Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Graham Stuart Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 8th January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

The Secretary of State has mentioned previous generations of politicians, and all of us in this House must recognise that we follow in the footsteps of giants. Tony Blair, Lord Adonis and others created the academy system that was built on under the last Conservative Government and brought about a transformation of English education. Why does the Secretary of State want to dismantle decades of work by Members across this House and bring about a gross socialist uniformity that will destroy the progress that has been made?

[Bridget Phillipson]

That is simply a mischaracterisation, and the right hon. Gentleman knows it. I will come on to the wider schools measures in this Bill later in my speech, but I note that he had nothing to say in his intervention about the safety of children and the measures we are discussing today. The wrecking amendment that the Leader of the Opposition has tabled would block the very important, very serious measures that the Conservatives have been telling us for days they want to see put in place. If they want those measures, they need to support them.

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[Bridget Phillipson]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I recognise the challenge that she faces in her constituency and that we see right across our country. We have seen a big increase in the number of children being home-educated. While I respect the right of parents to make that choice—there is a complex range of reasons why many parents are now making that decision, and there are questions about how we support our children with their mental health and wider challenges on the SEND system—let me be absolutely clear to the House that all children not in school, when they are being home-educated, must have a good level of education. We cannot allow the situation to continue where we do not have visibility of where children are and they slip between the cracks. We will ensure through the Bill that when a child protection investigation is under way or there is a child protection plan, local authorities will be able to decline that request from parents, because we all sadly know what can go terribly wrong when we fail to step in and protect children.

[Graham Stuart]

On that issue, will the Secretary of State give way?

[Bridget Phillipson]

I am afraid that I am concluding now.

We are bringing together the system’s many parts into a collaborative, coherent whole with children at its heart. Our ambition to support children does not stop here. We expect to bring forward further legislation when parliamentary time allows. Our work to erase the stain of child poverty must and will continue through the child poverty taskforce, which I am proud to co-chair with the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions.

Reducing the burden on schools, freeing teachers to teach and children to learn—today is about action. When colleagues from across the House read the Bill in all its detail, they will find running through its 60 clauses one golden thread, one common theme, one objective, one common cause. It is not structures or ideology, and they will find no pet projects or stale dogma. They will see that our focus is firmly on children: their life chances are the aim, their protection is the objective and their success is our common cause. This Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is written for them. It is introduced to the House for them. It will be implemented for them—for their safety, for their schooling and for their futures. I commend the Bill to the House.

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[Laura Trott]

I am glad that the hon. Lady has confirmed that the Labour party is, indeed, anti-academy.

The Bill goes on and on—rampant centralisation in search of a cause. Why are the Government making all schools follow the national curriculum? Where is the evidence that there is a problem? Why are they putting in place sweeping powers to direct academies on unspecified things? What possible justification do they have for that? The notes say that it is to prevent “unreasonable use of power”. I say, look in the mirror.

[Graham Stuart]

My right hon. Friend has mentioned pay and power. I think they lie behind the Bill, because the education unions opposed at every step under the last Labour Government and under the last Conservative Government. The dinosaur tendency, which we just heard from the hon. Member for Gravesham (Dr Sullivan), shows that the Government viscerally dislike the freedom of academies, and they turn their face against the transformation of educational outcomes—not least for the poorest—because of ideology rather than a genuine commitment to the child.

[Laura Trott]

Sadly, I think my right hon. Friend is absolutely correct. I see no other reason for the academy provisions to be in the Bill. It actually says in the explanatory notes that the primary aim of this legislation is to make the education system “more consistent”. That is at the heart of the problem today, because more consistency does not a better education system make. It is a classic Labour argument: one size must fit all, lopping the tops off the tallest poppies.

God forbid that schools might be able to innovate and learn from each other, and teachers might have freedoms in the classroom to try new things, backed up by a regulator that rigorously inspects and identifies failure. That is an excellent education system, but one that aims solely for consistency is not—a system of command and control, stifling teachers, supressing innovation, with everything decided in an office in Whitehall, far away from the classrooms. It is same old Labour: consistency for all, excellence for none.

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[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

After five years in this place, I am relieved and delighted that I and other hon. Members finally have the chance to consider a piece of legislation that focuses on children. The Bill gets to the heart of our shared duty as public representatives to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our children. The Liberal Democrats will approach the Bill in a spirit of constructive co-operation. I urge colleagues across the House to do the same for the sake of our children up and down the country.

On that particular note, I turn to the reasoned amendment tabled in the name of the Leader of the Opposition, the right hon. Member for North West Essex (Mrs Badenoch). Everyone in this House agrees that no child should ever face sexual abuse and exploitation. We all agree that the state must comprehensively investigate all allegations. We must deliver justice and prevent these sickening acts from happening again in future. Where we disagree is on how to achieve that. We on the Liberal Democrat Benches want action that helps victims and prevents these crimes from happening again. The Conservative party wants to derail this important Bill instead. We will table amendments ensuring the recommendations of the Jay inquiry are implemented in full. We will be a party of constructive opposition and we will aim to strengthen the Bill and its crucial measures on child protection and safeguarding. For that reason, we cannot accept the Opposition’s wrecking amendment. Our children’s safety and wellbeing is simply far too important. We owe it to them all to get this right.

[Graham Stuart]

Can the hon. Lady set out exactly in what way the amendment, which I think is entirely constructive—it accepts the safeguarding element, but challenges the educational vandalism that is being undertaken by the Government—is so objectionable?

[Munira Wilson]

I humbly say to the right hon. Gentleman, who has been in this place much longer than I have, that I understand that if the reasoned amendment were passed, the Bill would fall. That is why it is not a constructive amendment. That is why it is a wrecking amendment. I do not think killing a Bill that seeks to improve safeguards and safety for our children is the way to get justice for innocent victims of sexual abuse.

There is much in the Bill that we on the Liberal Democrat Benches welcome, but of course there are areas of detail where we will seek to probe and strengthen, and measures on which we will seek to go further. As the Bill makes its way through the House, we will provide that detailed scrutiny, challenge and improvement.

Some important changes are in the provisions on kinship care. The Secretary of State will be aware that this is a subject close to my heart and those of my party colleagues.

[Munira Wilson]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. He is absolutely right. I welcome the measures that put information about the local kinship care offer on a statutory footing, recognising the crucial role of kinship carers and finally putting a statutory definition into law, which we have long called for. Yet a definition in and of itself will not provide the financial and practical support that many families and children need. Areas where the Government are taking action are limited to certain sub-groups of kinship carers and their children, thus undermining the value of the proposed definition. The charity Kinship says it would

“hope to see future legislation and the forthcoming multi-year spending review further prioritise wider kinship care reform”.

I therefore ask the Secretary of State, and will ask the Minister during the progress of the Bill, when they plan to expand the current pilot scheme to provide allowances to all kinship carers. Why does the educational support in the Bill not seek to extend pupil premium plus and priority admissions for children in kinship care?

We welcome the Bill’s provisions on child safeguarding, including the register of children not in school. As Liberals, our party firmly upholds the right of parents to educate their children at home when it is the best choice for their child. In 99% of cases a parent knows what is best for their child, but it is deeply concerning that there may be many thousands of children whose whereabouts are simply unknown. That reality can contribute, as we have seen all too recently, to tragic safeguarding failures, and that cannot continue.

[Graham Stuart]

Can the hon. Lady provide a single instance where a child who was in home education—we must remember that children at school spend about 86% of their time out of school—who was at harm was not known to social services already? Too easily there is a conflation of a failure of social services, which needs to be fixed, with home education, which is entirely separate.

[Munira Wilson]

All the evidence points to the fact that the education and schools sector must be a key safeguarding partner, which is why it is in the Bill. When a child has been identified as being at risk, ensuring that they are in school, which the Bill seeks to do, will help to safeguard them. We saw this all too tragically in the recent case of Sara Sharif: she was taken out of school and then abused at home, and tragically died.

[Graham Stuart]

She was being abused anyway.

[Munira Wilson]

The point is that this is just an additional measure to ensure that children like her are safe.

I want to reiterate to colleagues across the House that we absolutely support and champion the right of parents to home-educate. This is not an attack on home education; it is about ensuring that all children are safe. That is the view of the Children’s Commissioner, the National Society for the Protection of Cruelty to Children and many other organisations, and in fact parties across the House. The Conservatives themselves started to legislate for this in the last Parliament but then binned the provision. There is cross-party consensus on this measure.

There are areas of detail that we need to dig into during the Bill’s progress, but in headline terms, the register is a crucial tool in the armoury that we give local authorities to ensure that our children are safe. As I have said, it has been called for by many organisations and all parties. However, the volume of information requested from parents places a significant and potentially intrusive burden on those who choose to home-educate for the right reasons, so we must ensure that data collection is strictly necessary and proportionate and is being used appropriately.

Clause 24 sets out the cases in which parents and carers must seek permission to withdraw children from school. I would question the inclusion of children placed in special schools. When there are safeguarding concerns about a child, the local authorities should be able to step in to ensure that they receive their education at school. However, some children’s needs will not be met in the special schools in which they are placed, and parents may feel that they have no option but to home-educate. In such cases, should not the presumed options be to improve the child’s experience of the school or to work with the family to secure alternative provision, rather than using the blunt instrument of clause 24?

We know that, after years of neglect and mismanagement by the Conservatives, our schools are crying out for support. For students, parents and teachers enduring crumbling buildings, persistent underfunding and a spiralling SEND crisis, hearing the Conservatives’ rhetoric today will be utterly galling. The Bill takes welcome steps in restoring local authorities’ powers to propose new maintained schools—especially given the desperate need in many areas for new special schools, which local authorities have regularly been prevented from establishing in recent years—although, it is disappointing that it does nothing else to start addressing the reforms that are so desperately needed to improve the special educational needs system. We also welcome the co-operation on school admissions criteria. Together, these changes empower communities to allocate educational resources locally, but some clarifications are needed.

Let me ask specifically what assessment the Government have made of the impact of requiring every single teacher to have, or to work towards, qualified teacher status, and whether they have spoken to the sector about that. We all agree that we want qualified teachers in our schools, but there may be some unintended consequences when non-qualified teachers are brought in to run certain services and extracurricular activities. Are the Government confident that this measure will not lead to those unintended consequences?

