Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Evans of Bowes Park Excerpts

Wednesday 28th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[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.

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[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendments 223 to 226, and your Lordships’ House will remember that we debated the issue in these amendments in June of last year. The amendments have two aims: to provide parents with an effective means of escalating a formal complaint about a school when they are not satisfied with the school’s response, and to introduce a mechanism for better enforcing the legal duties of schools in the provision of education, for example over political impartiality. Proposing these amendments allows for a debate that draws attention to breaches of education law, the failure of the DfE to enforce it or to support concerned parents and the disempowering of parents in the education of their children.

At present, there is little or no enforcement of significant parts of education law: first, because the school inspector at Ofsted does not consider compliance with education law per se. When challenged about rating schools hitherto as outstanding when they were clearly in breach of their legal duties, Ofsted has stated that there are many different obligations and that it is not a compliance-driven inspectorate. Inspectors are teachers by profession, so they may not always be equipped to make judgments over legal compliance.

Secondly, parents could, in theory, launch a judicial review against their child’s school, but the significant costs of such legal action and the damage it could do to the parents’ relationships with their child’s school are significant factors. Parents can use the school’s internal complaints process, and, at a state-funded school, if they remain dissatisfied, they can escalate their complaint to the DfE. However, there are examples of extremely poor handling of complaints by the department. The department occasionally appears to go to considerable lengths to evade making any decision and parents can literally be waiting years after they first submitted their complaint to the school before they receive a response, by which time their child may well have moved on to another school.

Consequently, failure to comply with some education laws is widespread and schools do not always take them seriously. It is common for teachers and governors not to know what education law requires, demonstrating that it is largely irrelevant in practice. There are exceptions; for example, inspectors will consider aspects of a school’s work on safeguarding, and schools are consequently more likely to closely follow the statutory safeguarding guidance, Keeping Children Safe in Education—although even here there have been concerns about schools’ practice.

The amendments would introduce a right for parents to appeal complaints to the First-tier Tribunal, rather than to the DfE, if they have completed the internal school process and remain dissatisfied. The internal school process usually has at least two formal stages. Parents would retain their ability to escalate a complaint to the DfE. The amendments would work by inserting new clauses into existing education Acts: the Education Act 2002, for local-authority maintained schools; the Education and Skills Act 2008, for independent educational institutions, including academies; and the Education Act 1996, for non-maintained special schools. Finally, Amendment 226 would allow for consequential amendments to be made.

As the hour is late, I will not go into detail on the amendments, but I will finish by explaining their impact. To make use of these provisions, parents would need to specify in their complaint the duty that they are concerned the school is breaching. There would also be some costs involved. Not all parents and complaints will be able to make use of these provisions. However, in those situations, parents would be no worse off, as they would still have their current ability to escalate to the DfE. The general effect, however, would be to increase awareness, among both parents and schools, of the school’s legal obligations. An increasingly clear focus on schools’ obligations may lead to greater objectivity in parental complaints and help reduce spurious complaints.

Whereas in the past schools have sometimes withheld information from parents on what they teach, the duty of disclosure would compel them to provide this information if an appeal to the tribunal was pursued, preventing secretive approaches to what children are taught about sometimes sensitive subjects. As tribunal judgments start to be issued, teachers and governors would become more aware of the legal requirements that they are under and take them more seriously, improving compliance and potentially reducing parental complaints in the long run. Politically sensitive judgments —for example, on whether particular teaching about gender identity is a breach of schools’ duty of political impartiality—would pass from the Secretary of State and the department to the tribunal, which would have a greater ability to prioritise a dispassionate consideration of the legal questions over political considerations. The Secretary of State and the department would also benefit, in that their policy decisions that lead to changes in schools’ legal obligations, or changes in statutory guidance to which those schools are legally required to have regard, would be given better effect in schools.

