Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will make a few comments on this group of amendments. On Amendment 230, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, I have great sympathy with what he says, and I hope that it may be an issue that the Minister will address when the SEND reform plans are presented in due course.

I understand the intention behind Amendment 198 and have a lot of sympathy with it. I can think of lots of schools that have been put in quite difficult positions and lots of children who have not had a good deal having being allocated to a particular school. The problem here—something that was not addressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Barran—is that, on the whole, schools are not queuing up to take the most challenging children. They might want to do their best by them and believe that that is their job, but, with the accountability mechanisms the way they are, it tilts the balance away from schools taking children who offer particular challenges.

If you put in legislation a whole set of reasons to say no to a given child, that does not make the child or the family feel very good, and you would have to work hard to make sure that it was for a valid reason and not an invalid reason. My approach would sooner be that you put support in and make the SEND system work. I am an optimist. I do not think we have to give protection to some schools from taking challenging children. I think we have got it in us to adjust the policy framework, go in there and help them succeed. That would be serving every child and not discriminating against them.

My main comments relate to Amendment 199. We semi-rehearsed this in Committee, so I will not go over that again. I would never support a situation where a school that was unlikely to succeed had more children allocated to it at the expense of a school that was doing well. If that was the only decision, I would probably end up supporting the amendment, but it is much more complicated than that.

There is a bit of a conundrum at the heart of this, and it goes to what the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, said. I agree with parental choice but I do not agree with the market in schools, and there is a difference between the two. Parental choice is right and good and desirable, and we should write the law to facilitate it whenever we can. In a market, however, you do not intervene; you let things fail. They wither away on the vine, and that takes time, and then they fail and then close, and that leaves a gap. Look at the high streets in some of our small towns and cities—we cannot have that for schools. We cannot have a schools policy that has in it an acceptance that some schools will wither on the vine and fail. It is not good for the children who are there. I know that the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, when she was a Minister, and her colleague, the noble Lord, Lord Nash, would have gone into such schools to intervene and try to make them improve. That is why I have never used the term “market” in relation to schools: parental choice yes, but market, no. Somehow, that is at the core of my concerns about this amendment.

There are two issues. If it was about not wanting to go to the surplus places, I would agree with the noble Baroness. If there are more children, let us try to put them in the schools that are flourishing. But if it is a situation where the number of students on a roll in a given geographical area is falling, something has to happen. If you can merge them together, that is great, but you can get the difficult situation where you have to do something else. That is where I would manage parental choice and whatever market there is. I worry that if we say that their numbers cannot fall but their numbers can fall, all we do is make it more difficult for every school to thrive and succeed.

A school that is just turning that corner, as the noble Baroness on the Opposition Front Bench described, that has been taken over by a good academy, got itself a new head and perhaps has a new housing estate nearby is on its way. It would fall under this because it does not have a good Ofsted inspection or anything like that.

If we look at Camden, 96% to 100% of schools are good or outstanding. I do not know, but I suspect that Camden is going to have falling rolls at some point because it is a London borough. This would give protection to every school in Camden because none of them is failing. Most of them are maintained schools, not academies, but it does not matter as they are all doing a good job. This clause would not work there. The way that schools would read this is that there is now a law that if it has had a good inspection in the last three years, it is protected. If you tried to enact proposed new subsection (5D)(a) and (b), there would be an almighty row because schools would have been given protection by this clause.

I would sooner play to our optimism. Where schools really cannot succeed, let them go and manage a good education for the pupils, but in cases of falling rolls we have to do everything we can to plan appropriately across a geographical area to make sure that we give every school the best possible chance of doing well.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, and largely to agree, although I would go somewhat further and say that I think we have reached the situation of a market in schools in which very crude judgments are being applied by Ofsted, and schools are being pushed to game the system. That is why I signed Amendment 230 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and why the Green group will oppose Amendment 199 should it come to a vote.

The noble Lord, Lord Addington, was charitable when he said that there is a strong suspicion that off-rolling is going on. I am afraid I have no doubt that off-rolling is going on because up and down England, particularly in some of the most deprived communities, I have spoken to parents, often parents from very disadvantaged backgrounds themselves, who have said, “I’m trying to home-school my child now because the head teacher said they thought that was the best thing that could happen”. That was not home schooling by choice. That was usually pupils with special educational needs that the school just did not want to deal with. I have some sympathy with head teachers. Having been a school governor, I know how much pressure head teachers are under to keep up with the results. The problem is that we have created a competitive system where schools compete against each other instead of working together to create the best result for every pupil.

