathy is an afterthought—such as when certain television dramas might evoke a public outcry—when really it should be there as a given.

So, while explicitly involving children and families in the development of kinship care offers may seem a small matter, I really do believe it would have a far-reaching effect in helping to make the state work better for the people who need it.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 69B to 72, and I declare my interests as a governor of Coram and as a trustee of the Foundling Museum, both of which organisations do a huge amount of work with children involved in these amendments.

We do not realise how lucky we are with kinship care. The figures speak for themselves. When you compare the fact that we have 153,000 children being kept in kinship care with the numbers officially in the care system, which is approaching dangerously near 100,000, and the relatively small number of children who are fortunate enough to be adopted, we are incredibly lucky to have kinship care.

A lot of the history of kinship care as it has evolved and grown has been really about taking it for granted and assuming that is what families or extended families do—and, to a large extent, being inordinately grateful that they are there to take these children on and feeling that one probably needs to devote slightly less time and attention to helping those kinship carers do the best they possibly can by comparison with, let us say, children who are conventionally going through the care system. That is clearly a major imbalance.

A particular sentence jumped out at me from the briefing that the organisation Kinship provided in preparation for this stage:

“Given the long and troubling history of poor compliance with kinship statutory guidance, it is imperative that government does not simply take the approach that these matters can be attended to in guidance alone”—


tempting as that is.

With 153,000 currently in kinship care, we have in theory an enormous amount of data to identify where it is being done well and where it is being done less well. So I did a bit of interrogation of the artificial intelligence tool that we are provided with here, courtesy of Microsoft, and an example that jumps out several times when I interrogated it, as a local authority or city council that has best practice in this area, is the city of Portsmouth. I have no idea whether people knew that, or to what extent the department or the Bill team have looked in detail at what it is that Portsmouth is doing that is clearly shooting the lights out compared with a lot of other cities or local authorities. But it is possible to identify what is being done well now, to learn from that and to try to see the best way to put that either into legislation or into guidance so that we are not effectively reinventing the wheel. This is happening at such a large scale that there must be incredibly rich qualitative and quantitative data that we can learn from. I just hope that during the course of the Bill we can drill down, look at that in more detail, try to identify some of those elements of best practice and perhaps bring that back to the discussion on Report.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I will start using the mantra of the Minister: on a number of occasions she has said that it is about getting children and families the right support. I very much agree with that.

I will start by talking generally about the care system. I met a young man whose name is Tristan, and when he was a child he was put into care. When I was chatting to him I was genuinely shocked when he told me he had been in nine different care settings throughout the country. Imagine this child going from one care setting to another. I do not know the reasons why, but that happened. He was lucky enough to end the care placements by being fostered by parents in Liverpool, who eventually adopted him as their son. That was the happy outcome after all the trauma that went on before. He is now at Liverpool John Moores University, studying law.

--- Later in debate ---

For the reasons I outlined, I kindly ask the noble Earl to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I welcome an awful lot of what the Minister said and what His Majesty’s Government are trying to do. My heart sank slightly when I heard the piece about relying on statutory guidance, which was obviously written for her beforehand. I have worked very closely on a variety of Bills over the past four or five years with the Children’s Commissioner, the Victims’ Commissioner and the Domestic Abuse Commissioner. If the Minister were to sit down with each or all of them and ask them about the experience they had of overreliance on statutory guidance, she would get some very mixed messages.

Statutory guidance is effective only if the degree to which it is complied with is monitored; it is of no use whatever if the organisations that are meant to carry it out know that nobody is looking over their shoulder or calling them to book if they do not comply. This again comes back to the variation in practice across the country. So I ask the Minister, her colleagues and the department to talk to some of those commissioners, to understand the historical and the live experience they have in dealing with some of the statutory guidance we have put into some of the legislation that has come through the House in the past three or four years, to see how effective it is and what we can learn from it.

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his contribution and reassure him that I was not just reading out a script. I have put a lot of thought into this. I have been in the place of delivering on this agenda, so I do have the experience.

We have to be careful that we are not too prescriptive at every level, because that can absolutely confound and take up more resource. But I do acknowledge that statutory guidance has to be adhered to, monitored and dealt with with the same seriousness across the piece and, where it has not been adhered to, it has to be called out. The most important thing that all of us can do is make sure that there is an awareness of the rights and responsibilities of the different organisations involved and that they live up to them and, as we have said all the way through, put the needs of some of the most vulnerable children in our communities at the heart of everything we do.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 12th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

I apologise; I am just so keen.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I support the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, and Amendment 164 in the name of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester.

I am a retread, a hereditary Peer who originally came here not very long ago, in 1981, left in 1999 and was recycled, like an old tyre, in 2014. I made my first maiden speech in 1982 and my second in 2015, on the subject of Staying Put. At that time the Minister for Children was the rather wonderful Edward Timpson, the younger brother of the Department of Justice Minister here. He had grown up in an extraordinary family. Apart from having full-blood siblings, while he was growing up his amazing parents fostered more than 90 children. So Staying Put was put in place by an individual who had a deep understanding of the issues faced by young people unfortunate enough not to be able to live with their natural or even unnatural parents. Staying Put was a result of that. The debate in 2015 was to welcome the fact that it had been extended, having been deemed such a success.

It is very fitting that now we have another Timpson in government, albeit in a different department, we again look at this and recognise how successful it has been. What we are asking for in this amendment will not involve a vast number of children or a vast amount of money. It will, however, be transformative for that small number of children. In economic terms, the benefits of giving them support up to the age of 25, if they need it, will be more than repaid by some of the problems that might cost rather more if they have to leave earlier. For all those reasons, I request that the Government look at this sympathetically and see how it can be fitted in.

On the amendment from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, in so many parts of our society there is a postcode lottery. That is not surprising given how the highly centralised country of England, with all roads leading to London, coexists with a piebald mosaic of different local authorities and different organisations of all kinds, which to some extent relish the English creative impulse to reinvent the wheel in your own image. As a result, there is considerable variation. If you asked a variety of organisations providing support for those in care or coming out of care to define succinctly, in two or three minutes, exactly what their care offer was, you would get rather different answers.

For those reasons, and as the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, said, it would be very beneficial to have clarity about the core elements of the offer and to do everything one can to make sure it is understood and, as far as possible, complied with across the country.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 98 in this group asks the same question I asked in the two previous groups: can we get local authorities to publicise what they are doing each year, to give them a benchmark to improve on each year?

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, this group ranges quite widely but there is a common theme: the things that are going wrong which ideally should not be. The question is, how do you get a handle on all of this?

There is a certain symmetry with the amendment of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, asking for a review into the disparities that care leavers are facing, which is fairly all-embracing. I suspect that quite a lot of that information is already available thanks to the MacAlister review. The right reverend Prelate’s amendment suggests that it could take up to two years—I would hope and expect it to be done a great deal quicker.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Storey (LD)]

Oh, goodness, I would not suggest that for one moment of the current Minister—or the previous Minister.

My Written Question was:

“To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the importance of the adoption and special guardianship support fund.”


The Answer from the noble Baroness, Lady Smith of Malvern, was:

“This government fully recognises the importance of support for adoptive and kinship children and families. The Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund … has been a valuable part of the support landscape for ten years. This is why we have provided £50 million of funding for the ASGSF for 2025/26, alongside £8.8 million for Adoption England, to complement the range of support available in local areas.”


I did a little further research, because that seemed to tell me that everything was okay and that this family need not worry: they were not getting any cuts. Almost half the ASGSF awards last year exceeded the new £3,000 allowance, so some children will receive cuts of almost 40%. Data shows that thousands of children will now go without the therapy they need as a result of this cut. Alongside this cut has gone a separate allocation of up to £2,500 per child per year for special assessments. This has been completely removed. Match-funding support for children with an exceptional level of need has also been removed. Previously, the ASGSF provided up to 50% of the funding for up to £30,000 per child, with the rest provided by the local authority. The consequences of these changes are that any new specialist assessment must now be paid for from the £3,000. Therapy care or support must also come within this budget, regardless of need. Support that was given may no longer be given.

Change can exacerbate issues for children with attachment and trauma-related needs, who require sustained, regular support. Building trust with a therapist takes time, but continuity of care will now be harder. Children with the most complex needs now face a highly uncertain future, which may may lead to increased exclusions, due to behavioural issues that were traditionally tackled with therapy. An increase in issues such as child-to-parent violence threatens family placements further.

This family just cannot cope any more because the funding, as we have heard, has been cut. Whether that is the element from the local authority or from the Government, I do not know, and I have been unable to look into that any further. The language we sometimes use in such cases is interesting. Need for funding is now framed as demand. Such language is insensitive to children who need the funding—SEND children as well as children who have experienced significant trauma.

I do not want to talk any longer on this. Given that we had the Statement yesterday from the Chancellor and there is a bit of extra money for education, maybe a small amount of it can be used in these cases. We all know the figures on fostering and adoption. Anybody who adopts a child—never mind two children—into their family, brings them up and supports them needs all the help we can give them. I feel lucky that, because I am in your Lordships’ House, I can use the opportunity to try to help this particular family. I hope the Minister will look sympathetically on my amendment.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I support the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I will also speak to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson. As far as this fund is concerned, I have been involved in the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Adoption and Permanence as an officer and occasional co-chair for the past seven or eight years. I do it with somebody the Minister will know: Rachael Maskell, the MP for York Central. I was just scrolling back on the group’s website to see how many times we have had to launch a mini-inquiry into this fund and go through a process of appealing yet again to successive Governments to keep it going. In doing that, we have amassed each time a large amount of evidence to show just how much good this fund has done and how transformative it is for families who have adopted children, many of whom are expressing the medium- and long-term effects of the trauma they received in early life. This fund is a genuine lifesaver for those children.

I have kept in touch with a parliamentary assistant who works for an MP and is an adoptive parent. She has told me over the past few years about the intense challenges she and her husband have had with one of their adopted children and how, frankly, without the support of this fund, they were getting near crisis point and would have had to give up the adoption, so the child would have lost their adoptive family. It was the fund that enabled them to keep going. I stress to the Minister the disproportionate good that is done for these families by the expenditure of relatively small amounts of money, in the great scheme of things. The quality support and counselling that is required to help children with this level of trauma is not cheap. It requires extremely dedicated professionals who are very focused in this area. Working with children who have experienced trauma is as challenging for the practitioners as it is for the parents and the children.

I would hate to think that, over the next four years of this Government, we will have a repeat of what the all-party group experienced under previous Governments, of having to go through this cycle every two or three years of the Government threatening to reduce the fund and us having to go out and get evidence to explain just how important and life-changing it is—along with other groups, of course. In the end, the Government typically listen to the argument, but in each case it has been a challenge to get them to listen, so this group is an opportunity to remind the Minister just how transformative this fund is for the parents of children who have experienced trauma, as many adopted children have.

That leads me to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson, to which I added my name. In terms of numbers, adoption is a relatively small part of looking after children who are unable to be with their birth parents. There are the large numbers in kinship care, which we talked about earlier this week, the large number—we wish it was larger—who are being fostered, and then the extremely large, expensive and distressing number of children who are in residential care.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to the amendments in group 6. This is the second group of amendments in a row where I think that, quite rightly, we in this Committee will recognise the enormously important contribution made by those people willing to take children into their homes and families as a result of adoption. As other noble Lords have said, and as I know from having spoken to people who have adopted children, it is something that can bring enormous pleasure, satisfaction and completion to some families, and is often very much wished for by families. However, because of the nature of the experiences that children have gone through and the history of some of those children, notwithstanding that a family when adopting a child take on responsibility for that child and they become part of their family, I completely understand the need for there to be ongoing support for children in those circumstances.

Without going too far into history, one of the very first pieces of legislation that I did the last time round when I was a Minister was the Bill that became the Adoption and Children Act 2002. At that point, there was still quite a lot of discussion and debate about whether it was legitimate to provide any support for children in adoptive families. Notwithstanding the concerns that have been expressed as a result of these amendments, it is the case that considerable progress has been made in understanding the nature of the challenge and the reward that comes from adoption, the types of experiences that children may well have had before going into adoption, the impact that that has on families, and the requirement to provide support on an ongoing basis for children who are adopted. I recognise that the amendments in this group cover that issue of support for adoptive and kinship children, as well as how we can ensure and review the quality of adoption support that is being provided.

This is a significant area, to which the Government are committed. Although there are some difficult elements in the amendments, I am nevertheless pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and my noble friend Lord Watson have tabled them and enabled us to talk about adoption.

I reiterate the point I previously made about fostering. The fact that something is not covered in this particular piece of legislation should not be taken as some sort of statement about the significance of that issue for this Government, or about its importance for children and families. The point of legislation is to address those areas which have shortcomings in the legislative framework. Our view, certainly at this moment in time, is that the adoption legislation framework is fit for purpose, and our focus needs to be on supporting Adoption England and regional adoption agencies to improve local practice and set national standards so that there are high-quality adoption services across the country. That needs to be the priority, rather than thinking about how and whether we need to change legislation. Adoption is a priority for this Government and will remain so. Of course, most importantly, it is a vital permanence option for some children.