The provisions on pay should seek only to set a minimum floor, not a maximum ceiling, on what staff can be paid. I take on board what the Secretary of State said in response to an earlier intervention—that no one’s pay would be cut—but that is a retrospective reflection. I hope that in future all schools, whether or not they are academies, should be able to pay a premium in order to attract the right staff, if they have the resources to do so. [Interruption.] From a sedentary position, the Conservatives are saying that they will not be able to do that. In Committee, we will seek to amend the Bill to make it clear that this should be a floor, not a ceiling.

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[Alistair Strathern (Hitchin) (Lab)]

I thank those on the Front Bench for the speed with which they have brought forward the Bill so early in the parliamentary term. As a former teacher and a local authority children’s lead, I know how important so many of the measures are—an importance matched only by how overdue so many of them are too—which is why it is such a shame to see others seeking to turn the debate into a political sideshow, when it should really be an opportunity for the House to come together behind some powerful and important safeguarding measures.

As a teacher who saw at first hand the importance of breakfast clubs for delivering the best start to a school day for young people, and as a local authority leader who worked to expand them, I am really excited to see that clause 21 brings forward Labour’s commitment to ensure that no child starts school hungry. No one should tolerate children starting school without the food they need to learn and to be ready for their school day, and I am glad that this Government certainly will not do so. Today, however, I want to focus on some of the measures relating to keeping some of the most vulnerable children in society safe and ensuring that they have the support they need. I am particularly pleased to see clause 24, which places on local authorities an obligation to have a register and visibility of every child off the school roll.

As a former local authority lead, I know that reading serious case reviews is an important part of preparation for any role, and certainly for that one. If we read those serious case reviews and stories of what can happen to some of the most vulnerable young people when they are allowed to fall off the radar and to slip through the net, and when they are left open to exploitation and abuse by some of the most evil people in our society, we can be under no illusions as to why this measure is so important. I absolutely understand why, at first reading, those who home-school might have some concerns about it, but this is absolutely not an attack on home-schooling.

The right to home-school is important, certainly at a time when inclusion and support in schools is far from what it should be for children with some of the highest needs, and it is important that that is protected. But just as every parent has the right and responsibility to do what is right for their child, we all have the right and responsibility to ensure that no child can be left vulnerable and fall between the cracks. This Bill does that, and I am incredibly proud to be standing with colleagues and supporting a measure that I know so many of us have called for in a variety of roles over the last decade.

[Graham Stuart]

Does the hon. Gentleman have sympathy with parents who feel that they have been let down by the local authority on support for their child with special educational needs, who recognise the historical primacy of parents in determining the education of their child, and who are now seeing a piece of legislation that removes that right and says that the state, not the parent, decides whether a child can be taken out of school? We all accept that where there are safeguarding issues, action should be taken, but is the hon. Gentleman really comfortable with changing the approach for the ordinary parent after decades of it being the other way around?

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[Sir Gavin Williamson]

The Bill removes academies’ ability to do more for teachers. The Ark academy trust, for example, pays its teachers an average of 2.5% more than every national pay point. Where academies have areas of specialism, they have used them as an opportunity to pay more and bring the best teachers in.

As we progress through the Bill, clause 50 gives the schools adjudicator the power the set public admission numbers for schools, including academies, giving local authorities greater influence over admission numbers for schools in their areas. In reality, that will mean that the very best schools lose out on the ability to expand rapidly and offer more children the opportunity to go there. That is increasingly important at a time when overall student numbers are starting to decline. The best schools have less opportunity to offer more spaces to pupils in their communities.

Clause 44 repeals the requirement to turn failing local authority schools into academies. There is already a great deal of ambiguity about failing schools. What will the Government do about them? That has not been made clear. Ofsted’s powers have been watered down, which will mean that failing schools continue to exist and there will be no change.

[Graham Stuart]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that Ministers must set out how failing schools will be tackled? We cannot have a system in which children are left in schools that let them down without immediate action. That is what the academies programme sought to address.

[Sir Gavin Williamson]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely correct. There is total silence on what will happen. There is no sense that where a school is failing, action will be taken to ensure that successful academy trusts take over those schools and drive improvements.

What we have heard from the Government since they came into office has been about getting rid of excellence. I was very proud of a number of the programmes that we introduced, such as the Latin excellence programme or more cadet forces in schools. The evidence points to the fact that those things had a real impact on children’s attainment, and often for children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. Those programmes have just been scrapped. There is a sense that the Government want a homogeneous schools system in which brilliance and excellence, and the freedom for teachers and schools to deliver the very best for their pupils, are stamped out. There is a sense that Ministers know best—that Whitehall is the master—and that that will drive our education system forward.

Many aspects of the Bill are positive in relation to children’s wellbeing, but I urge the Minister to consider the other aspects that will systemically destroy the progress made by both Labour and Conservative Governments in driving forward academic excellence, and in allowing state schools to offer some of the things that private schools offer, which they had not been able to do before. At my comprehensive school, joining a cadet force or learning Latin were simply not options. The Bill is about dumbing down. It is not about raising aspiration; it is not about raising excellence.

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[Sir Julian Smith (Skipton and Ripon) (Con)]

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) for all the work that she has done on child sexual abuse. I want to speak on two limited measures in the Bill: first, the registration of children not in school, a positive measure that builds on the work of the previous Government; and secondly, the clauses on teacher training.

We know from our casework that the measure on a register is positive and will play a big role in ensuring that children are not lost or hidden in the system. In implementing and applying the measure, I urge the Government to consult with SEN charities and organisations, particularly organisations working with autistic kids and families. Ambitious about Autism makes the case that the register should contain more data on the profile of children not at school, disaggregated by primary need. It is vital for autistic children and families that we put on a clear footing the expectation that there will be detailed profile data, so that schools and councils can offer more tailored support in getting them back to school. Children with pathological demand avoidance require a completely different approach when it comes to negotiating school entry, and we must ensure that their needs are met with patience and understanding.

[Graham Stuart]

My right hon. Friend will be aware that although many home-educated children with autism are known to local authorities, there is very poor support for them. How will this burdensome, expensive register—it will be even more expensive if he has his way—transform the support that children need, rather than being just another bureaucratic exercise that continues the current woeful level of support?

[Sir Julian Smith]

I thank my right hon. Friend for that intervention, but I make clear my support for the register.

The other aspect to having more rules and regulation for families of autistic children is the inadvertent risk of penalising those families through fines and the imposition of stricter rules, which will obviously add to the harm and stress that they often face. I urge Ministers and civil servants to reflect on that. Why should those parents be fined if they are doing all they can to get their children into school?

Even more problematic is the fact that for autistic kids, the clearer, firmer and harsher rules—even with all the good intent that I believe there is—can add further trauma and make school entry even more difficult. That already happens with registration. Schools are rightly under pressure from Government to ensure that children get to school on time. However, parents of autistic children, particularly with a PDA profile, have done amazingly well to get their children to the school gate at all, and the total focus on registration at a certain time of day at all costs risks school refusal and, ultimately, children missing education. Both Ambitious about Autism and the Children’s Commissioner’s report on support for autism and other conditions argue that a much better understanding of the different aspects of autism is key to getting children back to school.

At the heart of this matter are parents. Time after time, parents of autistic children are judged and challenged because schools and authorities assume that the issue is behaviour or bad parenting, or that the issue has a very simple cause. Making sure the measures in the Bill have a deeper understanding of what those families and kids are going through is absolutely vital.

The teaching measures will help. I again point to the work of the previous Government, supported by the Autism Society, making positive strides to introduce autism training in initial teacher training. The more that individual teacher training programmes have specific models about different aspects of autism and challenges to school entry, and the more that can be done on continuous professional development for all staff—teachers, administration staff and receptionists—is key.

Autism is often at the centre of school refusal and non-attendance. As the Bill progresses through the House and into implementation, looking at these measures with the autistic child front of mind will not only transform the school experience of children and families, but in my view help address the core goal of the measures to improve school attendance.

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[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in the debate. Let me begin with the question of the need for a national inquiry into the rape grooming gangs. Given what has been said so far, I challenge colleagues who have opposed the inquiry to name a single proposal from the Jay report that cannot be implemented if we go ahead with it. It really is a matter of “and”. Notwithstanding the political theatre that Labour Members have tried to bring to the debate, the fact that both the Prime Minister and the safeguarding Minister have said that they are open-minded suggests that—sensibly, from a policy point of view and politically—the Labour party may move to the correct position.

As was pointed out by my right hon. Friend the Member for Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge (Sir Gavin Williamson), this is a Bill in two parts, which could probably most usefully have been two separate Bills. The first half concerns safeguarding, and, for the most part, my party and I support it; the second concerns schools, and that we most certainly cannot support. Rather than accusing our amendment of being a wrecking amendment, as the Liberal Democrats have rather disappointingly done, they should recognise that the second half of the Bill—the schools element—is the wrecking element, because it makes the important safeguarding improvements part of a Bill that cannot be genuinely supported in this House.

There is a troubling theme; a misguided notion that the bureaucrat knows best, as colleagues have suggested—for instance, the proposal to strip academies of the flexibility to set competitive pay for their staff. If the Government were genuinely interested in the levelling up that has just been referred to by the hon. Member for Bury North (James Frith), why not, as Sir Dan Moynihan, perhaps the nation’s most successful headteacher and trust runner, said at lunch time today, give those academy freedoms to maintained schools? Why rip away the elements that have been used by academies to produce schools such as Michaela which are the best in the country? We have an ideologically driven Labour Government—that certainly applies to those on the Front Bench; I would not want to daub everyone behind the Front Bench with the same description—who cannot even bring themselves to congratulate a school that has been the best in the country for three years in a row.

The Government are signalling that they do not trust schools to attract and retain the best teachers, and trust only the Secretary of State to do so. In advocating for new schools to be opened and controlled by local authorities, they remove the contestability. Notwithstanding some of the contradictions in the Secretary of State’s speech, she did describe competition as “harmful”. I represent Beverley and Holderness, and for many years I looked at schools in Hull, where there was a view, expressed sotto voce, that “It is the people here who are the problem”. Generation after generation was failed, and when the academies programme was expanded in 2010, what happened? We saw primary schools leave local authority control en masse. We saw that it was no longer acceptable for a local authority to use its democratic mandate to give a substandard education to the local population. We saw a transformation. We saw academy groups opening up, and teachers and communities seizing that. I cannot believe that Labour Members really want to tear this away when the evidence is crystal clear from the OECD PISA tables. On any measure, English education has become immensely better.

