Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Addington Excerpts

Thursday 18th September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to speak as a design technology teacher, a veteran of the IfATE Act, an officer of the APPG on apprenticeships and a member of the House of Lords Social Mobility Policy Committee.

I think we all agree that apprenticeships are vital to this country. It is rather sad that this subject seems to have led to a general exit from the Chamber, but I think that is more because it is lunchtime. I welcome the defence industrial strategy and its new apprenticeship and graduate clearing system, which I know BAE Systems was heavily behind. We have seen Skills England start, and we hope upon hope that it is the answer. This is an incredibly important and nuanced subject, and I am afraid I do not think these amendments are the answer.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, I shall try to make a few remarks in summing up. Apprenticeships really feel like they should be an answer but are proving to be extremely difficult to get into operation. Employers, especially SMEs, find it difficult to give the work, but they are where you would expect to find most of those apprenticeships, especially at the introductory level. Most people have said, “Yes, it’s a problem”. T-levels have been brought in but, if I remember correctly, you have to work with an employer while doing them, and that has proved difficult in the past.

The reason why they are proving so difficult is that it is a bit of a mess. We have boards and so on for careers guidance, and things locally and nationally. We clearly need more emphasis on making sure that people know where these opportunities are, how they will be supported and how they will get through. There is a general duty proposed in the Bill, but something inside me says that, as written, it is an invitation to Henry VIII powers—possibly Henry IX and X as well. The fact remains that we have not got this right. There have been some valiant efforts, but we have not managed to bring the people who want and would benefit from an apprenticeship to those who will give one to them. That is the problem.

I hope that, when the Minister responds, we will get a better idea of how this will work. The levy has, shall we say, had its problems—that would be a generous way of putting it. The Minister has an opportunity to tell us how the Government are going to develop this. It should be remembered that many of the people in the client base have not been that successful academically —I think just about everybody would agree with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Deben—and the fact is that schools are judged by GCSEs and A-levels. That is the path forward and everything else is a secondary option. That seems to be the culture; Governments have tried to change it, but I do not think they have succeeded. What are the Government going to do to get these more practical-based operations in?

It would be remiss of me if I did not say that we need to look at the English and maths qualifications. I refer to this again as somebody with dyscalculia and 14 fails in functional skills in an apprenticeship. We did some work on this. It is a pity that the noble Lord, Lord Nash, is not here because we managed to get some consideration on English when the original Bill was brought forward; both he and I bear the scars of that process. I thank him for taking on his own Civil Service and Government to get it. Any Minister who is prepared to show that degree of courage will always get my support.

I hope we can get an idea of how we are going to address the problems, which have certainly been accepted, associated with getting people into apprenticeships. On the question of the things that should be attractive to those who have not been great successes in conventional education, or according to normal cultural expectations, what are we going to do? We need to act, not only for the nation’s general economy, but for the people who are the clients.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, I welcome this debate on the value of high-quality apprenticeships at all levels, with a focus on levels 2 and 3, and Amendment 483 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Layard, and Amendment 483A, which I have moved on behalf of my noble friend Lord Lucas.

The noble Lord, Lord Layard, predictably, gave a very insightful and expert analysis of the issues, particularly for young people who are not going to university, and painted, sadly, an accurate but rather bleak picture. I would agree with him rather than the noble Lord, Lord Macpherson, but I think there would be votes in it. The noble Lord said that it would be very popular across the country to take action on this. Anyway, that is not perhaps for this Committee to worry so much about.

I feel that, as I make my remarks, I have former colleagues sitting on each shoulder: Gillian Keegan, the first member of the Cabinet who had previously been an apprentice; and Rob Halfon who saw apprenticeships as a key part of what he described as the “ladder of opportunity”. That is exactly the kind of image and vision that the noble Lord, Lord Layard, set out.

The previous Government did a huge amount of work to raise the quality of apprenticeships and to expand them from some of the more traditional areas into financial services and others to better mirror our very heavily service-based economy and, crucially, to support important areas of the public sector where we have significant workforce shortages. That is in part where level 7 apprenticeships came in. I know that one point that my noble friend Lord Lucas would have made, had he been here, was that level 7 apprenticeships also contributed to that parity of esteem and the sense that apprenticeships could have the same prestige as a degree qualification.

I absolutely recognise the urgency to address the high level of youth unemployment, particularly after recent figures that show how much it has risen in the past year, and to give all young people a sense of real opportunity, which an apprenticeship can bring. We have been concerned at some of the changes that the Government have introduced so far, shortening the length of apprenticeships and removing the funding for apprenticeships at level 7.