Amendment 230 is very modest. It simply calls for a review. I can tell my anecdotal stories, but I cannot say how big the problem is. I have seen it in many places, and I am sure that it is quite widespread. I do not believe the noble Lord intends to put this to a vote, but surely we can ask the Government to look at this anyway. As other noble Lords have said, it is something we should know about because this is one way in which we are failing some of our most disadvantaged pupils. Amendment 199, if it were to be passed, just furthers that sense of competition, which is the last thing we need in our schooling system.

[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.

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[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, I reinforce what has just been said and endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, said. He and I have made common cause on this for some time.

I shall be extremely brief, because I want to make just one point. It is not so much about the substance of the amendment but why, as has just been said, it is essential that we take citizenship teaching seriously in this country. It is crucial because, at the moment, there is a problem with public trust in government and in Parliament. It is slow and declining and, unless we do something about it, we are going to be in real trouble. We need to invest resources into the teaching of citizenship. That means making sure that schools take it seriously and have the incentive to do so. It is no good just saying it is in the curriculum. Schools have to realise, “We have to teach this, we’ve got the incentive to do it and we have the resources”. It cannot just be left to any teacher on a wet Wednesday afternoon to teach citizenship. It is crucial and has to be taken seriously. I regard this amendment as absolutely key to British democracy.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Norton, except that I do not believe that we can put all the pressure on schools, which have so many other pressures on them.

[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

I totally agree. I should have said that I regard this as necessary but not sufficient.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

Schools have faced so many other pressures with exams, results and Ofsted judgments, that saying “And you’ve got to shove citizenship in here, but you’re not really going to get rewarded for it” is not going to work. The direction has to come from the centre.

It is interesting that this group of amendments has been so rich and apparently so varied. Actually, what it does is talk about education that prepares students for life, not just for exams or jobs but to be citizens, members of communities, neighbours and possibly parents, and it prepares them to have healthy bodies while they are doing that. That is the only point I will make on the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Sater, who made her point powerfully. Physical education has been totally downgraded, and that has to stop and be reversed.

In responding, I have to start with the suggestion from the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, that respect for the environment was “twaddle”. I looked it up in the dictionary. Among the definitions were “trivial” and “foolish”. I am assuming that the noble Baroness understands that she had to breathe to be able to deliver that speech. That relies on plants, algae and cyanobacteria to generate the oxygen to allow her to breathe. So that label is obviously incorrect. I will leave that there.

I turn to Amendment 220, which the proposer, the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, has not yet introduced. Schools do need practical and lawful guidance, but forcing the Government to bring that guidance in on the day that the Bill becomes an Act will inhibit schools’ ability. The guidance was always intended to be non-statutory, including when it was first published in draft by the previous Government. I acknowledge that we have not yet heard from the noble Baroness, but I do not think that, in Committee, we heard any explanation of why the guidance needs to be statutory.

I will speak very briefly on the two amendments that I actually signed. Amendment 208 has been very ably spoken to by others; I am just going to make one additional point. This is about providing relationship and sex education to persons of 16 and 17 in education. Your Lordships’ House chose to call for a ban on social media for under-16s. We do not know where that will end up, but, if the ban comes in and, assuming it works, young people at 16 start accessing a whole range of previously banned material, surely, they will need the help of education and support to be able to work through, process, understand and think about that. So we should think about how those two things fit together.

The other thing is that the noble Baroness, Lady Burt, knows that I have backed her Private Member’s Bill at least twice previously. She introduced it very clearly. The one thing I will add is that, in terms of education for life, we ask schools to create more space in school time in particular for cultural and social education, but where are they going to find the time? That assembly time could be a really useful time and, if that is preparing people for life—developing cultural interests, developing artistic interests, developing a love of the theatre or a love of music, all things that help people prepare for a rich and satisfying life—that is what we need our schools to be doing much more of.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

My Lords, I shall very briefly add my support to Amendment 243C and, in doing so, declare my interest as a member of the board of the London Marathon Foundation. As we have heard, schools play a crucial role in the formation of lifelong activity habits, but they need to be properly supported, both to provide more opportunities within school and to ensure that what they offer meets the needs of the various interests of young people and children, to make sure that they fully engage with physical education. A national strategy would give schools the structure they need to guarantee consistently high-quality physical education, as well as help them build partnerships with community sports organisations, creating pathways that link school-based activity with accessible opportunities outside school.

In its recent submission to the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee’s inquiry into community and school sport, London Marathon stressed the pressing need for national and local government, schools, governing bodies and charitable and commercial organisations to align behind tangible shared objectives to get children and young people active and, most importantly, keep them active. By mandating the publication of a national strategy for physical education and sports in schools, this amendment will be an important step to delivering just that.