[Richard Burgon]

rose—

[Graham Stuart]

I may not believe that of the Labour party generally, but I would believe it to be possible of the hon. Gentleman.

[Richard Burgon]

The right hon. Gentleman is making various remarks about what he considers to be the failings and deficiencies of this excellent Bill. May I invite him to reflect on the fact that in my constituency, East Leeds, families and children have been really struggling over the last decade? The measures in the Bill to bring down the cost of school uniforms and provide free breakfast clubs in primary schools should be warmly welcomed and supported by all of us who care about children and families in our communities.

[Graham Stuart]

No one can be against the principle of breakfast clubs and efforts to make sure that families do not have excessive charges imposed on them by schools, although we need to look at the specifics. That has nothing to do with what I was saying. I ask the hon. Gentleman, and indeed other Labour Members, to reflect on the speech made by the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh). I chaired the Education Committee from 2010 to 2015, and she and the hon. Member for Scunthorpe (Sir Nicholas Dakin), who is on the Front Bench, were distinguished members of that Committee.

[Damian Hinds]

And me!

[Graham Stuart]

As was my right hon. Friend, of course.

I do not think that anyone with whom I have been in this House over the last 20 years has a more personal and visceral record of fighting for change in their constituency than the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden. Colleagues should consider that before they go into Committee and have the opportunity to reflect on the changes in this legislation, because she knows of what she speaks. She has been heroic in championing the improvement in education in her area, and she has delivered it.

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[Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)]

I declare my interest as a former director of the New Schools Network. As such, I have worked with many great free school and academy leaders.

I am enormously proud of the huge improvements in English schools over the last 14 years. In primary schools, English children are the best readers in the west. The PISA rankings show that we are: 11th in the world for maths, up from 27th under Labour; 13th in science, up from 16th under Labour; and 13th in reading, up from 25th under Labour.

In response to various debates and questions, the Education Secretary has made it clear that she does not really like these statistics, but the same story is told by the “progress in international reading literacy” study and the “trends in international mathematics and science” study. It is a shame that Ministers cannot bring themselves to celebrate this success story, or even to congratulate the leader of the best school in the country, Katharine Birbalsingh of the Michaela community school. Facts are very inconvenient when Ministers are so ideological about education.

The magic formula behind this success is one championed by Tony Blair, David Laws and all of us on the Conservative Benches today. The formula is freedom, accountability and evidence of what works. Through this Bill and other measures, the Government are unfortunately taking a sledgehammer to each of these principles. New free schools have been cancelled, the trust capacity fund has gone, and funds for schools that are planning to academise have been taken away. And this Bill is about to reverse academy freedoms, restore the powers of council bureaucrats and replace innovation with ideological uniformity. The clarity of Ofsted accountability has been ruined. Standard attainment tests in primary schools are in danger, and with them school accountability and progress data will go.

On the evidence base, this Government are anti-data, anti-facts and, indeed, anti-evidence, as we have heard during the debate. There have been attacks on synthetic phonics, maths mastery, a knowledge-rich curriculum, teacher-led instruction and traditional academic subjects. We have heard some Members explicitly reject the concept of academies and demand state-run schools. There is a denial of the scientific evidence behind what has worked. From the neurological knowledge we now have about how children learn, to the work of E. D. Hirsch on cultural literacy, and the confirmation that higher-level skills are dependent on the automatic mastery of lower-level activity, the Bill is based not on what works, but on what we know does not work.

[Graham Stuart]

Does my hon. Friend share my hope that Government Members will follow the example of the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh) and put the Bill under genuine scrutiny?

[Nick Timothy]

I share my right hon. Friend’s admiration for the speech given by the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh). It was incredibly powerful and I hope Members on the Labour Front Bench listened closely to what she said, even if they are not listening to me right now—they are looking at their phones. The Government have made a deliberate decision to dismantle everything that has worked.

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[Matt Bishop (Forest of Dean) (Lab)]

The Bill is a landmark piece of legislation that promises to transform the lives of children across England. It is a testament to the Government’s unwavering commitment to the safeguarding and welfare of children. I welcome it as an opportunity to ensure that every child, regardless of their background, has access to the support, protection and education they deserve.

Following my earlier policing career and before entering this place, I worked as an education welfare officer in a large secondary school in the Forest of Dean. I saw at first hand the impact of a disrupted education. The covid-19 pandemic only exacerbated those challenges, and more and more children are missing school for a number of reasons. Vulnerable students were hit hardest, further deepening existing inequalities felt within the education system. The disruption to their education was not just academic, though; it poses pastoral problems. We have a system where parents can choose to home-educate without any checks or scrutiny, and that can lead to a crisis of safeguarding as children are often unaccounted for during this time. Let me be clear: I am not saying that home education and every single school absence are safeguarding concerns, but having dealt with some horrific safeguarding cases in my previous careers, I am sure the House will agree that even one safeguarding case is one too many and that we should all be doing something to ensure the safety of our children.

Currently, there is no legal requirement for parents to inform local authorities if their child is being home-schooled, and that lack of oversight leaves children at risk as their needs and safety may be overlooked. The Bill aims to address those oversights by introducing a requirement for children educated outside of school to be registered with local authorities.

[Graham Stuart]

Can the hon. Member give a single case of a home-educated child being harmed who was not already known to social services? Again and again, it is a failure of social services when notified, not the absence of a burdensome register for parents, who often home-educate their children out of desperation.

[Matt Bishop]

During my previous careers in the police and in education, there were cases. I will not say individual names in the House, but I am more than happy to liaise with the right hon. Member and his colleagues outside the Chamber about cases I have dealt with.

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[Catherine McKinnell]

No, I will not. I have said that I will not.

I know that we are all united in our desire to ensure that the Bill works for children and young people across the country. I apologise if I am not able to respond to all the points that have been raised; there were a huge number of them, and we will have an opportunity to debate all those issues in the weeks ahead.

This legislation will provide the safe and secure foundation that all children need, and I was surprised by the tone of the shadow Secretary of State’s opening remarks, in which she decried it as “educational vandalism”. I know what educational vandalism looks like: children unhappy in schools, standards falling, staff undervalued, school buildings crumbling, and special educational needs and disability systems failing on every measure. That is the Conservatives’ record on education. It is shameful, and it let down a generation of our children. We are determined to turn the page.

Central to the Bill is cutting the cost of sending children to school. In our manifesto, we committed to offering breakfast clubs in every primary school; through this Bill, we will deliver those clubs, which will ensure that all children get the chance to have a soft start to the school day and are ready to learn. The Bill will also address parents’ concerns about school uniforms by limiting the number of branded items, which will put money back into parents’ pockets.

Many Members have spoken powerfully about the impact of poverty on children in their constituency, including my hon. Friends the Members for Bury North (Mr Frith), for Washington and Gateshead South (Mrs Hodgson), for Nottingham East (Nadia Whittome), for Hitchin (Alistair Strathern), for Sherwood Forest (Michelle Welsh), for Stockton North (Chris McDonald), for Brentford and Isleworth (Ruth Cadbury), for West Bromwich (Sarah Coombes) and for Hartlepool (Mr Brash). All of them know that tackling child poverty will improve the life chances of our children, and today we have a chance to make that happen.

As Members have highlighted, our measures will ensure that we look again at admissions and place planning to make sure that decisions account for the needs of local communities. That is why we are introducing a duty for state schools and local authorities to co-operate on place planning and admissions, and emphasising the importance of working together to secure the best future for every child.

[Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister give way on that issue?

[Catherine McKinnell]

We have heard a lot from the right hon. Gentleman today.

Contrary to the comments made by the right hon. Members for East Hampshire (Damian Hinds) and for Stone, Great Wyrley and Penkridge (Sir Gavin Williamson), we recognise the importance of admission authorities being able to set their own published admission numbers, and of good schools being able to expand where there is local demand. There seems to have been a huge amount of misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the Bill’s measures on academies. Unfortunately, I simply do not have time to refute it all today, but we are determined to drive high and rising standards right across our school system, to ensure that schools and children have the support to thrive, and to break the link between background and success. That means looking beyond the sign above the door of a school to the children within, but we cannot achieve that without quality teachers. I pay tribute to all our school workforces, who work tirelessly in the service of children and young people.

Wild claims were made today; the shadow Secretary of State asked why the Government were telling teachers that their pay is too high. At no point have we said that teachers’ pay is too high; indeed, we recently implemented a 5.5% pay award for teachers. To be clear, this Bill does not seek to reduce teachers’ pay. We recognise the good practice and flexibility that academies have benefited from, and the focus of our measures is providing a core offer to all state schools while still leaving them the flexibility to innovate.

A number of Members have rightly highlighted the challenges around SEND, including my hon. Friends the Members for Hyndburn (Sarah Smith), for Altrincham and Sale West (Mr Rand), and for Scarborough and Whitby (Alison Hume). We know the challenges relating to special educational needs and disabilities. We are absolutely determined to fix the system by improving inclusivity in mainstream schools while ensuring that there are special school places for children with the most complex needs. This Bill will go some way towards supporting those aims, but it is by no means the whole picture, and we will continue to make progress on the reforms that are so desperately required.

Our priority is ensuring that the most vulnerable children do not fall off the radar of the professionals who are working to protect them. Members from across the House have rightly focused on that issue. I commend them for their very thoughtful contributions on these challenging issues, including the right hon. Member for Skipton and Ripon (Sir Julian Smith), my hon. Friends the Members for Rother Valley (Jake Richards) and for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), who must be commended for the work that he has undertaken in this area, and my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds South West and Morley (Mr Sewards). There will be “children not in school” registers in every English local authority, and local authority consent will be required to home-educate children who are subject to child protection inquiries or child protection plans, or who are at special schools; that is a proportionate solution that focuses on the most vulnerable.