On the points made about the adoption and special guardianship support fund, I note the points made by the noble Earl, Lord Russell, about the history of adoption—

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

It is actually Lord Russell. I have told this to the House before, but in 1959 my grandfather and Bertrand Russell—the then Earl Russell—jointly wrote a letter to the editor of the Times that said: “Dear Sir, we would like to point out that neither of us is the other. Yours, Russell, Russell of Liverpool”.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I am glad to know that I am not the only person who has made that mistake. I apologise to the Chamber and to the noble Lord, Lord Russell.

The noble Lord talked about the important work done by the all-party group and part of the history of ensuring that there is sufficient focus through government activity to provide the necessary support for adoptive families. The adoption and special guardianship support fund has given valuable support to over 53,000 individual children over the 10 years that it has been in place. Many have received support for multiple years, which is a point that I will return to when talking about the criteria.

The Government have continued to support the ASGSF; we provided £50 million for 2025-26. There has been an increase in demand—some noble Lords argued it was an increase in need. Then you face a challenge, regardless of how much money is allocated, as to whether you provide more support for fewer children and families, or ensure a level of support for a larger number of children and families.

The revised funding criteria effective from April 2025 will continue to enable children to receive an excellent level of support, many at similar levels to before, and £3,000-worth of therapy remains a substantial amount of support. On the point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, about the assessment, children and families receive this support over several years and I think I am right in saying that this £3,000 would include the assessment. Perhaps the next year or the year after that, it would not be necessary to redo the assessment, and £3,000 would fund 19 to 20 hours of therapy on current average costings. As I say, there are many children and families who are receiving similar levels of support as before, although I recognise the case brought to the attention of this Committee by the noble Lord, Lord Storey, where families have seen that as a cut in the provision that they have been able to receive.

Local authorities can continue to supplement available funding locally through the mainstream children’s services budget, if assessments deem this necessary. As I have said, the revised criteria will ensure that all children can continue to receive support. It is important to recognise the significance of the contribution that this support provides, even if in some cases it does not feel as though it is enough support to respond to the considerable challenges that families are facing. For that reason, the Government recognise that recent changes to funding levels came unexpectedly, and therefore local areas had limited time to plan.

I hope I can provide some reassurance that applications under the revised criteria are now being not only received but processed as speedily as possible, so that children can receive the therapy that they need. The Government will continue to assess the implementation of adoption support arrangements, including the adoption and special guardianship support fund. We will be taking forward discussions on the delivery and management of funds in future years. Across the department, we have heard the concerns that have been expressed in the Committee this evening and, most importantly, that have come from the families affected.

The ASGSF, like other government expenditure, is subject to business planning decisions following the spending review, and these decisions will obviously need to take into account the full range of government priorities. The ASGSF is not a statutory arrangement. We believe that it should remain flexible to provide an effective service, and that it would not be helpful—as proposed in these amendments—for decisions on funding levels to be made in isolation from consideration of other budgets. However, as I say, I recognise the strength of feeling expressed today and by others outside Parliament.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I have just checked, and I think the Minister mentioned that, with the £3,000, the average number of sessions that would be allowed is about 12.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

It would be 19.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

The range of applications for the support fund over the last few years has typically been between 20 and 50 sessions per annum, so it is right on the margin.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I did say that it would fund 19 to 20 hours. I also made the point that this is something that does not happen within only one year; it is something that can continue, in order to provide support.

However, I also said that I recognise the strength of feeling expressed today and by others outside Parliament. We will of course take these issues into account when making decisions about how to allocate funding from the DfE budget for future years. I hope this will assure noble Lords that we are considering these issues very carefully.

On Amendment 145 in the name of my noble friend Lord Watson, I agree with my noble friend that adoption support should be high-quality. Of course, Ofsted already reviews how well authorities are delivering adoption services and publishes reports on each authority every three years. The Secretary of State has powers under the Education and Inspections Act 2006 to require Ofsted to provide information on or conduct an inspection of any specified function of the local authority that falls within its remit, which may include adoption support services. Ofsted reports regularly on adoption support in local authorities, children’s social care inspection reports and on adoption agencies.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 17th June 2025 Lords Chamber

As those most directly affected, surely children and young people should be named in the Bill. That is what this is about, and I think it is quite a modest ask. I really hope that the Government will look sympathetically on this amendment. Every child should be confident that they will be involved in decisions that affect their lives.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, at Second Reading I said that, while I welcomed the Bill, it was a cause of great sadness that the late Baroness Massey of Darwen was not there to participate. It is a cause of sadness that, had she been here, she would have had her name on this amendment rather than me, with much more power and justification behind it. At the time of her untimely death, she was working with a group of us in this House to try to find ways of having the voices of children heard more regularly in the day-to-day work of this House, particularly in some of our committees. That is work that is yet to be completed, and we must carry it on.

The Josh MacAlister review showed us that, while we have a plethora of different organisations trying to look after the needs of the young people we are talking about in a variety of different ways, with an enormous amount of data about what they are and are not doing, the fact that we had to have a large-scale review to collate and understand this data—which required tremendous resources but which was carried out very effectively—and that we spent as much time understanding what it was not telling us as what it was telling us, is in itself telling.

I particularly support the amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady Cash. In trying to improve a situation that has developed over the last 20 or 30 years, and which at the moment is causing local government across this country huge difficulties because of the statutory duties that we have heaped upon it in legislation after legislation, with the best of intent, we have a system that is not working. We have an opportunity in the Bill to learn from the lessons of trying to do the right thing but clearly going about it in the wrong way, and to do it in a much better way.

I particularly took the points that, first, children should be listened to, and, secondly, that, in trying to provide the right services for these young people, we should be driven by the demands they require to make their lives better, rather than by the inadequacies of the current range of supply, which is hugely varied in both its coverage and the type of delivery, and the good or bad effect of that delivery.

For all those reasons, I support this group of amendments. I implore the Government, and all of us, to learn from the lessons of the past and try to do better in the future.

[Baroness Walmsley (LD)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 117, in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Tyler and others. The decision on where a child is cared for in the system is crucial to the child’s life, so we should listen to children with care experience. As we heard from the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, it may affect their ability to keep contact with wider family and friends, and other factors were mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Meston. It will make a difference even to their ability to keep in contact with a teacher who they might trust—that can be quite important in children’s lives. It can otherwise be very disruptive to their education if they are put a long way from where they previously went to school. As we know, children with care experience usually have less of a chance to get good educational qualifications than other children, and that has an effect on their whole-life chances.

As my noble friend says, it cannot be left to the Secretary of State under the title of “such other persons”. The category of those most directly affected by these regulations must be named in the Bill, and it is vital that children have the confidence that they will be heard. The slogan, “Nothing about us without us”, is very apt in this context.

--- Later in debate ---

Amendment 165 seems eminently sensible and would surely help to prevent children from falling through the cracks. In fact, it is so sensible that it is one of those things that you are quite surprised to learn that it does not happen already.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I put my name to Amendment 129 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, which I am happy to do. She has made a strong case for amending the sufficiency duty or doing something similar to make it clear that moving children beyond a certain geographical distance from their normal base is deleterious to their well-being and health in every way possible.

I also put my name to Amendment 144 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson. We have all heard what is going on and I think we all agree that it is unconscionable and appalling. The question, as was put very aptly by the noble Lord, is what action we are going to take to do something about it. The fact that it exists is bad enough, so we need to have a clear plan to do something about it.

I will focus my remarks primarily on Amendment 165 in my name. I thank the noble Lords, Lord Young and Lord Hampton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for putting their names to it. It is to do with temporary accommodation and the effect that being moved into temporary accommodation has on young children. This is a topic that the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary Accommodation, which is headed by Dame Siobhain McDonagh, has long campaigned for. In fact, on 13 May Dame Siobhain met the Minister’s colleague Janet Daby, Minister at the Department for Education, and Rushanara Ali, Minister at the Department of Housing, Communities and Local Government, specifically to explore what can be done about this issue.

The issue, as the amendment’s explanatory statement says clearly, is that the new clause would establish a notification system requiring local authorities to alert schools and GPs when a child is placed in temporary accommodation. To explain why that is important, this is a direct quote from a head teacher in Lewisham about this phenomenon:

“On the ground, the impact of TA on children is colossal. We only hear, by accident, only by us being nosey and being at the gate in the morning, or them being late, tired or hungry, is how we find out, then we do our best to support them”.


We have a situation at the moment where there is a lot of inconsistency in what is happening when a child is moved with their family into temporary accommodation, sometimes in a very different area from where they were before, which clearly is disruptive to both education and their health. I understand that the upshot of that meeting was positive. We still need to get colleagues in the Department of Health on side because there are some complications in there being several different elements to trying to get this to work.

There are three particular areas that need to be done better if this amendment is to be successful. The first is local authorities. There is a move within the LGA to acknowledge the need for councils to be compassionate councils. There is agreement that, in principle, local authorities should be doing this notification on behalf of the child, and that they should be sending the receiving authority a notification—a point that was raised by the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, on the last group. That often takes place but not always, when clearly it should. The LGA has very good and clear guidance on this. However, its guidance does not mention schools or general practices specifically. Perhaps this is an area that could be looked at.

The second is to do with technology. While government in all forms, including local government, can spend vast amounts of money on technology, it does not always do what you think it should be able to do. Many local authorities do not have the ability in their current systems to send notifications easily. Manchester, for example, which you would have thought of as one of the larger and more sophisticated metropolitan authorities, has to do this individually by email; there is no way of pushing a button and just getting it done.

Under the previous Government, the central government ensured that the providers of technology to local government were able to change their data systems so that they always included rough sleeper assessments. Where there is a will, there is a way; this can be done. We hope that His Majesty’s Government can do something to ensure that the housing system has a notification system embedded within it to make notification much more straightforward than it currently is.

The last point is to do with getting better guidance implemented. At the moment, training across schools and primary care provision is very varied, and I do not think there is necessarily an understanding, either by the schools from which the children are being moved or by the schools to which they are being moved, of the importance of having that dialogue, and the same is true of GP practices.

For all those reasons, I hope that the Minister will be able to give some indication as to whether the initial impression given at the meeting with the two Ministers in May—that the Government were receptive to this—is still the case. Perhaps the Minister can update us on any talks that have happened since then.

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 118, 144 and 165 in particular. Dealing with perhaps the least important of the three: as a boarding school girl, I think that boarding school can often be a very sensible place to send children. I would not want to see it required for all children—that would be most unsuitable—but boarding school should be in the thoughts of those wondering where to put a child. It might be that it would be possible to keep the child with a particular member of the family if that family member did not have the child for 12 months of the year. Anyone who has been a mother or a father understands that situation.

On Amendments 144 and 165, I feel particularly strongly about unregulated accommodation. Under Section 17 of the Children Act 1989, there is an obligation on the local authority to promote the welfare of the child. I cannot believe that local authorities that send children to unregulated places are complying appropriately with the law. I wonder whether any local authority has ever thought about it.

Unregulated accommodation—which has been set out so well already—is not, in fact, checked. If one thinks about it, the idea that 16 and 17 year-olds are not being checked as to how they are getting on—bearing in mind, as has been said, that they are still technically children and are at a very vulnerable age, particularly if they are in care—is extraordinary. The other point is that even adult accommodation seems very unsuitable. Who are they going to meet in adult accommodation? Although it may be checked, one wonders how much checking there is. I hope the Minister will listen to these particular matters very strongly.

--- Later in debate ---

Amendment 165 tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Russell, ably supported by the noble Lords, Lord Young and Lord Hampton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, concerns the new notification system for when a child is placed into temporary accommodation. It is fair to say, as has been outlined, that the Government are supportive of the principles behind this amendment, and I assure the noble Lord that the Government are considering how options for a notification system can work legally and operationally. As we have heard, the responsible Ministers across the departments of MHCLG, DHSC and DfE recently met Dame Siobhain McDonagh to discuss the design of the protocol, the list of public bodies to notify and the scope of guidance. Officials are currently working through these matters in detail. I cannot be more specific about that, but I want to reassure noble Lords that this is being taken seriously.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I hope I can take it as good news that they are meeting next week with Minister Georgia Gould, so hopefully the purse strings will be loosened.

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

The noble Lord may say that.

In my personal experience, there is no reason why local areas cannot put these arrangements in place. There have been circumstances with agencies in the past—I am sure this does not happen now—where police have gone into a situation of domestic violence, for example, and not even known that there were children hiding under the beds upstairs. That is the shocking result of a lack of joining up—of agencies not speaking to each other. Provisions in the Bill will go a long way to making sure that this becomes normal—a culture shift. It is normal to tell a school if one of its young people has a change of circumstances that could affect them in many different ways. I am delighted that Government Ministers are coming together, and we will await the outcome with interest.

Amendment 170 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Cash, concerns the publication of a national capacity plan for children’s homes intended to highlight the issue of distance placements. I highlight the Government’s commitment to supporting local authorities to meet their sufficiency duty through a range of reforms that will boost system capacity and better meet the needs of children in their areas. The noble Lord, Lord Storey, the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, and others added to the discussions on this amendment. While the amendment would require the Secretary of State to publish an annual national capacity plan, it would also take significant local authority resource to collect, collate and submit additional information on an annual basis to inform the plan, all at a time when their resources for children’s services are rightly focused on implementing reforms to actively improve services. A range of complex contributing factors across the children’s social care system can lead to the use of distance placements, which the Government are addressing through reforms in the Bill and investment in fostering kinship care and local authority children’s homes. Paramount in these decisions is the issue of risk to the safety of the young person. Sadly, in some cases, distance is a necessary factor when considering placements.

