Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Tuesday 20th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 3 in my name, which is cosigned by my noble friend Lord Effingham. The Bill states that

“the authority must offer a family group decision-making meeting to the child’s parents or any other person with parental responsibility for the child”.

In moving this amendment, I seek to extend the right to family group conferences to children, young people and young adults so that, most importantly, they can contribute to and ultimately agree their own care plan. The purpose is as simple as that. Why should they not be able to do this?

I thank all the organisations that work tirelessly to support families, children and young people every day, including for their briefings on this important subject. I am only sorry that I cannot refer to them all. Research commissioned by County Councils stated that there would be nearly 100,000 children in care, representing a 36% rise in a decade. By including 16 and 17 year-olds in the family group conferencing, we may be able to reduce the number going into care —where it is safe to do so—and staying, with the support of their family or those with parental responsibility, reducing the trauma they may face and ensuring that their futures are not impaired. That is a laudable aim that I hope all noble Lords will support.

I am grateful to the Family Rights Group for its briefing on the Bill, in particular on this issue. It said:

“The Bill gives the local authority the discretion to decide if the child is invited to be involved in the FGDM process or not. This is unsatisfactory and does not make for a child-centred process. This approach differs to elsewhere in the child welfare system, for example looked-after children reviews, where there is a presumption in favour of the child taking part. The Bill should ensure children are invited to take part in their family-group decision-making meeting, if safe and consistent with their welfare to do so”.


The British Association of Social Workers welcomes and supports the proposal to extend family group conferencing to include the voices of 16 and 17 year-olds. It says:

“This approach is rooted in social work values of participation, empowerment, and ensuring that young people are not passive subjects of decisions, but active partners in shaping their own futures. It also aligns with our support for the Keep Caring until 18 campaign, recognising that young people need to be heard, supported and cared for consistently as they transition into adulthood”.


I could not have put it better myself.

I received this from Action for Children:

“The Children’s Charities Coalition believe that real, positive changes to the lives of young people cannot be achieved without listening to their wishes and feelings when making decisions that affect them … We urge Parliamentarians to ensure the Bill strengthens requirements on local authorities to ascertain the wishes and feelings of children and give their views due weight in decisions that affect them”.


This amendment seeks to strengthen this request by extending the right to family group conferencing to children aged 16 and 17, so that they can agree their own care plan. I cannot help but reflect on my noble friend Lord Balfe’s contribution and how he wished that somebody had listened to him. For 32 years, I have been involved with young people. They are an admirable bunch. They have different characteristics and get into different kinds of trouble, but they succeed on many occasions.

Let me tell the Committee about one young lad. All he wanted to do was work in a television shop. He wanted to repair them, and we found him a job. He was excellent at the work and the employer loved him, but one day the employer called me and said: “You’ve got to get him out. You’ve got to come and withdraw him”. I went along ready to do the deed. I said to the employer, “What’s wrong with him?”, and he said, “His personal hygiene is disastrous”. I sat the lad down with the employer and asked him, “How’s things at home? How’s it all going? What challenges have you got?” He said, “My mum’s died and my dad does the washing by chucking it in the bath. I don’t even think the hot tap comes on”. While the employer heard that, it obviously touched his heart, and the long and the short of it was that the boy moved in with him and his wife, had his washing done and had a terrific career.

This is all we want for young people. My amendment simply says that we must listen and take their views into account. I beg to move.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I have five amendments in this group, all of which come from my knowledge and understanding of evidence-based work. I declare my interest as a trustee of the Foundations What Works Centre for Children and Families.

I have been involved in this even longer than the noble Baroness opposite. My first job in this country was in 1970 in Newcastle, at what was then the first of the children’s departments after the Seebohm report. I had just qualified as a social worker specialising in family casework. You do not get anything like that these days.

I was keenly aware that this country, in its legislation on children, responds to tragedies, and I have seen this all my working life. We do not start by asking what we need to give children the very best. We start from: “This child died in dire circumstances and we must make sure that it never happens again”. Of course, we have to do that, but we need legislation that starts by asking: what are the best ways to support families to enable their children to have the very best in life? We get things the wrong way round, so I am pleased that the Government are trying to start by asking what we mean by the well-being and best interests of children, and how we can start there, rather than just asking how we protect children. Protection is very important, but if we think about well-being first, many of them will not need a level of protection.