The Bill will strengthen multi-agency safeguarding arrangements and implement multi-agency child protection teams. We recognise that we must improve information sharing across and within agencies, and we will. The Bill will support children in the care system so that they achieve and thrive. It will keep families together, and children safe, and crack down on excessive profit-making. These are issues that I know hon. Members care very deeply about, and my hon. Friends the Members for Lowestoft (Jess Asato), for Derbyshire Dales (John Whitby), for Forest of Dean (Matt Bishop) and for Southampton Itchen (Darren Paffey) have spoken movingly about them today.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Report stage & 3rd reading
Tuesday 18th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Catherine McKinnell]

I will always share in the celebration of schools that are doing well, and the right hon. Lady is absolutely right to celebrate the schools in her area. I do question, however, the shameless pride we sometimes see in the record of her Government; when they left office, England’s schools were getting worse, standards in reading, maths and science were down, roofs were crumbling, children were struggling, and a generation of children were absent from school. We are determined to tackle those challenges head-on. The education that we provide for our children is not just for their future, but for all of our futures. It shapes society today and the society that we want for tomorrow.

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

It is good of the Minister, for whom I have a great deal of respect, to give way. As I know her to be an honest person, will she at least share with the House the fact that schools in England are better today than they were in 2010? Picking some tiny subset of time to make out that schools are deprived is not a fair assessment. Schools are demonstrably better in England today than they were in 2010. Please, Minister, at least acknowledge that.

[Catherine McKinnell]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his kind words and his assumption of my honesty. The fact is that one in three children starting school is not school ready. More than a third of children leave primary school without a firm foundation in reading, writing and maths. The disadvantage gap is widening. I will come on to what we want to achieve as a Government, but we are not satisfied, as Conservative Members appear to be, with leaving some of our children without the start in life that they deserve. We want the best for all our children, and that is what our changes will achieve.

[Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister give way?

[Catherine McKinnell]

I have given way to the right hon. Member. I will do so again later.

It is essential that every child and family has certainty that they can access a good local school—a school that will set high expectations and standards for all our children, enabling them to achieve and thrive. We are bringing forward legislation to achieve our reforms, but there are reforms that we can make for which no legislation is required. We are designing a school system that supports and challenges all schools to deliver for our children. We want a rich and broad curriculum, delivered by expertly trained teachers, who have a good pay and conditions offer that attracts and retains the staff that our children need.

--- Later in debate ---

[Catherine McKinnell]

Try as the Opposition might to make their straw man argument, this Labour Government will demand high and rising standards for all our children. Recent polls of the profession show that, despite all the scaremongering, trust chief executive officers agree that there is nothing to fear from our sensible, pragmatic and common-sense measures, which will drive standards up in every school. Academies have grown from a Government-backed insurgency in our schools, and now make up well over 50% of our school system. That is not about to change. The shadow Minister will be pleased to hear that conversions to academy status are progressing faster under Labour Ministers than at any time since she joined this House, but it is right to look forward and consider how we will build a system fit for the next 20 years. The Bill is a step on that path. It recognises, in the words of one multi-academy trust leader, that parents deserve clarity and confidence in the standards that their children’s school upholds, and that is what this Government will secure.

The Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth South (Stephen Morgan), led yesterday’s debate on part 1 of the Bill. I will use my opening remarks to speak to the Government’s amendments to parts 2 and 3. Members commented yesterday on the number of amendments, but the number of substantive amendments is small, and I shall focus on them today.

Many Members have a great interest in city technology colleges and city colleges for the technology of the arts, and they have raised with me the excellent practice supported by those institutions. The Government amendments ensure that these schools can be named on school admission orders, and make it clear that families with children attending those schools will benefit from other measures in the Bill, such as those tackling the cost of school uniform.

Just as we are committed to working with all our schools, so too are this Government determined to work with the devolved Governments to deliver higher standards of education and care in all parts of the UK. The majority of today’s amendments concern the extension of the “children not in school” provisions to Wales. The Minister spoke yesterday of our pride in working with the Welsh Government. Labour Governments in both Cardiff and London will deliver our shared ambition for a society where all children receive high-quality education, wherever they grow up. We will build a Britain where children come first. These 91 amendments will extend all the “children not in school” measures to Wales. There is a legislative consent motion on this change, on which we are working very closely with the Welsh Government.

Amendment 140 will include the Scottish definition of schools in the definition of “relevant schools” for the “children not in school” register clause. This amendment ensures that only those children who are intended to be captured by “children not in school” registers are eligible for registration. Without the amendment, a child who lives in England, but who attends school full time in Scotland, would be required to be registered on their English local authority’s “children not in school” register, despite being in school full time.

The previous Government said that there was no space in their King’s Speech to ensure our children’s safety and education, but for this Labour Government, our children are a priority across the whole of the United Kingdom. Amendments 189 and 170 will ensure that the amendments made on corporate parenting extend to the whole of the United Kingdom. Education is an essential protective factor, which can shield our most vulnerable children from harm. The “children not in school” measures include the new requirement for parents of children subject to child protection plans or inquiries to seek local authority consent. However, not every child subject to these inquires will be at risk indefinitely, so it would not be appropriate or proportionate for those home-educated children who are not at risk and who are receiving suitable education to be placed in a school if it is not their parents’ preference. This Government will respect parents’ rights to opt for home education, while keeping children safe from harm and securing their right to education. Amendments 141 to 148 will ensure that this intention is reflected through the school attendance order measures in the Bill.

[Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister reassure home-educating parents that the requirements in the Bill will not be overly onerous? For instance, there is a requirement to record the time that each parent spends educating their child. Is that 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year? How exactly would that work? Can she give us some reassurance that this measure can be made manageable and sensible, and will not be disproportionate?

[Catherine McKinnell]

Parents who are doing the right thing—home-educating their children and providing a suitable education in a safe environment—have nothing to be concerned about in relation to these measures. They are intended to ensure that no child falls through the cracks, and that is what we are delivering.

[Graham Stuart]

I am sure that the Minister intends to ensure that this does not happen, but would someone have to record all the hours and places in a week? I do not know how much the Minister knows about home education, but children are educated in all sorts of places. She has an opportunity at the Dispatch Box to say that she will come forward with regulations to ensure that they do not have to write down every time that they stop at an ice cream shop for some education about the vanilla flavour.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

The Bill does not set out any kind of clear plan or vision for our schools. It does not address the big challenges that need addressing. It is silent on discipline and behaviour—one of the biggest issues. It comes after the Government scrapped simple Ofsted judgments and will be followed by moves to dumb down the curriculum and lower standards further.

The Secretary of State has no positive vision. She has axed programmes for advanced maths, physics, Latin and computing because she thinks that they are elitist. She has axed behaviour hubs with no replacement, even though schools that went through the scheme were twice as likely to be good or outstanding. Yet, somehow, she is able to find £90 million for advertising. The Bill is the worst of all. We have tabled numerous amendments to it. It takes a wrecking ball to 40 years of cross-party reform of England’s schools. Those reforms worked. There is much more to do, but England has risen up the international league tables even as Labour-run Wales has slumped down.

Under successive Governments of all colours, England’s schools have been improved by the magic formula of freedom plus accountability. The Bill attacks both parts of that formula. On the one hand, it strips academy schools of freedoms over recruitment and curriculum and reimposes incredible levels of micromanagement, taking away academy freedoms now enjoyed by 82% of secondary schools. On the other hand, it strikes at accountability and parental choice, ending the automatic transfer of failing schools to new management, reversing the reforms of the late 1980s, which allowed good schools to expand without permission from their local authority—a reform that ushered in parental choice.

Let me unpack this. First, the Bill takes away academy schools’ freedoms over the curriculum. We have tabled amendments to that. As Sir Dan Moynihan, who leads the incredibly successful Harris schools, explained:

“We have taken over failing schools in very disadvantaged places in London, and we have found youngsters in the lower years of secondary schools unable to read and write. We varied the curriculum in the short term and narrowed the number of subjects in key stage 3 in order to maximise the amount of time given for literacy and numeracy, because the children were not able to access the other subjects… why take away the flexibility to do what is needed locally?”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 71, Q154.]

Likewise, Luke Sparkes from Dixons argued:

“we…need the ability to enact the curriculum in a responsive and flexible way at a local level…there needs to be a consistency without stifling innovation.”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 79, Q167.]

Katharine Birbalsingh, the head of Michaela school, which has been top in the country three years in a row, wrote to the Secretary of State:

“Do you have any idea of the work required from teachers and school leaders to change their curriculum? You will force heads to divert precious resources from helping struggling families to fulfil a bureaucratic whim coming from Whitehall. Why are you changing things? What is the problem you are trying to solve?”

[Graham Stuart]

Like me, my hon. Friend finds these proposals tragic because of the removal of the curriculum freedoms that have allowed schools such as Michaela and Petchey and others all over the country to tailor their curriculum specifically to reach disadvantaged pupils so that they can engage better with their learning and have an achievement that previously they did not have. That door is being closed. I hope that Government Members reflect on this and seek a change of policy, if not in this House, then at least in the House of Lords.

[Neil O’Brien]

My right hon. Friend is completely correct. Some Government Members have reflected on this: the hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden (Dame Siobhain McDonagh) said that the proposal to make it compulsory for academies to teach the national curriculum was of particular concern to her, and she is right. Ministers have never explained what they are trying to solve with this change, but the unions like it, so into the Bill it goes.

We have tabled further amendments on qualified teacher status. The Government are getting rid of academy freedoms over recruitment and the freedom to employ non-QTS teachers. Sir Martyn Oliver from Ofsted gave us a good example of how these freedoms are used. He said:

“In the past, I have brought in professional sportspeople to teach alongside PE teachers, and they have run sessions. Because I was in Wakefield, it was rugby league: I had rugby league professionals working with about a quarter of the schools in Wakefield at one point..”––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 49, Q108.]

Brilliant. The Government’s own impact assessment to the Bill says of this change:

“some schools may struggle to find the teachers that they need.”