Finally, Amendment 134B tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Sanderson, seeks to introduce a duty on the Secretary of State to carry out a review on the distinction in the planning regime between children’s homes and domestic dwelling-houses, and to consider whether it should be removed. I would like to reassure the noble Baroness that the Department for Education and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government continue to work together in this important area. In the last two years it has been clarified via a joint Written Ministerial Statement that planning should not restrict the timely delivery of children’s homes, and we have changed the National Planning Policy Framework to make it explicit that planning authorities must plan to meet the needs of looked-after children.

As we said in Keeping Children Safe, Helping Families Thrive, we will continue to make progress on further changes that support the delivery of children’s homes where they are needed. This includes data collection and an analysis to translate the data and work out how it needs to be used, which is often overlooked, I am sad to say. In my experience of dealing with an application for a small home in the ward I used to represent, we went out for intensive consultation with the residents living around the home. I am very pleased to say that, in the end, after some scepticism and reservation, when we went through it carefully and they met the people running the home and understood how many children would be there, it went through and was an enormous success. They came and asked how they could help to support the children in the home through their local connections. So there are reasons to be optimistic, but there is a great deal to do, which is why, as I have said before, we have this Bill before us. I thank everyone for their comments but, for the reasons I have outlined in these remarks, I hope the noble Lords will not press the amendments in their names.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

While there may be other educational reasons, which I do not have time to go into, why teachers might want to have pupils able to use these powerful pocket computers for learning, it is for the reasons of media literacy that I particularly urge support for my amendment to include educational reasons as an exemption from phone bans. We need better digital citizens who are media and AI savvy. We cannot achieve this without phones being allowed in classrooms for those lessons.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Knight. He makes a very compelling case for better media literacy. He and other noble Lords will recall that we did push very hard for that during the Online Safety Act’s rather lengthy passage, but without as much success as we would have hoped. Every week that we wait before we implement more effective media literacy is a week lost, and probably part of a generation lost as well.

I was very happy to put my name to Amendments 183CA and 183CB in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Penn. As noble Lords have heard, this is a very live subject. Countries and societies all over the world are wrestling with the effects of the technology that is all-pervading—to a greater extent than most of us would wish. When the noble Lord was talking about geolocation at Westminster School, I thought for a fleeting moment, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we had geolocation in the Palace of Westminster?”. Once one entered here, one could no longer have access to news websites telling us things that are distracting and probably not very helpful for what we are trying to do. I exclude important things such as messages from your club about the lunchtime and the availability of the wine list.

The Online Safety Act took a very long time to happen. As we have learned since its enactment, making it flesh and making its intent have teeth is a very lengthy and protracted process—far longer than we had hoped and envisaged. We may still be two or three years away from knowing whether some of the key protections for children are working.

We do not have the luxury of being able to take this slowly. We need speed and we need clarity. When the noble Lord was talking about the distractions of the screen for young children, I thought of how often I, like others, pass parents or carers in the street pushing a pram; the child may well be in distress or asking for something, but whoever is pushing the pram is so deeply into their telephone or so deeply engaged in a conversation with their earphones in that they cannot even hear the child. They cannot even see it, if it is facing forward. That, in some ways, is a very good summary of the dilemma we have got ourselves into.

The Education Select Committee of another place produced a sensible report, just over a year ago in May 2024, called—perhaps the name of the Bill is a tribute to the name of the report—Screen Time: Impacts on Education and Wellbeing. As it happens, almost exactly a month ago, His Majesty’s Government—and, I assume, the Department for Education—issued their response. It is quite lengthy and fairly comprehensive. I would be surprised if, when the Minister responds to this group, she does not talk about many elements of the department’s response to the Select Committee’s report.

The import of the Government’s detailed response and its underlying theme is that this is very complicated and there are lots of different moving parts: “We are still not really on top of it. We are engaged and listening, but not ready to do anything yet”. One message that we all sense is that we do not have time on our side. Society, parents, teachers, those who look after young people, educators and the companies responsible for education technology want clarity and a sense of direction. They want to know that the Government are engaged—we will never be on top of this—looking at this carefully, and willing and able to act, quite quickly if required.

Equally, and importantly, if the Government act but the consequences are not quite as intended, they should have the courage to say, “We did not get that right. We need to change it and tweak it in the light of new evidence”. This is such a dynamic situation that we need a dynamic approach to deal with it.

Lastly, I think we need to look carefully at the psychology of this. For nearly 40 years, I have been involved with a charity that is now part of Coram, of which I am a governor, called Coram Life Education. It is the largest provider of health education in primary schools in the United Kingdom; we teach about half a million children a year. The essence of the way we teach is completely contradictory to schools’ normal pedagogic approaches: we do not tell the children what to do; we listen. We give the children information without saying whether it is good or bad; then we ask the children to give their views on the information they been given and what conclusions they have come to—whether it is good or less good for them. In this way, the children feel they have some control over what they are asked to do.

The least effective thing would be going for any sort of blanket ban. Children, as we all know, are probably far better versed in technology than we are. The more we try to ban it, the more clever ways will be found to get around it. It simply would not work. The way to get this to work is to get the children involved and engaged, because they will come to their own conclusions. They are not stupid. The more intelligent ones know exactly what social media and these addictive applications are doing to them. We should listen and learn from them the ways to respond to this, rather than thinking that we know best. We have allowed this situation to develop in plain sight over the last 15 to 20 years, and we have been very ineffective in dealing with it. Perhaps listening to the generations who are most directly involved and on whom this is having the greatest effect would be a smart way to look at it.

Finally, my noble friends Lady Kidron and Lady Cass are unable to be with us today but, as the noble Lord, Lord Bethell, will know, they have convened a very impressive group of genuine experts in this field. There is a growing, deeply worrying and compelling body of evidence that the effects of screen time on children before the age of six will have a lifelong impact on their cognitive skills, behaviour—everything about them. The longer we take to acknowledge what is going on and to do something about it, the more we will regret it.

[Baroness Shephard of Northwold (Con)]

My Lords, I support the amendment so eloquently and persuasively described by my noble friends Lord Nash and Lady Penn. I was also extremely struck by the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, on the need for education. It is about education, which is one of the safeguards on which we can rely. I was also struck by the points made by noble Lord, Lord Russell, which in some ways echoed but added to those made by the noble Lord, Lord Knight.

In April this year, the Times published the wide-ranging and comprehensive findings of its crime and justice commission. Its conclusions on the effects of social media on children aged under 16 were damning. They ranged from radicalisation, criminalisation and antisocial attitudes, right through to mental health problems and extremist views. The commission recommended that children under 16 be banned from accessing social media. It added that two-thirds of the population support that view, and that a higher number of the 16 to 24 year-old group do so. That is significant, because that is the group that has experienced the pressures.

As was mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Knight, Australia has recently imposed such a ban, and many other countries are preparing to do so. A total ban is self-evidently beyond the scope of the Bill, but a ban on the use of smartphones in schools is within its scope, given its focus on the safeguarding of children.

The vast majority of our schools will have policies in place to deal with the use of smartphones. There can be problems in implementing them, not least because the technology is constantly evolving and policies have to adapt to keep up. Some parents have understandable anxieties, feeling the need to be in contact with their children at all times, and they might well oppose a complete ban. There are also anxieties about age limits and other issues. The fact is that the decision is left to the school, and as a result there is a huge range of policies across the school spectrum.

Many will maintain that the decision should be left to the school, in accordance with its circumstances. I have sympathy with that view, but I have a couple of points to make; indeed, I have a question for the Minister when she winds up. I hope she can tell us the view of heads of schools on an overall ban, perhaps by year group, on smartphones in school. Indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Bousted, might also be able to help us with this. My guess is that the majority of school heads and teachers would welcome at least knowing where they stood on this issue and having one less thing to justify or argue about to parents and colleagues. It would certainly be time-saving in developing the school’s own policy and they themselves having to police it, whatever it might be.

Restrictions on smartphone use, especially in the classroom, would cut out phone-related bullying in school, which frequently transfers to the playground and sometimes into the community. It would also reduce child-on-child abuse—an important safeguarding issue. Of course, this Bill is also about safeguarding. More positively, and I am sure former teachers in the Chamber will agree, schools that have introduced a reduction in access to social media through smartphones have reported better communication and participation skills in their pupils.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

On the point about regulation, the reason why I started by referring to the Online Safety Act was precisely to identify the need that was manifest in a piece of legislation that came through this House before my time but which presumably some noble Lords around the Chamber were engaged in and which was precisely about how to regulate the use of social media for children and young people. That legislation did not happen in the last century; it is literally only just on the statute books. I was making the case that it is important, and that it is right for the Government to ensure that it is working properly as a first priority.

The issue of how we support schools to be able to have within them the type of calm behaviour that they need is, of course, absolutely crucial. In response to the question about when we will publish the survey on behaviour, it will be later this year. To come back to the point I made at the beginning, although I very much doubt that the only factor influencing behaviour within schools is mobile phones, everything that head teachers might need to put in place the restrictions on mobile phones that will, along with the other necessary things, enable them to have strong behaviour policies and practice, is, rightly, available to them in order for them to be able to ensure that that is happening.

Lastly, I turn to the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Knight. I have already said that I see the point of the exemption he has proposed. However, my point is that you have two routes here: the legislative route, which has already begun to be unravelled by the inclusion of a whole range of exemptions; or a positive set of guidelines for head teachers to use to design and develop, in consultation with parents, their staff and the young people in their schools, the appropriate policies for safeguarding children, protecting behaviour and delivering what individual schools need. At this point, the Government believe that the latter is the most appropriate way forward to ensure that children have the protection from mobile phones they need and in a way that recognises the flexibility that will be necessary.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

Will the Minister give way? We had a debate a few months ago on this very subject and I visited the Fulham Boys School, which is a large all-male school with about 1,200 students, to speak at some length to the headmaster. That school has had a ban on phones for about 10 years. The issue is not about having a ban in school but, as the headmaster said very clearly, what happens outside the school. It does not matter what policies you have in place; they will not solve what young people are doing outside of school time. He said the biggest problem he has had in trying to tackle this issue has not been with the pupils themselves but the parents, some of whom are very challenging and regard it as an infringement of civil liberties that anybody should tell them what their children should or should not do.

The real problem is what happens outside the school. The school can have as many policies as it likes, but until and unless we find a way of influencing what happens outside the school—which, as I said, means getting to the young people, because they know themselves some of the harm being done, and perhaps through them getting to the parents to make them realise how their children feel—we will not start to tackle the psychology behind some of the problems we are confronted with.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I do note that I was coming to the end of my comments at 18 minutes—just so the Whips know I was sticking to the rules. The noble Lord tempts me to say that that was exactly the point I made at the beginning: there has been conflation in this debate of the use of mobile phones in schools, the impact of screen time across children’s lives—I can quite understand people’s concerns about that—and, as I have said, the need for us, at a very early stage in children’s lives, to be clear with them about the appropriate use of screens, which is probably practically none, and clear in the information that we provide to parents. The Government are taking action on all those areas, alongside gathering appropriate evidence. On that basis, I hope the noble Lord will feel able to withdraw his amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Cash (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 183B is in my name and I support the other amendments in this group. First, I draw to the Minister’s attention that this is a probing amendment. It is very long and detailed but none the less intended to generate a discussion of something I feel is very important in a children’s well-being Bill. To exclude the early years seems a lost opportunity; the intention is to generate that conversation.

It is almost 20 years—I have shocked myself by saying how long it is—since I stood as a candidate in Westminster North for the Conservative Party. As an inner-city seat, it was a challenging environment in which to work and to meet people. Deprivation was not uncommon. I remember vividly knocking on a door on the Brunel Estate. As the door opened, the fug of cigarette—and, probably, cannabis—smoke surrounded me. Through the haze, there was what looked to be a very young girl with a baby, probably six months old—now I know better—on her hip. In my shock, in the smoke that emanated from the flat, I said to her, “Is your mum at home?” But she was the mum.

By coincidence, I had just come from an excellent Sure Start drop-in centre around the corner set up by the last Labour Government. I had this moment of clarity, of thinking, “That baby is never going to get to that Sure Start centre”, and that it did not matter who was in government and what was offered—unless we had a proper strategy around early years and a way of reaching that mum, that child’s chances were going to be severely impeded.

I have declared my interest previously, and I declare an interest now, as this was the inspiration for founding Parent Gym, which has run across the country in all the years since it launched in 2010. The intention of Parent Gym, like so many other programmes now like it, was to reach young mums who probably had not had any parenting themselves. The aim was to provide support that was not otherwise available, when reaching out for that support was usually taboo because it came via social services, and they were hostile to the whole prospect of it.

At around the same time, because of my interest in all this, I realised that the beginnings of research were being published into the effects of early life experiences on children. I am delighted to stand in this Chamber today, almost 20 years later, knowing that there is a consensus now around the importance of all the early years and their impact on children—in particular, the first 1,001 days, as we call it—which are so very formative.

