Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)]

My Lords, I also support Amendment 107, moved by our friend, the noble Lord, Lord Bird, and will follow the powerful speeches by the noble Baronesses, Lady Lister and Lady Bennett. The amendment is timely. It supports our children, particularly those most in need. As we heard, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s analysis on child poverty in Britain has said that 4.5 million children are living in poverty—a figure that continues to climb, even after the most recent policy changes.

These are not abstract numbers; they are the lived reality of millions of families who are denied the security and opportunity that every child deserves. The amendment goes beyond rhetoric: it would require the Government to set binding targets, with clear timescales, and to account publicly for each step taken towards meeting them. Doing so would emulate principles behind other statutory frameworks. The most obvious is the Climate Change Act, through which parliamentary accountability has driven sustained action and cross-government focus. The noble Lord, Lord Bird, talked about eight separate departments having some sort of responsibility for child poverty. That rigour should be applied to the fight against child poverty.

Peer-reviewed evidence makes it clear why this matters. International literature also shows that poverty has causal, long-term impacts on children’s health, educational attainment and future incomes. Children in low-income families are more likely to suffer poor health, lower school attainment and diminished life opportunities than their better-off peers. Moreover, robust reviews find that increased family income improves children’s educational and health outcomes, including school performance and future prospects.

I am not just reviewing the literature: I speak before noble Lords with my own lived experience as someone who was on free school meals, who got subsidised school clothing and who could not afford to go to college simply because we were poor. I had to go and work on a YTS training scheme in 1988 for £27.50 per week, working 40 hours a week unloading lorries. This is my lived experience that I bring before noble Lords today.

The evidence also reminds us that policy choices matter profoundly for children’s life chances, and systematic measurement and accountability mechanisms are essential to gauge impact. The Government’s recently published child poverty strategy, which was mentioned earlier, forecasts that the current suite of measures could lift an estimated 550,000 children out of relative poverty. We should all aim for that, but without legally enforceable targets, there is no guarantee that those outcomes will be delivered and sustained across future Administrations.

Targets give shape to ambition; they transform good intentions into measurable progress. We should also heed lessons from within the UK. Scotland was mentioned earlier. Scottish poverty targets might not be perfect, but they have a guided, sustained policy focus, which has shown that, when outcomes are measured and monitored, progress is more achievable.

This amendment is a practical tool to ensure that Ministers cannot evade responsibility for promises they have made. It is a mechanism that will help ensure that every policy aimed at education, well-being, housing and family support is tested against the yardstick of whether it moves us closer to reducing child poverty. I therefore urge noble Lords from all sides of the House to support the amendment and help ensure that the Government are held accountable to the children of our great nation.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly to add my name and voice to the force of nature that is my noble friend Lord Bird. We have heard points made forcefully by all noble Lords around the House. I think noble Lords all know what I do for a living; I am sorry to be boring about this.

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

A schoolmaster!

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

I am indeed a schoolteacher. Every day in Hackney I see the effects of poverty. We still have 55% free school meals in our school. Schoolteachers are very used to targets. Every pupil has target grades and if they do not hit their target grades, we have to explain why. It really does focus the mind. If we can solve child poverty, the entire Bill will be so much more powerful. The best way to solve poverty is with targets, so I beg the Government to accept the amendment.

[Baroness Watkins of Tavistock (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to support the amendment in principle. I wonder whether we could get one or two simple targets to measure as indicators of potential poverty. Yesterday, a new report came out called, It’s Like Torture: Life in Temporary Accommodation for Neurodivergent Children and their Families. I believe that temporary accommodation for children is one of the biggest indicators of a lack of well-being, and it is linked to poverty. During Covid, we got almost every rough sleeper off the streets. It is time that we set a target to get every child in temporary accommodation into secure long-term accommodation. I urge the Government to consider that in relation to children’s well-being.