Rebecca Leek from the Suffolk Association of Headteachers gave a good example of how this freedom is currently used. She said that she urgently needed an early years lead, and was able to take on someone who had run an outstanding nursery, even though they did not have QTS and nor did they plan to get it. But in future, she would not be able to do that. Former headteacher David Thomas told us in Committee that this freedom allows them to recruit people who may be at the end of their career, who have a huge amount of experience that they want to give back to the community. They do not want to go through the bureaucracy, and if we put up barriers, they will not end up in the state sector.

Ministers have not produced a single shred of evidence that teachers without QTS are of lower quality, or for why they cannot be a good supplement to QTS teachers. Ministers have never explained why they, sitting in Whitehall, think that they are in a better position to judge who to employ than headteachers on the frontline. Ministers claim that is vital, but a footnote at the bottom of page 24 of the impact assessment reveals it would, in fact, not be applied to lots of different types of schools, including 14 to 19 academies, 16 to 19 academies, university technical colleges, studio schools, further education colleges and non-maintained school early years settings. It is supposedly vital but is not being applied to loads of different types of school. Yet Ministers are imposing it on loads of other schools. As the former head of Ofsted pointed out this week, taking that flexibility out of the system feels like a retrograde step, and she is right.

Under the Bill, Whitehall micromanagement is back, too. Clause 44 allows the Secretary of State to direct academy schools to do pretty much anything. The Confederation of School Trusts is really worried about that and has suggested a way to bring such unlimited power under some limits. They say:

“We do have concerns about the power to direct…It is too broad and it is too wide. We would like to work with Government to restrict it to create some greater limits. Those limits should be around statutory duties…statutory guidance, the provisions in the funding agreement”.––[Official Report, Children's Wellbeing and Schools Public Bill Committee, 21 January 2025; c. 81, Q169.]

Yet Ministers voted down our amendment to put that suggestion from schools into effect.

Likewise, as we discovered in Committee, clause 34(5)(2) will require academy schools to get permission from the Secretary of State to make any change to the buildings they occupy. That includes any change to

“(ii) either part of the building, or

(iii) permanent outdoor structure”.

Literally, if an academy school wants to build a bike shed, it will have to go to the Secretary of State. It was clear in Committee that Ministers had not even realised that that would apply to academy schools. Those are just two of the many, many centralising measures in the Bill.

While freedom is being taken away on the one hand, accountability on the other side of the ledger is being watered down too. The Government already got rid of single-word Ofsted judgments and replaced them with something much more complicated that does not seem to have left anybody very happy. Then, clause 45 ends the automatic conversion of failing schools into academies. The hon. Member for Mitcham and Morden has said,

“The current system, in which failing schools automatically become academies, provides clarity and de-politicisation, and ensures a rapid transition. I fear that making that process discretionary would result in a large increase in judicial reviews, pressure on councils and prolonged uncertainty, which is in nobody’s interests.”—[Official Report, 8 January 2025; Vol. 759, c. 902.]

She also said,

“the DfE will find itself mired in the high court in judicial review. When we tried to transfer our first failing school to a Harris academy we spent two years in court, and children…don’t have that time to waste.”

She is so right.

Rob Tarn, the chief executive of the Northern Education Trust, has made the same point:

“If there’s no longer a known, blanket reality…There is a risk that, where it’s been determined a school needs to join a strong trust, it will take much longer and we will go back to the early days of academisation when people went to court.”

The Children’s Commissioner makes that point too. She says that she is

“deeply concerned that we are legislating against the things we know work in schools, and that we risk children spending longer in failing schools by slowing down the pace of school improvement.”

She is right.

The Confederation of School Trusts has said that the current system offers struggling schools “clarity” as they

“will join a trust, and that process can begin immediately”.

In contrast, they warn,

“We are not clear on how commissioning part-time support through the RISE arrangements makes that any easier.”

The former national schools commissioner, Sir David Carter, has warned that the

“arguments and legal actions that will arise if a school in Cumbria is told to join a trust while a school in Cornwall just gets arm’s length support will only add delay to delivering a fairer and better offer to children.”

Worse still is clause 51, which attacks school choice and the freedom to go to good schools. It was in 1987 that Mrs Thatcher announced that

“we will allow popular schools to take in as many children as space will permit. And this will stop local authorities from putting artificially low limits on entry to good schools.”

That agenda became known as local management of schools and of it the former Labour Minister Lord Adonis wrote,

“Local Management of Schools was an unalloyed and almost immediate success…school budgets under LMS were based largely on pupil numbers, so parental choice came to matter as never before.”

In contrast, the Government’s impact assessment of the Bill says:

“We want the local authority to have more influence over the PANs for schools in their area”.

It goes on to say:

“It could also limit the ability of popular schools to grow…If a school is required to lower their PAN, some pupils who would have otherwise been admitted will be unable to attend the school. This will negatively impact on parental preference”.

Michael Johnson, the leader of the very successful Chulmleigh trust, warns that that “could be disastrous for successful schools…The Government are not better placed than parents to decide which school a child attends.”

[Graham Stuart]

Does my hon. Friend, like me, reflect on the irony that the success from 2010 to 2024, which we on the Conservative Benches would naturally celebrate, was only possible because of the Labour visionaries who drove the academies programme forward, made changes, developed the argument, rolled the pitch and allowed us to lift our schools to much higher levels of performance and our children from deprived backgrounds to much better results. Labour Members were the creators of that, and now this Government are disowning it.

[Neil O’Brien]

It is tragic. It is not us criticising the Bill; it is the professionals—the people who have given their lives to education. I will give another example. Gareth Stevens, leader of Inspiration Trust, another high-performing trust, gives the example of his local council wanting to halve places at an outstanding school to prop up other schools. He says that

“the idea that we could have the rug pulled out from under us and the number of places in our high performing school cut is the most worrying thing…It will mean fewer places at high performing good or outstanding schools”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Steve Witherden (Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak in this important debate and express my support for the Bill. For far too long, school children have borne the brunt of academisation. Fortunately, the Labour Government in Wales rejected this model, but, having been a teacher on the border for most of my working life and a national executive member of the NASUWT, I have seen at first hand the negative impact of academies becoming the default model, while local authorities have been sidelined.

Since the introduction of the Academies Act 2010, the freedom for academies and free schools to set their own pay, terms and conditions has led to the exploitation of teachers. For example, teachers at Ark schools are expected to work 1,657 hours more annually than a maintained school teacher, while earning £7 less per hour. The lack of national consistency not only allows these schools to undervalue and overwork staff but undermines basic rights such as pension schemes, maternity and sick pay. Our Bill will tackle those disparities by extending the statutory pay and conditions framework to all teachers in academies, ensuring greater consistency and fairness between academies and maintained schools.

There is also the issue of admission policies. Too many schools misuse their control over admissions to break with inclusive local authority policies, selecting what they consider to be a more favourable intake of students. The Bill’s extension of the power to direct admissions to academies will ensure that local authorities can secure places for hard-to-place and vulnerable students, rather than allowing academies to exercise shameful selective admissions. Furthermore, by ending academy presumption, the Bill takes a significant step towards increasing academy accountability, empowering local authorities to better serve the needs of their communities, particularly helping SEND students and reducing reliance on unaffordable independent providers.

I hope to see the severe disparity between teachers’ pay and the high salaries of academy CEOs reviewed and addressed in future education legislation. We must ensure that funding is directed where it is most needed: to teaching and learning. This Bill marks an historic first step towards creating an accountable and fair education system that will benefit all our children.

[Graham Stuart]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate and to follow the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr (Steve Witherden), who has done us and the nation a great service with the clarity of his speech. The Labour party is often accused of working to serve the producer interest rather than the consumer interest, looking after the needs of the trade unions and not those of the ordinary citizen or, in this case, the child. But rarely does any Labour Member make it quite so explicit as the hon. Gentleman just did, with a total betrayal of the child and a total focus on the needs of the professional, their interests, their pay, their disparities and their conditions. There was nothing about the child, nothing about the standards of education. Never have I seen a Labour Member speak up so honestly about what this Bill is really about. We should be enormously grateful to him for doing that, and for doing it so clearly—and in not many words.

This Bill contains 38 policy proposals all linked by a troubling theme: the misguided notion that the bureaucrat knows best. In advocating for new schools to be opened and controlled by local authorities, the Government choose to ignore the evidence that competition and innovation are what drive up standards, and instead they consolidate power in the hands of bureaucrats.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sarah Smith (Hyndburn) (Lab)]

Under the current system, a third of our children leave school without the basic qualifications to succeed in life, so does the right hon. Gentleman not agree that that shows that the current system is failing and needs change? Furthermore, in the communities with the most disadvantaged—I mean those outside of London—the academisation approach has not made an impact and has not turned around the life chances of children growing up in the most deprived wards. I have worked in those communities and with those schools and seen the impact of trust after trust failing those children. I will not accept that. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that that is unacceptable and that we have to move forward from this day to make greater improvements to make sure that the most disadvantaged students genuinely get the opportunities they deserve?

[Graham Stuart]

I thank the hon. Lady for her speech, if not intervention, and I certainly applaud her passion for the interests of children, disadvantaged children in particular, and her rage at failings in the system and her desire to see improvements, which might need to be radical, but we have not heard how the mechanics of the changes proposed in this Bill will raise standards. They will in fact dismantle them. The hon. Lady’s intervention comes in the context of my following the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr talking about Wales, and it is clear that the system being created by this Bill is much more akin to that in Wales, exactly as the hon. Gentleman so honestly said. Does the hon. Lady suggest that deprived children in Wales have better outcomes than they do in England? [Interruption.] She moved to stand up but then thought better of it, which was wise because she knows that the situation in Wales—which, as the hon. Gentleman said, is exactly what this Bill is trying to create—is infinitely worse than it is in England. Whatever the failings of the system in England, it is demonstrably better than it was 15 or indeed 25 years ago, and it is demonstrably better than it is in Wales.

[Sarah Smith]

rose—

[Graham Stuart]

I happily give way to the hon. Lady again.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. I remind hon. Members that interventions should be short.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stuart]

I thank the hon. Lady, but she again could not explain anything about the Bill. Her passion for improvement is great—we would all applaud that—but her linkage to anything in the Bill that will improve matters was distinctly missing.

Many people, including Sir Jon Coles of United Learning, have criticised the proposals in the Bill; he said they will effectively destroy the academy system. I could not tell where the hon. Lady is on that, but the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr spoke with great clarity. Where once Labour promised us “education, education, education,” it now promises us bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy. Tragically, it is our children who will bear the consequences.