We also know now that it is not just those very important years after birth. There is a wealth of research showing the effects of prenatal stress that a mother undergoes. There has been incredible research done in disaster zones, such as after flooding in Puerto Rico, where they have measured the telomeres of the cohort of babies born from the mothers who were in those natural disasters. Telomeres are part of the chromosomal profile that predicts your longevity and your health outcomes. They have found them to be shorter in those babies born in the wake of disasters. We know now that the environment—the family environment, the multigenerational environment—is so very important.

As noble Lords know, I have been involved in some earlier parts of the Bill. We have had important debates about looked-after children and foster care strategy, and so on, but we have not talked at all about the strategy for these families and these very young children. There is such a such a range of evidence now. There is the scientific evidence, but there is also the economic evidence that what we invest in these families comes back multifold for society.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Professor James Heckman did the analysis and found that the returns on early years intervention far exceed those from the remedial action, for which we all bear the cost much later in life. He found returns of $7 to $12 per $1 invested in preventive steps taken.

In this country, in 2018, the Early Intervention Foundation estimated that England and Wales alone spent £17 billion every year—I am afraid that I do not know the current figure but it has grown since then—on late interventions; for example, in social care, youth offending, mental health, special educational needs and criminal justice services. These are many of the things that we have been talking about in this Bill, in this Chamber, and yet we have not discussed, until today, the opportunity here to prevent some of these issues arising.

The numbers are not abstract; they relate to real lives: lives impaired, opportunities lost, families rent asunder, and public resources consumed by crises and situations that could have been prevented. We have looked at the numbers of children in care. We have looked at the numbers of child protection plans. We have not talked quite so much yet—it is in Part 2 of the Bill—about the persistent educational attainment gap that opens up before formal schooling even begins. Only 46% of disadvantaged children achieve expected language and communication standards at age five, compared with 69% of their peers. That is the Department for Education’s own data.

If it is a question of affordability, we are asking the wrong question. The right question is whether we can continue to afford not to do anything. There is plenty of evidence of what works, and we know that there are already plenty of charities and programmes out there, including some of the government programmes that we have heard referred to today, like family hubs and, previously, the Sure Start programmes. Governments always look at this and try to use piecemeal, locally funded, sticking-plaster solutions, but there remains a postcode lottery as to whether there is an infrastructure for these young families and these children who, through no fault of their own, begin life at a disadvantage.

There are a number of things that we know work. Parenting training works, not just in the programme that I founded but in many others: the Family Nurse Partnership, home visiting by trained nurses, health monitoring done by parenting training in the Incredible Years programme, parent-infant psychotherapy—we do not have any shortage of interventions to refer to about what works. I have not tabled the amendment to be directional about which intervention the Government ought to mandate or explore further, but to facilitate a conversation on ensuring that there is a universal approach to all the children in this country to ensure that they are given the right start and right support in life.

Many charities are already doing some of this work—the NSPCC, Barnardo’s, Action for Children, the Parent-Infant Foundation—but that is no substitute for a national infrastructure. We know that Her Royal Highness the Princess of Wales, through her Centre for Early Childhood and the Shaping Us campaign, is working to draw attention to all this, but we need the Government to take this and grapple with it in a meaningful way to ensure that we have some way of identifying these children, and some means by which we place them all within the safety net of our society, knowing that how we treat our children is really a measure of what all of us are. I have placed emphasis on the exploration of this, and I hope that the Committee can engage today in a sensible debate to find the solutions.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I support the spirit behind all the amendments in this group. Amendment 486 is in my name, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, and the noble Lord, Lord Young, for also putting their names to it.

I am assuming that we are, in effect, pushing at an open door in stressing the importance of early years to the Government. The noble Baroness the Secretary of State—sorry, she is not noble yet, though she probably will be when she stops being Secretary of State. I should say the current Secretary of State, together with the Minister, came to a Cross-Bench meeting before the Bill came to our House. A question was asked about early years, and the Secretary of State was very clear that it is an absolute priority. I am therefore taking that as read, and the question is not “Is it important?” but “What do we do about it?”

I should declare an interest: I was part of the parliamentary advisory team that worked with Dame Andrea Leadsom on the Start for Life initiative under one of the previous Governments—I cannot quite remember which one—which in many ways was a concerted attempt by a Government to do something about early years. Not least, we were trying to undo the unfortunate effects of what happened to Sure Start, which I think everyone across the House, regardless of party, would agree was one of the great achievements of the Labour Administration of the 2000s. With the benefit of hindsight, it was a tragedy that we allowed it to wither on the vine.

Of course, the Labour Party did not allow it to wither on the vine; the people of this country, exercising their democratic ability to vote, which of course we in this House do not have, decided to put in place the Government who decided that there were other priorities, or could say that it was important but not give as much clear support and direction to it as before. Inevitably, what then happens is some parts of the country will continue to think it is incredibly important but others, for reasons that may seem good to them at the time, give it a lower priority. That is how you end up with such uneven distribution across the country. The lesson from that for our new Government is that, if a Government of whatever political persuasion are not crystal clear that this is a priority, and if they do not lay down clearly what that means in terms of what must happen and what is non-negotiable, the same thing will happen again.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to add to the support given to Amendment 257A in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young, from all sides of the Committee, and just to emphasise almost the moral case for it.

Earlier on in Committee, when we were talking about the important role of kinship carers, I think we recognised the enormous debt that we as a society owe to them for the burden that they take on and the large number of young children they keep out of the care system, at disproportionate cost financially and to themselves socially and developmentally. The same is true of young children who end up being carers. As the noble Lord, Lord Young, said, we have 15,000 children caring for 50 hours or more a week, of whom 3,000 are between five and nine years old. If I remember dimly myself at that age, and if I think of my children at that age, the idea of taking on the responsibilities that some of these young carers take on, through no choice of their own, is extraordinary.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 18th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, at Second Reading, I said that a great sorrow for me and many others is that the noble Baroness, Lady Massey of Darwen, is not with us, because she would have been intimately involved in the Bill. In particular, she would have put her full weight behind these two amendments. She was a clarion call for the voice of the child to be heard.

During the last five or six years in your Lordships’ House, we have had a succession of Bills—I include the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, the Victims and Prisoners Bill and the Online Safety Bill. In each case, a group of us across the Chamber has fought repeatedly to try to inject into the Bill as much as possible a recognition of the rights of children, and that children are not—and should not be treated in the same way as—adults. In each case, this has been necessary because it has become abundantly clear that this was not foremost in the minds of those drafting the Bill at that time. If that was embedded in the system, so that what is in the best interests of the child was automatically a major part of thinking behind drafting any part of a Bill, what a wonderful advance that would be.

I have been involved for many years with a charity called Coram, particularly the part of it called Coram Life Education, the largest provider of health education in primary schools across the United Kingdom. One thing that we teach children, starting at age five and through to 11, is the meaning of mutual respect. Mutual respect is about respecting children of different ethnicities, faiths, backgrounds and beliefs, and doing so in a considered and thoughtful way.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, this has been a fascinating debate. I have not particularly participated in this Bill, but I am always interested when noble Lords seek to incorporate various treaties we have signed into domestic law. The reason I say that is because of my experience in a variety of ways of having been a Minister. Paragraph 1.6 of the Ministerial Code, which is not a new obligation on Ministers, states that Ministers have to comply with the international agreements into which Governments and previous Governments have entered and which have usually been ratified by Parliament. The need to think about these sorts of issues, particularly around children, is already embedded into how policy framework strategies are deployed.

“From the mouths of children”


is in the Psalms and in the Gospels. That element of truth comes through: it is absolutely vital that children’s voices are heard. This is why things such as the Children Act 1989 was really important, about aspects of that.

However, I am really concerned, and I share the concerns that my noble friend Lady Spielman expressed, about whether these need to be incorporated as a whole into domestic law. Only a handful of other countries have done this: Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Spain and, to some extent, or to the full extent of its devolved powers, the Scottish Parliament has decided to do the same—although noble Lords may be aware of the rulings after there was a referral to the Supreme Court which removed certain aspects of that legislation, partly because it counteracted the primacy of this Parliament in legislation and other matters.

However, as regards thinking through, I fully respect the long connection with education of the noble Baroness, Lady Blower. Both my parents are teachers. I do not have children, so I do not have the same experiences there, but I am aware, from when I was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, of absolutely how much, just from the DNA, in effect, of being normal human beings, we would consider aspects of impacts on children.

The noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, said the difficulty about the conversations is that they get legalistic. Well, that is the whole point. We are talking about the law. If I think of Amendment 502G, perhaps there would have been a different ruling with the Michaela academy recently on whether somebody could pray at school or not. I think also of keeping schools open. I know there is an element of it being discussed in Amendment 502M. I encourage the people who have been distinguished general secretaries of unions to think of parents perhaps starting to sue schools for not staying open when there is some snow. The snow may not be stopping the children getting to school, but it might be stopping a couple of the teachers, so the decision is then to close down education for a whole day or more, not on behalf of the children but because they cannot get some teachers there. I referred to “legalistic” because that is where you start getting into disputes, going to court, trying to settle outside—all these other issues.

That is why I completely understand why ratifying that treaty was so important. That becomes guidance, a framework and an actual way of doing things, but it does not then become necessarily—I believe we have incorporated certain parts of the convention into domestic law—a straitjacket in effect on how we kind of evolve in terms of policy. There are risks, and I know that there has been another Supreme Court ruling trying to discourage judges and indeed people from bringing judicial reviews trying to change policy. But that is exactly where we get into issues that we can see in other legal cases that are often in the courts.

Obviously, I respect the distinguished legal experience of the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Haslemere, but I would have thought that the public sector equality duty, which recognises religion and belief, would already capture perhaps some of what he is trying to incorporate in his amendment.

I do not want to delay the Committee too much longer, but I think this is a case of “Be careful what you wish for”. What has happened for children that now makes it necessary to do this? The children were ignored when they were being groomed and when they went to the police. Children have been ignored in other situations. That grooming is still ongoing; I hope the police and the CPS are more alert as well. But going back to the substance, I hope that the way that the UNCRC has been effectively incorporated into how we go about our affairs as Ministers, as Parliament and as public servants should be sufficient. However, I will continue to try to understand the deficiency that we are trying to address by this wholesale incorporation of this into our domestic law when I genuinely do not believe it is needed.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

I will just swiftly respond to the noble Baroness. During the 14 years that her party was in office—I witnessed this first hand, because I am a retread, as I got re-elected back in in 2014—there was a series of Bills, some of which I mentioned I have been involved with, where children are directly involved and affected. Repeatedly, those Bills arrive here after—as per usual—minimal scrutiny down the Corridor, by design. It is manifestly clear that the detailed needs, requirements and rights of children have not systematically been thought through and embedded in the legislation, which is why we have had to go through lengthy debates to try to tease that out. I am proud to say that, in the majority of cases, faced with strong cross-party arguments in favour, the Front Bench of the noble Baroness’s party, repeatedly in different Bills, acceded to the strength of those arguments and amended the legislation to put children’s rights in there. Whatever the Ministerial Code may say, unfortunately that was not filtering its way down into the way that Bills were being drafted. Your Lordships’ House did its work very well, but what some of us are hoping and asking for is a situation where that requirement becomes less frequent and is abnormal rather than, I am afraid, substantively normal.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

I would say in return— I was trying to keep my speech brief—that I hear what the noble Lord said. He talked about being unsuccessful in keeping it brief. That is because we have had a lot of stuff about legalism. I am giving direct experience of government—I appreciate what the noble Lord said. I can give more examples. One reason why children get the flu vaccine every year is primarily to protect adults—the teachers and school workers—to stop the spread of flu. It is not really to help the kid. All sorts of things happen today that are actively encouraged to be done to the child in a way that should not be harmful.

I come back to the legislation and the point that is relevant. The Secretary of State for Education has the leading responsibility in government to have that horizon-scanning of every bit of legislation that affects children. If there have been deficiencies, I recognise them. I am not convinced that the incorporation of more law into domestic law is going to be the way to achieve that. I encourage the Minister in her reply to give confidence. Even if the noble Lord feels that the last Administration were deficient, I am sure that the current Administration will say that they are very much on top of it.

Frankly, it is a bit like when I was at DWP. I had primary responsibility for disabilities, so it was my job, working with my officials, to keep scanning legislation for how it would impact people with disabilities. That was not always very popular with other departments, which kept telling us to keep our noses out, but that is what we did. I am sure that that is what the Department for Education is intending to do. That said, I know that my noble friend Lady Barran was assiduous in her support of children, and I am sure that the Minister for this Government has continued to be so as well.

--- Later in debate ---

I am aware that I have joined the Committee’s deliberations rather late in the day, but each of these amendments tackle a fundamental gap in privacy, efficacy and safety in schools. Therefore, absent a positive response from the Government, I intend to bring them back on Report.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I was very happy to add my name to the noble Baroness’s on the majority of these amendments. She has outlined the compelling need to do something in these interrelated areas sooner rather than later. I will not bore your Lordships but rather try and illustrate one or two examples of what is going on in real time.

