Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Richard Burgon Excerpts

Wednesday 8th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Sir Julian Smith]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention, but I make clear my support for the register.

The other aspect to having more rules and regulation for families of autistic children is the inadvertent risk of penalising those families through fines and the imposition of stricter rules, which will obviously add to the harm and stress that they often face. I urge Ministers and civil servants to reflect on that. Why should those parents be fined if they are doing all they can to get their children into school?

Even more problematic is the fact that for autistic kids, the clearer, firmer and harsher rules—even with all the good intent that I believe there is—can add further trauma and make school entry even more difficult. That already happens with registration. Schools are rightly under pressure from Government to ensure that children get to school on time. However, parents of autistic children, particularly with a PDA profile, have done amazingly well to get their children to the school gate at all, and the total focus on registration at a certain time of day at all costs risks school refusal and, ultimately, children missing education. Both Ambitious about Autism and the Children’s Commissioner’s report on support for autism and other conditions argue that a much better understanding of the different aspects of autism is key to getting children back to school.

At the heart of this matter are parents. Time after time, parents of autistic children are judged and challenged because schools and authorities assume that the issue is behaviour or bad parenting, or that the issue has a very simple cause. Making sure the measures in the Bill have a deeper understanding of what those families and kids are going through is absolutely vital.

The teaching measures will help. I again point to the work of the previous Government, supported by the Autism Society, making positive strides to introduce autism training in initial teacher training. The more that individual teacher training programmes have specific models about different aspects of autism and challenges to school entry, and the more that can be done on continuous professional development for all staff—teachers, administration staff and receptionists—is key.

Autism is often at the centre of school refusal and non-attendance. As the Bill progresses through the House and into implementation, looking at these measures with the autistic child front of mind will not only transform the school experience of children and families, but in my view help address the core goal of the measures to improve school attendance.

[Richard Burgon (Leeds East) (Ind)]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir Julian Smith]

Sorry!

[Mr James Frith (Bury North) (Lab)]

I am pleased to speak in support of the Bill and wish to speak to the cost of living impact it begins to address.

Every child matters: not just political guidance, but an ideal to live by and to come into politics for. I therefore welcome the first steps that the Bill represents: steps towards a change in the security and fortunes of all young people in Bury and Britain. Ensuring the wellbeing of a child and the whereabouts of a child in Bury North has been one of my main priorities as an MP. It is also why I have long championed, both in this Parliament and in my previous time in this place, improvements to the appalling state of the special educational needs system.

A child’s wellbeing, or their vulnerability, does not exist in a vacuum. It is tied to the conditions they grow up in. In Bury North we confront a grim reality: 42% of children in Bury North are living in absolute poverty. Poverty must no longer simply be glanced at by our politics. We must reach into it. It is a concentrated poverty—dense, multiple and compounded.

[Richard Burgon]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Frith]

I will not.

It is a poverty that has crept up on us faster and faster in recent years, where one mile’s difference between postcodes can mean as much as a seven-year gap in life expectancy. It shows itself in poor, squalid housing, too few teachers in schools, a lack of accessible public or social services, an absence in quality public transport, the scourge of antisocial behaviour, victims of unpunished criminality, and even worse streets than the better-off wards are rightly animated by. Worse still is the poverty of opportunity, with children unaccounted for or not attending school at all.

I strongly support the Bill’s first moves to ease the burdens faced by so many families, by cutting the cost of children going to school. Common sense on school uniforms will save parents more than £50 a child on the back-to-school shop. Free breakfast clubs for all primary school children will save hard-pressed parents up to £450 a year per child. Critically, that can help working parents to make their hours.

The ambitions of the Government go well beyond what the Bill starts. Eyes and expectations will turn to the child poverty taskforce and its recommendations, as well as the future work of this Parliament. We need to tackle the roots of these experiences, not just the symptoms. The Government are determined to transform the lives of children, with structural, strategic changes to life in Bury and Britain. It has been done before: Sure Start, the Building Schools for the Future programme, the maintenance allowance, the power of progressive social policies, the importance of the first 1,000 days of a child’s life, foundation learning, and, yes, phonics and choice.