I would argue—maybe it is easier from this side of the Dispatch Box—that this should be an area of “both and”. Level 2 and level 3 apprenticeships clearly fulfil a different role in the economy from those at levels 4, 5, 6 and 7, but they are no less important. One is not more important than the other. When we were in office, we were particularly concerned about levels 4 and 5. I will be interested to hear the Minister’s reply to the noble Lord’s amendments. I hope that she can reassure the House that the Government are committed to continuing with the employer-created standards rather than the frameworks that the previous Government introduced and that further moves will be made to secure the engagement of small and medium-sized enterprises in the use of apprenticeships.

The noble Baroness, Lady Wolf, who is no longer in her place, made an important point about how to fund an expanded apprenticeship offer at levels 2 and 3. I also very much recognise the comments made by my noble friend Lady Coffey in relation to T-levels. My reflection on that is that these changes take a great deal of time to embed. I do not think that in visiting schools I have met someone who has not been thrilled to be doing a T-level. I visited many schools where children wanted good, high-quality technical and vocational options and were not even aware that T-levels exist. At the very least, the Government will need to do these things in parallel. I hope very much that we will hear a positive response from the Minister.

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[Lord Storey (LD)]

Did I say agree? I am still recovering from the interventions. To be clear, I agree with everything that the noble Lord said and would support all four amendments. I thank noble Lords for introducing them.

Children and young people get so much from sport and physical education. It is not just about their well- being; believe it or not, it helps them in their other studies. One of the local head teachers in my area used to start the school day not by doing numeracy or literacy but a creative activity—either sport, drama, dance or something like that—because it got people energised and helped with their learning. Sport is important not just for the mind and body but for the well-being and development of the child as a whole.

I thank noble Lords who put down those amendments. I speak for my party when I say we very much support them.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, my noble friend has covered what happens in school, but that is just one area of activity. If it is done properly, school is merely part of a greater continuum that goes out into the community. The school sports partnerships were going to save the breakdown in the traditional links between small clubs, grass-roots sports and school, but they were not there for long enough for us to know whether they would. Many of us in both bits of the coalition Government thought that it was one of the weirdest things possible that they were kept going until the Olympics and then cancelled afterwards when we might have got some benefit. I got a small nod from the noble Lord, Lord Moynihan—a bigger one now—which says, “That’s exactly what we thought at the time”.

We also knew from that and from looking at studies that a big sporting event is great for tourism and volunteering but does not make any difference to grass-roots sport unless you back it up with something—with your inspiration. Schools have to work with the grass roots. In the amendments, we have the start of that structure, which we can go forward with. It is not just in this Bill or with this department. If we are going to lose lots of playing fields in the planning Bill, it does not matter what you do because you will not be playing anywhere else—probably not even at schools. We have to have something that goes forward. These amendments start to look slightly broader.

[Lord Moynihan (Con)]

My noble friend in sport mentioned playing fields. One of the most important roles that Sport England plays is that it is the statutory consultee for playing fields in this country. It was exceptionally worrying when, just a few months ago, the Government announced that they were putting out to consultation whether Sport England should continue that role. Does my noble friend in sport see anybody else performing that role? Will it not be even more damaging to playing fields in this country, which are so important to the public at large, if there is nobody among all the statutory consultees whose job it is to ensure their survival?

[Lord Addington (LD)]

The answer is yes, yes and yes. I hope that the Minister will make sure that her colleagues in other departments take this on board. I moved an amendment on the planning Bill seeking to ensure that this duty is still there. I know that I am asking the Minister to part the Red Sea and take the salt out at the same time, but I am hoping for two parts of government to talk to each other on this.

We want people to remain active for all the reasons that we have stated. Physical activity leads to better exam results, which we seem to forget. If schools are to provide the initial smorgasbord of finding the right form of physical activity for individuals’ physique, culture and temperament, then I hope that the Government talk across departments in support of these amendments. I would like to hear from the Minister that they are having a coherent look at this and that they will lead other departments to do something solid. The Department for Education is best placed. We could ask the Department of Health but it would get buried there. If a lead department takes this on, there is a chance of achieving some of these aims. These amendments, or ones like them, are essential to making sure that we have a duty saying, “This is what you should be doing”.