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[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

My Lords, I add my support to Amendment 114, which I believe provides a more flexible approach to achieving the Government’s aims of keeping down the cost of school uniforms while ensuring that the legislation before us is better future-proofed to potential changes in individual school policies. For instance, noble Lords may have seen reports of the growing number of schools, particularly primary schools, that are replacing traditional uniforms with activewear uniforms that consist of practical, weather-appropriate sportswear that is worn throughout the day. A recent Times article highlighted polling that found that 67% of primary school teachers would support their school adopting an always-active uniform policy and that schools that have done so have reported improvements in academic achievement, well-being and attendance.

This is just one example of how attitudes to school uniform are already changing. It may well be that the cap on items that the Government are talking about becomes irrelevant as attitudes to school uniform change, but surely it is better to have an annually reviewed monetary cap that allows schools to develop their uniform to the requirements of the pupils, parents and governing bodies than to arbitrarily choose a number of items which may, in the long term, mean that legislation needs to be revisited anyway.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group, particularly Amendment 117, in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, and Amendment 119, which was so powerfully and scarily introduced by my noble friend Baroness Boycott.

These clauses came from a very real attempt by the Government to limit parents’ spending at a time when the cost of living is so high. I spoke at great length at Second Reading and in Committee about how important school uniforms are. I talked about a 14 year-old girl whom I taught and most of whose pregnancy was hidden by her blazer. It is important, particularly for girls, that changing shapes are hidden during school. It promotes equality and unity.

Amendment 117 is particularly good about sport. I remember the first time we were given a full kit with all our numbers on it in Dyson Perrins CofE high school’s under-15 rugby side. It made us feel unbeatable—until we got beaten. Having listened to the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, we need to make sure that they are not going to poison us. Local businesses often sponsor kits for local football teams; it seems churlish and idiotic not to accept it.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My Lords, I speak briefly in support of Amendment 114. Throughout my teaching career, I taught in the most deprived communities on Merseyside, and I always observed that the parents with the least were the ones who took the greatest pride in how their children were attired. I pay huge tribute to them.

I understand where the Government are coming from on this: uniforms cost a lot. However, as I said in Committee, this is not the way to do it. There are so many “ands”, “ifs” and “buts”. For example, a uniform in the school colours that consists of a kilt, a braided blazer and a jumper can cost a fortune compared to five items that are simply branded. It is quite difficult to know how to move forward, but the old way of doing it was probably better, whereby you could obtain a uniform grant, and many local authorities still do that.

We all share the same goal of making school uniforms affordable for every family, but good intentions without practical wisdom can lead us precisely where we do not wish to go. I fear that if we are faced with a three-item cap, this could happen. Let me speak plainly about what happens when policy meets the playground. The Schoolwear Association tells us that 85% of retailers believe schools will drop branded PE kits entirely to avoid breaching the cap. When that happens, families do not suddenly pay less; they pay more. They turn to Nike or Adidas, the commercial brands that cost nearly double what specialist school suppliers charge. An £11 school PE top becomes a £20 branded alternative.

It gets worse. Schools in the West Midlands are already dropping particular sports from the curriculum because the new guidance prevents them having school-specific sport kits for those activities. One school that was mentioned in the Times last week has adopted as its school kit “casual sportswear”. As I say, that is not really a school uniform, but it is very expensive to wear, and no doubt the branded sports kit as a school uniform—albeit three items—can be far more expensive than a five-item school uniform.

We risk pricing children out of sport entirely, not through expensive uniforms but through their absence. The child whose parents cannot afford the expensive commercial kit will become the one left on the sidelines. The very children we seek to protect become more visible in their disadvantage, not less.

We have learnt, sometimes painfully, that good legislation must be workable legislation. The amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Mohammed, offers us a different approach, one that focuses on actual cost rather than arbitrary numbers. It gives schools clarity about what they can require families to spend, while allowing children the opportunity to be in branded clothing.

