Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

2nd reading
Thursday 1st May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I shall restrict my comments to the clauses in the Bill on schools. By my reckoning, we are probably entering our third decade of discussing the structure of schools in England. Interesting and important though that may be, it has not been the easiest of discussions. There have been a lot of piecemeal changes. Two government Bills on this subject have been completely withdrawn because of differences of opinion within the Conservative Party. Throughout all that time, teachers have managed to keep the school system going and raise standards.

I hope most of all that this can be a turning point when we put behind us this debate on the structure of schools and begin to focus on what makes the real difference: what happens in the classrooms. We have got to learn from those decades of discussion and years of change, and without doubt, there are more good schools than there were before. Without doubt, the birth and growth of academies has contributed to that. Academies have brought something new to the system. The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, referred to them as a disruptor. They brought outside expertise that it was not always easy to get into schools, they have brought an energy, and they have helped to raise standards. But there is no evidence that I can find that shows that they should be the universal model—that only within that model can excellence be achieved. There is often, among some people in the Chamber, a lack of generosity of spirit in acknowledging that that excellence, that innovation, that improvement, exists in maintained schools as well. Academies do not have the monopoly of excellence, nor of innovation, nor of turning round failing schools.

My conclusion is that both types of schools should be allowed to flourish as part of a strong school system. If you want a choice on governance—because that is what it is about—if you want to leave the partnership of the local authority and the partnership of schools, if you want to take on those extra responsibilities, choose to be an academy; but if you want to retain that relationship with a local authority and that local family of schools, choose to be a maintained school.

Frankly, policymakers should be able to learn to live with that, rather than offering a bribe or incentive to change. If we can live with that choice and focus on other things, more schools will improve. If we want every school to be a good school, we must not only ensure that, as policymakers, we give each school the best possible chance of succeeding; we have to make sure that they do not achieve this by behaving in a way that makes it more difficult for other schools to succeed. We need a policy framework for individual schools to succeed that determines how schools relate to the wider school system. It is not a market that should govern whether schools succeed or not; it should be the strength of that partnership and the acknowledgement of the school system.

I welcome the parts of the Bill that make that more likely to happen. I welcome co-ordinated admissions. I welcome the power of local authorities to direct academies to accept particular children, often in challenging circumstances. I welcome the removal of the ability of academies to set their own admission numbers, not because I want to take away the freedoms, but because those can be exercised in a way that makes it impossible for the school down the road to flourish and succeed, and that cannot be right.

I welcome the measure on the national curriculum, as well, not because I want to tie the hands of teachers and heads, but because I have never, ever understood why it is a privilege afforded to academies but not maintained schools. It is a national curriculum: the clue is in the title.

When I look back through all my years in both politics and education, I cannot remember a time when flexibility within the national curriculum was not allowed. If the Minister could reassure us that it is a national curriculum and there are exceptions, I think it would put a lot of minds at rest. The decisions, in terms of the national curriculum, should centre on the needs of the child and not the structural status of the school. If a child has the need to do something other than the national curriculum in the maintained sector, why on earth should they not have that same freedom as in an academy?

I hope that the Bill gives us a strong framework for strong schools within a strong school system.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 23rd June 2025 Lords Chamber

Limiting the use of smartphones in our schools would support our teachers and our school leaders. It would improve pupil safety and make a significant difference to our children’s safety and life chances. I hope that this is a policy area on which we might achieve some consensus in this House. The arguments are strong. They would speak for themselves, but they are eloquently supported by noble Lords. I support these amendments.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, this is the first time I have spoken in Committee, so I declare my interest as chair of and adviser to the Birmingham Education Partnership.

It is 25 years ago, when the Minister and I were in the Department for Education, that we were discussing the rollout of technology in early years. It just was not part of school life; it was not an implement that was used. The thing we were most worried about then, which underpinned every speech I made, was that it should be an innovation that became available to all and was not limited by social class, the family you are born into or how much money you had in your pocket. I never thought that, a quarter of a century later, the debate would be about the damage that that area of technology development has brought to schools, but we must remember that that does not take away from the vision, the hope and the aspiration we saw in this technology a quarter of a century ago.

However, we are clearly not in a place where we want to be. I cannot say anything to counter the evidence that the noble Lord, Lord Nash—indeed, everybody who has spoken—gave about the impact of social media on young minds. It is just terrible. As an adult, I feel responsibility that it has happened and that we moved too slowly to do anything about it. If some of us come to the conclusion that we do not want to ban smartphones in schools, it should not be a political dividing line; we are actually all on the same side. We have at least got to that point, but there is a genuine debate to be had about how we take it forward to protect our children so that they have the advantages that technology can bring while saving them from the risks and the bad things that it can do.

I think that there is a difference between smartphones and social media that has not been clear in this debate, and I am not sure about the definition of smartphones at the end of the proposed new clause. It says that a smartphone is something

“whose main purpose is not the support of learning or study”;

I do not know what that means. A smartphone enables learning and study and good things in life, and it allows social media to reach people that it should not be reaching. The definition is quite difficult to follow.

My main problem is that the smartphone is a bit like the atom bomb; you cannot uninvent it. It is entrenched in our society. There are things that as adults we cannot now do unless we have a smartphone, and every single week, month and year, government and everybody else push us as adults to use smartphones. That is what AI is about. All the advantages that are going to come through AI are connected to smartphones, so whether we like it or not, we have gone too far down the road. For adults, smartphones are here to stay. I do not see how abolishing them in schools allows teachers and educationists in wider civic society to train and help young people come to terms with the adult world in which they are going to live. If smartphones are banned in schools, if they cannot be used, how can we expect young people to be competent and confident adult users of smartphones and to cope with social media? It would be like saying, “We’re not going to teach you to swim, but by the time you get to an adult, we’re going to let you live by the side of a lake”. It is just nonsense. We have got to help children to come to terms with smartphones, and that is why I thought that the speech made by my noble friend Lord Knight was powerful.