I will start with Copilot, a tool that most of us will be at least faintly familiar with—or will at least have heard of—and which is integrated into the Microsoft package that we use in Parliament. At the time that research was started by a group of organisations, including the 5Rights Foundation founded by the noble Baroness, Microsoft, which owns Copilot, stated publicly that Copilot was intended for users 18 and above, such as all your Lordships. However, in May 2025, the company announced without warning that Copilot would become available to users aged 13 and above. This shift raises important questions, none of which was answered at the time by Microsoft. The user age change proceeded without any published child rights impact assessment—which takes us back to an earlier group that we discussed—or documentation of any child participation in this decision. Using it in this way, without any child-focused safeguards, is unlikely to be in the best interests of the child, but currently there seems to be no satisfactory way to hold Microsoft to account for this.

A second example is Vimeo, a popular video channel that some of your Lordships may be aware of. In a particular case where a child used Vimeo and some of its video capability to do his homework, a detailed look at what Vimeo had done with his homework demonstrated that 92 different commercial companies had gained access to this child’s data. Not very satisfactory.

A third example is the problem that data protection officers—each school nominates one—as you might imagine, are struggling to try and understand and keep up with this blizzard of new technology and new tools. There are more and more sophisticated ways of, in theory, giving children a good education, underwritten by hideously long and complex terms and conditions, which I suspect even an artificial intelligence tool would have a problem making any sense of.

An example would be perhaps one of our best known technology companies, Google. It has a very successful edtech business called Google Classroom. Google, as is its wont, packages different Google products together in the same package. Within Google Classroom, you have Google Maps, which I am sure most of your Lordships are familiar with and will use occasionally. Let us assume you are doing a geography project using Google Classroom and, as part of that, you decide to go into Google Maps to use its capability. The minute the child clicks on Google Maps, he or she loses the data protection provided by Google Classroom, which allows Google Maps to harvest all of their data.

That is a real life current example of what is happening in plain sight. Data protection officers are not going to be aware of that, neither are headmasters, students or parents. It seems compelling that the people who should be most aware of that are the Government, the Information Commissioner and the bodies which are there to protect children and guide schools through this extraordinarily difficult complex morass of these competing technologies which, quite rightly to some extent, the Government are encouraging schools to take advantage of. But beware of what you encourage without understanding exactly what it is you are recommending.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when it comes to technology, I think I have a slightly different relationship to it, although the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, may even go beyond me for this. We need it to operate in the modern world. I have said before several times on this Bill that I am dyslexic. I cannot produce a one-page document that is in a readable form in any sort of format unless I use voice dictation. The relationship with technology changes.

If you want to make people independent and they are, in this case, dyslexic—dyspraxics might use the same technology in a slightly different way—you must make sure information is available to them and they can function with it. Having said that, the second part of this is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, that there should be safeguards within it. These things actually go hand in glove. You should have something that allows people to function in the modern world. When you are independent and interacting with a computer, you have to put the correct information in for the computer to function; you have to actually know what you are doing. A balance needs to be achieved.

There is a move to use systems which are built into computers, as opposed to bolt-on bits for educational support. In certain cases, which the Minister is aware of, schools decide to use the free bit of tech as opposed to purchasing it. But the free bit of tech is there to advertise; otherwise it would not be there. There must be a commercial advantage for somebody to provide you with a free bit of tech.

The balancing structure the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, puts forward here is essential to allow those like me who need this technology to carry on using it. We are talking about schoolchildren here, but there will be no shortage of people who will need it in the future and we are identifying more and more all the time. I hope we can strike a balance and make sure we get further forward into it.

The same is true—I am sure we are going to hear about smartphones being the devil’s work—for smart- phones, as it is the information on the smartphone we are talking about. If you can ban social media sites on smartphones and you can block them, they merely become a platform you can fill with other technology.

This is as the Minister gets an answer by using her smartphone. I hope we will get a more balanced approach to this, because it is not all bad, and not all good, it just needs to be used correctly, and using safeguards is something we have not really got our heads around. I am sure most of the commercial companies did not come in with this as their first priority, they just came in as commercial companies. The fact that they said they were platforms and did not need to worry about this is now coming back to bite them. However, I hope there is a balanced approach and a sensible way that we can get the best out of technology.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 19th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Meston (CB)]

My Lords, I wish to speak in support of Amendment 49, specifically relating to sibling contact, to which I have added my name. In doing so, I do not want to repeat what the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, said, other than to stress, as she did, the importance of maintaining and developing sibling contact.

Where a child has to be separated from his or her parents, temporarily or permanently, the most important viable relationship remaining is often with that child’s siblings or half-siblings. Typically, siblings have shared experience of the parenting they have received, and they have, of course, a relationship which can long outlive the relationship that they have or have had with their parents.

The Children Act created a presumption that children should be placed together, but that is not always possible to arrange or to achieve. Contact between separated siblings, particularly if no longer in the same school or placed at some distance apart, can require commitment not only by their respective carers but by the responsible local authorities. Properly arranged sibling contact typically requires a concrete plan by the local authority and an underlying framework of support. It may, it has to be said, sometimes influence what happens at the next stage after the care proceedings and determine what happens if the children are to be placed for adoption.

Amendment 49 would help, because it would not require or assume that both or all of the children will be in the care of the local authority, and it would thereby sensibly extend the scope of local authority duties towards siblings.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to speak in support of Amendment 62 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler.

The case for this is, really, fairly straightforward. Children in care often have quite strong mental health needs and are not in the best of mental health. Care leavers comprise about 1% to 3% of the general youth population, but that translates into them being responsible for one quarter of the homeless population. That group are twice as likely to die prematurely than the general population, and in many cases suicide is the largest reason for that high death rate. That is a fairly strong causal link between children in the care system, or those going into the care system, having fragile mental health, and that not being picked up as early as it should be. This amendment simply asks that we please ensure that, when children have an assessment of the quality of their mental health, the practitioners who are doing that are qualified in mental health. Only in that way can we be sure that we catch those vulnerable young people at that early stage and that they do not become one of the depressing statistics that I have just mentioned.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to Amendment 62, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, and to which I have added my name. I declare, as ever, that I am a teacher and I thank the National Children’s Bureau for its help on this.

Children do not come into care because they have won the lottery of life; trauma is unlikely to be far from their lives. Yet our assessment processes still rely on professionals who may have little or no training in mental health or trauma-informed practice. Care-experienced young people told the Education Select Committee, as part of its inquiry into children’s social care, that local authorities are not always fulfilling their obligations to include emotional and mental health in their health assessments of children in care. One young person told the committee:

“I feel a lot could be explained if they understood the experience of trauma. It will take time. It will not go away at night, and sometimes before it gets better it could get worse. No one talks about that. You will not be okay if you are going into care; there is a reason why you are there, and so it is important that the minute you go into care every child should have a mandatory assessment, physical and mental, and there should be that on-call support for them”.


Bringing qualified mental health practitioners into the mandatory health assessment of children in care is simple, practical and overdue. I hope that the Government will use this amendment as an opportunity to do more for children in care and to make their lives and, as importantly, their futures better.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, the adoption and special guardianship support fund was established in 2015 to provide therapeutic support to families caring for children through adoption and guardianship. Since its inception, the fund has supported over 4,000 families and played a transformative role in so many families’ lives, offering interventions that have helped children manage emotions, process early trauma and build trusting relationships, while equipping parents and guardians with the tools they need to care effectively. In fact, over the past 12 months, the Home for Good charity talked to a large number of families who had used the fund: 67% accessed therapy, such as counselling, play therapy and family therapy; 34% accessed therapeutic parenting support or training; and 33% accessed specialist assessments.

I am grateful to Minister MacAlister for his letter following a meeting with a number of us, in which he said:

“Many children who become adopted or are in kinship care have faced difficulties in early life that mean that they cannot live with their birth parents. These experiences place them at greater risk of mental health challenges, often made more complex by increased SEND prevalence compared to their peers. I am clear that government has a responsibility to these children which I am determined to meet it both now and in the future”.


He also said:

“The Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund has helped children and their families access a wide range of interventions, including play therapy and therapeutic parenting courses”.


Imagine the dismay among those parents that this element of the fund has been reduced.

In Committee, I gave the example of a family living close to me that had adopted two children at a very young age who were absolutely traumatised. Counselling, paid for by the support fund, has created a huge change in those children. Because the fund has been cut, they are not able to continue with that provision.

Interestingly, that has been mirrored by a number of comments from other families talking about the support, who have said: “The support we had so far dramatically helped. Any loss of it would be devastating”; “My child is sick. She needed the help so she grows up feeling accepted and cared for and not angry and let down”; “Both our boys have additional needs. It scares us that we might lose the help they desperately need”; “The recent reduction of the adoption support fund has been a shock and has led to huge stress for the families who rely on it’; “The new financial limits imposed are a major concern. We are already stretched to our limits financially”; and, from a professional, “It is hard, when told by professionals that your child needs more support, and then you realise you cannot access what they recommend”.

My amendment is simple: that element of the fund should be restored, so that parents who adopted and fostered children can get that resource, which those children so desperately need. I beg to move.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, in speaking to these amendments, I declare that I am a co-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Adoption and Permanence, alongside Rachael Maskell, the MP for York. In 2019, the APPG carried out an inquiry into the fund. I will simply read its recommendation 6, which is headed “Continuity”:

“The department should ensure a continuity of therapeutic support by removing the current annual application requirement, enabling agencies and authorities to apply for support that orients around the needs of children and their families”—


not necessarily the budgeting needs of the department in question.

I know, from carrying out that inquiry and subsequent work that I have been involved in—I am a governor of Coram, the children’s charity, which has a large say in adoption—that the experience of families that have been fortunate enough to access the support given by the fund is that it is literally transformative, albeit in many cases, when the therapeutic support is accessed, there is already a situation within the family where adoption breakdown is potentially a reality. Unfortunately, over the past couple of years, there has been an increase in the level of adoption breakdown. If one looks at the amount of effort, time and emotional expense involved in going through an adoption, one will find it difficult to imagine having, in the end, to admit that it has not worked but has failed—which is devastating both for the adoptive family and for the child or the children. This fund genuinely does make a difference. One of the achievements of His Majesty’s occasionally loyal Opposition when they were in government was getting it on to the statute book.

One of the problems with it is that continuity of support is fundamental; this is not the sort of support that responds well to being stop-start. Unfortunately, because the flow of funding has not been consistent and because, for whatever reason—perhaps through negotiations with the Treasury—the department has been unable to be assured enough of the funding, that makes it extraordinarily difficult for the department to say to the families that are currently getting or wish to get support that it will be available.

It makes the livelihoods of those practitioners providing this therapeutic support very difficult. This support is highly specialised because, in many cases, these children have been, and are, subject to really quite severe trauma. To be able to give the level of care required at the rate required, those professionals need consistency of funding from the Government, to enable them to stay in business and to be able to engage with a family on the basis that they will be able to provide sufficient support, over whatever time required for it to be effective, and to really make a difference. For those reasons, I hope that the Government will look at this carefully.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, this is an improved version of Amendment 165, tabled in Committee by the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and supported by the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and me. We are all very grateful for this very positive response. Some 41,000 households in temporary accommodation have been placed out of area and 26,640 of them are households with children, so a large number of children will benefit from this.

I have three quick questions for the Minister. First, when she wound up the debate in Committee, she said some technical issues needed to be resolved. I think she said there were some operational issues to see how it can work. I assume those have been resolved. I hope there can be some IT solutions that mean we do not have to do this manually and it will be done automatically. Secondly, under proposed new subsections (6)(a) and (6)(b), the bodies that have to be notified that there is a child in their area in temporary accommodation out of area are medical practices and schools in England. Those living in Shropshire, for example, may be placed out of area in Wales—is there any duty to notify the Welsh authorities that they have children in temporary accommodation living in their area? Thirdly and finally, when will this very helpful amendment come into operation? What is the commencement date? Having said that, I warmly welcome this initiative.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, said, I tabled this amendment in Committee. I also pay tribute to Siobhain McDonagh for having pursued this for many years and the way in which she has worked with different parts of government to try to work through the issues. It was always really about the children and not about the problems that government has in doing this. I will now make a very lengthy peroration and simply say thank you.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, as the noble Lord, Lord Young, said, I supported and spoke to a similar amendment in Committee. Again, I will not be very long.

I want to celebrate this great example of when campaigning works. I pay tribute to Justlife, which worked alongside the Shared Health Foundation for the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Households in Temporary Accommodation. I want to stress the importance of this, and will not apologise for repeating what are such horrific figures. From 2023 to 2025, 80 children died while in temporary accommodation; that was 3% of total child deaths. From 2019 to 2024, temporary accommodation was cited as a factor in the deaths of 74 children.

Having said that, I want to stress, as I think the noble Lord, Lord Young, was hinting at, that it is crucial that this comes into effect as soon as possible. We could potentially save a life if GP surgeries and schools know the situation that children are in. Much more broadly, we need to get to a situation where we do not have children in temporary accommodation for the long periods of time they are now. Please let this be done as soon as possible.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 21st January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, once upon a time, in a previous moral panic about children’s safety, parents reacted to the media and politicians catastrophising by stopping their offspring playing outside unsupervised. The unintended consequence was the creation of what became known as cotton wool kids, prone to risk aversion, anxiety, lack of resilience and social isolation. Ironically, to compensate, many of those children were forced to cultivate their activities online. Their social interactions became virtual, and here we are.