My amendments all come from the work that Foundations has done on family group conferencing. I am delighted that the Government talk about family group decision-making in the Bill, but I want them to be brave and go to the next stage: the family group conference, which is now a well-established and researched evidence-based model. In 2023, Foundations completed a randomised control trial of family group conferences—the first in the UK and the largest in the world—which involved over 2,500 children and their families across 21 local authorities in England. The evaluation found that the children whose families were referred for an FGC at pre-proceeding stage were less likely to go into care. It also found that 12 months after the pre-proceedings letter was issued, 36% of children whose families were referred were taken into care, compared with nearly half, or 45%, of children who were not. Children who had been part of this process were less likely to go to court for the decisions about their care: only three in five—59% of children—who were referred to FGCs had care proceedings issued, compared with 72% of children who were not referred. They also spent less time in care: six months after the pre-proceeding letter, children whose families had been referred to FGCs spent an average of 87 days in care, compared with 115 days for those who had not been through the process.

Foundations estimated that 2,293 fewer children would go into care within a 12-month period if FGCs were rolled out nationally. This in turn could save taxpayers over £150 million within two years, from a reduction in both court proceedings and the number of children entering the care system. From my perspective, when I was dealing with this in government and was responsible for social exclusion, it was so clear that when you used evidence-based programmes, although you did stop a bit of, “Let every flower bloom”, which we love in this country, you got much better outcomes for children; for example, by introducing parenting classes in Sure Start—I could say a lot more about that now, but I am not going to. We need to look at evidence-based programmes and use them. We do not have time to let these kids suffer while we think, “Oh, that might be a good idea. Why don’t we try that instead?” Until we have based something on evidence, we should be giving them the strength of what we know works.

Free School Meals

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Baroness is talking about the changes to the transitional protections: as she knows, phase one has now come to an end. To reassure families, no pupil will feel any change as a result of the move to phase two of the protections until after the summer. I can assure the noble Baroness that, as with all government policy, we will keep our approach to free school meals under review. I am happy to write to her with the figures for those who have had transitional protections and how they will be supported until the end of this school year. Then, we will bring forward more information about what will happen at that particular point.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, I was told before the election that this was a GDPR issue, but it became very clear that it is not. Now that that is clear, every single one of the 23 local authorities in the north-east is now engaged in auto-enrolling every eligible child for free school meals. In Newcastle alone, within the last year, that is over 2,000 additional children, and of course the schools also benefit. Will my noble friend join me in congratulating every one of those 23 authorities, but also really push to make sure that other local authorities just get on with it?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend makes an important point, and makes the case that I was trying to outline about the way in which local authorities are often very well placed to ensure that children are getting what they are entitled to, but often need the data and the information to be shared with them in order to be able to do that—although I know my noble friend thinks that they could have done it more easily. But we will facilitate the sharing of that data and I share her view that, where some local authorities have already made enormous progress in enrolling more children in free school meals, others should look to their example and ensure that they do that as well.

Adoption and Special Guardianship Support Fund

Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

As I pointed out, for individual children there was transitional support for therapy that they had got permission to receive from last year into this year. However, I concede that this has been a difficult time for both the children and families that receive support through the fund and for therapists who supply support as part of that funding. We will work as hard as we can to make sure that we provide consistency and early indication of budgeting in future years.

[Baroness Armstrong of Hill Top (Lab)]

My Lords, it seems clear that this support is critical for many children, and I am thinking in particular of children in kinship care. The problem is that at the moment the criteria restrict the fund to those who have previously been in the care system. When kinship care really works well is when the case conference enables the wider family to step in immediately, but the child may still be traumatised and indeed other members of the family may need support too. Will the Minister commit to looking at this so that, when the Government are thinking about the criteria for the now very welcome money, they think about those who are not just coming through the care system?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

My noble friend is right that the adoption and special guardianship support fund is specifically aimed at recognising the state’s role in having previously cared for the child at the point at which they are adopted or go into special guardianship. She is also right about the enormously important role that kinship care plays in our system. That is why the Government have made a series of announcements about how we can support the important role of kinship care: the appointment of the first national kinship care ambassador; the new kinship care statutory guidance for local authorities; the delivery of over 140 peer support groups across England, available for all kinship carers to access; and, of course, the recently announced £40 million package to trial a new kinship allowance, to test whether paying an allowance to cover the additional costs of supporting the child can help to increase the number of children taken in by family members and friends, with all the benefits that my noble friend has identified.