I describe myself as being on a bit of a journey. I am a bit of a floating voter on smartphones in schools, but when I am honest with myself, I know that the reason that I nearly come down on the side of banning them in schools is that I am panicking that we are not doing anything else. I almost reach out for anything—at least we could ban them in schools; at least we could protect children between 9 am and 4 pm; at least we could protect them between five and 18. To be honest, that is not enough. If there is this problem, and we all seem to have signed up to the idea that it is a problem, it needs more from us as policymakers than to, yet again, say it is the responsibility of schools. Reducing teenage pregnancy was the responsibility of schools. Healthy eating was the responsibility of schools. Being better citizens was the responsibility of schools. Every time we have a problem that goes through society and we are not quite sure how to deal with it, we put it on the curriculum—it is the responsibility of schools.

I do not say that schools have not got a responsibility—they hold the major responsibility because they are going to be teaching media literacy—but they are not the only ones who have it. If we are serious, adults, parents, government and civic society need to get together with schools and educators to try to solve this problem. It is not sensible to say that all we can do in this Bill is go for schools. That would make a bad policy. When it does not work, we cannot say, “Yes, that’s all we could do in that Bill”. That would be poor policymaking. I hesitate to say that government has got to look at it in the round and do something more than it has, because that is just time, and we have known about this problem for 10 years at least and we have not moved fast enough. I end up probably coming down on the side of my noble friend Lord Knight and saying that there are things that need to be done in schools that mean we ought to keep smartphones in schools.

I have some specific questions on that. The proposed new clause in Amendment 458 would ban smartphones, except in two or three circumstances. My noble friend Lord Knight then puts down an amendment, which is great, excepting another circumstance. We know what is going to happen: people will be putting forward amendments as to why, in a particular case, smartphones should not be banned in schools, and eventually it will all be a muddle and we will have to start again. In truth, you cannot ban smartphones in schools. There will always be reasons why you will need to use them, so you end up coming down on the side of saying that we have got to use them well and we have got to support young people.

My last point is, how do you enforce it? It is in the law. If the governing body—that is the noble Lord, Lord Nash, to tell the truth—permits smartphones in schools, who enforces it? Do you get the police in? Do you get parents to report it? Do you get kids to report that they have been allowed to have a smartphone in school? At the moment, it is heads who choose, along with their governing body and staff and the wider school community, not to have smartphones in schools. They own that. It is their law. They have gone through the preparation, talked it through and arrived at a decision, and that makes sense. I may just not be seeing the rationale, but I worry that enforcement, when it is in primary legislation, will be not a great thing for schools. I am coming down on the side of not banning them, but my great worry is that it is just another couple of months passed where the real dangers that were outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Nash, and others have not been addressed in this House or elsewhere.

[Lord Bethell (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great privilege to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Morris. I think she spoke for many of us on the challenge of edtech: how our hopes that this would be a transformational technology have now changed emphatically, and how we now find ourselves in a place we really did not intend to be.

I would like to say a word about Amendment 183CA, from my noble friend Lady Penn, the noble Lord, Lord Russell, and the noble Baronesses, Lady Kidron and Lady Cass. My noble friend Lady Shephard put it well: our children do need respite, and a school is a wonderful place to be spared that kind of respite. The noble Lord, Lord Knight, spoke well about the harsh impact on education.

However, it is Amendment 177 that I primarily want to address. For that reason, I see Amendment 183CA as a stepping stone to getting rid of mobile phones from the lives of under-16s altogether at some stage; that is what I will address my comments to. I do this as a former Health Minister and I declare my interest as a trustee of the Royal Society for Public Health.

The neurobiological evidence of the harms of social media on children is not ambiguous any more. It is irrefutable, as it is, for instance, for tobacco. We can see the causes and the correlations. One three-year longitudinal study published two years ago found that adolescents who habitually checked social media showed “distinct neurodevelopmental trajectories” in brain regions governing social reward and punishment, such as the amygdala, the ventral striatum, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In other words, social media exploits the dopamine pathways involved in addiction, creating cycles that exploit the neurochemical pathways that determine their actions.

I personally struggle with addiction. I find it extremely tough. Our children’s plastic brains are just not in a shape to be able to survive that struggle. This challenge is not a teenage rebellion or some kind of moral panic. It is a systematic neurological manipulation by megacompanies that know exactly what they are doing.

Social media is a major driver of the mental health crisis that this country faces, and the consequences are contributing to the overwhelming of our NHS. In 2024-25, NHS mental health services supported 800,012 under-18s, an increase of nearly 300,000 since the NHS long-term plan first started. I will not go into the figures in detail, but I assure the Chamber that this is not a question of “snowflakery” or wokery; it is a genuine public health emergency, and the problem is not going away.

I say this with some delicacy. I am one of the few Peers in this House who has children of this age. Mine are 18, 15, 13 and 10. In answer to my noble friend Lady Shephard, they are all at different schools, which is a logistical problem for me. None of the schools is winning this battle. In fact, I would say to the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that, each year, I have seen this problem get worse. You can feel the algorithms getting more effective and having more of a grip on your children’s lives.

Each year, children spend more hours on the phone. The communal social pressure each year is more intense. Mental health, and self-harming among friends in schools, gets worse. There is more and more disgusting pornographic filth available to young children. Statistically, there are more predators, activated by the addictive escalator of increasingly violent porn, seeking meet-ups with my children. There are more frustrated parents each year watching their children’s attention and well-being deteriorate. The kids simply are not mature enough to handle these toxic tools and this content—and this is even before AI gets to work on their brains with superpowered social algorithms that screw with their heads. It is going to get worse and worse.

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[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, we have had the privilege this afternoon of listening to some very powerful and well-informed speeches, and I thank all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. I shall speak to Amendment 458 in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, and to Amendment 177, which I was very pleased to co-sign with my noble friend Lord Nash. I note the widespread support evidenced by the popularity of my noble friend Lady Penn’s Amendments 183CA and 183CB, which prevented me from adding my name to those as well, which is testament to the cross-party recognition of this important issue.

Noble Lords across the House have witnessed first-hand the dedication of teachers, parents and school leaders, who work tirelessly to create environments where our children can thrive. Today, I speak to an issue that threatens to undermine their best efforts. Amendment 458 would require schools to implement comprehensive smartphone bans during the school day, with carefully considered practical flexibilities for children who need smartphones to access their medical devices—for example, for diabetes—for boarding or residential schools and for sixth forms. This is not about a blanket prohibition without thought; it is about creating the conditions that are necessary for our children to succeed academically, socially and emotionally.