I worry that we risk similar unintended consequences now if we rush to pass a social media ban for under-16s, so I will be opposing Amendment 94A. I know it has become normalised that, whatever social, cultural or moral panics we encounter, we believe that we can legislate to make them go away. I fear that this sort of lawmaking can lead to avoiding tackling difficult problems and to attempts at quick-fix solutions that too often create a whole new raft of difficulties down the line.

I noticed that the noble Lord, Lord Nash, blamed social media for eating disorders, radicalisation, terrorism, the mental health epidemic, ADHD, poor behaviour in the classroom, misogyny, violence against women and girls, and on and on. At this rate, all that Parliament would have to do is ban the internet for everyone and all problems would be solved. There is a danger of looking for easy answers and scapegoating social media for all society’s ills.

I worry about attempts to push this through too quickly or to fast-track it. It is interesting that the three-week fast-track consultation put forward in the other place has been discussed as though it is holding things back. The leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch, calls it more “dither and delay”. But this proposal is new; it has only just arrived here on Report as an amendment that would fundamentally change every citizen’s relationship with social media, not just children’s. I worry about attempts at steamrolling it through, with an assumption that everyone agrees that it is so obvious and inevitable that there is no point opposing it. I am grateful to the Liberal Democrats and the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, for an attempt at proportionality, even though I do not think it goes far enough.

We are hectored that this is what parents want. There has not been a referendum of parents, though there are polls. Many parents are pulling their hair out and will be tempted by it—it is so much easier to say, “You can’t because it’s against the law”, than it is to assert adult authority. Teenagers’ and children’s pester power can be the bane of all our lives. If only the law could be extended to ban other things and make them illegal—no, you cannot wear that hoodie; no, you cannot spend hours gaming; no, you cannot go to that sleepover; no, you cannot gorge on junk food; no, you cannot go to that party. In truth, this approach encourages parents to outsource their authority and shifts responsibility from parents to the state. All families ultimately are being told that they are incapable of managing their children's habits, and that is a dangerous precedent. It can disarm parents in the name of empowerment. Is there really a consensus among parents on this? Many of my friends are split down the middle, so I do not think we can claim the evidence is in.

What about the incontrovertible scientific evidence that backs a ban? The jury is out. The causal relationship between social media and mental well-being in teens and young people is much more contested than has been implied. Recent extensive research by academics at Manchester University found no evidence that social media has increased teenagers’ symptoms of anxiety or depression. The chair of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy Advisory Group, Professor Louis Appleby, points out that the evidence is, at best, circumstantial, noting that self-harming in the young began well before social media took hold in that age group. That reflects what I know from my own work in relation to mental ill-health and young people; I do not think it can totally be blamed on social media.

An Oxford University study of nearly 12,000 children showed no correlation between screen time, including social media, and mental health. Instead, the way in which children engage with social media is what determines its impact and—shock horror—in many instances, evidence shows the positive impact of social media use. The noble Lord, Lord Bethell, said that no more research is needed. That is anti-scientific and complacent, and I do not think it is true.

Let us be clear about what this amendment as drafted would do in relation to user services. The noble Lord, Lord Knight, pointed out the dangers to, for example, WhatsApp, websites such as Wikipedia and so on. That needs clarifying at the very least.

Despite histrionic headlines, social media can be used for self-educational ends. There is a new generation of autodidacts who are teaching themselves coding, video producing, editing and even musical instruments, languages and chess. I know that sounds rose-tinted and a bit glib, but social media often is a tool for connections—finding your tribe, making new friends—and a place where you can cultivate solidarity and autonomy as a young person. It can be a counter to the social trend towards fragmentation.

What about allowing the young to explore diverse political perspectives? On the eve of 16 year-olds being given the vote, surely it is important, if not essential, that we do not narrowly restrict soon-to-vote teens to state-sanctioned media channels. We want them to broaden their horizons, and explore and develop a democratic curiosity about the world, and they are going to do that online. When talking to school pupils, as I do often, I recommend that they find out about their peers around the world as part of them learning about international relations. What civic lessons might British children learn by looking at those brave protesters in Iran whose commitment to freedom has given them the courage to take on a theocratic Islamic regime and whose stories we know because they used social media to organise and to connect with each other and the rest of the world? That was, of course, before the ayatollah shut down the internet—oh, the irony.

As for safety and whether this ban will throw children off a cliff edge, it risks not equipping youth with the skills to safely and responsibly navigate the online world, knowing how to identify problems, spot dodgy red flags and apply strategies to deal with them. As the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed of Tinsley, pointed out, in all likelihood, many pre-16 year-olds will find ways of migrating to even riskier unregulated platforms or the dark web without guardrails and zero moderation. Our teenagers and children are clever and, dare I say it, devious. They will find a way. They will use VPNs—but it is okay, because noble Lords are going to ban those too. I hear that there is already a roaring trade in fake IDs among pre-teens.

Finally, how will over 16 year-old adults be affected by this ban? Whereas the Online Safety Act age-gated only certain types of harmful content, Amendment 94A would age-gate entire platforms, even when the content is child-friendly or harmless. According to Big Brother Watch, a 70 year-old accessing the neighbourhood news, a 50 year-old looking up the history of golf on Wikipedia, a 30 year-old small business owner responding to customers on Instagram and a 17 year-old wanting to message parents on the way home from school would all require age-verification measures. That is the threat to adult civil liberties and the right to privacy and, in effect, it means that we will have to digitally verify to participate in the public square. I do not necessarily think that young people will gain from this, despite the hyperbole.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I remind the House that we are on Report, and I think some of the contributions are in danger of erring on the wrong side of self-regulation. We should stick to the point; I will be very brief and simply try to explain for the benefit of the Government Front Bench, because in various Bills going through Parliament in the last month or so, this subject has raised itself in various forms. I sometimes notice the Front Bench being slightly amazed at what is coming at them from all sides and not necessarily understanding why. That is largely because they were not in your Lordships’ House at the time we went through the lengthy discussions about the Online Safety Act. What they are hearing today is a collective howl of rage and frustration across the House because what we thought we were very clear was meant to happen has not happened. I will give one or two facts which back up the view of my noble friend Lady Kidron that, whatever we do, we have to gather together—the right reverend Prelate made a very good point—and collectively send a message to the other place that this situation is simply not good enough.

Today, within the last 10 hours, a court case has been going on in California against Snap, Meta and TikTok where a group of parents are accusing those organisations of creating products which are addictive. It so happens that in the last 24 hours, Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, has settled with the complainants. That is because, I suspect, if they had not settled, the chief executive of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel, would shortly have had to appear in person in the court to answer the case against his company. He chose not to do so. Mr Zuckerberg is apparently also in the queue to give evidence at this trial, and it will be interesting to see whether his company takes the same route.

Yesterday, along with many other colleagues, I was part of a session of Learn with the Lords in the Education Centre. I took the opportunity to talk to the young people, most of whom were 14 and 15, about what they thought of a social media ban, which all of them were aware of—probably through social media. Almost without exception, they said they were against it and gave the sort of reasons one would expect, such as “That’s where we get our news from”, and so on. The teachers were completely and utterly in favour of a ban. We can take from that what we will, but I suspect the fact that they see day in and day out in the schoolroom the effect on the pupils they are trying to help, to develop and to manage—and to mitigate, in some cases, difficult behaviours—means that are completely united that this is unsustainable.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, mentioned that in Australia they have a different regulator, an e-safety commissioner. Comparing the e-safety commissioner in Australia with what we have in Ofcom is a bit like comparing “Crocodile Dundee” with “Dixon of Dock Green”. The difference is that stark.

Last week in the Peers’ Lobby, I met one of the bereaved parents whose child has died as a result of exposure to social media. I told that bereaved parent that a group of us were going to meet the chief executive of Ofcom within the next couple of weeks. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Simon, would you give the chief executive a message from me?”. I said, “Yes, of course”. He said—and you will excuse my Anglo-Saxon—“Would you kick her up the arse?”.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 28th January 2026 Lords Chamber

I hope not only that the Government take up the amendments but that they commission an analysis of the findings from these home visits, which could provide useful insights to help both local authorities and central government to make good use of the children not in school register and help to shape government home education policy in future.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I am happy to have added my name to Amendments 121A and 131A by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. I am grateful to officials from the Department for Education who had a meeting with us to discuss these amendments and the reasoning behind them.

The reasoning behind those amendments is really simple. The Sara Sharif incident happened despite multiple reviews looking into not dissimilar cases, in some cases over previous decades. In this case, I do feel that almost an extreme preventive approach is required to make sure that we do not have a repetition. The point was made by the officials that there have been significant improvements in the quality of children’s services in most of the country and about two-thirds are now in a reasonable shape, but that raises the question: what about the other third?

If there is another case, God forbid, like Sara Sharif —and history, for I am a historian by background, teaches us that that probably will happen—the opprobrium that will be heaped upon whichever unfortunate Ministers and officials happen to be in office at the time will be considerable and, in our view, is avoidable. We should mitigate that risk by assuming that we have to legislate for the one-third of children’s services that are not in good shape, because that is almost certainly where the accidents will happen. One of the key findings of the Sara Sharif review was that there have been systemic weaknesses again and again, despite all the inquiries and the well-intentioned actions that followed them. This is important enough that we feel we have to prepare and assume that the worst might happen and do everything in our power to prevent it.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I added my name to Amendments 121A and 131A. There is a real problem of mistrust with elective home education against traditional education. I acknowledge my noble friend Lord Crisp, and am delighted to be on his working party to try to do something about it.

I was in the same meeting as the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and my noble friend Lord Russell where we talked to the DfE. It was rather wonderful, because instead of talking about technicalities, one of the people there started talking about cricket, which I am much happier with than Section 31s and things. He accused us of setting the field for a bad ball—so we were being extremes. Obviously, I came back with no setting the field for a bad ball but putting some sweepers out as well just in case. The whole point of legislation is to avoid the disasters, the out of the ordinary, the Sara Sharifs. We were also told that a possible future home visit might deter parents from seeking help with a Section 31. Again, I cannot see why. These amendments are incredibly sensible and thoughtful, and their spirit would help those avoidable disasters, which, tragically, may well happen.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Deputy Speaker (Lord Russell of Liverpool) (CB)]

I remind the House that if Amendment 138 is agreed, I cannot call Amendments 139 and 140 because of pre-emption.

Amendment 138

Moved by

--- Later in debate ---

I say to the Minister that there is time for further reflection on this. If this were something that the Government were minded to do at some future point, it would build relationships with home-educating parents and children more strongly than almost anything else.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I rise, first, to thank the Government, on behalf of myself and the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, for bringing forward Amendment 146, putting carers on the register. We heard moving testimony in Committee about some incredibly young carers aged eight, nine or 10 looking after several members of their families—siblings and parents. In some cases, they were apparently being home-educated, but from the point of view of the adults they were caring for, looking after them took priority. That is why it is so important and so helpful that they will be recorded.

I also support my noble friend Lord Crisp and Amendment 175ZC from the noble Lord, Lord Wei, which is along the same lines—it is for children who are coming to the final parts of their home education and will, one hopes, take and pass exams. There is a real postcode lottery, particularly post-Covid, in access to examination centres. In parts of the country such as Cornwall or large parts of the north of England, it is extraordinarily difficult for parents to access examination centres for their children. In some cases, they have to travel one and a half to three hours to go to them. In many cases, their children are not taking a single paper; they might be taking three or four papers for mathematics, so they have to go back and forth. Some of those children will have some challenging behaviours and may find that an examination centre is not an environment that they are entirely comfortable in. Having it within reasonable reach and access of where one lives is exceptionally important.

For those reasons, I hope that the Minister will think carefully about this and look at some of the facts and figures. The charity, Education Otherwise, has looked into this in great detail and has a lot of really quite useful and compelling information. I hope that if the department is prepared to look at that, it might be able to think again.

[Lord Wei (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 161A, 175ZA, 175ZB and 175ZC in my name. These amendments sit in a part of the Bill that would be felt most sharply not in Whitehall but in kitchens and living rooms by parents doing their best for children whose needs do not fit neatly in the school system. When Parliament reaches into family life, it has to do so with care, because it is easy to create a framework that looks reasonable on paper and yet breathes mistrust in practice.

Again, I want to acknowledge at the outset the Government’s movement in this group. Government Amendment 158 recognises the reality of exam access and ensures that information about GCSE routes can be provided to parents who ask for it. Amendment 159 creates a regular forum for parents to raise concerns and discuss how this regime operates. Amendment 161 tidies the drafting around exam-related provisions. These are sensible steps. They start to show an understanding that families need information and a channel of engagement, and I welcome them.

Yet there remains a gap between permission and protection. Information may be offered, but access can still fail, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, and others. A forum may be held, but families can still feel unheard when nothing changes. These amendments in my name aim to close that gap with light-touch safeguards that strengthen legitimacy and reduce conflict. With the Government having shown that they are listening, I think that many of us hope that, on these quite non-contentious amendments, they will also come back with suggested changes to the Bill, as well as afterwards in the statutory guidance, to understand these realities.

