Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Sentamu Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 198 and will touch on Amendment 230 from the noble Lord, Lord Addington. Listening to noble Lords around the House, I find it surprising that they consistently believe that inspection, for which I was responsible for seven years, does not place a heavy emphasis on inclusion. Certainly throughout my time it did. The current framework has increased that focus almost to the point of giving up on looking at education, for which one learning walk and the results are about the extent of the coverage. Inclusion is and has long been taken extraordinarily seriously.

There are two issues that I want to touch on. The first is that however much we might want to believe that every child’s special needs can be coped with, there are times when those special needs consist of problems that inflict real harm on other children. The most awful parental complaints that came across my desk were about children who had been seriously assaulted and harmed, on occasion raped, by another child who had been admitted by a school either conscientiously trying to include a child for whom the local authority was desperate to find a place or that had been directed to take a child. That is agonising to learn about. We have to acknowledge that the interests of other children need to be considered when placing the most difficult children. That is important for children most of all but, of course, it is important for staff as well. If people are trying to work outside their capacity, schools tend to deteriorate, and that is not good for anybody.

Linked to that, I want to make a point about off-rolling, which has been touched on. In my time we put more of an emphasis on looking for signs and pursuing that—inquiring into it—where we found it. One of the things we discovered is that it is extraordinarily hard to characterise definitively whether an individual case is a case of off-rolling. There is typically quite a long history, a deterioration of the relationship between the child and the school. It is not a clean and tidy yes or no. Getting to a point where you could definitively say what the extent was would be extremely labour-intensive. The issue, in my view, is not a lack of regulation to prevent this—inspection is perfectly capable of disincentivising it—but we have to acknowledge that it needs a lot of resource that simply does not exist in Ofsted or anywhere else to dig into individual cases and establish the extent and the remedies.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak on Amendments 198, 199 and 230. I will give some historical background. The word “education” is derived from two Latin root words. The first is “educare”, which means to impart knowledge. For too long, some schools have seen themselves as imparting knowledge. They have emphasised too much that first root of the word, “educare”.

The other Latin root word is “educere”, which means to draw out knowledge. The best schools often do both. They impart knowledge but they also realise that a person is not a blank sheet of paper on whom you simply impart knowledge and do not draw out the best that is in them. In most schools that do both, the pupils all thrive.

That being the case, I think we have gone through a short-term revolution. Her Majesty’s inspectors, as they were then, saw themselves as helping the school to do better. Then Ofsted arrived and seemed to give simple judgments on the school, sometimes on very narrow elements. If the school failed one of its elements, it was totally judged to be a failing school.

I declare an interest here. The Archbishop Thurstan School in Hull had been there for many centuries. It was not performing as it should be and, therefore, there was a decision by the Secretary of State that it should be rebuilt. The council agreed to have it rebuilt and that it should be given a name that would be canvassed for in Hull. To my surprise, the pupils, staff and council decided that it should be called the Archbishop Sentamu Academy. That was the beginning of academisation.

We were very fortunate that the Labour Government, who lost the election in 2010, had agreed to provide the money. I was told by John Prescott, “Be quick, make sure that you get this money, because the new Government may not want this to happen”. Anyway, we got the £45 million and the place was rebuilt; the place was thriving. Students in Hull were thriving and doing excellent work for the first time, going to university for the first time. Four of them went to the University of Liverpool to read maths, which had never been dreamed of.

So the school was doing well but, as it went on, there was a problem in one of the departments and there was an Ofsted inspection, which said, “The school has failed”. If a school fails, the schools commissioner has a job to do: the school has to be brokered and brought into a much larger group, and that is what happened. What shocked me was that Ofsted would not then visit that school for three years. I said, “As a parent, if I had a child in that school and you judged it to be failing, I would like to know whether it had improved by the following year”.

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[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I too support the amendment. We have relied through history on a presumption that schools will stay open, even in adverse circumstances such as epidemics or bombardments. But once we closed schools for Covid, we set children adrift because there was nothing in law to balance their interests against those of adults. Children stayed locked up for months, learning little even when schools made great efforts to provide online learning.

I shall not repeat what others have said, but the story of the continuing harm to children—their academic progress, social development, health and happiness—is still unfolding. Ofsted did some of the earliest work on this in autumn 2020, when my inspectors made a series of fact-finding visits to schools and published monthly reports on the impact of Covid on schools and children. They reported that children were lonely, bored and miserable—the advance warnings of the lasting problems that we now see. I spoke about this publicly a number of times, but the tide of emotion was too strong for people to hear.

With hindsight, the existence of a formal duty and a mechanism to ensure that the available evidence, such as the reports I mentioned, is considered and weighed up against the representations of the adults who work in schools, health sector representatives, and so on might have helped to focus minds. I believe that there is an opportunity here for the Minister to get ahead of potential recommendations from the Covid inquiry.

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I am sorry if I sound like a dinosaur, but I will. Hindsight is always a harsh, cruel science. It makes us think, “If only we did not do this”. The evidence is very clear; as the inquiry went on, the lessons to be drawn have not yet been concluded, and the nation needs to take those lessons into its lifeblood.

We are talking about legislating for an assurance that if a huge pandemic breaks out—or, let us say, a war—we need to go to Parliament every two weeks to consult. But perhaps Parliament will be permanently shut. I would not want us to reach a stage where we have not fully learned all the lessons. I have grandchildren who, because their parents were working, were seen as those who needed to be supported at school during the pandemic. Even then, there were infections, and shutting down schools looked like protecting children. When something like Covid happens, our first look is to the vulnerable, such as children and other vulnerable people. I would find it difficult to support a measure which thinks that Parliament will always provide security.

Do you remember the Second World War? For their own protection, pupils had to be taken out of areas where the bombs were dropping pretty fast, so let us learn the lessons. We may return to this proposal, but for the time being let us support what the Bill as drafted is doing.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, my noble friends have made a compelling human, practical and democratic case for the role of Parliament in expressly approving school closures in the event of a future pandemic or public health emergency. In practical terms, as we all know and have heard in this short debate, parents and teachers see every day the impacts on those young people who missed out on significant chunks of their education and their social development when schools were closed. My noble friend Lord Brady rightly pointed out the fundamental value of schools being open as unlocking all the other good things that we expect and trust them to deliver for our children.

I hope that, when the Minister comes to close, if she does not plan to accept these amendments, she gives a clear response as to how the issues that my noble friends have raised will be dealt with in future. As my noble friend Lady Spielman said, children at that point had no balancing voice to the decisions that were made, and that feels like something we do not want to have happen again.