I note Amendment 458A, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Knight of Weymouth, and would be delighted to talk to him after this debate in a bit more detail, but I also note the remarks made by my noble friend Lady Spielman about the benefits of using a school-owned device in these cases, and actually did not hear any examples that could not be done on a desktop or a tablet.

There is genuine urgency to address the profound impacts of smartphones on the health and well-being of our children. I am afraid I do not agree with the noble Lord, Lord Storey, that the evidence is mixed. I think one needs to look very carefully, and I thank my noble friend Lady Jenkin for this advice when I sent her an article suggesting that the evidence was mixed. She pointed out who had funded the researchers who were writing the article. We have to be scrupulously careful about both the scale of the sample size in some of these studies and who is funding them.

As the noble Lord, Lord Hampton, said on behalf of the noble Baroness, Lady Cass, it is crucial to take both the personal and professional experience into account when designing policy. The desire for change, including, perhaps most importantly, as we have heard this afternoon, from children themselves, is very clear. We have to reset the social norms around smartphone use among young people before we lose another generation to screens.

The Government have argued that existing guidance on phone use in schools is sufficient, pointing to the fact that every school has a policy. But speaking as someone who was part of the previous Government that created many drafts of that guidance—as the Minister can imagine—perhaps we are uniquely positioned to acknowledge that, while it may have been the right place to start, it has proven insufficient. Good intentions without enforcement mechanisms do not protect our children from the sophisticated algorithms designed to capture their attention. As the noble Lord, Lord Russell, said, we need to move with speed and clarity. Some have questioned—

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

That point has been raised by a number of Members, so perhaps I might ask the Minister, because I am genuinely unclear what the thinking is. I know it is not that no harm happens to children using smartphones outside of school. You do not know who is in the bedroom with them; you do not know who they are talking to. I think that is our starting point. I am not clear from those who are supporting this amendment whether they are saying at least they will have those hours a day when they will not be subject to smartphones or social media. I do not know whether that is sufficient, or whether there are further plans in those Members’ minds as to how to cope with the rest of the week. My view is that that is where most of the damage happens: outside school, not inside school.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

The noble Baroness is right that a smartphone amendment on its own is not sufficient. As the Minister said a couple of times on previous days in Committee, I will be coming to that later. I will try to address the noble Baroness’s points. If I have not done so by the end of my speech, I ask her to please intervene again.

Some have questioned why we favour freedom and discretion for school leaders in areas such as curriculum and staffing yet seek to mandate action on smartphones. The answer lies in a couple of areas. The first is about accountability. When school leaders make decisions about teacher pay, qualifications or curriculum, they are held accountable through Ofsted inspections, public examination results and parental choice. The consequences of their decisions are measurable and visible. Smartphone policies operate in an entirely different landscape. Here, schools face external actors: powerful social media companies with business models that are predicated on capturing and monetising our children’s attention. These companies employ teams of neuroscientists and behavioural psychologists to create algorithms designed specifically to keep our children scrolling, clicking and consuming content that ranges from the merely distracting to the genuinely harmful. We can all think of cases that, tragically, have been fatal.

The facts surrounding smartphone usage among children paint a sobering picture. A quarter of the UK’s three and four year-olds now own a smartphone—these are toddlers whose cognitive development is being shaped by screens before they can properly read. This figure rises to four in five children by the end of primary school. We are witnessing the digitisation of childhood itself. The emerging evidence linking smartphones and social media to the explosion in mental health problems among young people cannot be ignored. Research demonstrates that the average 12 year-old spends 21 hours a week on their smartphone, which is equivalent to a part-time job. One in four children and young people uses their devices in ways that are consistent with behavioural addiction.

Beyond mere time-wasting, smartphones fundamentally disrupt sleep patterns and concentration, as we have heard from a number of noble Lords. Applications are deliberately designed for addiction, through sophisticated dopamine triggers, as my noble friend Lord Bethell said. This pattern appears consistently across western nations, with research showing that earlier smartphone acquisition correlates strongly with poorer adult mental health outcomes, particularly affecting girls.

The academic evidence is equally compelling. The OECD data reveals that two-thirds of 15 year-olds, as the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, report phone distractions during their mathematics lessons, with distracted students performing three-quarters of a year behind their peers. Even brief non-academic phone use can require 20 minutes for students to refocus on learning. We are not talking about minor inconveniences. We are witnessing a systematic undermining of educational achievement.

Experimental research has moved beyond correlation to establish causation. Studies where students are randomly assigned different conditions—one of which I will send to my noble friend Lord Lucas and the noble Lord, Lord Knight—prove that simply having a smartphone in one’s bag, jacket or desk reduces attention capacity and cognitive performance. Students with device access during lessons achieve measurably poorer results because the very presence of these devices is profoundly distracting.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 3rd July 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to ask a question on this set of amendments on registers. I have not spoken before, but I am absolutely supportive of the Bill; it is long overdue and I very much welcome it. But in the spirit of wanting to do this as practicably as possible, we need to make sure that we are not being too onerous on parents and local authorities in this area, and that what we do makes sense. In respect of what has just been said, if I am right, parents just have to provide information under new Section 436C(1), not new Section 436C(2), which is a much longer list. In fairness, it says:

“To the extent that the local authority has the information or can reasonably obtain it”,


so I am not overly worried about that.

I do not think that the questions being asked are unreasonable, as long as the list does not grow and we are firm with local authorities about not sneaking in extra questions that are not required, but—I am not sure where this is in the Bill—how often does this have to be updated by parents? When educating your child, if for some reason you wish to do an area of learning next month and you approach somebody new to do that—maybe for one hour a week—would you have to notify in advance, would you do an annual review or whatever? We need to be really clear around that area, as a sign of good faith that we are not deliberately trying to make this onerous. There should not be some kind of checking that means you can never make a mistake. I am just using this as an example for the Minister because, if we are not careful, the rules could be misinterpreted and this could get more cumbersome than we intended. Other than that, I do not think that new Section 436C(1) is unreasonable or time consuming, as long as it is interpreted in the way that was intended.