I am also in favour of the very important amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott. My only observation is that many clothing items of course come from China, and it would be difficult to get the Chinese Government to stop child labour, never mind putting chemicals into items, but it is an issue that we as a society should certainly look towards.

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[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I am happy to have added my name to Amendments 121A and 131A by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. I am grateful to officials from the Department for Education who had a meeting with us to discuss these amendments and the reasoning behind them.

The reasoning behind those amendments is really simple. The Sara Sharif incident happened despite multiple reviews looking into not dissimilar cases, in some cases over previous decades. In this case, I do feel that almost an extreme preventive approach is required to make sure that we do not have a repetition. The point was made by the officials that there have been significant improvements in the quality of children’s services in most of the country and about two-thirds are now in a reasonable shape, but that raises the question: what about the other third?

If there is another case, God forbid, like Sara Sharif —and history, for I am a historian by background, teaches us that that probably will happen—the opprobrium that will be heaped upon whichever unfortunate Ministers and officials happen to be in office at the time will be considerable and, in our view, is avoidable. We should mitigate that risk by assuming that we have to legislate for the one-third of children’s services that are not in good shape, because that is almost certainly where the accidents will happen. One of the key findings of the Sara Sharif review was that there have been systemic weaknesses again and again, despite all the inquiries and the well-intentioned actions that followed them. This is important enough that we feel we have to prepare and assume that the worst might happen and do everything in our power to prevent it.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I added my name to Amendments 121A and 131A. There is a real problem of mistrust with elective home education against traditional education. I acknowledge my noble friend Lord Crisp, and am delighted to be on his working party to try to do something about it.

I was in the same meeting as the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and my noble friend Lord Russell where we talked to the DfE. It was rather wonderful, because instead of talking about technicalities, one of the people there started talking about cricket, which I am much happier with than Section 31s and things. He accused us of setting the field for a bad ball—so we were being extremes. Obviously, I came back with no setting the field for a bad ball but putting some sweepers out as well just in case. The whole point of legislation is to avoid the disasters, the out of the ordinary, the Sara Sharifs. We were also told that a possible future home visit might deter parents from seeking help with a Section 31. Again, I cannot see why. These amendments are incredibly sensible and thoughtful, and their spirit would help those avoidable disasters, which, tragically, may well happen.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield (LD)]

My Lords, I have also added my name to Amendment 121A in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran. This is a very important set of amendments. I welcome the fact that many of them are about strengthening safeguarding. That is really important.

I listened very carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, because he had, as ever, some very important points to make. I do not agree with everything he said, but I agree that the time is ripe have a broader debate about a wider set of issues around the whole issue of home education that go outside the scope of this Bill. I hope it will be possible to do that. I also agreed with the noble Lord about the need for any safeguarding action to be proportionate, but it is my view that the targeting of action—as it is in Amendment 121A, so that

“local authorities must consent to the withdrawal of a child from school”

if they are involved in either child protection plans or are a child in need as classified under Section 17 of that Act—is proportionate in trying to provide additional support for vulnerable children and making sure that they do not fall through the cracks.

We have heard too many times, over the years, these heartbreaking cases of children who have fallen through the cracks—the most recent one, of course, was the harrowing and terrible case of Sara Sharif—because of a lack of visibility. This amendment would ensure that greater visibility is given to these children, which is why I added my name to it. I know people have different views on this, but that is my reason for believing that it is a proportionate amendment.

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[Lord Hampton (CB)]

Before the noble Baroness sits down, I am slightly disappointed that she did not comment on something that I would like to hear from her. The noble Lord, Lord Lucas, for whom I have enormous admiration—particularly as he was very kind about Mossbourne just now—said that there are plenty of schools like the one in episode two of “Adolescence”. It really bugs me that, although “Adolescence” is an extraordinary piece of drama, it is now being taken as a documentary. It is a dystopian view of schools. Will the Minister assure the House that there are not plenty of schools like in episode two of “Adolescence”?

