Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Lord Lucas and Baroness Longfield

Tuesday 16th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much support the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the amendments she has put forward. I hope that the Government are thoroughly behind the National Education Nature Park, which is a great initiative from the Department for Education, and are looking for ways to push that out, maybe through the natural history GCSE. If the noble Baroness feels in need of a holiday, I recommend Japan as a place that has really got on top of how to get young citizens involved with nature; that may surprise noble Lords, in view of the urban character of Japan, but it is very good at that.

I also agree with my noble friend Lady Spielman that indirect measures are best. They are very much the underpinning of the Good Schools Guide: watching, observing and looking for strong structures and relationships—and, yes, someone to turn to when you do not know what to do, but an excess of mental health professionals is almost always the sign of a school in trouble.

When it comes to children, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies. By asking a child a question, you create the answer; you have to be really careful how you try to measure well-being, particularly in young children. Maybe the Dutch can teach us to do it, but I share the scepticism of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, about much of what is going on in schools at the moment.

[Baroness Longfield (Lab)]

I shall add something on those points, although I do not want to drag this on. Clearly, this arouses a lot of emotions, but we are mixing a lot of things up. There are rooms full of evidence on how these effectively work, not least on the things that the noble Lord is putting forward. I do not think that schools are being asked to undertake surveys—it is about giving information to schools, which is a completely different aspect.

What we should all be talking about here is keeping children well, which means intervening when they need help; it does not mean taking them to clinics or overmedicalisation but it is about providing positive environments in which children can flourish. Also, it is not something that we are asking schools to take on; schools have had to take this on, because it comes through the door. We are talking about other professionals —health professionals, youth workers and others, who know about well-being—being able to work with schools to support those children. This is a win-win for everyone, and children and their families are the last ones who want to overmedicalise this and come up with what has been described as an industrialisation of a medical complex. That is not what anyone wants, and I do not think that it is there in any of the intentions that have been put forward.