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

My Lords, my noble friend was a most distinguished Secretary of State for Education, and I am very grateful to her for intervening in this debate. To answer her questions directly, she said that she was focusing only on new Section 436C(1), which is indeed the subsection that I particularly drew to your Lordships’ attention in covering paragraph (e). I have to disagree with my noble friend saying that it is okay; I do not think it is okay at all.

My noble friend asked what the onward obligation is to provide further information when, let us say, an extra teacher or the like is brought in. The answer according to the Bill is that there is a duty to inform the register every time, within 15 days, so that is the onward responsibility.

My noble friend is quite right that new Section 436C(2) refers to the local authority, not the parents. I pointed it out because there is an enormous number of requirements on the local authority in the registration process; they actually number 27. That is an illustration of how complicated the Bill has become and how unworkable it is in its present state.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 2nd September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 250 in my name and those of the noble Lord, Lord Bourne of Aberystwyth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell of Hardington Mandeville, whose support I greatly value. This amendment would oblige schools to ask for and record why the child is to receive home-education. This is not done at present and the Department for Education lists the reasons as “unknown” in 42% of cases. The current census estimates that 111,700 children are being home-educated, a 20% rise since last year—hardly an endorsement of what has been going on in some schools. The reasons must be collected to get a better understanding of why children abandon the advantages of school and where feasible, deal with them. We know there are many reasons, some of which, like the bullying which so many Gypsy, Traveller and Roma children endure, must be more effectively and specifically tackled; among those reasons, regrettably, is the desire of some schools to ensure their exam pass rates reach a certain level, thus neglecting the children who most need their education to work. I hope my noble friend the Minister can accept this amendment.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will contribute very briefly to this debate. I thought that the amendments by the noble Lords, Lord Young and Lord Crisp, showed the difficulty of the Bill in that very different groups of young people are being referred to and both sets of needs need to be met. Therein is the difficulty of getting the legislation right. I very much took the point about children with caring responsibilities and hope that we can take this opportunity to improve that; it is something about which I have been concerned for a while.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 10th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Morgan of Cotes (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I want to speak briefly in overall support of Amendment 427C, which has just been so well moved and spoken to by the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford, on behalf of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester, and the noble Lord, Lord Glasman. I support the thrust of the Bill and what the Government are doing in these sections. I suppose, in a way, my remarks are directed not just towards the Minister but to her officials who will be listening. I would encourage them to engage with the thrust of this clause: if this is not necessarily the right wording, then something along these lines.

Those of us who have had the privilege of serving as Ministers in the Department for Education—I was going to say “served time”, but I do not quite mean that—know that these are difficult issues and have become more complicated. While we have heard a particular focus on a particular religious group, I know from previous conversations, in relation to both yeshivas and other religious institutions, that there is always a reason why there should be an exception, yet we also know that there will be those who seek to subvert any exception for the wrong reasons and it is the young people who will lose out.

What attracts me to this particular amendment is the fact that the local authority would be involved in terms not only of registration but of safeguarding assurance. I have some concern: we do not want to go back to 1944, when the world was very different—we are in 2025 and we know a lot more about different institutions—but, overall, as we know and have heard set out so powerfully, there are many communities who want both to comply with the law and to have their practices and customs respected. I hope that, even if it is not with this amendment, discussions behind the scenes before we get to the next stage of the Bill can find a way through so that these provisions are able to go through with the support of the whole House.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I oppose Amendment 427C and the gist of the speeches and comments that we have heard so far. In doing so, I tread with great care, because I realise the history, the sensitivities, and the passion and commitment of those people whose lives would be involved. I do not pretend to be part of that community or to criticise it in any way. I am very proud that our country welcomes people of all faiths. I have always been a defender of faith schools and served for a while on the board of Church of England schools. As a Minister, I argued—sometimes with great difficulty within my own party—for continuing with faith schools. That is the background I come from, but I cannot support this amendment.

Over the past 12 months, together with the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, I have had the privilege of meeting young adults, some up to the age of 30 and some in their late teens, who have been students at yeshivas and educated within the system, living within the community. To be honest, they would not recognise the description that the noble Lord, Lord Glasman, has just given. They would not describe their own education and their own lives in that way. So I think our starting point should be that, as with any school or any community, there is a risk to children if we do not protect them in an orderly way and in the way that we should.

I am not opposed to this community being able to continue to educate in its own faith. Why would we not wish it to do that when we allow every other faith to do the same? But that is possible already. There are Haredi-registered schools where parents can send their children. It is not the case that if you close down the yeshivas, no one can have a school based on this faith. They can—and it is in the registered sector. What I have a problem with is the yeshiva. This is where I oppose Amendment 427C. My argument for doing so is very straightforward: if you are there at 8 am and you leave at 6 pm, it is a school. Whatever you do at home afterwards is not full-time education. If you are there at 8 am and leave at 6 pm, it does not in any way have that balance of education that I think we want for everyone.

I understand that it is difficult to get the balance right and decide where to draw the dividing lines. It is not easy and there is an element of compromise, but what I have heard from the people who have spoken so far is that we all welcome the Bill and we all want things to be regulated to protect children—but not this religion, not this faith, not this group. I cannot buy into that. Every child, including children in this community, deserves to be safeguarded and to have a broad and balanced education, which we are all signed up to. Unless you register it, I cannot see how this will happen.

Where I think the debate comes in is the nature of the registration and the consultation with the community. I urge the Minister, as I know she will— I suspect the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, spoke with her already on this—to try to get an understanding and, where possible, to fit our wish to regulate to protect children with the rights of the community to continue to educate its children in its faith. I would not want to stop that, but I would not want to support anything that excluded children from this community from being safeguarded in the way that children from other communities are.

