Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Meg Hillier and Laura Trott

Wednesday 8th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Laura Trott (Sevenoaks) (Con)]

I beg to move an amendment, to leave out from “That” to the end of the Question and add:

“this House, while welcoming measures to improve child protection and safeguarding, declines to give a Second Reading to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill because it undermines the long-standing combination of school freedom and accountability that has led to educational standards rising in England, effectively abolishes academy freedoms which have been integral to that success and is regressive in approach, leading to worse outcomes for pupils; because it ends freedom over teacher pay and conditions, making it harder to attract and retain good teachers; because it ends freedom over Qualified Teacher Status, making teacher recruitment harder; because it removes school freedoms over the curriculum, leading to less innovation; because repealing the requirements for failing schools to become academies and for all new schools to be academies will undermine school improvement and remove the competition which has led to rising standards; because the Bill will make it harder for good schools to expand, reducing parental choice and access to a good education; and calls upon the Government to develop new legislative proposals for children’s wellbeing including establishing a national statutory inquiry into historical child sexual exploitation, focused on grooming gangs.”

The Bill in front of us today is a Bill of two halves, one of which seeks to protect children and improve safeguarding and support for children in care. While the Opposition will seek to amend various aspects of what is being put forward in Committee, we do see value in it. But the other half of the Bill is the policy equivalent of a wrecking ball. It is an all-out assault on teachers, the education system and standards. It is nothing less than education vandalism and we will oppose it with every fibre of our beings.

The House must be in no doubt that the Bill really matters. It destroys the consensus built over two decades in England on how to improve schools—a consensus that has led to English children being the best in the western world at reading and maths. I cannot understand why the Government would seek to reverse that progress. What are they hoping to achieve? It seems to be policy built purely on ideology. More than that, it is wrong. I desperately hope that Government Members will come to see that.

Madam Deputy Speaker, you would think that a Labour Government would feel proud of the record they had on education under Blair. It was that Labour Government who innovated and made way for academies. When Blair talks about academies, he says that an academy

“belongs not to some remote bureaucracy, not to the rulers of government, local or national, but to itself, for itself. The school is in charge of its own destiny.”

That Blairite principle—a school in charge of its own destiny—was built on and expanded by subsequent Conservative Governments. What has been the result of this largely cross-party consensus? A thriving education system in which English children have soared up the programme for international student assessment rankings.

I see before me a move away from all the things that have enabled that success. The Bill seeks to turn its back on Labour’s history and take back those academy freedoms on curriculum, on pay and on behaviour. You name it, they are reversing it—all the things that have done so much to improve our education system. Step by step, the very policies that saw our schools rise up the international league tables are being reversed. I guarantee that just as we went up, as a result of the Bill we will come down those very same rankings. And who will suffer? The poorest pupils in society.

[Dame Meg Hillier]

I have lived the dream of the academy programme from the very beginning under London Challenge, and I have seen Hackney children go to university—they did not when I was first elected. But the last Government brought in a wrecking ball. They made a smorgasbord of free schools, and offered an open chequebook to pay over the odds for inadequate sites that children were condemned to for years, with no accountability in the system as each bit fractured away. The reason why standards have notionally gone up is that some schools went 11 years without an inspection after they were rated were outstanding, but they were far from outstanding when they were next inspected. The right hon. Lady needs to take responsibility and accountability for what her Government did, and applaud the Secretary of State for what she is trying to do to put it right.

[Laura Trott]

I have a huge amount of respect for the hon. Lady, but she will know that the academy programme was expanded more than 50 times under the last Government, and we went up the education rankings, not down, under the previous Government.

The Bill would abolish academies in all but name, and for what? Because Education Ministers think that they know better than Katharine Birbalsingh and Sir Jon Coles. Blair said in 2005 that

“command public services today are no more acceptable than a command economy.”

Well, someone needs to tell the Education Secretary, because that is exactly what she is proposing in the Bill. It is anti-rigour, anti-choice and anti-accountability.