The outcomes of the last Labour Government serve as a stark warning of where the Bill will lead. In 2010, notwithstanding the nascent academy movement, we inherited a country where our children ranked 27th globally in reading. We spent more on education than Germany, yet achieved results that lagged behind nations like Poland. By the time we left office, England’s students were ranked as the best readers in the western world. In 2010, just 68% of schools were rated good or outstanding, but today that figure is 90%. These dramatic improvements did not happen by accident; they are the result of a system that puts freedom, competition and accountability at the centre of education, and equally importantly leaves mediocrity with nowhere to hide.

If the Conservative education reforms were great, it was only because we were standing on the shoulders of giants.

“Academies were introduced in the areas of greatest challenge, harnessing the drive of external sponsors and strong school leadership to bring new hope to our most disadvantaged areas.”

Not my words, but those of the longest serving Labour Prime Minister, Sir Tony Blair, in 2005. To his credit, he recognised the failings of our country’s overly centralised education system and started the reforms that paved the way to make our schools great again.

From tiny acorns do mighty oaks grow, and that is what the Conservatives delivered. In 14 years, the number of children attending academies skyrocketed from 192,000 to 4.9 million. That was transformative for pupils across England, particularly those living in deprived communities. One example is Harris Academy Battersea. Formerly known as Battersea Park school, it was considered inadequate before joining the Harris Federation in 2014. At that time, 68% of students achieved five or more GCSEs at grades A* to C. By 2017, that figure had risen to 83%, and in 2018 Ofsted rated the academy as outstanding, noting that teachers were proud to work there, morale was high, and pupils of all abilities made very strong progress. By putting a strong emphasis on cultural enrichment and academic excellence, the life chances of the working-class pupils that academies predominantly teach and who Labour claims to represent were transformed.

I am pleased that the Government have seen sense on one issue—I congratulate the Minister on that—and have amended the Bill to stop the extension of national pay rules to academies, and only require academies to have due regard to the school teachers’ pay and conditions document, rather than impose a ceiling on pay. That would have undermined the remarkable progress made by these institutions in raising standards, particularly for disadvantaged pupils.

New clause 38 goes one step further, making the pay set out in the school teachers’ pay and conditions document a floor and extending freedoms over pay and conditions to maintained schools. One of the strengths of academies is their ability to respond flexibly to local needs, including offering competitive salaries to attract and retain the best teachers in challenging areas. Limiting that flexibility would ignore the realities of teacher recruitment and retention, especially in communities where the need for high-quality education is greatest, because people respond to incentives. If academies cannot pay the best maths or physics teacher more, the children who would benefit from their skills the most will be left behind.

Building on the need for greater freedom and flexibility to raise standards, we introduced free schools, an initiative that helped to spark a renaissance in English education. Walking hand in hand with its union paymasters, who decry those schools as unaccountable and underfunded, as we heard set out in the previous speech, Labour wants these engines of social mobility to be destroyed. Its proposal to allow local authorities to open new schools, along with its planned review of the free school programme, would shift control of our children’s education away from communities and teachers and back into the hands of bureaucrats.

Unfortunately, the process has already started. In October, Ministers paused plans to open 44 new state schools in England, putting parents who planned to send their children there in limbo, so I am pleased to support new clause 39, which would reverse that pause and allow those schools to open as planned. Let us be clear: in 2024, 21% of GCSE entries from free schools achieved a grade 7 or above compared with 19% in comprehensive schools. Labour may not want to face the facts, but the reality is that sometimes the bureaucrat and the trade union shop steward do not know best. The Secretary of State is Labour’s Miss Trunchbull, putting our teachers in the chokey to satisfy her union paymasters.

This Government are so certain in their belief that they know best that they will not even allow parents the freedom to educate their own children without state interference. Buried within this Bill is a new legal requirement for local authorities to maintain a register of children not in school—a policy that I recognise was in the Conservative party’s manifesto, but which has the potential to be not just unhelpful, but actively harmful to children.

Our country has long upheld the primacy of parents, not the state, in determining the best education for their children, and this proposal seeks to undermine that fundamental covenant. That is why I support amendment 200, which would require a local authority to submit a statement of reasons when it does not agree for a child to be taken out of school to be home educated. It should at least have to account for itself. Compulsory enrolment could have serious consequences, as families may simply refuse to comply and potentially disengage from state involvement altogether because of this overreach, leading to negative unintended consequences that could impact on the child’s wellbeing.

The state thinks that it has a divine right to infringe on every aspect of the child’s life—or, at least, this Government do. They want to know what home-educated children do at the weekends and during the holidays. If that information is not required for children who attend mainstream schools, what is the justification for demanding it for children who are home-schooled? Why, in response to my repeated interventions, could the Minister not provide any reassurance that some sensible and proportionate rules would be put in place? I therefore support amendment 197, which would remove that requirement.

It was John Maynard Keynes who said:

“When the facts change, I change my mind”.

In the same spirit, I ask colleagues across the Chamber what they do. The evidence is clear: freedom and flexibility in education drive up standards and deliver better outcomes for children. In government, we followed the evidence and built on the previous Labour Government’s body of work, and the results speak for themselves. England now has the best readers in the western world, a record number of schools rated “good” or “outstanding” and greater opportunities for working-class children, albeit never at the level we would like, which is why that needs to be built on, not knocked to the ground.

As proud as I am of our record, this debate is not about party politics. At its heart, it is about ensuring that every child, regardless of their background, has access to the highest-quality education that we can provide. I urge the Secretary of State to follow the evidence, not ideology. I will vote against this Bill, but given the Government’s majority, we accept that however misguided these policies are, they will probably pass. All I can do is finish by appealing to colleagues across the Chamber to show courage, stand up for the poorest in society, stop the wreckers and support our amendments this evening when we come to vote.

[Abtisam Mohamed (Sheffield Central) (Lab)]

I commend the Minister on all the excellent work that has taken place so far on the Bill. My representations will be on home education. I recognise the importance of safeguarding and making sure that vulnerable children do not fall through the net; however, the home-educating community is growing, diverse and caring, and those involved are fiercely passionate about their children’s education and learning.

Amendments 4, 13 and 14, which stand in my name, would add to the Bill the definition of “suitable education” that already appears in section 7 of the Education Act 1996. Without these amendments, it would be left to individual local authority officers to decide what they think is suitable education.

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[Lizzi Collinge]

I acknowledge the complexity of that case and that the absolutely unacceptable failings before Sara’s death were abject across many organisations. However, she was removed from school partly so that her parents could prevent the detection of the abuse. I have recognised, and will continue to recognise, that that obviously does not speak to the vast majority of people who home-educate their children. However, as parliamentarians, we have a duty to protect the most vulnerable, and sometimes that includes regulating the majority, who are decent, honest people.

I want to reassure parents that the new regulations, such as registers for children not in school and the capacity to compel school attendance in certain cases, are not aimed at limiting home education as a whole or about policing how people choose to educate.

[Graham Stuart]

The intention is not the thing; it is the actual impact that counts. Let us take the example of someone who has taken their child out of school for the reasons that the hon. Lady has mentioned. Perhaps they have an autistic child who is miserable every day, and after letters to the headteacher and the local authority and failure after failure, they are forced to go into home education. Can she understand why parents are fearful of a representative of—as far as the parents are concerned—that failing local authority having the right to enter their home and sit in judgment over the child that they have been forced to home-educate? Can she understand why they would be fearful of the imposition a hard, top-down register, especially after so many years of successive Governments failing to provide any proper support for home educators?

[Lizzi Collinge]

I accept wholeheartedly the amount of parents of children, particularly with SEND, who have been absolutely failed by our system and by 14 years of Conservative Government. What I do not accept is that the proposal is somehow a major imposition. I do not believe that checking that children are receiving a decent education and are safe and well cared for is a major imposition on parents, and I think all good parents would welcome that.

These measures are being put in place to protect and safeguard vulnerable children. Having no oversight of children not in school is an unacceptable risk to children’s welfare. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill is crucial, and cannot come too soon to protect our most vulnerable children and to support families up and down the country with rising costs. It has the welfare of children at its heart, and I am proud to have served on the Bill Committee and to have played a role in shaping this vital legislation.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stuart]

Has my right hon. Friend seen Tim Leunig’s article in Schools Week talking about Ofsted’s new report card system following the Labour manifesto commitment? One danger is that, if my right hon. Friend is right and we see a reduction in standards, the Bill could switch off the light that allows us to see that, because

“reliability and validity are in tension”,

as Tim Leunig puts it. Does my right hon. Friend share my concern that Ofsted must ensure that it continues to put a bright and reliable light on the education system, so that we can see whether the policies in this Bill work?

[Damian Hinds]

I do, and my right hon. Friend gives me two valuable opportunities. The first is to pay tribute to the great Tim Leunig. We do not often talk about him in this House. He has friends here, and he is a perceptive thinker. I will look up his article.

The other opportunity that my right hon. Friend gives me is to highlight the discrepancy we can get when things appear to be getting better, when in fact they are not. That is what happened under the last Labour Government when, in spite of us falling down the international comparisons, they managed to find 11 different ways in the system to make it look like our GCSE results were improving year after year. We do not want that to happen again. There were those champions in the new Labour years who made these great reforms happen and would want to continue them now, so I say to those on the Government Benches: where are the champions today? Where are those in the modern Labour party who will say, “No, we will not be bound by ideology. We are going to do what is in the best interests of the children”? I hope there will be some of those champions in the other place.

To be fair, I was mildly encouraged this morning to hear the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, when questioned on the radio about the fate of this Bill, appearing to be somewhat open-minded, shall we say, about what might happen. To be fair, I have even been slightly encouraged listening to the Secretary of State for Education in recent days and weeks. She has sounded like she might be a little bit open to rowing back from some of the worst excesses of this legislation. There is still time. There will be weeks of this legislation being considered in the other place, so I just ask the Government to please take that time to think carefully about the legacy they will be leaving and to turn those words into deeds.