Although judgments of the tribunal at first tier do not set a binding precedent, unlike the decisions at upper tier, they would nevertheless build up a body of legal opinion on the application of education law that would be a valuable reference for governors, teachers and parents. If tribunal decisions repeatedly support bad practice, this would provide clear evidence to Parliament of the need for changes to education law. This may help cut through the claims and counterclaims about whether there are problems in schools’ teaching in areas such as RSE, providing a more objective basis for debate and evidence-based policy. For those reasons, I am happy to commend the four amendments tabled in my name.

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 191 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, to which I have added my name. In doing so, I declare my interest as honorary president of COBIS. Unfortunately, the noble Lord, Lord Knight, is unable to be here today, but I am grateful to him for sharing recent correspondence he has had with the Minister on this matter.

It is critical that we act to improve the safeguarding arrangements between schools here in England and international schools overseas. The Safeguarding Alliance has supplied a couple of very concerning examples of recent cases where the system has clearly failed. In one international school, sexually explicit material was discovered on a school-owned computer during recent IT maintenance. A subsequent investigation identified multiple videos showing a member of staff livestreaming and recording explicit content which was stored within their user account. The content was assessed as being of such an extreme nature that the local UK embassy declined to view or handle the material. A referral was made to the Teaching Regulation Agency, but the TRA confirmed that the matter fell outside its jurisdiction. The member of staff is now working in another country and able to return to teach here undetected.

In a second example, a nursery teacher was discovered by a parent in the act of sexually abusing a child within the school setting. The parent immediately reported the incident to the school’s senior leadership team. The school made an immediate referral to the relevant local authorities and attempted to report the incident to the TRA, but as the school was based overseas, the TRA was unable to accept or process the referral. The school had no clear alternative reporting or regulatory pathway for international safeguarding concerns involving a UK-regulated teacher. The alleged perpetrator subsequently left the setting, and their current whereabouts remain unknown.

For this reason, Clause 46 is very welcome, in that it extends the jurisdiction of the TRA to those who have previously worked in England. It will give much-needed assurance to employers as teachers return from overseas. However, there remains a narrow but significant gap: where an individual who is qualified to teach in England through IQTS has completed induction in a British school overseas but has never taught in England, there is currently no route for serious misconduct overseas to be reported to the TRA. As the Minister has agreed in correspondence, this covers a very small number of teachers, but this loophole remains a risk to children if it is not closed.

The substantive reason for the Government resisting this amendment was set out in a letter which the noble Lord, Lord Knight, received last night. In essence, it argued that the TRA cannot practically be expected to investigate such incidents overseas. Yet this is precisely what it will have to do with incidents in relation to Clause 46. I want to stress on behalf of both me and the noble Lord, Lord Knight, that this amendment does not seek to turn the TRA into a global regulator or require the Secretary of State to investigate all misconduct overseas. It is tightly drawn, applying only to those who are qualified to teach in England and who may in due course seek employment in our schools.

Once Clause 47 requires all schools to employ qualified teachers and Clause 46 brings those who have previously worked in England within scope, this group is all that remains. It is a small cohort, but without this change, an individual who commits serious misconduct overseas may move on, secure a fresh reference and subsequently take up a post in England.

Safeguarding training reminds us that safeguarding is everyone’s responsibility; it does not stop at national borders and concerns must be reported wherever there is a risk to children. This amendment is pursued in exactly that spirit, and I hope that the Minister will once again reflect on whether this narrow extension could be accommodated to deliver the outcome that I know we all seek.

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)]

My Lords, I am also grateful to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and to speak to Amendment 191A in my name. During the debates on the Employment Rights Bill, Peers on this side of the Chamber welcomed the Government’s commitment to a review of Section 10 of the Employment Relations Act 1999. However, it is clear that such a review will not necessarily be economy-wide in scope.

What it cannot easily do is address the specific position of teachers and school staff, who work in one of the most highly regulated and safeguarding-intensive environments in the labour market. For teachers, disciplinary and grievance processes are not exceptional; they are a structural feature of the profession. Safeguarding law rightly requires that every allegation be taken seriously and investigated, even when later it proves unfounded. As a result, teachers and school leaders are far more likely than most workers to experience formal proceedings during their career.