Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Peter Fortune Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Peter Fortune (Bromley and Biggin Hill) (Con)]

As has been highlighted on the Opposition Benches, English education has been a success story. We have trusted schools to get on with the job, and academies and new free schools enjoy the freedom to run themselves, pay their teachers more and improve their curriculum. Ending central Government and local government micromanagement has put power into the hands of people who know best: school leaders and teachers. And it has worked: English schools have soared up the global rankings under the Conservatives.

[Andrew Cooper (Mid Cheshire) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman talks about putting power into teachers’ hands. Is he aware of the number of teachers who have been so radicalised by the Conservatives’ reforms that they now surround me on the Labour Benches?

[Peter Fortune]

Well, the figures speak for themselves. As was highlighted by my hon. Friend the Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy), who has morphed into a Whip at the moment, English schools have soared up the rankings. If we look at the recent PISA league tables, we see that English education is now ranked seventh-best for maths and ninth for reading and science. That is up from 21st, 19th and 11th respectively in 2009. Meanwhile, education in Scotland and Wales under the SNP and Labour, where schools were not granted those freedoms, has stagnated and slumped in various global rankings, so much so that some of them have withdrawn altogether from some of those rankings.

I want to focus on one problematic element of the Bill, which was raised by the hon. Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse). The Government’s proposals would strip academies of the power to pay teachers more, award performance, and attract and retain talented people. I understand that at least two schools in my constituency pay teachers more than the national pay scales: Oaklands primary in Biggin Hill and Pickhurst primary in Hayes. Nearby, the Harris primary academy in Shortlands and many more schools in Bromley also choose to pay teachers more. The Bill will strip academies of that power, cutting teachers’ pay and weakening schools. In any other industry, pay reflects performance. When vacancies cannot be filled, pay rises to attract talent. That is why schools should be able to vary from national pay scales. School leaders should be able to pay good teachers more and respond to the local jobs market. Instead, the Government want to wind the clock back and empower Whitehall, not schools.

The Government are so eager to be doom-mongers to justify their ideological policies that they risk wrecking a decade of progress. Who will benefit? It is not the teachers or the children, so why are they doing it? I am not even sure that those on the Government Front Bench know, but what we do know is that the Bill will destabilise years of progress and damage the future opportunities of young people across Bromley and Biggin Hill, and right across the nation.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Peter Fortune Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 9th March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Laura Trott]

The hon. Gentleman is arguing for things that are outside the scope of the Bill. What we know is that the change made by Lords amendment 44 would have helped Sara in a way that the unamended Bill would not have done.

I am not going to push Lords amendments 2 and 21 to a vote this evening, but I reserve the right to come back to them if the Government do not engage constructively in the other place. I am grateful to the noble Lady Baroness Barran for her brilliant work on those amendments and on the wider Bill.

Turning to phones, I really want Members to understand how bad things have got with phones in schools, and why a statutory ban is necessary. I know that the Government have issued revised guidance and have asked Ofsted to enforce it, but Ofsted’s guidance on this topic still allows phones to be present in schools. I cannot overstate to Members how damaging and dangerous that is. I was thinking about how to communicate this most effectively, and given that the Government are not listening to me, to parents or to teachers, I thought that first-hand testimony from a young person might get through.

I warn you, Madam Deputy Speaker, that the following account from a former pupil involves some graphic content that I sincerely wish I did not have to talk about. However, I refuse to shy away from it, because if we are exposing 13-year-olds to such content in schools, we need to be able to talk about it in this Chamber. This is testimony from a girl who was at an outstanding girls’ school that had a “not seen, not heard” phone policy. Such policies are common in many schools across the country and count as a phone ban under the Government’s definition. The Minister says that children’s voices are rarely heard—well, I hope she listens to this testimony today.

“When I was around 13 or 14 years old, one of my classmates would pull out her laptop at lunch times. She would connect her laptop through her phone’s hotspot, because the school wi-fi would block any social media, and launch up social media, because some thought it was funny to see how long it took to find an old man wanking—it was never long—or how long it took for somebody to ask them their age, and when they replied with ‘14’, they would send their Snapchat for you to add. The teachers never knew, because we were alone in our forms.

“Some of my friends had access to Snapchat from very young, some even primary school, but I did not. I got Snapchat when I was 12 or 13, but I remember before, my friends talking about dick pics in the changing rooms, and one said she got at least 10 in the morning. She’d put up her phone and show us by scrolling through them, just because it was funny that they would just send it. This happened after she added someone on Snapchat that she didn’t know. Others had them too.

“Looking back now, I remember pretending to find everything funny, just to fit in, but actually I felt really confused and grossed out at some of the content being shared. All of this happened at school, and we probably should have talked to a teacher, but as an 11 to 14-year-old girl, you’re not going to tell your male form tutor that people were being sent dick pics in school, or that your classmates were sending porn in the form group chat. I didn’t even tell my parents until recently, because I was embarrassed, or maybe because it just seemed normal, but my mum was already pretty strict with my phone usage and if I told her what was being sent around at school, I felt like I would be in trouble and she’d take the phone away. The phone was how everyone connected, so I needed to protect it. Over time, all the sexually explicit stuff just became normal.”

I remind Members that this is happening at school and, in this case, at an outstanding girls’ school. It is so far from being an isolated incident—in fact, it is the opposite. It is approaching a norm.

[Peter Fortune (Bromley and Biggin Hill) (Con)]

To enhance my right hon. Friend’s point, I have been running a survey in my constituency and the vast majority of respondents and parents have said that they support the concept of a simple age limit on social media, because of these particularly harmful algorithms. Does my right hon. Friend agree that the responsible thing for all of us in this House to do is to support our party’s policy of keeping our children safe by putting an age limit on social media?

[Laura Trott]

My hon. Friend is completely right. We need that age limit, and we need the phone ban in schools. Polling out today shows that 40% of children are shown explicit content during the school day. That is happening right now. This is an emergency. No more guidance; no more consultations—the Government should legislate, do something about it, and vote to ban phones in schools tonight.

The Lords amendments on social media received overwhelming cross-party backing in the other place. They were put forward by the noble Lords Nash, Berger, Cass and Benjamin. The amendments have been extensively debated and are backed by a number of expert groups and bereaved parents. In the place of those amendments, we have the farcical situation where the Government are asking the House to support their own amendment, which does not tell us what the Government will do or even when they will do it. No action is required by the provision being put forward this evening.