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[Vikki Slade]

I think a lot of people who do not know anything about home education miss the fact that there is a whole community of home educators, and home-educated children spend plenty of time with their peers, but they are just different peers—others who prefer to have their education outside a school environment—and there is a risk of such organisations being driven underground or lost altogether.

Under section 7 of the Education Act 1996, parents already have a duty to ensure that their child receives a suitable education, whether through school or otherwise, and local authorities can already conduct informal inquires and issue school attendance orders if they believe a child is not receiving an appropriate education, so this is simply overkill. A formal register would help to ensure accountability, but this is overreach. My amendment 221 proposes a more practical solution of requiring only those who provide more than six hours per week of education or activity to be included in the register. That strikes a reasonable balance by ensuring that key educators are identified without overwhelming families or local authorities.

While there are genuine safeguarding concerns, local authorities already have the power to intervene under section 47 of the Children Act 1989. The Victoria Climbié Foundation stated that the provision proposed in the Bill would have done nothing to help Sara Sharif because the local authority had already decided that the child was not at risk.

[Graham Stuart]

I hope colleagues in the other place will follow up on the hon. Lady’s excellent speech. To focus in on that point, if a register does go ahead—the hon. Lady supports that; I do not—it should start with the minimum requirements, and then it could be expanded if that is needed, rather than be spread out in this way. To reinforce the point she makes, local authorities already have the power to intervene if it appears to them that someone is not having a suitable education, and they have all the powers required if there are concerns about welfare. Conflating welfare and education in the way this Bill does particularly irritates and upsets home educators.

[Vikki Slade]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention. In fact, Kathryn from my constituency wrote me a very long email talking about welfare versus education—two totally separate issues. People are really upset and would have been devastated and distraught to hear the hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Lizzi Collinge) effectively make them feel like they were some sort of pariah. I was really upset to hear that, especially as I asked home educators in my constituency to listen to the debate and give me their feedback.

I support amendments 195 and 197, tabled by the right hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott), which seek clarity that educational activities outside regular school terms should not be subject to this overreach. My children are not subject to them, and children in home education should not be subjected to anything more than the rest of us. Children receiving education out of school should have the same rights to take their public examinations as their peers. It should not be based on a parent’s ability to fund that. After all, the Treasury already saves many thousands of pounds for every home-educated child. New clause 53, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Munira Wilson), would provide support for parents by providing for home-educated children to sit any relevant examination and to be fully funded where requested.

I thank the Minister for confirmation on one point: as I sat here this afternoon, I received a letter to say that the challenges faced by summer-born children will now be considered. I would like to pass on the thanks—[Interruption.] Well, I’ll save the rest of it for you.

I was not going to speak about academies, but as I sat here over several hours I received two more emails relating, in particular, to concerns about their governance. I heard the challenge from those on the Conservative Benches about the comments by the hon. Member for Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr (Steve Witherden) on teachers, but I cannot tell the House how many times I hear complaints about the way staff and whistleblowers are being treated in multi-academy trusts. While I have sat here today, I have heard of another who has been suspended by a multi-academy trust. This is not about them getting better treatment; it is about them getting worse treatment. If teachers are treated badly and leave the sector, that has an impact on our children. It is about the children, not just the teachers.

In summary, I support the principles of the Bill, but I urge the Government to consider the amendments on excessive and potentially harmful requirements imposed on home-educated children. They are common sense amendments that would allow children to be protected without placing undue burdens on families.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Graham Stuart Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Wednesday 15th April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Olivia Bailey]

If the hon. Member will forgive me, I will address smartphones in schools in a moment. Our consultation allows us to act at real speed. Through the additions we are making to the Bill today, we are committing to report back to the House within six months, if we have not acted before then. The range of options that we are considering in the consultation is significantly wider than the options in the amendments from the other place that we are debating. The consultation will allow us to address a much wider range of issues, including critical ones, such as addictive design.

[Graham Stuart (Beverley and Holderness) (Con)]

Will the Minister give way?

[Olivia Bailey]

I apologise, but I am going to make some progress.

I turn to Lords amendment 106, which deals with phones in schools. The amendment is unnecessary, as this Government are already crystal clear that mobile phones have no place in schools at any point during the school day. We have strengthened the weak guidance provided by the Conservative party to make it absolutely clear that schools should be mobile-free environments by default. We have written to every headteacher in the country to tell them that phones should not be in their schools. We have asked Ofsted to ensure that phone bans are properly enforced, and we have rolled out targeted support, through our attendance and behaviour hubs, for every school that is struggling to make that ban a reality. The Conservative party seems to be deliberately ignoring those facts. Of course, if the consultation tells me that making the guidance statutory will make a difference, we will do it—our amendment in lieu makes that possible—but my honest opinion is that the issue is not whether or not the ban is on the statute book. Rather, the problem is with the clarity of the guidance, and the quality and enforcement of policies, and we have already acted to fix all three.

[Olivia Bailey]

I do congratulate the hon. Member’s constituent on her work, and can confirm that there is provision in the guidance—which he can show her—for schools to make exceptions for such exceptional cases.

I turn to amendments dealing with school uniforms and admissions. On Lords amendment 41B, I welcome their lordships’ support for tackling school uniform costs. However, the amendment is unnecessary, and risks creating uncertainty for schools and parents about the Government’s intent and the direction of policy at a time when they will be implementing the limit. The Department for Education has surveyed parents and school leaders extensively over many years on school uniform policies, and we will continue to monitor the impact of this measure, informed by the latest available evidence.

[Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister give way?

[Olivia Bailey]

We have also already committed to strengthening statutory guidance to clarify that high-cost compulsory items should be avoided, and will keep that guidance under review. As the legislation requires, we will also conduct a post-implementation review to capture the actual impact of the implemented policy and assess any modifications recommended as a result of that review.

[Graham Stuart]

Will the Minister give way?

[Olivia Bailey]

I am just concluding this section of my remarks, but the right hon. Member is very persistent.

I have previously been clear on our concerns about a cost cap. A numerical limit is simpler, transparent, enforceable and overwhelmingly backed by parents. It was also explicitly in the manifesto on which this Government were elected.

[Graham Stuart]

I think anyone outside this place watching would think that the reason why the Minister will not accept the Liberal Democrat amendment on this subject is a sort of pride and an inability to change on behalf of Government. There is no real argument against the amendment, and she has not made such an argument. Neither is there an argument against having an immediate statutory ban on social media. Her earlier argument about the addictive design of social media being included in the consultation made no sense either, because if no children under 16 can access social media, it does not matter how it is designed, because it will not be having the noxious effect it currently has on them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Laura Trott (Sevenoaks) (Con)]

Since I last stood at this Dispatch Box to argue, again, that we should stop ignoring the evidence and act to ban social media for under-16s, 12 individuals in California have done something remarkable. They have begun to turn the tide against the use of social media by children. On 25 March, a jury in Los Angeles delivered a landmark verdict: they found two social media giants responsible for injuries suffered by a young woman over the course of her childhood. The conclusion was stark. These companies knew that their platforms were addictive. They knew the risks to young people and they chose not to act, and children have paid the price. The jury did not ignore the evidence, and nor should this House.

That is not an isolated case. It is the beginning of something much larger. Eight further trials are already scheduled in California alone, and federal cases brought by states and school districts will follow this summer. Behind them stand thousands of claimants waiting to be heard. Here in the United Kingdom, however, we are still watching rather than acting. This ruling should have made the Government stop dragging their feet. It confirms what parents, teachers and health professionals have been saying for years. Aggressive, addictive algorithms are damaging children’s mental health, and, in the worst cases, costing them their lives.

[Graham Stuart]

Does my right hon. Friend share with me a certain sympathy for the Minister, who has obviously been ordered by the Secretary of State to come and make the preposterous case that on the one hand the whole problem has been solved and on the other—in a complete logical contradistinction—if the consultation concludes that this does need to be put in statute, the Government will then go about doing it? Well, which is it? Have they solved the problem, as the Minister claimed, or could the consultation yet tell us that it needs to be legislated for? Clearly it needs to be legislated for, and clearly the Minister—who is smart, likeable and decent, and committed to the welfare of children—has been put in an impossible position, arguing a ridiculous case. Does my right hon. Friend agree?

[Laura Trott]

As ever, my right hon. Friend is entirely correct. The evidence is irrefutable, and the Government need to get on with it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Emma Lewell (South Shields) (Lab)]

A decade ago, I raised the heartbreak that siblings in the care system suffer when they are separated and have no contact with each other. My aim was simply to create parity in legislation, by extending the requirement for a looked-after child’s reasonable contact with their parents to contact with their siblings or half-siblings. What followed were amendments, debates, early-day motions, articles, questions, ministerial meetings and letters—so many letters. Every single time, I was advised that there was sympathy for my request, but nothing ever changed—until now. Under this Labour Government, we are finally putting an end to the cruelty in our care system that separates siblings and denies them contact with each other.

When I heard my noble Friends in the other place carry unopposed Lords amendment 17B—the same amendment that I moved in 2016—I was for once completely lost for words. This may seem like a very small change to legislation, but it is not. It will make a profound difference to the lives of so many children, including children whose lives are already more difficult than many of us in this place can even begin to comprehend.

Like everything that happens in this place, it was not a solo endeavour. If the Chamber would please indulge me for a moment, I want to thank all the MPs across the House who over the years have supported this change; my right hon. and hon. Friends in our Education team; Cathy Ashley and the team at the Family Rights Group who, way back, helped me craft the amendment; and my friend the broadcaster and journalist Ashley John-Baptiste, who powerfully used his experience of the care system, in which he grew up never knowing that he had siblings, to help press for this change.

That leads me to who I want to thank most of all: the children I worked with in my former career. I promised them that if I ever made it into this place, I would do absolutely everything in my power to change legislation that causes them further pain and distress.

[Graham Stuart]

I just want to say thank you to the hon. Lady for persisting, and showing what a Back Bencher can do by persisting, keeping going, winning the argument, bringing it around and making a material difference to the lives of people who, as she said, already suffer enough.

[Emma Lewell]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for that intervention—possibly one of the nicest interventions I have ever had in this place.

I hope that if those children I worked with are listening now, they will know that I have honoured my word to them. It may have taken me a decade and they will now be adults, but I sincerely hope they know that this is for them and it is they who have made sure that other little ones will never ever have to go through what they had to go through.

