Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath Excerpts

Tuesday 16th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 472 and 479 briefly but very warmly. I will not try Treasury terms, though as a former civil servant, I of course recognise their strength.

Quite apart from the intrinsic value of enabling happiness, which I confess is my underlying reason, well-being has instrumental advantages for society. It stimulates motivation, energy and concentration, particularly for demoralised and alienated children, such as those from minority-ethnic groups who have experienced constant prejudice and belittling, among others. It encourages them on to a pathway of achievement. We know that children from disadvantaged backgrounds and on free school meals are more likely to have lower well-being, as are care leavers. In our credentialised society, improving motivation and raising achievement can reduce the disturbing proportion of NEETs who slot aimlessly into routes to unemployment and crime.

I think well-being is allied to a sense of self-worth—after all, if you feel your world does not think enough of you to value your happiness, you may well feel that you are not worth it yourself. It is this absence of sense of self-worth and self-respect that I noticed most strikingly among the criminals I met when I was a magistrate; also among the children at risk of delinquency who I used to run a club for; and even among a few so-called normal children when I did some teaching; and more recently in encounters with embittered adults whose childhood had surrounded them with prejudice and discrimination. Children can be resilient and can triumph over adversity if they are motivated enough, but the erosion of the ability to cope, which suffering and the absence of well-being causes, has clearly undermined an increasing number.

Well-being has been notably increased by the right kind of design and architecture in schools, and particularly by music education, including singing. There is good evidence for that, but well-being needs to be measured systematically in all schools. This would do much to start embedding a stable culture of resilience and happiness in our schools, so I very much hope my noble friend the Minister will accept these amendments.

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, I speak in support of Amendment 502YG, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Cotes, and other noble Lords. Your Lordships may well have seen the helpful briefing from the Natasha Allergy Research Foundation, of which I have the honour to be a parliamentary ambassador. For those noble Lords who have not had the chance to read it, I will share some brief highlights, given the hour.

Two children per class suffer from food allergies, on average. If your allergic reaction to milk, cheese, nuts or anything else triggers an anaphylactic shock, you need an immediate dose of adrenaline injected with an EpiPen, also known as an autoinjector. Half of all of England’s schools have not got one—that is 10,000 of them. Two-thirds of teachers have not had any formal training on what to do if a pupil suffers from an anaphylactic reaction or shock—and that is in the buildings outside the home where children are most likely to have an anaphylactic shock, unsurprisingly, since they spend six hours a day, five days a week, 38 weeks a year there.

I am confining my remarks on this amendment to the support of all elements relating to EpiPens and autoinjectors, but I support all of the amendment. Your Lordships can see from my comments that requiring all schools, not just half of all schools, to have an EpiPen and someone who knows how to use it has the potential to save lives and reassure countless parents that their children will be safe at school.

Your Lordships might be wondering why so many schools are completely unprepared for this sort of emergency. Schools have a vital day job to do. It is hard enough teaching maths to children who are not interested—please insert your own least favourite lesson if you happen to be a mathematics enthusiast—so is it fair to load this responsibility on to them as well? I gently say that all that is being asked at this point is that an EpiPen is in the school reception and that there is someone who knows one end of it from the other. I am not joking—I am afraid that there has been at least one incident of a member of staff injecting themselves with adrenaline rather than the pupil in shock.

Another argument which might be used against the amendment is that it is surely the responsibility of the pupils at risk to carry their own EpiPens and of their parents to make sure that they do. This is true, but I imagine that my noble friend the Minister agrees that it is not realistic to assume that every child will follow the rules every day without fail. The evidence shows that pupils are most at risk when they are 15 to 17 years-old, precisely the age when they are most likely to take risks.

I have spoken in this House on this issue before, as the mother of a now 17 year-old pupil who has suffered two episodes of anaphylactic shock. Yes, she has two EpiPens in her bag and yes, I try to make sure that she always does. But just like any other mother, I know that things do not always go to plan. I live with that fear just like so many others.

Shortly after my daughter’s first anaphylactic shock, 10 years ago, her doctor at the Evelina London Children’s Hospital, just across the river, asked for my phone after her emergency treatment. To my astonishment, he then took photos of my pale, limp and silent daughter as she lay in my arms. He explained to us that we should print out these photos and give them to her grandparents, her friends’ parents and anyone else who was a bit doubting that severe peanut allergy is really dangerous, and keep one for her first boyfriend in years to come, so that everyone who might have to treat severe allergies would understand that this is what can happen, and that the adrenaline in EpiPens is life-saving.

It is well worth requiring schools to keep them and for them to know how to use them. They save lives.

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I will be fairly brief. I mainly want to commend the Government on the restraint that they have shown in this Bill in clauses relating to mental health and well-being.

Despite the Bill’s title, there is a welcome absence of clauses that imply that well-being and activities that promote it are separate from, or even antithetical to, good education. In reality, they are strongly correlated. For most children, well-being is a likely outcome of being well taught, well supported, discovering and developing their wider interests, and forming good relationships with peers and with adults—developing a sense of belonging.

Further, there is a growing recognition that spending too much time talking about mental illness to young people who are not ill can be counterproductive. We may need less mental health awareness training in schools, not more. For those advocating more universal mental health interventions in their amendments, I recommend reading the findings published by DfE earlier this year on the effectiveness of several school mental health awareness interventions. These tests of established programmes found that they did not reduce emotional difficulties in the short term, and in the longer term appeared to be associated with greater emotional difficulties and decreased life satisfaction.

Those who have been around in education long enough may also remember the evaluation of the then popular SEAL programme; I think it was “social and emotional aspects of learning”. This study of the programme, which was for primary schools, showed not only that the positive outcomes expected did not materialise, but also that there was an unwelcome side-effect in that, to paraphrase, it taught the mean kids to be better bullies, using the techniques of emotional manipulation that the programme taught them. These findings are a valuable reminder that sometimes less is more.

A word of warning: much of what is proposed in these amendments is hugely well intentioned, but I am particularly nervous about some of the ideas around measurement. If we do not want measurement processes in themselves to harm children, we should not collect data by constantly asking children who are not unwell about their well-being, and especially about their negative emotions. I have seen so many dreadful examples in schools where even very young children are constantly prompted to express emotions and invited to say that they are experiencing negative emotions. You can see the change; they start to believe they are sad or worried or afraid, where this had not even occurred to them. Nothing could fit the phrase “throw the baby out with the bath-water” more accurately than to make children unhappy through well-intentioned measurement processes.

I therefore urge the Government to prioritise advice from expert clinicians in this field and to allow schools to do only—