Amendment 161A would require each local authority to establish a home education parental advisory board, composed primarily of parents with recent experience of elective home education in the area. We are not trying to create new bureaucracy for its own sake; it is about a practical feedback loop. Families most affected by these powers are often those most able to spot unintended consequences earlier than we can in this environment. When policy is made without their input, misunderstanding becomes routine, and routine misunderstanding can become the culture of the system. Advisory boards would keep local authorities grounded in reality; they would create discipline around reasoning, and when an authority departs from a formal recommendation, my amendment suggests that it needs to explain why. That simple requirement can improve decision-making and build trust.

I want to express strong support for Amendment 160 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, which addresses a long-standing injustice that the House should not tolerate any longer. Home-educated children face serious obstacles in accessing examinations. Parents are left to navigate a patchwork of centres, fees, refusals, capacity limits and inconsistent arrangements. This is not just in small cases—it is in many instances. Qualifications open doors, and access is important; we must not make the children pay the price. With my own children, we had to travel several hundred miles to the south coast pretty much for all their GCSEs, and you can imagine how many they did, how many you multiply that by, and how many hotel stays that meant for my dear wife, who did most of the heavy lifting, although I drove a few times myself.

My Amendment 175ZC would place a clear duty on local authorities to secure reasonable access to approved exam centres, building on the thinking around Amendment 160, including adjustments for children with special educational needs. That would ensure that the responsibility is not left just to good will or market convenience. Somebody mentioned that, in the summer of last year, around 47,000 home-educated children in England were in their exam years, yet there are fewer than 200 centres listed as supporting them, many with limited capacity—and there is uneven geographic coverage. Whether a child can access qualifications should not depend on commercial viability or geography; we need to provide equitable access to this basic infrastructure as a responsibility of the state.

Amendment 175ZA deals with the related harm that is already appearing. Some providers are withdrawing opportunities for home-educated children in anticipation of new compliance burdens. Museums, activities, learning programmes and even basic services can become quietly harder to access. That may not be the Government’s intention but, because you are talking about a higher level of scrutiny and information-sharing requirements, that is already causing people to hold back. This amendment would draw a clear statutory line against discrimination and extra administrative hurdles imposed solely because a child is educated otherwise than at school. Lawful educational choice should not become a reason for exclusion.

Finally, Amendment 175ZB addresses the people who will operate these powers. I welcome the fact that the Government have indicated that training will be provided to those in local authorities working with home-educating families, and I welcome that. The House knows that guidance can be diluted over time, especially when you are under pressure and you have lots of families to look after with not much more funding. This amendment would require a national training standard to be issued, covering elective home education and related SEND, lawful decision-making and the avoidance of unconscious bias when dealing with these families. These families deserve consistency, and officers deserve clarity; a system with serious powers needs competent hands.

Safeguarding works best when families co-operate, and co-operation relies on trust. Trust is earned through fairness, understanding and clear routes for participation. These amendments would strengthen these foundations, and I hope that the Government show good will towards the many home-educating families who are going to have huge disruption to their lives in the coming years by looking at these amendments and others today, especially those on the area of access to exams. I urge the House to support them.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to support Amendment 208 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan. The reason is very simple. I do not know how many of your Lordships have seen a documentary available on BBC iPlayer called “Lover, Liar, Predator”. For those who have not seen it, it is pretty searing. It has a happy ending in the sense that the women who were abused by this man—who started at the age of 17—in the end learned about one another, got together and very bravely faced their accuser in court. A Scottish jury found the predator guilty on all counts by a unanimous decision.

The reason I mention this is that, in almost every case, the predator seized upon young women when they were 16, 17 or 18. That is the age at which, frequently, young women—and some young men, although they are usually a bit slower on the uptake—get involved in relationships. At that age, without the right education, without understanding, frankly, the nature of some men, it is easy to get into a relationship in which one quickly loses one’s sense of self—the ability to take one’s own decisions and to direct the course of one’s life.

This was articulated at the briefing the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, kindly arranged last week, which some of us were at. Some of the students themselves spoke powerfully of their own cases, or those of people they have known who, at that vulnerable stage in their lives, growing into sexual beings, got it wrong. Given particularly that this accords completely with the Government’s new strategy, the more we can do to reinforce that and to enable this cadre of children—some several hundred thousand, which is a not insignificant number—to receive the education that all their peers in other forms of education are receiving seems a no-brainer.

[Baroness Sater (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 243C standing in my name and those of my noble friends in sport, the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, and the noble Lord, Lord Addington. I thank them for supporting this amendment.

My amendment follows up on an amendment previously brought forward so powerfully by my noble friend Lord Moynihan in Committee, which attracted cross-party support. I am delighted that he has rejoined our Front Bench, with responsibility for energy and net zero. We will miss him from debates on sport policy. I will do my best to match his energy.

We have an ambition across the House to raise educational outcomes and improve children’s well-being. The school curriculum is currently under review, and that makes this a particularly timely moment. My amendment is offered in a constructive spirit, as was my noble friend Lord Moynihan’s, as a way of supporting the Government’s wider aims by ensuring that physical education and school sport are considered in a coherent and strategic way.

This amendment asks the Secretary of State to publish within 12 months

“a national strategy for physical education and sport in schools”,

and to review and report on it annually to Parliament. It does not advise how schools should deliver provision. Instead, it brings together existing priorities such as daily physical activity, teacher training and inclusion for disabled pupils into a single framework, with clear outcomes and accountability. To be clear, it is intended to assist and not constrain government policy.

The evidence shows that regular physical activity and engagement in school sport not only improves health and well-being but supports concentration, behaviour, attendance and attainment in literacy and numeracy, with benefits that extend into later life. Many schools are already doing great work in this area, often under significant pressure. To make this work more effective, teachers need the right resources, training and support.

While the Bill has children’s well-being in its name, it has not addressed how schools could properly use physical education, sport and physical activity to support this and improve educational outcomes. This amendment seeks to offer a fully integrated national strategy to address that gap and monitor and evaluate the best way of doing it. Data, evaluation and analysis are so important to this endeavour.

It is a strong belief, which I know is shared across this Chamber, that physical education is not merely a subject; it is a cornerstone in the development of young people, fostering health, resilience, teamwork and confidence. When embedded effectively, it can also contribute to wider educational goals, supporting behaviour, attendance and attainment across the curriculum. This amendment also encourages collaboration between education, health, sport and the voluntary sector, and provides a framework to align existing efforts in this space behind a shared national vision. It identifies the leadership role of the Minister in bringing that collaboration together and ensuring consistency of approach.

Back in 2021, I was a member of the taskforce established by the Association of Physical Education. We published a report, which issued a clear call to government to put physical education at the heart of school life. If the Government are serious, as I believe they are, about improving well-being in schools and giving every child an opportunity to thrive, this amendment would offer a constructive opportunity to consider how a national strategy for physical education and school sport could help deliver those ambitions. I therefore hope that the Minister will see this amendment in that spirit and give it careful and positive consideration.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

I got stuck with this horrible image of the gut microbiome. I could not it get out of my head, so I am now going to inflict it on your Lordships. We have millions of microbes in our gut, as followers of Tim Spector and ZOE will know. Some of them are good and are helping us, while some are bad and are not helping us. It has taken a lot of research to work out which bugs are which, and how you foster some and get rid of the others. That is also true about education tech. I got to thinking that, if you do not properly monitor and filter what you put into your gut, you end up with not just microbes but nasty parasites that are not doing you any good but sucking out your nutrients, in the same way that these apps are potentially sucking out children’s data without their permission. We have to correct those things, as my noble friend has said.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I put my name to the amendments tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, for a very simple reason. An awful lot of what we have been discussing today, and in recent days in Committee, is about trying to make this Bill as child-centric and school-centric as possible. There is a common theme running through many of these amendments. Given the pace at which the world is changing and the challenges that parents, schools, teachers and children have, to allow each individual entity to try to navigate their way through these changes in a wonderfully sort or British laissez-faire way will be wholly unrealistic and will not produce good outcomes.

Whether or not one likes to compare this country to them, examples of countries that have very centralised approaches to identifying what is safe and what is not safe for children include the People’s Republic of China—which, I remind noble Lords, has the only parliamentary assembly larger than your Lordships’ House—and France, to which some hereditary Peers perhaps have some antipathy for ancestral reasons. In both cases, those countries take it upon themselves systematically to proactively try to identify what is safe and what is not safe.

As an example that I think I may have mentioned in Committee of what can go wrong, and is going wrong, one of the best known technologies in classrooms now is Google Classroom. Let us say that you are on Google Classroom, provided through the school, you are being asked to use that to do a project, and that project is something to do with geography. To complete your project, you naturally go to Google Maps, which is conveniently there on the screen as part of the cluster of products linked into Google Classroom. The minute you leave Google Classroom and go on to Google Maps, you as a child and you as a school lose every protection you previously had for your data. Everything suddenly becomes visible to Google, and the data becomes saleable. It is making money out of the schoolchildren who are using the apps linked to Google Classroom.

One has to understand the financial model that these very successful companies use. We cannot expect individual schools and the data-processing officers within schools, who will be teachers who probably have multiple other responsibilities, to be on top of all the changes taking place in the products being sold in a very alluring way to schools. The companies will often say that this is being done with the overt or tacit approval and backing of His Majesty’s Government, which may or may not be true. It is extraordinarily difficult for these schools to identify what is safe and not safe, and what is effective in terms of outcome and what is less effective, because there is no moderating body at the moment that is trying to make sense of this on behalf of these schools, which are being assailed on all sides by multiple pressures.

On the one hand, we have a Government who are implying that this is good and we need more of it. Simultaneously, there is all the debate we are having about the amount of time we are spending on screens and the way we are using screens possibly having very unfortunate side-effects. To have all of this going on at the same time without any clear guidance and sense of direction from His Majesty’s Government is distinctly unhelpful. All these amendments are simply asking the Government to take a lead, to provide in a totally apolitical way some clarity about what is safe and what is not safe, to put processes in place to ascribe responsibility to those bodies capable of doing this, to do it in a co-ordinated way and, above all, to remember that we are talking about are the short, medium, and long-term interests of children.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, it is a bit like the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, having the two doctors in the room and great passion. It reminds me a bit of this Chamber, actually: we can certainly go for it at times.

I normally shy away from edtech, but I thought, “No, come on, grow up, Storey, you need to look at this carefully”. I went into teacher mode, I am afraid. I have some general thoughts. All the amendments grapple with the tension between protecting children and preparing them for the digital world. We need to balance parental rights, children’s educational needs and teachers’ autonomy. Technology is neither inherently good nor bad, and implementation and context matter. Finally, there is the risk of one-size-fits-all solutions not accounting for diverse school context and pupils’ needs.

I turn first to Amendment 227:

“Register of software tools permitted in schools”.


There are positives, are there not? This would ensure minimum safety and privacy standards for educational software, protect children from inappropriate content or data harvesting, and address current inconsistencies in firewalls, as some schools overblock, preventing legitimate learning. What are the concerns? There is a risk of creating a bureaucratic bottleneck as innovation in edtech moves faster than government approval processes. It could stifle teachers’ ability to use emerging tools or respond to pedagogical needs. Whitelisting requirements could be too rigid. What about trial periods for new tools? And who decides what meets curriculum principles could become politically contentious.

Then I look at Amendments 234, 235 and 236 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. Their intent is to reduce screen time for young children, which is particularly important for early years development and the reception baseline. They address equity concerns that not all families might have reliable devices or internet access at home. Handwriting skills and motor development remain important, especially for young children. The amendments reduce the potential for cheating or AI assistance in assessments. They give parents agency over the child’s screen exposure. From head teacher experience, I say that some parents are deeply concerned about excessive screen time and lack of control.

The concerns are that reducing screen time might disadvantage students who are more comfortable with digital tools. It could also limit the development of general computer skills and risk making education feel out of step with modern skills. It could create additional administrative burdens for schools, as managing two parallel systems could be impractical for certain subjects beyond just computing, and might inadvertently stigmatise children whose parents opt out. So it is over to the Minister to unravel the pros and the cons and tell us what we should do.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Wednesday 25th March 2026 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Colville of Culross (CB)]

My Lords, I welcome the government consultation, but I am distressed by how very wide its scope is and, as the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, said, how very vague the outcomes seem to be.

The arguments that I put forward in my AI chatbot amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill also apply here. These amendments will allow the Secretary of State to age-gate any internet service or function. She will be able to determine at what age and by what methods a platform can be restricted. Any regulations under these powers will not be able to be amended by Parliament. All the arguments made by noble Lords last week about the severely limited parliamentary scrutiny of regulations are just as concerning this week with these amendments.

I support the Government carrying out a consultation on a social media ban for under-16s. Evidence of the effect of such a powerful measure needs to be examined and responded to. But I urge the Minister to look at the important changes that would be made to the Government’s amendment by Amendment 38E from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron.

