Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Fox of Buckley Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 208 in this group. It is a pleasure to follow the noble and right reverend Lord. While I might not agree with everything he said, the debate on British values was an extremely common theme of my time in the Department for Education. It is a commentary on the world we live in that we now need to define what we mean by democracy, but I do not disagree with the point the noble and right reverend Lord made. I thank other noble Lords who added their names to Amendment 208: the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett.

As this amendment was debated in Committee, I will not take too long to introduce it. But I also do not think that I really need to convince the Government Front Bench, given that, just before Christmas, we had the arrival of the Government’s long-awaited violence against women and girls strategy. It was good to see the commitment:

“The Minister for Skills is exploring the most effective route to make Relationships and Sex Education … mandatory for young people under 18 in further education colleges”.


Unknown to many—including, presumably, some noble Lords in this House—and rather extraordinarily, hundreds of thousands of young people aged 16 to 18 are currently excluded from the benefits of relationships and sex education if they happen to be in further education colleges. This is despite the fact that this group experiences, for example, the highest rates of domestic abuse. An estimated 608,000 students aged 16 to 18 study in either further education or sixth-form colleges in England. Although further education colleges can deliver relationships and sex education on a voluntary basis, provision is inconsistent, unmonitored and often with scant training or support for those who are asked to teach it.

The campaign has the support of the Association of Colleges. I am also grateful to the Let Me Know young people advocates, Tabitha and Angela, who spoke so movingly at a briefing last week for Members of this House on why the extension of this education is needed for their age group. I also pay tribute to the efforts of Faustine Petron of Make It Mandatory, a survivor and formidable campaigner who identified the gap in education for this age group, having been unsupported during her own experience of relationship abuse. Some 105,000 people have now backed her petition.

Recent research from the Institute for Addressing Strangulation shows that almost half—43%—of sexually active 16 and 17 year-olds have been strangled during sex, and 70% of young people surveyed by the Children’s Commissioner have seen porn routinely featuring rape, strangulation and incest. This House and the other place have rightly been introducing, discussing and amending legislation on issues such as nudification apps, violent online pornography, harmful and abusive content across social media, and the non-consensual sharing of intimate images. That is why, at the same time, we must support the creation of space in the curriculum for all 16 to 18 year-olds—the very age group most likely to be having to deal with the reality of these and other relevant issues—so that they receive a proper education on these matters. As the young people I met last week said, for them, these issues are not theoretical. The more than 600,000 young people in further education colleges have as much right to that curriculum as the rest of their peers.

I am grateful to the Minister for her engagement on this issue. I shall listen very carefully to what she says. As I say, I think she agrees with the overall thrust of this amendment. If this is not the right Bill, which I think reflects the conversation that she and I had, I ask her to say which one would be, and, if one of those who support this change were fortunate enough to secure the ability to bring forward some legislation sooner than the next Department for Education Bill, I would be grateful if the Government would indicate their support for it.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 220, relating to the guidance for schools on gender-questioning children, which is still long overdue and which I think we have to ensure happens as quickly as possible. I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, for having pursued this and for tabling her amendments.

This is incredibly important and necessary to clarify issues for parents, for teachers in understanding and knowing exactly how they might deal with the difficult questions around gender-questioning children, and of course for children themselves. Obviously, this relates to some of the controversy and the failure to issue the EHRC code in relation to the guidance coming from the Supreme Court judgment, but it stands on its own terms.

When I talk to teachers and parents, there is still a lot of confusion about the demands of the Equality Act 2010’s gender reassignment protected characteristic and how one deals with that, and duties in relation to it, and how that might clash with, for example, safeguarding or free speech. That leaves teachers exposed and unclear.

I want to refer to what it feels like for parents who, across the UK, have been shocked to discover what their children have been taught or told in classrooms and have sounded the alarm on some teachers covering highly sexualised age-inappropriate content with young pupils and, in some schools, even affirming children in their gender identity—that is, social transitioning—without the consent or knowledge of their parents. It is understandable that that has caused alarm. For three to four year-old children just starting to learn to tell fact from fiction, the difference between make-believe games with friends pretending to be princesses, playing families or whatever and telling children at this stage that a person can literally change from one sex to another can be hugely confusing. I understand that this is not the Government’s intention and that they want to clarify it, but that is why I think the guidance should be urgently introduced and explained to schools and the Government should make clear what is and is not permissible.

Too often, it is left up to grass-roots activists otherwise. Recently, an article hit the media about a group of women—one a retired midwife, another a retired solicitor and another a mum of two—from a group called Protect and Teach who said that many schools do not have the appropriate safeguards in place. They are especially worried about outside organisations being invited in to effectively teach children, some as young as primary school, about inclusiveness, which might sound harmless until you look at the kinds of teaching materials used by these third-party organisations that research shows have very flawed policies, muddling up sex in the Equality Act 2010 with sexual identity and gender.