[Baroness Blackstone (Lab)]

My Lords, I support what my noble friend Lady Morris of Yardley has just said. Perhaps I can say to my noble friend Lord Glasman that I am Lady Blackstone of Stoke Newington, so we share part of our region in our titles. I am familiar with the Haredi community and have been for very many years, and I admire a great deal of what they do, but I am concerned about what is happening to some of the boys in this community. I share the concern based not only on the meetings that I have had, with my noble friend Lady Morris, with some of the young men who have been through these institutions, but also on the very good charity Nahamu, which is concerned about the abuses of children that are taking place in these yeshivas in north London and, I think, Manchester as well. The trustees of Nahamu are proud members of the Orthodox Jewish community and they are concerned about what is happening to fellow Jewish young men and boys. I think that we should respect that concern in considering how we approach the whole issue of these yeshivas. I will speak at greater length in the next group about what I and my noble friend Lady Morris think we should do to make sure that these young men get the education they deserve, which they are not at the moment, and that their experience is properly safeguarded.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My amendments are different from those of the noble Baroness, Lady Blackstone, and narrow in scope. I refer to my Amendments 429 and 433, which relate to independent schools and which I have brought forward in close association with my noble friend Lord Black of Brentwood, who is, like me, a strong champion of independent schools.

I declare my interest as a former general secretary of the Independent Schools Council, which gives expression at national level for the collective views of its 1,423 member schools, where around 80% of the pupils in the independent sector are educated. Indeed, I have a double interest to declare, since I am the current president of the Independent Schools Association, which is one of the council’s constituent bodies and has nearly 800 members, many of them small in size and cherished by the local communities they serve so well—particularly by making provision for a wide range of special needs.

It is no secret that independent schools have their differences—deep differences—with the current Government, principally because of the imposition of VAT on school fees. However, I am glad to say that this Bill does not arouse deep anxiety among members of the Independent Schools Council. There is no clash of fundamentally opposed principles as over VAT. My two amendments seek to explore the possibilities of adjusting and modifying the Government’s proposals in a number of respects, rather than taking serious issue with them.

I should add that the points in question have been the subject of careful discussion between Department for Education officials and senior staff of the Independent Schools Council. The essential aim of my probing amendments is to secure on the public record a firm indication of the Government’s response to issues that have been raised in those discussions without seeking to contest overall policy.

Amendment 429, for example, accepts that the Secretary of State should have a power to require independent schools to “have regard”—the phrase used in the Bill—to guidance issued from time to time by the Department for Education. That is entirely appropriate in order to ensure, for example, that all children have equal safeguarding protection and equal education in moral and cultural development. The amendment recognises that, in such areas, it is reasonable for a Secretary of State to place duties on independent schools by way of guidance. However, would it not also be appropriate to ensure that a Secretary of State would not seek to limit a school’s independence, in the words of the amendment,

“with respect to admissions, the curriculum, or examinations”?

Those are the three vital components of independence in education, subject to qualifications specified in the amendment. It would surely not be unreasonable to expect that a Secretary of State who prescribes a new standard that independent schools must meet would lay before Parliament a statement asserting that those three vital components of independence would not be compromised. A similar statement would also be appropriate when subsequent guidance is issued.

As it stands, the Bill provides that any new standard to which independent schools would be required to adhere would be subject to parliamentary scrutiny. Thereafter, though, guidance issued under that standard would be legally binding on independent schools without any defined role for Parliament. My amendment would give Parliament a role. Members in both Houses would be able to bring forward motions on individual documents and pieces of guidance if they wished to do so. Effective power for Ministers needs to be balanced with effective protection for independent schools. Above all, no future Government should be able to limit their operational independence by expanding the purposes for which guidance can be used; that is what Amendment 429 would achieve.

Amendment 433 would address a single, specific problem that independent special schools frequently encounter. There are 128 such schools within the membership of the Independent Schools Council and another 600 that are not council members. Children admitted to these schools to receive support for one or more special needs are often found to have other needs as well—a point on which my noble friend Lady Barran touched. A child admitted to a school specialising in dyslexia, for example, may be found to have trouble learning to read as part of a wider disorder such as ADHD. Under the Bill, a special school that responds to these circumstances by making provision for additional need or needs will be required to make what is known as a material change application. It is that to which my noble friend Lady Barran made specific allusion.

The trouble is that, under Clause 39, such applications will need to be made before action is taken to meet a child’s extra needs. This is obviously impractical. A school that is deeply concerned to assist such pupils fully will want to make immediate arrangements to cover all of their needs. Amendment 433 would provide a simple remedy and set at rest the concern of schools finding themselves in these circumstances that they may be in breach of the law. It would give such schools two academic terms to make a material change application. This is a common-sense proposal that I hope the Government will consider. Plainly, some change to the Bill seems to be needed in order to avoid inflicting difficulty on independent special schools.

A misunderstanding could perhaps have arisen here. In some places, the Bill gives the impression that a school will need to make an application for material change only if it wishes to alter its main purpose. The Explanatory Notes accompanying the Bill refer to schools that are

“specially organised to make special educational provision”.

Does this mean that an independent special school will need to make a material change application only if it changes the type of SEND provision that it is specially organised to make? Perhaps the Minister could clarify this point when she responds to the issues that my two probing amendments have raised.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I have added my name to Amendments 432A and 434. I spoke about this issue in our debate on the previous set of amendments; I do not wish to rehearse that but, briefly, I wish to link to what the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, said in her contribution to the previous debate. She described a situation in which people are not co-operating with Ofsted and the inspectorate to make sure that unregulated schools can be regulated. Amendment 432A would, as my noble friend Lady Blackstone said, mean that action can be taken in relation to the people who own the building, which is usually clear, rather than the people who run the building, as you can see how that might be evaded.

Secondly, the other amendment would give Ofsted the power to search premises when it goes there, rather than being sent away and, presumably, having to get a warrant in order to go back and look round. I very much support those amendments and tag my comments on to those made in the previous debate.

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

My Lords, it is approaching 2 pm. I suggest that, unless the next speaker can finish his or her contribution by then, we take a short break to allow the House to prepare for Oral Questions; and that the debate on this amendment be adjourned until after Questions.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 16th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Nash (Con)]

My Lords, it is a delight to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bousted. She may be pleased to hear that I have advised my noble friend on the correct pronunciation of her name.