The government consultation needs to have parameters, which are provided by her amendment, as she has already set out. Many are issues that do not seem to have been covered by the Online Safety Act—addiction, different developmental ages, unsolicited contact and live-streaming. The restriction of these harms to children could be rapidly implemented under the amendment by the prospect of tech companies facing business disruption measures. These are the enforcement measures that so many of us campaigning against online harms have been calling for. All these issues would be considered not in a consultation without time limit but in one that must conclude within six months. I call on the Minister to take on board the concerns expressed in Amendment 38E and put them into action.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, as mentioned earlier, Google and Meta were today found in the Supreme Court of California to be guilty of causing pain and suffering to a plaintiff who had brought the case. The jury has initially ruled that $3 million in damages will be paid for that pain and suffering. The jury is now considering punitive damages for malice and fraud. I put it to your Lordships’ House that today we are the jury. We have heard about the malice and fraud that these companies are visiting on so many of our children and, indeed, on their unfortunate parents. We as the jurors should deliberate today and give a resounding verdict.

[Baroness Bertin (Con)]

My Lords, I will be brief, because others have spoken so eloquently. I support my noble friend Lord Nash in his heroic efforts to stop social media for under-16s, and I support the spirit of the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, as well.

I feel that I must represent the army of parents out there who are bitterly disappointed that the Government are failing to act decisively and quickly. A consultation is always code for a fudge. We have been there; we know what that is. The Government’s amendments are presented as action, but in reality they offer very little certainty. They create space for delay and a future compromise that may arrive with limited scrutiny, as we have heard so eloquently put.

We are being asked to accept a risk, and not an abstract one. It is a risk with our children’s safety and it offers an olive branch—a wholly inappropriate olive branch now, with all the court rulings that we are hearing about—to social media companies that have already done so much damage to our children and their childhoods. They must be absolutely delighted with this compromise that the Government have come up with. I predict that, over the coming months, there will be a PR blitz about how great they are, how concerned they are with safety and how much safety by design they are putting into progress—all of which will no doubt have to be policed by us, the parents.

Instagram’s recent effort, which I am sure it wants a medal for, was to alert parents who have put the highly complicated safety notices on that their child is searching for self-harm material. Here is an idea: let us stop them seeing that material in the first place. Like so many families, we are constantly negotiating this space: what is allowed, what is not, what feels safe, what suddenly does not feel safe. Something that seems harmless can very quickly change. The point that the Pinterest boss made is very powerful, because a lot of these sites that feel harmless are in fact constantly trying to sell content to our children.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Monday 20th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Harding of Winscombe (Con)]

My Lords, I shall briefly add to the eloquent contribution made by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron. I recognise that all parties have moved and that the groups of amendments are much closer than they were when we last debated this topic. However, I worry that the pressure is still on the child, not on the tech companies.

I too will support my noble friend Lord Nash should he choose to divide the House, but I ask the Government to think carefully, when they bring back the next group of amendments—as I suspect they will need to—about what the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, just said about setting up a regime that, in technical economist-speak, internalises the risks within the company so that the company has to bear the cost to work out how its products are safe enough for our children to use. That is what we do in the physical world. We do not ban children using toys; we enforce health and safety legislation so that toys cannot be sold to children unless they are safe. Unfortunately, I fear too much of this is banning children and not enough is holding executives and businesses to account to make their products suitable for children.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I largely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, who brings all the rigour that you would expect from an MBA from Harvard Business School to the analysis of this problem. Ultimately, it is a business issue. These companies are making a vast amount of money from, basically, monetising the time that these children are spending on what are designed to be addictive products. That is the simple truth. Until and unless we find a way of disrupting the business models of the companies behind those platforms in such a way that it hurts them—the point at which individual directors and senior executives know they will be held personally accountable and may well go to jail, as well as the companies being fined vast amounts of money—there will really not be a tipping point. This often feels like pushing water uphill.

I want to make a point about educational technology. We are focusing very much on smartphones and the terrible effects they are having on so many young people. Simultaneously, the Government have been promoting, quietly but overtly over many years, the increased use of technology in schools, from primary schools onwards, partly as an understandable result of Covid, when your Lordships’ House even managed to embrace technology to a degree that many of us would have thought completely unthinkable. Schools have indeed been embracing technology, and in many cases the effects on the young people in those schools that have done so are not good.

Many countries of the world have recognised this and are doing a complete U-turn on their previous eagerness to get children in front of touchscreens and computer programs. They are trying to reverse the effects because they have been doing it for long enough that they have seen the evidence produced of the effect that it has on children: reduced attention spans and reduced vocabulary. In Scandinavia—surprise, surprise—libraries are doing the unthinkable: they are bringing back books, having largely decided to no longer invest in them five or six years ago.

I appeal to the Government, and particularly to the Department for Education, to look carefully at what is going on in schools. Schools need advice from the Government about how to deal with this issue. The blandishments of these companies, which are large, sophisticated and profitable in selling their products to schools, have all the smoothness of a tobacco or asbestos salesman, but in many cases their terms and conditions mean they are monetising those children and their details, along with the schools’ details, and the educational product they are producing is substandard.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Motion D on the phone ban. The Minister talked about strengthening guidance and Ofsted being able to inspect schools’ mobile phone policies, but I speak as a parent as well as a teacher when I say that parents do not understand statutory footing; they understand a legal ban. If the Government want to reduce unnecessary burdens on head teachers then, from what we have seen over and again, that has to mean an outright ban in the Bill.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Monday 27th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, the Government are arguing that they need much more time to consider the evidence because of the given challenges of enforcement. But the bereaved parents who have lost their children through online harms do not agree. They want action now, not some time in the future.

Last week, I met again the bereaved parents who have written a letter to the Prime Minister. They desperately wanted to meet the Prime Minister personally to show their strength of feeling for having a social media ban for under-16s. To hear their harrowing, heartbreaking stories would make any morally minded person weep. The Prime Minister has met the tech companies: why not also with those who have suffered the tragic losses of their children? The bereaved parents felt so hurt by that. They are seeking change so that other families do not have to go through what they had to endure and still do every day since their loss.

Right now, as we debate at this moment, a child is being affected negatively by social media harms. How many more children will be harmed every day by the dangerous, addictive effects of social media before something is done to stop it as soon as possible? I urge the Prime Minister to meet the bereaved parents to give them hope and security; for the Government to accept the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Nash, for the sake of our children’s future happiness and mental well-being; and to give the nation’s thanks to all the bereaved parents who are fighting and campaigning for change. Let us not let them down. Let us act now. Remember, as I keep saying, childhood lasts a lifetime.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I am sure that it will be source of huge disappointment to all noble Lords that I do not intend to give a valedictory speech.

[Noble Lords]

Shame, shame.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

Indeed.

I thank the Minister for responding to the points I raised on educational technology at the last round of ping-pong. It has an awful lot of consultation in it, rather than action, which is emblematic of the situation we find ourselves in.

We went through only one round of ping-pong on the Online Safety Act, the reason being, as the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, said, that there was a degree of cross-party accord, which went to the nub of the problems, along with genuine interaction between the key parties and a willingness to listen to one another. I am sorry that we do not seem to be in quite the same place today.

I support Motion A1, from the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and particularly Motion A2, in the name of my noble friend Lady Kidron, for exactly the same reasons as the noble Baroness, Lady Harding. I am not sure that a social media ban is the perfect solution—I am not sure there is one—but the intent is to concentrate the Government’s mind.

If noble Lords want to see what leadership in this area looks like, I draw attention to a column in the Financial Times of 17 April by no less a person than the Prime Minister of Spain, Pedro Sánchez. He is doing two things simultaneously: he is standing up to our occasional friend across the Atlantic, who is currently probably testing His Majesty’s patience somewhat, but I am sure will be fuelling his sense of humour, probably unintentionally. Secondly, what the Prime Minister of Spain wrote was clear and unequivocal: on protecting under-16 year-olds on social media, consultation and talking about it are not enough: what is required is action.

His Majesty’s Government really must do better on this account. They are telling us, at least if we believe the press, that we are thinking about trying to get closer to our erstwhile colleagues in the European Union. Within Europe, France, Norway and Spain have all said quite unequivocally that they will move to protect from social media children under the age of 16 and, in one case, 15. By working together, all of us who might take this as a course of action will come across the same problems. Australia is coming up with ingenious ways to get around it and the ways in which the companies are reacting. Talking to each other to find a joint approach, to find out where the loopholes are and to close them together, is surely an intelligent way to respond to this, rather than trying to go it alone.

On Motion A2, His Majesty’s Government really do not need a consultation. All they need to do is shut themselves in a room with my noble friend Lady Kidron, who would be able to tell them, with her eyes closed, exactly what they need to do to get action and results.

The Minister mentioned that she was very grateful for her interaction with a variety of people across the House on this subject. One person who has largely not been included in those discussions is my noble friend Lady Kidron. If there are any meetings, guess who is usually the last to be met? That is a compliment to the noble Baroness: they know she will ask some extremely awkward questions and will almost certainly know a great deal more than the Ministers, who are not experts, but also than the so-called experts who are advising them. But that is not the intelligent way to go about this.

As a backdrop, the columnist Gideon Rachman has written a piece in the Financial Times entitled, “Are Europe and America headed for divorce?” I suggest to the Government that looking over their shoulder, which they have done since they took office, and worrying about what the United States might or might not do or think, is getting us nowhere. If it comes to a choice between looking after our children and protecting them as quickly as possible, and worrying about what the US might do to react and whether that could hurt us economically, surely that is not a proper choice. Children, obviously, come first, and I implore the Government to follow that route.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a source of great regret to me that I will be following the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and possibly the noble Lord, Lord Nash, into the Lobbies, because I think the Government are making a mistake here. We should have been much more courageous in addressing these problems.

I am mindful of the fact that the United States of America is making life rather difficult for us at the moment, because taking any kind of independent stance seems to be a reason to be roundly scorned by the United States President, but there has to be a moment when we take a stand. We have done it with the war in Iran and it would be right to do it here, for the very reasons that have been expounded by others already, which is that this is about protecting our children. We are making a grievous mistake by not listening to those voices about the need for us to work in coalition on this and not to make it something that we worry about.

As the noble Lord, Lord Russell, just said, we have to be prepared to stand up to the technology oligarchs who basically do not want any regulation at all. We have to be brave and courageous, in this area, in empowering Ofcom to do its job properly and in protecting those whose lives are made so difficult in trying to restrain their children from using these phones in the ways that we have heard about. I really regret it, because I do not want to disagree with the Government at the moment, but we should see that there are principles that must be adhered to here. I hope that other colleagues on these Benches see this as too important for us to put off for three long years.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments and / or reasons
Tuesday 28th April 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Government for listening to the voices of concern, including those of the bereaved parents, for our children’s safety to be at the forefront of all our minds.

As we move forward to the next steps, it might be a bit late in the day to make this suggestion, but I have an idea to throw into the mix. It may sound radical, but it is for the tech companies and IT platforms to require a licence from Ofcom to operate in this country. It may sound like a crazy idea, but radio and TV companies need a licence, so why not tech companies and social media platforms? If they do not comply then their licence will be taken away from them or they will be fined huge sums. This is one way to get them to be focused. Are we bold or intrepid enough to do this? It could be the answer to keeping them focused and to keeping our children safe. Age assurance is the key which they need to operate to keep our children safe. As we move forward, I hope that everyone will make it their responsibility to do just that, in every way possible. Ofcom is vital to all this. I look forward to working with the Government on this important issue and to us keeping the focus of our minds on our children’s safety, happiness and contentment for the future.

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, here we are again. It feels a bit like doomscrolling to keep returning to this subject. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and all those who have supported him for pushing water uphill successfully, defying gravity. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, for appropriating, with her permission, the Motion moved yesterday by my noble friend Lady Kidron.

I thank the Minister for having moved. However, I take issue with her description of where we are today as a “landing point”. Rather than us being at a landing point, I hope that we all feel that we are at a launching point, because we need to go a great deal further. One of the things that one has learned throughout this process is that there is a body of knowledge on this issue among some people in both Houses of Parliament that is quite considerable. There is a very high level of knowledge of some of the issues, some of the potential solutions and the faults with some of those potential solutions. There is no perfect answer.

For many of us who have been quite closely involved with the genesis of the Online Safety Act and what has happened thereafter, there has been an apparent lack of interest and engagement from some in the current Government and the departments involved to co-operate and collaborate with those Members of both Houses who have extensive knowledge and to tap into that knowledge. There is a loose collection of those involved in this. We are called the “tech team”—a nice tautology. The members of that team want to help the Government and be behind or alongside them. We do not wish to be constantly harrying the Government and encouraging them to do more. Yesterday I was wearing a tie which had some acrobatic, leaping elephants, because it required a level of noise and drumbeats to get the Government’s attention. Today, I am wearing a tie which has a series of sheep jumping over a hurdle, because those of us on the tech team need to summon our inner sheepdogs to manoeuvre the Government in the right direction.

Motion A1 is not, as the Minister said, about creating restraint on the Government. It is about creating focus. What is contained in Motion A1 is a very clear description of what can and should be done at speed, without restraint, to get the ball rolling. I do not think that anything that comes out of the consultation will tell us anything that we did not know. If anything, it may get slightly more confusing because I suspect that it will be quite unfocused. I appeal to the Government to listen to those involved in this who perhaps have the most history, the most bruises, the most insight and the most knowledge about what is going on internationally, not just in this country, to work together for the benefit of children.

I will support the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, if he decides to test the opinion of the House—more in hope than in expectation of a great victory. However, I appeal to the Government to listen and to work with us and not, as it occasionally feels, against us.