Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Brady of Altrincham Excerpts

Thursday 18th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Acton (Con)]

My Lords, Amendment 502M would create a statutory duty to keep schools open for in-person attendance in future public health and other civil emergencies, unless Parliament expressly approves any closures and continues to approve them every two weeks.

We await the conclusions of the UK Covid-19 inquiry, but it is now widely accepted that it was a mistake to close schools during the pandemic. The evidence that it had a catastrophic impact on children is overwhelming. I am thinking of the research published by Ofsted in April 2022, when my noble friend Lady Spielman was at its head, which was based on inspection evidence that highlighted delays in children’s speech and language progress and a negative impact on children’s personal, social and emotional development. I am thinking of research published by the IFS, the Education Endowment Foundation and the Social Mobility Commission detailing the persistent and highly damaging impacts of school closures, exacerbating inequalities and reversing progress previously made to narrow the attainment gap.

I am thinking of the work done by the Centre for Social Justice showing 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. In the summer term of 2024, 172,938 English schoolchildren were severely absent. 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 from children and young people now about the deterioration in children’s mental health since the school closures. Some 1.3 million schoolchildren were 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 in terms of infections averted and lives saved, but children were at negligible risk from Covid-19. According to the ONS, between March 2020 and October 2022 in England and Wales, 88 deaths of children under the age of 18 were registered as being due to Covid-19. 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 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, 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 if we look at Sweden again, the evidence is that, no, keeping schools open did not mean that more people were at risk of becoming infected and dying from Covid-19. According to the ONS, Sweden’s overall excess mortality between March 2020 and July 2022 was negative —namely, lower than the pre-pandemic average—and far lower than in the UK, where schools were closed. In fact, Sweden’s excess mortality was the lowest of all European countries, except Norway. Incidentally, Norway did close schools, but the Prime Minister at the time 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 does not rule out ever closing schools again during future public health or civil emergencies. All it does is make it a statutory requirement, before schools are closed, to seek the advice of the Children’s Commissioner on the likely impact of such action on the children and young people affected by it and to have due regard for the Children’s Commissioner’s advice. It also makes it necessary to secure the approval of Parliament, with such approval needing to be renewed every two weeks if schools are to remain closed.

It was a mistake to close schools during the pandemic and we should take whatever steps we can to avoid making it again. I beg to move.

[Lord Brady of Altrincham (Con)]

My Lords, I am very pleased to follow my noble friend in supporting the amendment, which is in his name and mine. I am conscious of the hour, so I shall be brief in endorsing the point that my noble friend made. This is a modest amendment in that it seeks only to place a duty on Ministers to do something that we surely would all wish them to do anyway. It is crucial because it seeks to make the huge error of closing schools during the Covid pandemic far less likely to be repeated.

Many of us thought, at the time, that it was a mistake to engage in protracted school closures and that it would be immensely damaging. The excellent work of UsForThem, run by the splendid Molly Kingsley, helped to highlight the problems that were going to be caused. These harms were always going to be significant, but the evidence since the end of the Covid restrictions, as my noble friend pointed out, suggests that our fears five years ago were actually a gross underestimate of the damage that would be done to children and young people.

The repeated lockdowns and school closures constituted, in my view, the biggest public policy disaster in modern history. The fact that the interests of children and young people were treated so lightly is a disgrace. The damage to mental health, to education and to levels of school attendance have all been, and continue to be, profound. The lessons from Sweden, Florida and those few places around the world that took a more measured and intelligent approach is proof that many of our restrictions delivered little if any benefit while doing immense damage.

This amendment would ensure that, should there be pressure to repeat school closures in a future emergency, the government response would have to be transparent and that the criteria used to decide on school closure and opening would have to be clear and available to the public and to Parliament. It would ensure that Parliament would have a role in making those decisions in a way that Parliament was denied during the Covid period. I urge the Government and the Committee to accept it.

[Baroness Boycott (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 502P and will give my support to Amendment 502YB, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. If the noble Lord, Lord Young, chooses to put his amendment to a vote later, I will support it; I thought that his introduction to it was very well argued.

I am deeply sympathetic to the Ministers handling this Bill, as schools are being asked to do so many different things. It is the widest brief imaginable—and I am coming up with something else at the end of the day and at the end of the Bill. My amendment is about adaptation and mitigation around flooding and heat risks. Just this summer, we have seen schools having to close because of excess heat. Near where I live in Somerset, the school in Tiverton is now flooding almost every year; the defence is very poor. Looking at all our green and sustainable amendments, my worry is that the Government are not taking seriously enough the issue of how we adapt to the coming weather threats. This amendment is a stitch in time for tomorrow.

Before the summer, I tabled Questions about how much information the department held about the amount of lost learning time due to flooding and heat stress. The document came back saying that, if no adaptation measures were implemented, it was predicted that, in 2050, eight days a year could be lost due to extreme heat levels. That is a lot. It is also quite a long way ahead, and therefore there is every possibility of the can being kicked down the road. That would be unwise, as so much in the climate change world is changing much faster than we anticipated, and things are already happening now.

That document said that, on the basis of the EA analysis, 20% and 34% respectively of primary and secondary school buildings were at high risk, and 37% and 59% of them were at medium risk of surface water flooding right now. So we are in a position where we know some, but not all, the impacts. We are indeed lacking a lot of knowledge about the impacts of heat and what is an okay temperature to expect school kids to learn in and teachers to teach in.

My amendment would require the Government to produce a “safe and resilient schools” plan that lays out how existing school buildings will be consistent with net-zero emissions and become resistant not just to climate change but to the flooding and overheating that are the by-products of climate change, which is obviously why we are pursuing net zero. Importantly, it would change existing government guidance, introduced by the previous Government to apply to new school buildings, so that they should be designed for a 2 degree rise—we are already at nearly 1.5 degrees—and future-proofed for a 4 degree rise in temperatures, while also being built to adapt to climate risks. These two things seem fairly simple and, I hope, doable. Given the current situation, which is evident from the Government’s own papers, I would find it really hard to accept that these are not real and expected risks that need to be addressed.

I quickly draw attention to a report on about 60 London schools that was carried out a couple of years ago at the behest of the mayor. It looked at what tailored actions they could take. Of the schools surveyed, 93% reported overheating as an issue that they had experienced in the last couple of summers; 78% said that overheating had a significant impact on learning; and 43% experienced this multiple times, or continuously through their summer term. It is great that something was done and that these schools now know what they need to do, but these measures have not actually been installed because, unfortunately, they cost money. This was just 60 schools out of the 30,000 in England. We need a nationwide plan. It is absolutely not the case that one size fits all. I am afraid that this is a case where difference is important.

We also need to realise that air conditioning can never be the future. You cannot use excessive heating in the winter and excessive air-con in the summer, because we cannot afford the energy. We are in an energy transition, and that is not a workable long-term solution. But you can do a lot, such as shading windows from the outside, having natural ventilation and having many more trees—which is a good thing in lots of other respects—planted around schools. It would be a capital investment into our publicly owned infrastructure and would make schools resilient. We also need to think about what the costs of inaction are: lost days at school.

I have three specific questions. Would it be possible to ask schools a list of questions about what their experiences have been of, say, this summer’s unnaturally warm weather? Could the Minister take on the responsibility for providing data on the department’s assessment of school plans to help schools transition? I know that we are asking a lot, but this is going to come and bite us very soon. Finally, has the department at any time considered moving exams away from the hottest moment of the year, because that is pretty tough for the kids?