Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Meyer Excerpts

Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, education in this country has always been about shaping free minds and raising thoughtful, moral citizens who can think for themselves. The Bill threatens that proud tradition. It does not modernise education; it centralises it. It strips away the freedoms that have helped so many schools succeed, handing power to bureaucrats. It is the children from working families who will lose the most—less choice, lower standards, fewer chances to break through.

I support the Government’s aim to protect children, but I fear that the Bill overreaches. As it stands, the state is grabbing sweeping powers, especially over home-educating families, demanding personal data, club attendance and anything local authorities consider appropriate. My concern behind this is the mindset that the state knows best, and that parents cannot be trusted and need to be managed. Authoritarian regimes always start by inserting themselves between parents and children, and demanding conformity of thought and value. Is this really the path we want to take?

Many parents turn to home education because the system failed them, or because of special needs, safety concerns or different values. They are doing what they think is best for children. I was home educated for two years. It was not ideal, but I survived, and I even went to university. We lived in a part of the world where schooling was not possible. My parents could have sent me to a boarding school but, being French, to be separated from children was not part of their beliefs, and I was only seven years old. Does that mean that, according to the Bill, my parents would have been criminals?

Meanwhile, this Bill also goes after some of our most successful schools—high-performing academic schools that have transformed lives, especially for children from tough backgrounds. What is their crime? They are different. They are independent, but they work. Instead of learning from them, this Bill seeks to drag them down, imposing an unpublished national curriculum, removing freedoms over hiring, flexibility and admissions, and tightening control through local authorities. That is not about raising standards; it is about government control. It does not fix what is broken; it breaks what is working. It does not raise standards; it lowers them. We should be backing good schools, not burdening them with red tape.

As the Bill stands, it creates an education regime that will be less human, less free and ultimately less effective. Can the Minister explain how, exactly, forcing home-educating families to share private details will help their children, and how stripping the autonomy of successful schools will benefit working families?

In closing, I welcome the two new noble Lords and congratulate them on their excellent speeches.

International Women’s Day

Baroness Meyer Excerpts

Thursday 7th March 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Meyer (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great honour to speak in celebration of International Women’s Day. It has a special personal meaning for me. On this day 102 years ago, my mother was born in St Petersburg in Russia. She lived for 100 years and two weeks. When I think of her life’s journey, I am reminded of women’s resilience and courage. I am also reminded of the many misfortunes that women of that generation had to endure and overcome.

For the first 30 years of her life, hardship and danger were my mother’s travelling companions: from Russia on the eve of the revolution, through the years of civil war in Siberia, exile in war-torn China, tragedy during World War II in Indochina, where her first husband was killed by the Japanese when she was nine months pregnant, to sanctuary at last in Paris and London. When I think of her life, I remind myself how lucky my generation was to have been born in this country when we were. Yet we had our own struggles—and we too needed more than a few drops of determination to overcome them. Those of us who decided to forge a career in the 1970s and 1980s could be confronted by an often intimidating and hostile world dominated by men, many of whom saw the arrival of women as a threat to the natural order.

While at university, I decided to become a commodity broker in the City; I was one of the first women to do so and I enjoyed it enormously. But to get there and stay there, I had to run the gauntlet of harassment, molestation and abuse, some of which would make you blush today. The view then was that if you wanted to make it in a man’s world, you had to pay this price and shut up. Thankfully, today that kind of behaviour is considered totally unacceptable and often illegal. This is surely something for all of us—men and women—to celebrate. It is an example to the world. This Conservative Government can be proud that female employment is at a record high and the gender pay gap at a record low.

But there is no room for complacency. Some men will always resist the equal treatment of women. Power too often goes to the heads of men who wield it, leading to abuse and bullying—we have seen gross examples in the press—so the struggle goes on. Eradicating misogyny is challenge enough, but we need to move beyond that. More women should be positively encouraged and helped to become politicians, CEOs, firefighters, surgeons or train drivers—whatever they want to do—with equal opportunities and equal rights. That should also embrace women who want to stay at home as wives and mothers, if that is their choice, without being judged as second-rate by their female peers. The challenge for women today is to get the balance right and not to let the pendulum swing too far in the other direction.

Let me explain what I mean. I have a confession to make: I like men. I have two sons, two stepsons and a husband. I do not want to emasculate men, bludgeon them into submission or turn them into our enemies. I do not want them to be afraid of paying me a compliment, opening a door or entering a lift alone with me. What I want above all is for the vast majority of decent men to be on our side—to work with us. We do not want to wage a gender war, nor do I believe it necessary. What we want is to be respected for what we are and who we are. In turn, we need to do the same and respect the majority of men. So let us include them in our fight. I see very few men here today, and I hope that next year the debate will be earlier so that more men can participate. After all, we are all—women and men—one humanity. This is how I have watched my sons and stepsons grow up—to cherish and respect women as their equals, to enjoy their company and, if it is their choice, to love them.