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I am more than happy to do that. The point we have raised consistently throughout this is that it is right that parents have the ability to home-educate their children, if that is what they choose to do, but the idea that they are forced to do that because the vast majority of our schools are bad is simply wrong. The vast majority of our schools do a very good job for children. That is why the vast majority of children are educated within them and benefit from that.

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[Lord Wei (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 161A, 175ZA, 175ZB and 175ZC in my name. These amendments sit in a part of the Bill that would be felt most sharply not in Whitehall but in kitchens and living rooms by parents doing their best for children whose needs do not fit neatly in the school system. When Parliament reaches into family life, it has to do so with care, because it is easy to create a framework that looks reasonable on paper and yet breathes mistrust in practice.

Again, I want to acknowledge at the outset the Government’s movement in this group. Government Amendment 158 recognises the reality of exam access and ensures that information about GCSE routes can be provided to parents who ask for it. Amendment 159 creates a regular forum for parents to raise concerns and discuss how this regime operates. Amendment 161 tidies the drafting around exam-related provisions. These are sensible steps. They start to show an understanding that families need information and a channel of engagement, and I welcome them.

Yet there remains a gap between permission and protection. Information may be offered, but access can still fail, as we have heard from the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, and others. A forum may be held, but families can still feel unheard when nothing changes. These amendments in my name aim to close that gap with light-touch safeguards that strengthen legitimacy and reduce conflict. With the Government having shown that they are listening, I think that many of us hope that, on these quite non-contentious amendments, they will also come back with suggested changes to the Bill, as well as afterwards in the statutory guidance, to understand these realities.

Amendment 161A would require each local authority to establish a home education parental advisory board, composed primarily of parents with recent experience of elective home education in the area. We are not trying to create new bureaucracy for its own sake; it is about a practical feedback loop. Families most affected by these powers are often those most able to spot unintended consequences earlier than we can in this environment. When policy is made without their input, misunderstanding becomes routine, and routine misunderstanding can become the culture of the system. Advisory boards would keep local authorities grounded in reality; they would create discipline around reasoning, and when an authority departs from a formal recommendation, my amendment suggests that it needs to explain why. That simple requirement can improve decision-making and build trust.

I want to express strong support for Amendment 160 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Crisp, which addresses a long-standing injustice that the House should not tolerate any longer. Home-educated children face serious obstacles in accessing examinations. Parents are left to navigate a patchwork of centres, fees, refusals, capacity limits and inconsistent arrangements. This is not just in small cases—it is in many instances. Qualifications open doors, and access is important; we must not make the children pay the price. With my own children, we had to travel several hundred miles to the south coast pretty much for all their GCSEs, and you can imagine how many they did, how many you multiply that by, and how many hotel stays that meant for my dear wife, who did most of the heavy lifting, although I drove a few times myself.

My Amendment 175ZC would place a clear duty on local authorities to secure reasonable access to approved exam centres, building on the thinking around Amendment 160, including adjustments for children with special educational needs. That would ensure that the responsibility is not left just to good will or market convenience. Somebody mentioned that, in the summer of last year, around 47,000 home-educated children in England were in their exam years, yet there are fewer than 200 centres listed as supporting them, many with limited capacity—and there is uneven geographic coverage. Whether a child can access qualifications should not depend on commercial viability or geography; we need to provide equitable access to this basic infrastructure as a responsibility of the state.

Amendment 175ZA deals with the related harm that is already appearing. Some providers are withdrawing opportunities for home-educated children in anticipation of new compliance burdens. Museums, activities, learning programmes and even basic services can become quietly harder to access. That may not be the Government’s intention but, because you are talking about a higher level of scrutiny and information-sharing requirements, that is already causing people to hold back. This amendment would draw a clear statutory line against discrimination and extra administrative hurdles imposed solely because a child is educated otherwise than at school. Lawful educational choice should not become a reason for exclusion.

