Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Brady of Altrincham Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a member of the Knowledge Schools Trust. Amendment 207 would create a statutory duty to keep schools open for in-person attendance in future public health and other civil emergencies for all pupils, not just vulnerable children and children of key workers, unless Parliament expressly approves any closures and continues to do so every two weeks.

We await the conclusion of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, which is looking at the Government’s response to the pandemic’s impact on children and young people in module 8. I will come to some of the evidence submitted to the inquiry in due course. I think it is now widely accepted that closing schools during the pandemic for all children, save for a tiny handful, was a mistake. The evidence that it had a catastrophic impact on children is overwhelming.

I am thinking of the research and analysis published by Ofsted in April 2022, when my noble friend Lady Spielman was at its head, based on inspection evidence which highlighted delays in children’s speech and language progress and a negative impact on their personal, social and emotional development. I am thinking of research published by the IFS, the Education Endowment Foundation and the Social Mobility Commission which detailed the persistent and highly damaging impacts of school closures in exacerbating inequalities and reversing progress previously made in narrowing the attainment gap. I am thinking of the irrecoverable learning loss highlighted in a report by the University of Oxford in January 2023.

I am thinking of work done by the Centre for Social Justice which showed that some children who were told to stay at home during the pandemic never reacquired the habit of attending school, with severe absences—defined as missing at least 50% of lessons—tripling compared to pre-pandemic levels. This means that 172,938 English schoolchildren were severely absent in the summer of 2024. Incredibly, the number of persistently absent children—defined as missing at least 10% of lessons—climbed to 1.6 million last summer. I am thinking of the data accumulated by Children & Young People Now about the deterioration in children’s mental health since the school closures, with 1.3 million schoolchildren being referred to mental health support services in the school year 2023-24—a 71% increase on the pre-pandemic year of 2018-19.

Some will argue that these costs, while undoubtedly high, were outweighed by the benefits of infections averted and lives saved, but children were at negligible risk from Covid-19. According to the ONS, in England and Wales, between March 2020 and October 2022, 88 deaths were registered as due to Covid-19 for children under the age of 18. That is 0.05% of the total number of Covid deaths in the same period. To put that figure in perspective, between 1 April 2019 and 31 March 2022, 644 children died from accidents.

In any event, closing schools did not make children any less likely to become infected. A study published by the Public Health Agency of Sweden in 2020 found that infection rates were no higher among schoolchildren in Sweden, which closed sixth forms but no other schools during the pandemic, than they were in Finland, which closed all schools.

What about adults? Did closing schools protect them? We are in the realm of counterfactuals here, but the evidence from Sweden is that no, keeping schools open did not mean that more people were at risk of becoming infected and dying from Covid. According to the ONS, Sweden’s overall excess mortality between March 2020 and July 2022 was negative—lower than the pre-pandemic average and far lower than in the UK, where schools were closed. In fact, Sweden’s excess mortality during the pandemic was the lowest of all European countries save Norway. Incidentally, Norway closed schools, but the Prime Minister at the time later apologised for doing so.

The costs of closing schools were almost incalculable and the benefits non-existent. It was a catastrophic error. Nevertheless, this amendment would not rule out ever closing schools again during future health, public health or civic emergencies. All it would do is make it a statutory requirement, before schools are closed, to seek the advice of the Children’s Commissioner for England on the likely impact of such action on the children and young people affected by it and to have due regard for that advice.

I note that in her evidence to module 8 of the Covid inquiry in the autumn of last year, the noble Baroness, Lady Longfield, the Children’s Commissioner at the time, said that keeping schools closed while other areas of society were open during the pandemic was “a terrible mistake”. She described the Government’s approach as showing an

“apparent lack of any serious recognition of the short-term and long-term harmful effects”

of school closures, particularly on disadvantaged pupils.

In addition, this amendment would make it necessary to secure the approval of Parliament if schools were to remain closed, with such approval needing to be renewed every two weeks. That would address one of the problems that Gavin Williamson, a former Education Secretary, raised in his evidence to the Covid inquiry last autumn—namely, that the decision to close schools in January 2021 was rushed and ill-thought-out. If, in future, Secretaries of State made similar mistakes, Parliament could correct those mistakes within two weeks.

Noble Lords may be inclined to forgive the various bodies involved in the decision to close schools during the pandemic because they had limited information about the risks that Covid-19 posed, and posed to children in particular. I am not so inclined. I believe we did know enough at the time about the negligible risk that coronavirus posed to children, and the authorities involved in the decision to close schools were given ample warning about the terrible harm that closing schools would do to children’s learning, social development and mental health, with a particular impact on disadvantaged children. Whatever our view of that mistake, I think we can now agree that it was a mistake. We should take whatever steps we can to avoid making it again. This amendment would be a vital first step. I beg to move.

[Lord Brady of Altrincham (Con)]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Young of Acton, who has made a compelling case. We should be ashamed, as a nation, of the way we allowed schools to close repeatedly and for protracted periods, and the almost casual way in which that was allowed to happen.

As my noble friend has set out, this amendment is hugely important but very moderate, in that it deliberately would not preclude the possibility of closing schools should it be deemed necessary but would require some process and mechanisms to be put in place that would require consultation and thought to be given. Should the closures be continued for more than a very short period, it would then require parliamentary approval to be given. My noble friend made a compelling case, so I do not need to speak for long.

I just make the final point that it is self-evident that the substance behind this amendment is more important than any of the other issues relating to schools that we have debated and deliberated upon—because none of those matters at all if schools are closed and children are not receiving an education or the social benefits of their time in school and all the other effects that my noble friend has enumerated.

I suspect that my noble friend will not be testing the will of the House on this so I really hope that the Minister, in responding, will give reassurance about the seriousness with which this is taken and that even without this as a statutory requirement, the Government will seek to observe that kind of process and ensure both proper consultation and parliamentary approval if these actions were ever to be contemplated again.

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Additionally, my right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is looking carefully at the legislation around future public health emergencies. As I say, he is drawing on lessons learned from Covid-19 to ensure that we are prepared for the next pandemic. One of the lessons we learned through the whole experience is the value of local, regional and national government at all levels and all the different agencies working together across the piece, making sure that all that experience comes together to make the best possible decisions, with children at the heart of them, so that so many young people do not suffer again—as they did and have continued to do.

[Lord Brady of Altrincham (Con)]

I am grateful to the Minister for her serious response. She alluded correctly to the role of many different bodies, were these difficult circumstances to happen again. However, if I am not mistaken, the one body she did not mention in her response was Parliament. Does she not accept, as is fundamental to Amendment 207, that in these circumstances a decision to close schools is so important that it should have explicit parliamentary approval within a reasonable time?

[Baroness Blake of Leeds (Lab)]

I apologise, but my assumption was that all the departments working together would keep Parliament informed of the decision. However, I do not think we can pre-empt at this time how quickly decisions will need to be made. We just need to make sure that we do not create serious disadvantage by putting in legislation something that might undermine our ability to respond at pace and appropriately in circumstances that we perhaps cannot envisage now. With that, I hope that the noble Lord feels reassured enough to withdraw his amendment.