[The Earl of Effingham (Con)]

My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for raising the critically important issue of sport and physical education in schools, which I personally feel particularly strongly about. If schools were to follow the suggestion of the noble Lord, Lord Storey, and perform physical exercise in the morning before classes, it would be transformational. School sport has no greater champion in your Lordships’ House than my noble friend Lord Moynihan, an Olympic silver medallist and former chairman of the British Olympic Association who has been leading the charge for greater provision of physical education and sport across our schools for many years.

In September last year, NHS England published research that found the truly frightening statistic that 15% of children aged between two and 15 in England are obese. Although that figure is a slight decrease from 16% in 2019, the fact that childhood obesity has remained stubbornly high should be a huge concern for everyone: parents, teachers, the NHS and the Department for Work and Pensions. This issue affects us all in some way or other.

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[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

Well, I start by saying that I actually agree with the vast majority of the points made by noble Lords opposite, but I just have to say that we in this House are not disinterested observers of the activities of Governments. Several of the noble Lords opposite who rightly identified the decline in school sports, the reduction in teachers and the narrowing of the curriculum were supporters of or part of the Government who were responsible for it. I just want to put that on the record as we start this.

Having said that, there is good news. This Government are reviewing the curriculum and establishing a new national approach to PE and school sport. We value PE and sport as a great opportunity to improve not only the health but—

[Lord Addington (LD)]

I have one more question. If we are doing this for PE in schools, is there going to be a specific link to activity outside school? A lot of the sports education is done by sports governing bodies and grass-roots clubs. I hope the noble Baroness can give me some reassurance that that will be done.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I know that I added a little bit to the beginning of my speech, but I am actually only three lines through, and I will come to precisely that point.

The amendments proposed align closely with the important practical work already under way by this Government to expand access to high-quality PE and school sport for every child. We remain committed to ensuring that all young people, regardless of background, have the opportunity to thrive through physical education, school sport and physical activity. I also agree with the points ably made by the noble Lords, Lord Holmes and Lord Moynihan, about the broader benefits of sport, physical activity and physical education. The impact on academic achievement, mental health, healthy weight and sleep: those are all important elements of the broader benefits that come from children being active and being supported to move in a wide range of ways—something I thought about carefully as I finished the Worcester 10K on Sunday morning.

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[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I was very happy to add my name to the noble Baroness’s on the majority of these amendments. She has outlined the compelling need to do something in these interrelated areas sooner rather than later. I will not bore your Lordships but rather try and illustrate one or two examples of what is going on in real time.

I will start with Copilot, a tool that most of us will be at least faintly familiar with—or will at least have heard of—and which is integrated into the Microsoft package that we use in Parliament. At the time that research was started by a group of organisations, including the 5Rights Foundation founded by the noble Baroness, Microsoft, which owns Copilot, stated publicly that Copilot was intended for users 18 and above, such as all your Lordships. However, in May 2025, the company announced without warning that Copilot would become available to users aged 13 and above. This shift raises important questions, none of which was answered at the time by Microsoft. The user age change proceeded without any published child rights impact assessment—which takes us back to an earlier group that we discussed—or documentation of any child participation in this decision. Using it in this way, without any child-focused safeguards, is unlikely to be in the best interests of the child, but currently there seems to be no satisfactory way to hold Microsoft to account for this.

A second example is Vimeo, a popular video channel that some of your Lordships may be aware of. In a particular case where a child used Vimeo and some of its video capability to do his homework, a detailed look at what Vimeo had done with his homework demonstrated that 92 different commercial companies had gained access to this child’s data. Not very satisfactory.

A third example is the problem that data protection officers—each school nominates one—as you might imagine, are struggling to try and understand and keep up with this blizzard of new technology and new tools. There are more and more sophisticated ways of, in theory, giving children a good education, underwritten by hideously long and complex terms and conditions, which I suspect even an artificial intelligence tool would have a problem making any sense of.

An example would be perhaps one of our best known technology companies, Google. It has a very successful edtech business called Google Classroom. Google, as is its wont, packages different Google products together in the same package. Within Google Classroom, you have Google Maps, which I am sure most of your Lordships are familiar with and will use occasionally. Let us assume you are doing a geography project using Google Classroom and, as part of that, you decide to go into Google Maps to use its capability. The minute the child clicks on Google Maps, he or she loses the data protection provided by Google Classroom, which allows Google Maps to harvest all of their data.