Finally, Amendment 175ZB addresses the people who will operate these powers. I welcome the fact that the Government have indicated that training will be provided to those in local authorities working with home-educating families, and I welcome that. The House knows that guidance can be diluted over time, especially when you are under pressure and you have lots of families to look after with not much more funding. This amendment would require a national training standard to be issued, covering elective home education and related SEND, lawful decision-making and the avoidance of unconscious bias when dealing with these families. These families deserve consistency, and officers deserve clarity; a system with serious powers needs competent hands.

Safeguarding works best when families co-operate, and co-operation relies on trust. Trust is earned through fairness, understanding and clear routes for participation. These amendments would strengthen these foundations, and I hope that the Government show good will towards the many home-educating families who are going to have huge disruption to their lives in the coming years by looking at these amendments and others today, especially those on the area of access to exams. I urge the House to support them.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak briefly to Amendments 160 and 175ZC, which we have heard so much about. The noble Baroness, Lady Blake, when talking to Amendment 158, painted a very rosy picture of parents being signposted to happy centres where their children could all take wonderful exams and obviously achieve enormous success. However, the reality, from what I have seen and heard, is a very different thing. Amendment 175ZC provides a very clean solution.

Access to exams is the golden thread. We want as many of our students to succeed—they have to do their exams. If they are driving hundreds of miles, that is not going to work. I genuinely think that working in partnership with local state schools would be quite a simple thing. There is always room in an exam hall for an extra 10 people, and you have the invigilators already. It would be a very simple thing, so I urge the Government to accept these amendments.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, in the spring of 2024, my noble friend Lady Barran was kind enough to allow me to explore what is going wrong with GCSE provision for home-educated people. I was foolish enough to think that the election would be in October, so I never got to the end of that process, but it is clear from the work that I did that there are a number of things the Government can do to help.

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[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I have Amendment 243D, which is unchanged from the amendment that I tabled in Committee. It is late and I shall be brief. We are in a world where we all have a much greater propensity to complain in great numbers and are doing so very frequently. AI is making it easy to complain at great length, with minimal effort, and service providers of all kinds are quite simply drowning in workload. Talk to any head teacher and you will hear this.

I propose streamlining the current messy patchwork of statutory provisions to create a single streamlined model in which complaints will be triaged and considered only by the most relevant body, with information available to others when necessary. I believe that this would improve schools’ capacity to respond to serious concerns.

The Minister’s response was that the issue was being considered by the Improving Education Together group of unions and other stakeholders, with which the Government are committed to co-developing policy design and implementation. Indeed, this consideration seems to have happened, because guidance was recently published, both for parents by DfE and for schools by Parentkind. The content is entirely sensible, but it does not address the major structural problem: that a minority of parents can and do spray complaints at every conceivably relevant entity, including Ofsted, DfE, the Teaching Regulation Agency, as well as school governors and MATs or local authorities. A proportion of parents do not desist, even when they get fair and reasonable responses, and these volumes are drowning out the serious complaints that absolutely need attention. And despite this guidance, there are still those different legal frameworks and best practice guidelines for maintained schools and academies, which continues to create confusion.

I think schools will have hoped for greater acknowledgement of the scale of the issue and the impact it is having both on staff well-being and more generally on school capacity to respond, especially in relation to AI-generated complaints. I think they will now be hoping that the schools White Paper will provide for root and branch review of the system, including a co-ordinated system to triage complaints, such as this amendment would provide for, and perhaps also some powers for school leaders to act where there is unreasonable behaviour that goes beyond what is contemplated in this amendment. With apologies to my noble friend Lord Jackson, I think that rationalising the current problems to release the capacity that needs to be there for serious complaints is perhaps more likely to help than adding an additional layer. I therefore hope that the noble Baroness will be able to reassure me that the Government intend to go beyond mere advice as to how all parties can use the current legal framework better.