We will not let the inheritance from the Conservative party stop us. This will be a period of renewal and hope. Bury North’s poorest are failed by living down the road from those doing just all right; another town overlooked and underserved by funding formulas that have only ever glanced at the place and its problems, and by the failures to level up, let alone even out. Let us be clear: the Bill is only the beginning—a good start. We must keep going, because every child matters.

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in the debate. Let me begin with the question of the need for a national inquiry into the rape grooming gangs. Given what has been said so far, I challenge colleagues who have opposed the inquiry to name a single proposal from the Jay report that cannot be implemented if we go ahead with it. It really is a matter of “and”. Notwithstanding the political theatre that Labour Members have tried to bring to the debate, the fact that both the Prime Minister and the safeguarding Minister have said that they are open-minded suggests that—sensibly, from a policy point of view and politically—the Labour party may move to the correct position.

As was pointed out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge (Sir Gavin Williamson), this is a Bill in two parts, which could probably most usefully have been two separate Bills. The first half concerns safeguarding, and, for the most part, my party and I support it; the second concerns schools, and that we most certainly cannot support. Rather than accusing our amendment of being a wrecking amendment, as the Liberal Democrats have rather disappointingly done, they should recognise that the second half of the Bill—the schools element—is the wrecking element, because it makes the important safeguarding improvements part of a Bill that cannot be genuinely supported in this House.

There is a troubling theme; a misguided notion that the bureaucrat knows best, as colleagues have suggested—for instance, the proposal to strip academies of the flexibility to set competitive pay for their staff. If the Government were genuinely interested in the levelling up that has just been referred to by the hon. Member for Bury North (James Frith), why not, as Sir Dan Moynihan, perhaps the nation’s most successful headteacher and trust runner, said at lunch time today, give those academy freedoms to maintained schools? Why rip away the elements that have been used by academies to produce schools such as Michaela which are the best in the country? We have an ideologically driven Labour Government—that certainly applies to those on the Front Bench; I would not want to daub everyone behind the Front Bench with the same description—who cannot even bring themselves to congratulate a school that has been the best in the country for three years in a row.

The Government are signalling that they do not trust schools to attract and retain the best teachers, and trust only the Secretary of State to do so. In advocating for new schools to be opened and controlled by local authorities, they remove the contestability. Notwithstanding some of the contradictions in the Secretary of State’s speech, she did describe competition as “harmful”. I represent Beverley and Holderness, and for many years I looked at schools in Hull, where there was a view, expressed sotto voce, that “It is the people here who are the problem”. Generation after generation was failed, and when the academies programme was expanded in 2010, what happened? We saw primary schools leave local authority control en masse. We saw that it was no longer acceptable for a local authority to use its democratic mandate to give a substandard education to the local population. We saw a transformation. We saw academy groups opening up, and teachers and communities seizing that. I cannot believe that Labour Members really want to tear this away when the evidence is crystal clear from the OECD PISA tables. On any measure, English education has become immensely better.

[Richard Burgon]

rose—

[Graham Stuart]

I may not believe that of the Labour party generally, but I would believe it to be possible of the hon. Gentleman.

[Richard Burgon]

The right hon. Gentleman is making various remarks about what he considers to be the failings and deficiencies of this excellent Bill. May I invite him to reflect on the fact that in my constituency, East Leeds, families and children have been really struggling over the last decade? The measures in the Bill to bring down the cost of school uniforms and provide free breakfast clubs in primary schools should be warmly welcomed and supported by all of us who care about children and families in our communities.

[Graham Stuart]

No one can be against the principle of breakfast clubs and efforts to make sure that families do not have excessive charges imposed on them by schools, although we need to look at the specifics. That has nothing to do with what I was saying. I ask the hon. Gentleman, and indeed other Labour Members, to reflect on the speech made by the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh). I chaired the Education Committee from 2010 to 2015, and she and the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Sir Nicholas Dakin), who is on the Front Bench, were distinguished members of that Committee.