Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff Excerpts

Thursday 18th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, I have a probing amendment in this group, which came about because it struck me that we need to be prepared to think of the unthinkable. Sadly, there have been some tragedies in different schools in different places. There have been bus crashes and knifings. We know that defibrillators on sports fields have saved lives by having a programme that was rolled out. We know that autoinjectors of adrenaline, which are now in schools as a spare autoinjector, have been saving lives.

However, I am not sure that children really know how to cope with some of the life-threatening emergencies that can occur before emergency services arrive: particularly, how to manage if a child seems to be bleeding out from a severe injury—there are some very simple measures that can be taken—how to manage choking if someone is choking on a bolus of food in the dining room, and how to manage a chemical attack. I should say that my own grandsons attended the school—one is still at the school—where there was a chemical attack on a pupil in the street that hit the news. I was very struck many years ago when those same grandchildren were much younger and at nursery, where they were taught a very simple rhyme to shout if there was a fire: “Fire, fire. Do not hide. Run outside”. It was terribly simple. We chanted it in the home with them. It was an important lesson, because things can be incredibly dangerous and can happen very fast.

The purpose of my amendment is to probe the extent to which we are taking seriously some of the unthinkable things that could happen to our schoolchildren and making sure that they are prepared for responding in a way that does not further endanger them when there is serious danger in front of them. It is a probing amendment—I know that it is not well drafted—but I felt that when we are going through such enormously complicated legislation, putting so much onus on schools, we have to think about the unthinkable.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lord, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and to share in her concern about the need to prepare pupils in this age of shocks where we literally do not know what is around the corner. I have often spoken in your Lordships’ House about the need for first aid education in schools. This amendment is broader than that.

We need education that prepares people for life and not just for exams. I note that recently some basic questions about first aid have been introduced into the driving licence test, which shows that there is some recognition by the Government of the need to act in this space.

I shall speak chiefly to my Amendments 502YB and 502YK and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, for her support for them. Amendment 502YB, which would require a review of climate adaptation in schools, very much fits with the noble Baroness’s Amendment 502P, but her amendment is focused largely on the physical fabric of schools while mine is focused to a large degree on how schools behave and are arranged. It is more of a behavioural kind of question.

I note that the UK Health Security Agency has published updated guidance about heat for schools and early years settings. That guidance allows schools to relax uniform policy in the heat. It suggests that students should wear loose, light-coloured clothing and sun hats with wide brims, stay in the shade as much as possible, and wear sunscreen with high sun protection factors, et cetera. It also says that teachers should encourage students to take off their blazers and jumpers. But all that is in terms of encouragement and suggestions.

I put it to the Minister and the Government more broadly that we are in a situation now, particularly when we have so many schools with an unreasoning and almost religious attachment to rigid uniform policies, where there should be rules that say that schools must act to keep pupils safe. I note that the National Education Union suggests that 26 degrees should be set as an appropriate point at which to identify additional measures—so let us make some rules about taking action to protect our children.

On the broader point about climate resilience, the noble Baroness, Lady Boycott, referred to a London study; I shall refer to a London programme that may have followed from that, Climate Resilient Schools. In 2022-23, the Mayor of London funded measures in 100 schools to make them more resilient, but when we look at the website, we can see that that programme has now ended. Surely, we need an ongoing programme to make our schools more climate resilient.

I come now to Amendment 502YK, about the prevention of the transmission of respiratory and other diseases in classrooms and schools generally. I was looking at Amendment 502YH in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, which would introduce a new clause headed:

“Statutory standards of filtering and monitoring systems deployed in schools”.


I thought, “Oh, this might be similar”, but, no, that is an amendment about computer or digital viruses. We have just had a very long debate focusing on those digital safety issues, but, somehow, even despite the Covid pandemic, we have rather less focus on biological virus risks—mine is the only amendment that does that.

You might call this the Covid amendment, and certainly I speak in the context where it is very clear that Covid is not over; a new variant, Stratus, is spreading fast and raising levels of concern. That means that Covid is still spreading and that more and more people are not just becoming ill in the short term but, as we know, getting long Covid. The pulmonologist, Binita Kane, has recently started an NHS long Covid clinic and notes that there has been a refusal to acknowledge the problem of long Covid, and the continuing problem. If we look at the history of the world’s medical treatment of so-called chronic fatigue syndrome, or myalgic encephalomyelitis, we see that there has been a refusal to acknowledge the issue of broader post-viral syndromes and the fact that people get ill for a long time.

There was a study out at the end of last year whose headline said that after two years 70% of the children who had shown the symptoms of long Covid were no longer displaying them. That means, of course, that 30% of the children who had been diagnosed a couple of years ago with long Covid still have it, and it is still affecting their lives. That is something that we cannot ignore about Covid—but, of course, this is not just a Covid amendment. Just because we have had a Covid pandemic, that will not have any impact on the continuing acute risks of a flu pandemic, something that the world has known much of in the past.

Ventilation and air filtration are also good for pupil concentration. It is good for general health to have fresh air in the classroom, and we need to be able to look after the health of pupils. I have a direct question for the Minister—I shall understand if she wants to write to me on it later. In 2021, England spent £25 million on providing all state-funded schools and colleges with a portable CO₂ monitor for every two classrooms. There was further funding in November 2022 for the remaining 50% of classrooms. The recommendation is that CO₂ levels should be kept below 800 parts per million, with indoor air at 600 to 800 parts per million being a relatively good level of ventilation. Can the Minister tell me now or in the future how many of those monitors are still in use and what kind of results they are showing?