Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Richard Foord Excerpts

Tuesday 18th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Neil O’Brien]

With the leave of the House, we have had an excellent debate this afternoon, as we did in Committee. I will pick out only a few of the contributions. We had important words from the Chair of the Education Committee, the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), who pointed out how quickly the Bill had been prepared and pushed through. That is why we have so many amendments on Report and, to be honest, one reason that the Bill has run into such trouble.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Beverley and Holderness (Graham Stuart) gave a great speech, drawing on his experience as the Chair of the Select Committee, and the hon. Member for Sheffield Central (Abtisam Mohamed) gave an excellent speech, laying out why the provisions on home schooling are an excessive burden and go too far. We all agree that it is about making sure that children are not just “not in school”; however, the provisions really are overly burdensome. The hon. Members for Taunton and Wellington (Gideon Amos) and for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) and lots of Conservative colleagues pointed out the same thing.

I have to say that my jaw hit the floor when I first read the Bill and saw the provisions that treat the parents of children in special schools the same as people who are being investigated by social services. Those people are not criminals, they are not doing the wrong thing and sometimes they need to move to look after their vulnerable children. I hope the Government will think again in the other place.

[Richard Foord (Honiton and Sidmouth) (LD)]

I agree with the shadow Minister on the point about special schools. Additionally, in Committee in January, he raised the point about local authority consent for some children to be withdrawn from school, and how that should be extended from children who are subject to a child protection plan to children who are regarded as a child in need. Why are the Opposition not pushing that to a vote today?

[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.