That is one of the reasons why we have concerns. Some of the work the group did, for example, showed that 75% of Church of England schools had problematic policies in relation to, for example, anti-bullying policies, which are not directly related, but practically all the material used in those policies focused on transgender identity, not bullying in any other way. The message of this was that affirmation was the way forward and young people needed to be kept safe from polarised debates, which would indicate a one size fits all. So I am straightforwardly saying that we need clear guidance. The Government must issue that clear guidance. Schools need help with this. It is not easy—nobody is saying it is—but what we cannot do is just leave it open.

I will make one final point on Amendment 206 from the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth. I commend him for doggedly and persistently pushing this amendment, which I have heard a number of times. I commend his celebration of British values, because I think that is important, and I have said that before, although I do not agree with the content of all the British values listed. The “respect for the environment” paragraph is particularly contentious and weak: I have written “twaddle” here. That is probably not a parliamentary word, but I have written it down.

The section on democracy includes that the Government should be accountable to Parliament, which is something we could learn a lesson from. The Government are not always accountable to Parliament—there are far too many Henry VIII clauses, in my view. It also notes that democracy, as a value, should mean regular elections, which would suggest that you should not cancel them, as we are witnessing at the moment. It talks about the importance of the rule of law, which immediately reminded me of what is happening to jury trials. It finally says that “freedom” should include freedom of thought and conscience, freedom of expression, and freedom of assembly and association. As somebody going through the Crime and Policing Bill, I did think it was perhaps worth sending the British values amendment of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, to the people pushing that Bill. I assure noble Lords that freedom of thought, expression, assembly and association are not safe under that Bill.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendment 207 to create a duty to keep schools open for attendance. The speeches that have been made excellently explained why.

I arrived in this House during lockdown, and I was shocked—genuinely, to the core—by the ease with which people in this House on all sides clamoured to close down schools. It was an extraordinary thing to witness. I could not justify it at the time and argued against it. That argument—which was a minority argument, not just put forward by me—was treated as though somehow those of us who were worried about schools closing were the irresponsible ones; whereas I think it was the other way round. I genuinely think that many of the issues that the Bill is trying to tackle—many of the real problems and challenges that we face with young people today—were created, exacerbated and turbocharged as problems during that period. Schools were closed down, which meant that adults broke the social contract with children—not for their sake but ours—and it was against all the evidence. I am very keen to hear the Minister’s response to this, even if it is not tested in a Division of the House, as I think that this will be a huge, important lesson for us to learn.

I will note a few of the problems that have already been raised. We have a mental health crisis, which we talk about regularly—as we will later and have been throughout the Bill—as though it came out of nowhere, but there is serious reason to imagine that young people’s mental health suffered during that period. But we are also talking about behaviour. A lot of teachers will tell you that once that social contract was breached, it created discipline problems because pupils were no longer in class. We have increasing numbers of parents withdrawing their children from mainstream schools. The habit of going to school was broken. We have spent a huge amount of time in this Bill talking about home-schooling, which is going up, and that is partly because schools were no longer considered necessary. I said then that if you tell pupils that truancy is okay in certain circumstances, it will be hard to get back to normal. If you say, “You shouldn’t come into school”, it will be hard to say, “You must come into school”.

Certainly, as a teacher, I lectured young people—many a time—saying, “There is nothing more important than going to school. There is nothing, nothing, nothing more important than your education”, and then suddenly as a society we said, “Oh, there are lots of things that are more important than going to school or your education”, so they learned a very bad lesson.

We will come on to talk about the problems with smartphones. What did we do when we sent all those young people home? First of all, we told them to look at screens to get lessons—a lot of the time we did not bother even supplying the lessons on the screens—and what they did was spend a lot of time on their phones. They were not out socialising. They became desocialised—anti-social.

The final reason why we have to remember that this is so important is that a cohort of young citizens was told, “If there is a problem, you stay at home, you withdraw”. I think that if we say to young people, “If you feel ill, you aren’t up to coping with going out and being part of society”, we are creating a medicalised fragility and an acceptance of illness as a reason to withdraw that have led to massive social problems. We are now paying for that with a huge welfare bill. Many young adults now lack the resilience to become economically active.

The cost of what we did was enormous and we are yet to come to terms with it. The Bill is trying to deal with a lot of the problems created by that period, and this amendment is therefore important in raising the possibility that we should not, as a default, close schools. The default should be that we do not, that we owe it to children to have their education and that schools are kept open for attendance. There has to be an extremely good reason why schools are closed, and that should be thought through deeply. As someone who was here when we were deciding, let me assure noble Lords that it was not.

[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.