Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Sentamu Excerpts

Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I was going to speak in support of Amendment 451, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, but perhaps he is going to introduce it when he winds up for his Front Bench. What I have to say is probably relevant to the wider aspects of this debate. I declare that I am a patron of Humanists UK.

I have listened to children speaking about the unregistered schools that they went to, of all faiths. Of course this is only about some schools. Nevertheless, I was very struck by what they had to say about the paucity of the curriculum, often about the enforced dogma of what was taught, sometimes about abuse and sometimes about a very anti-social and anti-democratic ethos. Of course this does not at all represent all faith schools, but those children themselves were not alone.

In short, we need to get a grip on unregistered schools, especially in the case of children for whom education has not been working well, as in the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Storey. I very much look forward to my noble friend the Minister’s explanation of how we navigate this real problem in the free and diverse society we live in, as we must—we must navigate it. Unregistered schools are not all good—on the contrary.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, the concern of those who have spoken against Amendment 427C in the names of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and the noble Lord, Lord Glasman, is, if I have understood right, around whether these pupils are being safeguarded. Proposed new paragraph (h)(iii) says

“where the institution demonstrates to the Local Authority that it provides the required safeguarding measures”.

That is important. If it did not say that, I would be joining those who do not want this amendment.

The noble Lord said that it is wrong to call these schools and to think that they are providing education, and that the education being provided is in home-schooling. In terms of safeguarding, the amendment is very clear: the local authority must be satisfied that safeguarding measures are in place. Therefore, for me, the arguments fall away because the drift of them was about whether there is sufficient safeguarding for these pupils.

Because the amendment is quite sensitive, I was not going to speak to it or support it. Having heard the arguments, I am persuaded that proposed new paragraph (h)(iii) answers the question. Therefore, I am bound to support this amendment.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I want to speak to this group of amendments on the poorly understood world of unregistered provision, including the types of religious institution that have had a lot of discussion already, as well as looking more broadly. I support two of the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Lucas—Amendments 427 and 427B.

Clause 36 is a constructive attempt to put sensible controls in place around the oversight of educational provision for children outside schools and colleges. It creates a wider category of independent education institution to supplement the narrower concept of an independent school. This is a complicated and messy landscape. I could draw out at least four strands—there are probably others—and they overlap. There are the alternative provisions, most often for children with severe behavioural problems. There is a huge patchwork of provision there. Some of it is registered and inspected, so it has a level of quality control, but much of the weakest is not, and there are no neat cut-offs.

A school puts two children in a volunteer-run community garden for one afternoon a week. That would be best viewed as part of the school’s educational model, and the school would be accountable for the child’s experience. However, if those same children are at the garden four days a week and are barely attending school, it is unrealistic to ignore the fact that the gardens become the children’s main source of education —though it is clearly an incomplete education—and that school registrations become a fiction, perhaps to avoid recording an exclusion.

It is often assumed that alternative provision is or should be a brief stint to prepare a child for reintegration into a mainstream school. However, the reality is that few children who move into alternative provision will successfully reintegrate. Hardly any such children take their GCSEs in a mainstream school. AP needs to be seen as a mode of education, not just as respite care.

Then there is provision for children with psychological problems, such as school refusal. Again, unregistered provision is often born out of excellent local initiatives. If a child makes use of such a programme for a short period as part of a plan to help them acclimatise to a suitable school, direct oversight might be overkill. However, if it becomes a de facto permanent placement, it has become that child’s main place of education and it needs to work to the same standards as other schools.

As has been touched on, there are programmes for children who are home-educated, including sports, music, art and other worthwhile activities. Parents are entitled to home-educate, and sports, music and art are all part of a rounded education, but, if an organisation is running five different programmes, one each day, and a child attends all of them, the reality is that, at that point, the organisation is best viewed in the round as having the characteristics of a school—or at least an independent education institution—in taking responsibility when parents are not present for a large part of the week. It is hard to see why such an entity should sit outside the legal framework that protects children’s education and safeguarding.

Finally, I need to talk about illegal schools. It is depressing that they exist, and even more depressing that some of them operate knowingly and intentionally outside the law. Ofsted has a small budget to investigate suspected illegal schools and to warn those that are outside the law that they must register with the Department for Education. It has successfully prosecuted proprietors of such schools, at least one of them twice; I should day that I do not think any of those prosecutions related to a Jewish-affiliated institution. Current legislation just is not equipped to deal with bad-faith operators. It dates back to a time when it was almost unimaginable that a school that had omitted to register would not do so when it was pointed out.

It has been extraordinarily easy for operators to sidestep the law. There is a kind of artificial separation. An operator running multiple illegal institutions, teaching the same group of children in one location in the morning then bussing them to another location to be taught in the afternoon, may claim that they are separate institutions and that neither reaches the threshold to be considered as a school, but, clearly, the reality is that it is a single school. That is why I support my noble friend Lord Lucas’s Amendment 427B. There needs to be a sensible ability to take a holistic perspective so that avoidance does not readily happen.

We have had a lot of debate about institutions that rely on the fact that children are not being taught subjects such as English and mathematics, but only an exclusively religious programme, to say that they are not schools. It is a shocking fact that there are British citizens reaching adulthood without the most basic education that they need in order to play their full part in British society and the workplace, if they choose to do so, as adults. They may not choose that, but pre-emptively taking away their capacity to do so should concern us deeply. It seems unreasonable that an institution that is part of such a model should want to be outside the scope of any meaningful scrutiny. We know from IICSA and from many previous cases that, sadly, a strong religious affiliation is not a guarantee that children will be completely protected from the kinds of harm that adults can inflict on them.

It is worrying that so many people do not want to acknowledge or discuss this problem and its tensions. There is widespread hesitancy to venture into sensitive areas linked to faith or ethnicity; we have seen this where other issues have arisen recently. I can see the temptation of offering an opt-out, as proposed by my noble friend Lord Lucas, yet I also know that the better path is to carry on working to try to find models that do a better job of reconciling the desires of a faith group and the important rights of children. I know that many of my colleagues, including my noble friends Lord Nash, Lord Agnew, Lady Morgan and Lady Barran, worked hard in their time in government to try to find those next steps and better accommodations. An opt-out is just not, in my view, sensible or workable. At the point when this country has become simply a patchwork of self-segregated communities, cut off from each another, there will not be much of a nation left.

I note that there is an evolving picture internationally around the same issues that we have been seeing in schools in England. As chief inspector, I talked to my counterparts in countries such as France and Sweden, which are seeing parallel trends. This is something that needs discussing, not just domestically but internationally. I believe that it is impossible—and, indeed, undesirable—to try to make tidy regulatory categories covering every kind of provision outside school. They quickly become obsolete, as would any micro-precise thresholds.

Overall, the extension of scope in Clause 36 is important and justified, but it is also important that the regulations that are made are clear and well understood, and that enforcement is adequately funded, with enough resource for Ofsted to carry on its investigatory work and for the DfE to act where it should. There has to be a high level of transparency about the work, to help stave off pre-emptive attempts to brand this difficult work as biased or unfair. We must carry on doing all that we can to make the intrinsically knotty subject matter here fully discussable.