Finally, Amendments 190 and 191A are also important in establishing some important principles of fairness for school staff as well as for parents, and Amendment 191 would close a small but significant loophole.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak very briefly to Amendment 191A, to which I would have added my name had I been slightly more organised. I have been a member of teaching unions in the past but I am not any longer. Many teachers are not members of a union. These are personal decisions, whether cost or philosophical. Trade unions play an important role in the workplace, but not being a member should not put you at a disadvantage when facing a formal allegation. It is all very well bringing a colleague along but, apart from the moral support, they might not be much help.

Doctors and dentists are permitted to be accompanied at disciplinary hearings by representatives from professional defence organisations under the NHS’s maintaining high professional standards framework. This has not undermined trade unions or weakened safeguarding: it has simply ensured that highly scrutinised professionals are not left unsupported at critical moments and has helped to ensure that due process has been followed. Teachers and school staff operate under comparable levels of public scrutiny and regulatory oversight. Amendment 191A is a modest, sensible step that reflects the reality and promotes fairness and consistency in how disciplinary processes are conducted. It does not even go so far as arrangements in medicine but is a step in the right direction and I strongly support it.

Amendment 243D, to which I did actually add my name, is very simple. I know from first-hand experience how complicated school complaints can be, with different complaints being sent to different organisations, often duplicated. They could be going to DfE, Ofsted, TRA, the school and the LEA. This is a very simple, overdue and badly needed amendment.

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, it was a pleasure to listen to the speech from the noble Baroness, Lady Evans, which was about a modest change to the remit of the TRA. However, I support Amendment 190, to which I have added my name, precisely not to extend the TRA’s remit in two particular ways—that the TRA should be allowed to consider, as the noble Baroness opposite said, complaints about behaviour before someone becomes a qualified and practising teacher, and that it should be allowed to consider complaints after someone has stopped teaching.

I do not know whether there is any confusion in the minds of anyone in the Government. Clearly, if someone interrupts their teaching and then wants to come back to it, that is a different matter. If we are talking about people who have permanently left teaching, though, it seems unreasonable for the TRA to proceed. With regard to people against whom the TRA might seek to proceed before they have started teaching, the National Education Union says:

“Once the door is opened to pre-career conduct, it becomes very difficult to draw principled boundaries. How far back should investigations reach? Should conduct as a teenager or student be included? What weight should be given to immaturity, context, or personal development?”


What about what both the noble Baroness opposite and I described in the meeting with Minister Gould, which I was very pleased to attend, as “youthful high jinks”, which in no way reaches any kind of criminality but someone might seek to complain about?

There is a real problem here. Even Minister Gould said that she could see we were saying that these proposals seemed to be too much of a broad brush, and that is indeed my concern. Teachers are rightly held to very high standards and, although we heard some egregious examples of bad behaviour from teachers, in general the vast majority not only are held to high standards but meet and exceed them. Therefore, to create the pressure of the possibility that someone could complain about pre-career conduct or post-retirement conduct seems to be an unnecessary burden to put on both the teaching profession and the TRA, which is not currently able to manage the workload it has, although that is not my prime consideration.

Noble Lords will have heard from the noble Baroness opposite that during the meeting we hoped that there might be some movement on this. Like her, I have now had the letter from Minister Gould, who says:

“I also want to assure you that we are committing to setting out in guidance a framework which makes clear the factors that will need to be considered before the TRA can proceed with an investigation … We will do this in consultation with the sector and unions in due course”.


As the noble Baroness opposite said, and as has been said from many corners of this Chamber on many occasions, setting out guidance in a framework is not the same as having something in the Bill. The NEU concludes:

“Even if guidance later seeks to limit this, primary legislation would authorise the power, and guidance alone cannot cure an overly broad statutory remit”.


It is with regret that I say that I think the Government have got it wrong on this. However, I am slightly pleased that there will be a consultation and I am sure that the sector and the unions will engage very vigorously in that. If this amendment is not accepted, I hope that this being in the Bill does not set the tone and imply that we think there is every reason to have open season on anyone who might become a teacher or once was a teacher.