Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Debate between Neil O'Brien and Nusrat Ghani(2 weeks, 1 day ago)
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Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)
The Bill does not set out any kind of clear plan or vision for our schools. It does not address the big challenges that need addressing. It is silent on discipline and behaviour—one of the biggest issues. It comes after the Government scrapped simple Ofsted judgments and will be followed by moves to dumb down the curriculum and lower standards further.
The Secretary of State has no positive vision. She has axed programmes for advanced maths, physics, Latin and computing because she thinks that they are elitist. She has axed behaviour hubs with no replacement, even though schools that went through the scheme were twice as likely to be good or outstanding. Yet, somehow, she is able to find £90 million for advertising. The Bill is the worst of all. We have tabled numerous amendments to it. It takes a wrecking ball to 40 years of cross-party reform of England’s schools. Those reforms worked. There is much more to do, but England has risen up the international league tables even as Labour-run Wales has slumped down.
Under successive Governments of all colours, England’s schools have been improved by the magic formula of freedom plus accountability. The Bill attacks both parts of that formula. On the one hand, it strips academy schools of freedoms over recruitment and curriculum and reimposes incredible levels of micromanagement, taking away academy freedoms now enjoyed by 82% of secondary schools. On the other hand, it strikes at accountability and parental choice, ending the automatic transfer of failing schools to new management, reversing the reforms of the late 1980s, which allowed good schools to expand without permission from their local authority—a reform that ushered in parental choice.
Let me unpack this. First, the Bill takes away academy schools’ freedoms over the curriculum. We have tabled amendments to that. As Sir Dan Moynihan, who leads the incredibly successful Harris schools, explained:
“We have taken over failing schools in very disadvantaged places in London, and we have found youngsters in the lower years of secondary schools unable to read and write. We varied the curriculum in the short term and narrowed the number of subjects in key stage 3 in order to maximise the amount of time given for literacy and numeracy, because the children were not able to access the other subjects… why take away the flexibility to do what is needed locally?”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 71, Q154.]
Likewise, Luke Sparkes from Dixons argued:
“we…need the ability to enact the curriculum in a responsive and flexible way at a local level…there needs to be a consistency without stifling innovation.”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 79, Q167.]
Katharine Birbalsingh, the head of Michaela school, which has been top in the country three years in a row, wrote to the Secretary of State:
“Do you have any idea of the work required from teachers and school leaders to change their curriculum? You will force heads to divert precious resources from helping struggling families to fulfil a bureaucratic whim coming from Whitehall. Why are you changing things? What is the problem you are trying to solve?”
Neil O’Brien
We have a limited number of things that we can press to a vote, but I hope, as we go to the debate in the other place, that we are in complete agreement on the excessive nature of some of the requirements being made of home schoolers, who we must not treat as illegitimate just because they choose to educate their children in a certain way. My hon. Friend the Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds) used his huge experience to take us on a rather bleak journey from the reforming agenda of the early Blair years to the regress that we are seeing now. My hon. Friend the Member for Farnham and Bordon (Gregory Stafford) explained why this was such a mistake and took us through the Bill in bleak detail.
I do not always agree with the hon. Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana), but I do agree with her on Andrew Tate, whom I regard as totally abhorrent. I am glad that my right hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick), the shadow Justice Secretary, is leading the charge to get the Tates deported to this country so that they can face justice here. I find their work utterly, utterly abhorrent.
My brilliant hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) contrasted the reforming rhetoric that we at least see in other Departments with the rather retro agenda in the Department for Education. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds), who did so much work in Committee, gave us another brilliant and witty speech. He talked about how Labour reformers had always been swimming against the tide, and I think that is right. He also talked about the free school breakfast numbers that the Government have used and the claim that they are going to save parents £450. This is a mysterious figure, because if we want to give £450 to every primary school child, that will cost north of £2 billion, but the Government are spending £33 million, so they are two orders of magnitude apart. Why will the Government not publish the workings behind this figure? I think the truth is that the source is the back of a spad’s fag packet, to be completely honest.
The hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince) gave a good speech, and the thing I absolutely agree with him about is the importance of teaching. It is one of the best and most noble things anyone can do with their life. All of us as MPs do school visits, and we might do an hour of highly energetic chat with people in year 6. We then realise the energy required to be a teacher and to keep that up all day, so I absolutely pay tribute to those who are doing this noble work.