I did not hear very well when we were here last week, but the word “devil” was mentioned. Having checked Hansard, I see that the noble Baroness, Lady Bousted, seemed to think that when we had some dealings in the Department for Education, I thought she was doing the devil’s work in working for unions. I could not possibly think that—I always found her the most charming person to deal with—and, as opposed to the devil’s work, I commend the unions on doing what seems to me the Lord’s work in their campaign on smartphones. I look forward to talking to them about that. I welcome the noble Baroness back from her sojourn in the Arctic this summer, and I hope she is finding the atmosphere in the Labour Party at the moment somewhat less glacial than she found it there—although in the current circumstances, maybe not very much so.

I rise to support the amendments in the names of my noble friends Lady Barran and Lord Agnew. Life in the real world teaches one that the benefits of competition are that strong organisations survive and expand, and weak ones demise. While I accept that there may be remote communities where the availability of these schools is essential, as an overriding policy in schools, allowing competition has been proven to be a good thing. Take for instance the London Academy of Excellence in Stratford, which resulted in a rising tide lifting all boats. Apart from its own excellent performance, it has had a dramatic effect on the performance of the other sixth forms in the area. Good schools must be allowed to expand. To not allow this is to deprive children of their benefits, and they certainly should not be forced to shrink.

Turning to my noble friend Lord Agnew’s amendment, local authorities clearly have a conflict of interest under the proposed admission provisions. Surely there must be a right of appeal, as set out in his amendment. I also support my noble friend Lady Barran’s Amendment 502YC, as highly performing schools should be given the freedom her amendment asks for.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to speak to the amendments in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Agnew, as the noble Lord, Lord Nash, has done. However, on managed moves, these are good things when done well, as they can prevent permanent exclusions. At their best they are in the best interests of the child.

I know Birmingham very well, and the size of Birmingham. Sometimes the managed moves are made on a consulting basis. I ask my noble friend Lady Longfield, who moved the amendment, to reflect that if you make that more bureaucratic in terms of the local authorities’ overall role, it will put too much of an administrative burden on what is working very well in some parts of the city. I am not saying that it is working well everywhere, but where it is working well on a consulting basis, it would be a shame to add layers of bureaucracy. However, on the whole, managed moves based on the framework she suggests are very good.

On admissions, my starting point is the same as that of the noble Lords, Lord Agnew and Lord Nash. Why would you want to prevent a good school expanding? Also, if something is good, why would you not want more children to go to it? That is at the centre of what this is about, because it is true. However, life is not as simple as that. It is not only the interests of the school and the children who might go to it that are affected by the amendments.

I was reflecting back on both noble Lords. One of the best things they did as Ministers was to recognise the early mistakes made by the coalition Government in having stand-alone academies and not encouraging schools to work together. The work they did on multi-academy trusts was a very good step forward from what we had at the start of the coalition Government. Inherent in that is the understanding that schools do not stand alone. At their best, they work with each other, help each other, depend on each other—and the key point is that they do no harm to each other. They do not make life more difficult for the school down the road.

This goes further than multi-academy trusts. Take geographical areas such as Birmingham, Camden or Coventry, which I know reasonably well. There is something about those places that every school in the area has in common. For example, it does not matter whether they are an academy, a maintained school, a faith school, a free school or an independent school—they teach the children of Birmingham. What they hold in common is that they teach the children who go to school in that area. They owe the same obligation to each other that I have just praised in multi-academy trusts—do no harm, support each other, help each other, and compete. You want to get to the top of the table, but not at the expense of the school down the road, because we want all schools to thrive. The problem with the amendments is admissions. If they were to follow these amendments, it would harm other schools serving the same group of children. That is a problem, and that is why I oppose these amendments.

If numbers are rising and there must be an expansion of places, then I take the point: why not expand the good schools? I have often thought that that is not as simple as it is claimed to be, because sometimes the success of the school is the size of the school. You cannot put in two, three, five or six more children—it does not work. You end up putting in 30 more children per school year. You raise it by one form of entry, and over seven years you have more than 200 pupils. The change in the size of the school sometimes makes it different in nature and different in culture. It might damage its academic performance and its pastoral work. Expanding good schools is not done at no cost at all. There is something to pay.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Report stage
Wednesday 28th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Marks of Hale (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 175A. The Government and the Secretary of State for Education in particular have rightly been vocal in confronting antisemitism in education, but that commitment must extend beyond condemning violence or bans towards Jews. The Government cannot condemn violence and bans against Jewish people and then ban or close down their faith institutions.

The Government make no secret of the fact that Clause 37 consciously seeks to close down or entirely alter yeshivas. In their analysis of the Bill since its launch, the only faith community they ever mention is the strictly Orthodox Jewish one. The Bill leaves no lawful space for long-established religious institutions, which provide only religious instruction and operate alongside registered home education.

Yeshivas are safe and safeguarded institutions. They are not schools. They do not provide academic education and cannot be turned into schools without destroying their religious purpose. They exist to inculcate a lived faith. That some noble Lords may raise an eyebrow at that purpose says more about the distance of our own society from faith traditions than about the yeshivas themselves.

Alongside attending yeshivas, these boys are home-schooled. That home education is serious and improving. I have seen their new communal platforms personally, and they are now in active use.

The amendment before the House is narrow and proportionate. It ensures the continued safeguarding of yeshivas; requires registered home education, regulated, of course, by the local authority; and prevents the misclassification of religious institutions. In short, it allows the Government to achieve their aims of maintaining child welfare and education while recognising the lawful set-up of the Haredi Jewish community.

Report is the final opportunity to correct this in primary legislation. To use biblical imagery, the Government’s heart and lips must be aligned. The Haredi Jewish community and its yeshivas must continue to flourish, their children safe and home-schooled. The amendment is the only way that this can happen.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I wish to speak against Amendment 175A. It is tabled in the same way as it was in Committee, but I accept that it was the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Oxford rather than the right reverend Prelate Bishop of Manchester who spoke to it on that occasion. I do not want to rehearse all those arguments again. It was a good debate, so I will perhaps sum them up and express a few further points.