--- Later in debate ---

[Graham Stuart]

It is a pleasure to take part in the debate. We have had significant and interesting contributions from both sides of the House so far. I will speak in support of Lords amendments 38 and 106. As the hon. Member for Derbyshire Dales (John Whitby) just set out in a powerful speech, social media is too often toxic in its effect on children, and parents who want to act—again, exactly as he just pointed out—fear isolating their children from their friends who are all online. Teachers, who want to protect children, spend their days investigating claims of cyber-bullying instead of boosting learning, which is their job. Our children struggle to escape the clutches of algorithms that are designed to be addictive.

That is why I will vote for Lords amendment 38, to save children from that toxic world and give them their childhood back. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott) said, it is a “fight for childhood”. That is a good slogan, because unlike most slogans it has some real heart and substance to it.

We need to support parents like John in Beverley, who tells me that his children feel constant pressure to be online and compare themselves endlessly with others. John is right. Those of us who are parents know that sometimes the kindest word we can say to a child is no—only to hear the inevitable response, “But Billy’s mum lets him do it.” It is not fair that parents like John, who are doing their best each day, face that battle alone.

Lords amendment 38 sets a clear boundary so that parents are not isolated in their decision making, and when John’s children ask why they cannot go on Instagram, he can say, “Sorry, but that is the law.” Since MPs seem to get blamed for pretty much everything else, if parents say, “It’s because Graham says you can’t; it’s not my fault,” I will take that. If as a result one child is happier and healthier, that is something we can all be pleased with.

Parents are not alone in saying that the relationship with technology is broken; teachers say it too. Hannah, a teacher from Hedon in my constituency, tells me that she deals with the consequences of online harms every single day and she fears the long-term impact on her pupils. Teachers such as Hannah are spending their time investigating what pupils have seen on Facebook or X, when, as I say, they should be teaching physics or art.

In too many schools, smartphones are everywhere. I never seek to be rude, and in particular not to the Minister, but she suggests that the problem is solved. The problem is not solved. Smartphones are everywhere in too many schools, meaning that students are scrolling, not learning, and staff are policing, not teaching. That is why I will also vote for amendment 106, which would require schools to ban smartphones during the school day. It means that governing bodies, headteachers and parents—whoever—have absolute clarity.

I did not really understand the Minister’s argument, suggesting that passing it into law would not have effect. If we pass a law to ban smartphones in schools, in primary legislation, I would be pretty confident that that would mean that schools would not have smartphones during the school day. She has probably been put up to it by her Secretary of State, who will not let her do the obvious and sensible thing, which is to listen to colleagues on all sides of the House. The hon. Member for Derbyshire Dales studiously stuck to the party line but none the less made an emotionally powerful argument for action now, albeit just managing to say, “Well, if you have to do your consultation, get on with it.”

The arguments from the Minister do not really stack up. This is not political point scoring—I hope it is not —but children are suffering every single day and month that this goes on. If we know that it is wrong, if we know that it is harmful, if we know that it is damaging children’s futures and their mental health—we have parents in the Public Gallery who have lost their children as a result of this stuff—how can we say that we are just being thorough when there are no clear questions that we need an answer to and no clear questions were set out?

[Helen Hayes]

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Graham Stuart]

I will happily give way to the hon. Lady, who is an expert in this area.

[Helen Hayes]

I believe that there is a consensus across this House, both about the harms of social media and smartphones for our young people and about the urgent need for action. I have listened carefully to the contributions from Opposition Members but have heard no acknowledgment that, on some points of detail, there is genuine disagreement between different important stakeholders—including bereaved parents—on what exactly the solutions should look like. The Government’s consultation is affording the opportunity, for example, to the Education Committee to undertake some really detailed questioning of those important stakeholders who have differences of opinion. That will help the Government get to the right and effective approach. Will the right hon. Gentleman at least acknowledge that difference of opinion and the importance of probing it?

[Graham Stuart]

Again, with no disrespect to the Minister, I think the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) has made a stronger case, but lacking in the specifics. It would be important to understand exactly what it is that the Government wish to find out. Then we could better understand why there would be a cause for delay. I have not been able to understand precisely what that is.

Let us take the issue of smartphones in schools. We have absolute denunciation from the Minister of the use of smartphones in schools, yet a kind of smokescreen has been thrown up that somehow passing into statute that smartphones cannot be in schools during the school day is somehow not the solution. If there is evidence to suggest that schools will disapply primary statute that says smartphones can never be used in schools during the school day, and that headteachers up and down the land will literally break the law, okay, let us hear it. That seems like nonsense to me. What case is there? What do we need to know about smartphones to not just put this in the Bill and, as soon as it becomes law, see every single school in the land ensure that there are no smartphones, with no argument? It is obvious, is it not? I will happily give away to the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood again.

[Helen Hayes]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman, who is being generous in giving way. I think he would find it helpful to listen to the Education Committee’s evidence session on Tuesday next week, which will afford two hours of questioning of experts and important stakeholders in the field. I believe that we will make a useful contribution to helping the Government get to the right and implementable solutions during the consultation process. I encourage him to tune in to that.

[Graham Stuart]

I thank the hon. Lady, but it is not like the Select Committee has never looked at this issue; it has looked at it repeatedly. If we are being unfair, then just let us know. What is the problem with banning smartphones in schools in the legislation? The hon. Lady has given an excellent answer, and I accept her offer and will ensure that I have a look at the evidence, but I still do not have an answer on what we are looking for. What we need is a ban. What the hon. Member for Derbyshire Dales (John Whitby) wants to see is a ban. We know that smartphones in school are harmful, and we need to get on with this.

The problem we face involves not just social media but smartphones. It is the combination of the two together. Smartphones give children constant access to social media, and social media gives them algorithms designed to keep them scrolling. That is why these amendments must be passed together. One tackles the addictive platforms; the other restores classrooms to places of learning.

We would never allow our children to be abandoned in a car park full of strangers, so why are we leaving them alone in chatrooms? Data from the Youth Endowment Fund shows that 70% of teenagers—vulnerable children—have seen violent content online, despite only 6% actively searching for it. That is all because of the algorithms. Children are not seeking extreme content; it is pushed at them. Knives, pornography and real-life violence are being delivered by addictive algorithms designed to keep children scrolling, all in the name of so-called fun. The parents in the Gallery and across the country are looking on and wondering what on earth is keeping us back. At a time when there is a disconnect between ordinary people and politics, it is obvious that we need to act. We have the opportunity to act—we have legislation that has a slot in Parliament—yet we are still coming up with bogus excuses for inaction. Parents have had enough.

[Caroline Voaden (South Devon) (LD)]

I believe we are talking about two different things. On banning social media for under-16s, there is a complication there. We have seen what they have done in Australia, and what other countries are doing. We believe that our solution is the right one, because it is future-proof and would encompass every platform, every game and every piece of tech, but the issue of smartphones in schools is much, much simpler. We do not want phones in schools. We do not need phones in schools. We know that phones are in schools, and we need the Government to act on this; doing so would be simple, straightforward and quick. It could be done through this Bill, right now.

[Graham Stuart]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. She makes a fair point about the greater complexity around social media. I would have liked greater clarity in this debate about what questions need to be answered, and how those answers would be pursued, but she is so right on the issue of smartphones. There is literally no reason not to act. I have been a Minister at the Dispatch Box, and with no disrespect to the excellent supporting civil servants, there is a tendency for Government, including the civil service, to resist all amendment and change. It becomes about defending the first script regardless, even when it is obvious that it should be changed. Even when there are parents in the Gallery who have suffered the most unimaginable loss, somehow the system still resists.

[Iqbal Mohamed]

Would the right hon. Gentleman agree that banning mobile phones in schools will not harm children, and that not banning them does harm children?

[Graham Stuart]

That is a simple logic, beautifully expressed. There is no argument against a ban, is there? Smoke is being blown in our faces.

The Minister is better than this. I say this to the Government Whip: I hope that the Government will listen in the Chamber tonight. I remember an Adjournment debate during my first Parliament, when we were again in opposition. Halfway through, the Minister tore up his briefing notes and said, “Actually, do you know what? It says here that I should resist this, but the hon. Member is right; I will seek legislation. We will get the opportunity and make the change that he has asked for, because what he says is true.” Should not all of us be trying to deal with what is true, right and proper? We must recognise complexity when it is there, but where there is a simple answer, we should simply get on with it.

[Caroline Voaden]

rose—

[Graham Stuart]

I had better bring my remarks to a close; I have probably taken up too much time already.

[Christian Wakeford (Bury South) (Lab)]

True.

[Graham Stuart]

Thanks very much—the Government Whip agrees with me; that is always nice.

Let us act, listen to the parents and the people out there, and get on it. I know that the Ministers on the Front Bench do not get up in the morning to make the world a worse place, let alone to make children suffer. They are here to try to make children’s lives better, and there is a real opportunity here to do that. I hope that Government Members will consider breaking from the fearsome Whips—we have heard the Government Whip shouting from a sedentary position. Tell him that he is best ignored, and vote with us to make things better for children.

[Peter Prinsley (Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket) (Lab)]

Let me start by saying that I support the Government’s direction of travel on this Bill. The focus on children’s wellbeing, both in schools and out, is obviously right, but let me address Lords amendment 38, tabled by Lord Nash, about social media access; it was accepted back into the Bill, with a large majority. It has cross-party support and reflects growing concern not just in Parliament, but among parents, teachers and professionals working with young people.

The amendment is quite simple: it is about delaying access to certain harmful social media services until children are 16. It is not a blanket ban or a restriction on everything, but targeted measures aimed at services that are not designed with children in mind. That distinction matters, because some criticism has suggested that the amendment would create cliff edges, but we already have age limits in place today. The issue is not whether limits should exist; it is whether they are properly enforced, and whether they reflect the reality of how platforms operate.

There has been a lot of debate about whether age verification actually works. The evidence from countries like Australia suggests that where it is not working, it is often because platforms are not properly enforcing the rules, or young people find ways around the ban through VPNs. That leads to a broader point: the onus must be squarely with the tech companies to implement the safeguards. Where the law sets a clear standard, platforms must meet it consistently and effectively.