One of the most interesting speeches this afternoon was the one from the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr (Steve Witherden). Various Labour Members said that things under the last Government were not nirvana, and that is right. Various people said that there were more things to fix, and that is right too. We absolutely agree with that. But the hon. Member said that things were so much better in Wales because they had avoided the Blair-era reforming agenda, they had avoided academies, they had got rid of league tables for a time, they were still using other methods such as cueing rather than phonics, and so on and so forth. But let us just have a look at the numbers to see what that has done.
The PISA tables show that, under the last Government, England went from 11th to ninth on science, 19th to ninth on reading and 21st to seventh on maths. That is a huge increase. In Wales, the best bit was on maths, where they went from 29th to 27th. They were flat at 28th on reading and collapsed from 21st to 29th on science. A pretty dismal record, really. I would encourage those who say that things are brilliant in Wales to read the searing report by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which is known for its mild-mannered work and cautious judgments. The report states:
“PISA scores declined by more in Wales than in most other countries in 2022, with scores declining by about 20 points (equivalent to about 20% of a standard deviation, which is a big decline). This brought scores in Wales to their lowest ever level, significantly below the average across OECD countries and significantly below those seen across the rest of the UK…Lower scores in Wales cannot be explained by higher levels of poverty. In PISA, disadvantaged children in England score about 30 points higher, on average, than disadvantaged children in Wales. This is a large gap…Even more remarkably, the performance of disadvantaged children in England is either above or similar to the average for all children in Wales.”
Disadvantaged children in England are doing better than all children in Wales, and the IFS also points out that the disadvantage gap is bigger in Wales. It concludes that the explanation for lower educational performance is not ethnicity or deprivation, and that it
“is much more likely to reflect longstanding differences in policy and approach, such as lower levels of external accountability and less use of data.”
That is the damning indictment of the IFS.
As Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things”. We have seen what this agenda does in Wales. It is a disaster, and those who are the most deprived are the ones who lose out the most. That is why this afternoon we are going to be pushing our amendments to protect academy freedoms, to protect the ability of good schools to grow and to protect parental choice. This Bill shifts power from parents to politicians, and we will always resist that. We will be moving to a vote now to stop this destructive agenda, which has failed in Wales and will fail in England too.
Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill
Debate between Neil O'Brien and Nusrat Ghani(2 weeks, 2 days ago)
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Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)
I want to concentrate today on our new clause 36, which would ban phones from our schools. The new clause would also write into law some of the content of the very good private Member’s Bill drafted by the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), because this does not need to be a party political issue.
When I was on the Science and Technology Committee back in 2018, I got us to do a report on screen time, social media and children’s mental health. Back then, the evidence was already very concerning, but by now every alarm bell should be ringing. Over the last decade, there has been an explosion in mental health problems among young people all over the world, over the exact same period that smartphones and social media have become dominant in children’s lives. The growth in mental health problems is focused almost entirely on young people, not older people. Children now get smartphones at a very early age. As the Education Committee pointed out in a good report last year, one in five of the UK’s three and four-year-olds now has their own smartphone. By the end of primary school, four out of five kids have a smartphone.
There are many different ways in which smartphones and social media cause problems for children. They displace time in the real world with friends. US data, for example, shows that prior to 2012 children spent over two hours a day with friends, but that had halved by 2019. The proportion of children feeling lonely and isolated at school has exploded all over the developed world. But smartphones are not just a time sink; there is also the lack of sleep. Children are tired in school, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has increased massively and concentration is impaired. This is a feature, not a bug. Apps are designed to be addictive and drip feed users dopamine.
At a recent school meeting that I organised in my constituency, I heard from local doctors about how excessive screen time is damaging eyesight and giving young kids the kind of back problems that one might expect from someone in late middle age. Eight out of 10 children are exposed to violent porn before the age of 18, many at a really young age. The average age at which kids see porn is now 13. The shift to a smartphone-based childhood is also leading children to be exposed to graphic violence, sextortion and self-harm encouragement, and is doing terrible things to girls’ self-image. According to the Office for National Statistics, one in five children aged 10 to 15 says they have been bullied online, and 72% of that is happening during school time.
As well as being bad in their own right, these negative effects come together to damage education. Although a ban of phones in schools cannot fix everything, it is a vital first step and can make a big difference in itself. I spoke to one headteacher who said that when they went from a policy of phones not being out to a full, “start of the day to end of the day” ban, with phones being handed in, the number of detentions they had to hand out fell by 40%, and teacher recruitment and retention improved, too.