The Bill is not trying to abolish yeshivas; that is not the intent of the legislation. I join both speakers so far in saying that I cherish and welcome the fact that we are a country that values education for all children and allows people of all faiths to reflect that faith in their own education. I have, sometimes at my own political expense, defended the state system, which has Roman Catholic schools, Church of England schools and many other schools. Politically, there are many people who think that we ought to not have faith schools at all. I have always defended them, because that is an important tenet of a free society, and I value the contribution they make to our lives.

I feel the same about people of any faith. This is not about the Orthodox Jewish faith. The amendment could be used by people of any faith to start a school and have 10 hours a day of religious instruction and home education in the evening. That point is very clear.

However, I am opposed to the way some faiths are organising their education at the moment. Without rehearsing the arguments, it comes down quite simply to this: if a child, maybe under 11, is in a yeshiva or any other school—but the yeshiva has been the one that has been mentioned—from 8 am to 6 pm, I do not believe that they can be home educated effectively in the evening. I do not think that is what we are about. If we take faith out of that and think of the needs of the child, we cherish our differences, but we are only a cohesive society if we cherish the things that we hold together.

One of the “samenesses” of our society is that we believe in the right of a child to have a broad and balanced education. I do not see how, in this structure, with yeshiva from 8 am to 6 pm and only religious education, sometimes not in the English language, then home education from 6 pm onwards, we are delivering that to those children. It is as simple as that. I have met people who have been educated in the yeshiva movement. They would not describe it as the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester described it. It is the same as any other school. There are people who like it, people who do not like it, people who say it has served them well, people who it has not served well. It is as simple as that. Let us not go down this line because we think it is one form of education that everybody cherishes and wants to preserve. There is as much of a difference of opinion in this as there is in anything else.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

We have moved slightly faster than I expected us to move, which I am sure is greatly welcomed by most Members of your Lordships’ House. I begin with the group of amendments concerning Clause 40. Government Amendments 176 to 183 and 185 principally concern the Bill’s provisions on the material change regime, which governs the type of change that independent schools require Secretary of State approval to make.

When the Bill was first published, concern was raised that minor or secondary changes, such as bike sheds or classroom conversions, would be unnecessarily captured if changes of buildings at a school’s already registered address were treated as material changes. The Government have listened to these concerns and the amendments now make clear that building changes at a school’s registered address do not require material change approval. Importantly, the same principle applies to any additional addresses that the department registers after approving a change of building. Further changes of building at these addresses will not be treated as material changes.

These amendments take a proportionate approach. They reflect that a registered school making use of new or unfamiliar addresses may be placing pupils at higher risk of harm. Under these changes, the focus will be on any addresses beyond the school’s registered address and any additional addresses registered following an approved change of buildings where there is no prior assurance that standards are met. In addition, these amendments clarify that only changes to how an institution providing special education is specially organised constitute a material change and require ministerial approval. Actions taken solely to meet an individual pupil’s needs do not constitute a material change.

The Government have worked closely with interested parties to ensure that the original policy intent is properly captured. It is right that, where independent schools make changes to their operations that may place children at risk of harm, the Secretary of State is made aware of that and is given assurance that these changes are safe. That is an important principle, and these amendments are a sensible balancing act between strengthening oversight and avoiding unnecessary bureaucracy.

I turn to Amendment 184. In Committee there was broad support for Clause 43, which aims to strengthen Ofsted’s powers to investigate suspected illegal, unregistered independent schools and registered schools operating unlawfully. These additional powers have been drawn with an awareness that the powers currently available to Ofsted in Section 97 of the Education and Skills Act 2008 are inadequate to identify suspected criminal behaviour. Therefore, when drawing up Clause 43, the Government listened closely to the chief inspector to make sure that these powers can be put into operation.

The amendment is aimed at giving greater confidence to the chief inspector when operating under these new powers. It is the Government’s experience that demonstrating offences in this space relies heavily on gathering documentary evidence. Some of that evidence may, under ordinary circumstances, be considered confidential or otherwise fall within existing legislative restrictions. The amendment therefore facilitates the chief inspector’s access to such information when acting under the authority of a warrant, where that is relevant to deciding whether a relevant offence is being or has been committed. It further ensures that independent judicial oversight, in the form of a warrant, is sought before such documents are inspected, copied or, when necessary, seized in reliance on these powers. This approach strikes the right balance between protecting the rights of the individual and ensuring that the chief inspector is able to properly inspect potentially dangerous settings. I beg to move.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I have a quick question for the Minister on Amendment 184, which she described towards the end of her speech. I agree with the purpose of this and most of the details, but I am not quite sure what is meant by “excluded material” or “special procedure material”. Is that anything to do with data protection? If it is an unregistered school, would the inspector be able to go in and seize, copy or have access to a register or pupil progress file without having to go and get a warrant? If they gain access and then have to go and get a warrant before they can see the register or the pupil progress information, they are not going to be able to do their job effectively—but that hangs on what is meant by “special procedure material” and “excluded material”. Does that include things such as school registers?

[Lord Storey (LD)]

Again, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, has taken the words out of my mouth. This is an issue that I have felt strongly about for a number of years. I know from talking to Ofsted that one of the barriers has always been getting the evidence. I presume that the Minister has had detailed discussions with Ofsted and that, as a result, this wording fulfils what needs to be done. I hope the Minister will confirm that.

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[Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 193A and 193B in the names of the right Reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth and myself. These amendments are very simple. They seek to address a small technical omission regarding the inspection of multi-academy trusts when they are the proprietor of one or more schools with a religious character.

When Ofsted inspects schools with a religious character, one of the organisations it is required to notify of the outcome of state inspection is the religious authority responsible for running the school. My noble friend the Minister’s amendment to introduce inspections of multi-academy trusts is welcome, but I feel that the amendment does not replicate the duty of notifying religious authorities for these inspections.

Multi-academy trusts play an important role in creating and upholding the ethos and community in which schools with a religious character operate, so it is essential that the result of any inspection of the trusts that contains such schools must be shared with the relevant religious authority. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth has already said, it is an issue of communication.

These amendments would ensure that the inspection of multi-academy trusts which contain schools with a religious character is consistent with the individual inspection of those schools. I have worked closely with the Catholic Education Service and with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth in bringing these amendments to your Lordships’ House today, and I am sure that the representatives of other religious groups which run schools would also support them. Therefore, I hope that my noble friend the Minister will be able to accept these amendments today or give her assurances that under the Government’s amendment the relevant religious authorities will be notified about the results of multi-academy trust inspections when those trusts are the proprietors of schools under their denominational jurisdiction. I also support Amendment 193C in the name of the right reverend Prelate.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a big change in the education service. I welcome the Government bringing this amendment, because it was not there in Committee and I think it is a response to speeches made on both sides of the House, so I want to put on record my thanks to the Minister and her team for working in between Committee and Report to give us something. It deserves a longer debate than it will get at this time of the night, so it is a shame that it has arrived so late.

I want to seek one reassurance. It must get the prize for the longest amendment because it is pages long. But it also gets the prize for the longest amendment that does not say very much. That is basically the first question I want to ask. Will the Minister give assurance that we will have opportunity to discuss the detail of this? It is a big change, and some of the points raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Spielman, need to be addressed. Secondly, and this is the most important thing for me, could the Minister give an assurance that she will endeavour to make the inspection such that schools do not feel they have been inspected twice, and that it is an inspection of the MAT ownership or governance and not the schools themselves?

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will speak chiefly to Amendment 196A in my name and to Amendment 197 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, to which I also attached my name. Given the hour, I am going to restrain myself on a lot of things. It is a great pity that we are doing this important business at this hour. The Minister, in introducing this group, talked about the need to improve the accountability of multi-academy trusts, which has not kept pace with the growth of MATs. We have heard agreement on that from right across the House. With that in mind, I am going to start with Amendment 197, which we have not yet heard the formal introduction of. I will not go through it in detail, but it looks at the remuneration of chief executives of multi-academy trusts. It includes the provision, under parliamentary scrutiny, to impose limits on that pay.

It might be a difficult job, but I think I am about to shock the House at 11.23 pm. A few days ago, the website Education Uncovered produced some figures on the pay of CEOs of multi-academy trusts—not the biggest ones but the group of the next biggest ones, ranked from 11 to 25 on the number of pupils. A £220,000 salary is becoming standard for these multi-academy trust CEOs—and you can add a pension of about £50,000. This is significantly more than the Prime Minister is paid. We have a fat-cat pay problem right across our society, but here we are talking about public funds allocated for children’s education going to fat-cat pay.

I said that the Education Uncovered figure was for 2025. For the largest trusts, I had to go back to a Schools Week investigation from last March looking at some of the highest pay, and a year ago the CEO’s pay at one of the multi-academy trusts had crossed the £500,000 a year threshold, while three more were on more than £300,000 a year. Unsurprisingly, the National Governance Association told Schools Week that benchmarking seemed to be leading to inflationary pressure—something some noble Lords here who know quite a bit about the financial sector have seen happening. It really is obscene that this is happening in our schools.

The Education Uncovered study shows that the larger trusts are spending more per pupil on these highly paid staff and less per pupil on pupils in the classroom than are smaller trusts and, particularly in England, local authorities and local authority schools. This is a huge problem of accountability, and I commend the noble Lord, Lord Storey, on bringing forward this amendment and seeking to deal with it. I cannot think of a reason why the Government would not think this a good idea.

I come now—very briefly, given the hour—to my Amendment 196. This follows attempts that I made in Committee, with the assistance of the National Education Union, to create something that would allow schools to get out of this mess when they are just fed up with it. It would allow parents fed up with multi-academy trusts that are not working—we have seen a lot of examples recently of multi-academy trusts imposing on local school communities disciplinary rules that have caused a great deal of upset, concern and fear for the well-being of pupils—a way to get schools out of this system that is not working for them.

In Committee, I brought forward the idea of an academy reversal order. It is very complex, given that schools in multi-academy trusts no longer have their own legal entity, but I made an attempt at doing that. I also attempted to say that it was a duty of the Secretary of State to produce an order like that.

Now, on Report, with Amendment 196A I am calling for the Government to create a duty for them to produce a report on the demand for, desirability of and mechanisms for the conversion of academy-run schools to maintained schools, within two years of the Act calling for a report. That would not direct anything to happen, but it asks for a direction to the Government to think again, in a Bill that already acknowledges that there are huge problems with the academy trust model, ends the presumption that all new schools must be academies and removes the duty to force schools into multi-academy trusts. We are clearly heading in that direction. Let us get ahead of the game and prepare for a future where we put schools back under local democratic control.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Morris of Yardley Excerpts

Report stage
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.

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[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly in support of Amendment 208, to which I have added my name; I also express support for the aims of Amendment 206 as a fellow member of the Select Committee which the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, mentioned.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, made the substantive case very well, so I will not add to that as I do not think it is necessary. I just remind noble Lords that supporters of the amendment, of whom there are many, called it the Massey amendment in memory of, and in tribute to, our dear late friend and colleague Lady Massey of Darwen—Doreen—who did so much for children and young people’s health and well-being.

I hope that the Government will think again and, if they are not prepared to accept this amendment, that my noble friend will give answers to the questions asked by the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, and it will be very clear as to how exactly they going to pursue the commitment made in the very welcome VAWG strategy document.

[Baroness Morris of Yardley (Lab)]

My Lords, I will very quickly add my support to Amendment 206. I shall be brief, because the points have already been made. I was a fellow traveller on the committee that considered this and I share with others a recognition of the tenacity that the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, has shown with this.

The noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, reminded us of when “British values” was brought into the curriculum. It was not an easy time and it was not readily accepted. I congratulate the noble Baroness on her tenacity in getting that on the agenda.

Times are not easy now, what must be 10 years later, but it is right that we review the content of what we call British values. The teaching profession has had experience of teaching this and of organising schools that have it at their centre. We have learned a lot. The publication of the national curriculum review is an ideal opportunity to address this again.

Democracy is not taught well in schools. My noble friend Lord Blunkett is absolutely right that we do not do this well; we could do it a lot better. The need to do so is great. This amendment gives us an excellent opportunity to address that.

[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.