That is a real life current example of what is happening in plain sight. Data protection officers are not going to be aware of that, neither are headmasters, students or parents. It seems compelling that the people who should be most aware of that are the Government, the Information Commissioner and the bodies which are there to protect children and guide schools through this extraordinarily difficult complex morass of these competing technologies which, quite rightly to some extent, the Government are encouraging schools to take advantage of. But beware of what you encourage without understanding exactly what it is you are recommending.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

My Lords, when it comes to technology, I think I have a slightly different relationship to it, although the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, may even go beyond me for this. We need it to operate in the modern world. I have said before several times on this Bill that I am dyslexic. I cannot produce a one-page document that is in a readable form in any sort of format unless I use voice dictation. The relationship with technology changes.

If you want to make people independent and they are, in this case, dyslexic—dyspraxics might use the same technology in a slightly different way—you must make sure information is available to them and they can function with it. Having said that, the second part of this is, as the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said, that there should be safeguards within it. These things actually go hand in glove. You should have something that allows people to function in the modern world. When you are independent and interacting with a computer, you have to put the correct information in for the computer to function; you have to actually know what you are doing. A balance needs to be achieved.

There is a move to use systems which are built into computers, as opposed to bolt-on bits for educational support. In certain cases, which the Minister is aware of, schools decide to use the free bit of tech as opposed to purchasing it. But the free bit of tech is there to advertise; otherwise it would not be there. There must be a commercial advantage for somebody to provide you with a free bit of tech.

The balancing structure the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, puts forward here is essential to allow those like me who need this technology to carry on using it. We are talking about schoolchildren here, but there will be no shortage of people who will need it in the future and we are identifying more and more all the time. I hope we can strike a balance and make sure we get further forward into it.

The same is true—I am sure we are going to hear about smartphones being the devil’s work—for smart- phones, as it is the information on the smartphone we are talking about. If you can ban social media sites on smartphones and you can block them, they merely become a platform you can fill with other technology.

This is as the Minister gets an answer by using her smartphone. I hope we will get a more balanced approach to this, because it is not all bad, and not all good, it just needs to be used correctly, and using safeguards is something we have not really got our heads around. I am sure most of the commercial companies did not come in with this as their first priority, they just came in as commercial companies. The fact that they said they were platforms and did not need to worry about this is now coming back to bite them. However, I hope there is a balanced approach and a sensible way that we can get the best out of technology.

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[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, as we have heard, this group of amendments would introduce a number of reviews of the Bill. Those in the name of my noble friend Lord Wei also seek to limit the new powers in the Bill in relation to elective home-educated children.

Amendment 502C from my noble friend Lord Norton of Louth would introduce a review of the Act after five years, and my noble friend made an extremely articulate and clear case for this. I think my noble friend said that there were already over 20 examples of amendments seeking reviews of different parts of the Bill. Although concerns about Part 2—which we have debated more recently—are certainly uppermost in my mind, those of us with long memories will remember some of the concerns about the pace of and evidence base for the reforms to children’s social care in Part 1.

My noble friend set out some criteria for post-legislative scrutiny: it should be a substantial Bill—I think that, on day 12, we can agree this is a substantial Bill; it should introduce major changes; it has unquestionably been controversial; and it did not have pre-legislative scrutiny. I thought almost the strongest point is that this would allow the Government to demonstrate their confidence that the Bill will deliver on the changes that the Government seek and the impact that the Government desire, so I hope very much that the noble Baroness will be able to accept my noble friend’s amendment.

Amendment 505C in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, again very ably presented, highlights concerns about the responsibilities of private providers of children’s social care in relation to children’s human rights. Again, it would be helpful to hear the Minister’s response to this. For my part, I suppose I would prefer the Government’s focus to be on the quality of care that children receive when they are in local authority care, in a children’s home or, potentially, in foster care, as in this case. They already have considerable rights enshrined in legislation, as the noble Lord said; what we need is for the culture in those organisations to make sure that children receive the care that they so very rightly deserve.

[Lord Addington (LD)]

Just before the Minister replies, I shall very briefly say that the principle of reviewing legislation is one that I think we have all agreed to and no Government have ever found terribly convenient. I hope that we can get something going and some commitment by the Government that they will look at what happens here, or some structure for reviewing what happens, because the unforeseen is something which no degree of planning now can ever adjust.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The amendments in this group cover a wide range of issues, including review of the Act, disapplication and commencement.

I will begin with Amendment 502YR tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, which seeks to protect a parent’s right to determine their child’s education in the event of a national emergency or an authoritarian Government, by placing judicial oversight above executive restrictions. This amendment would actually be ineffective as, quite rightly, Parliament is sovereign. Any law passed by a current Parliament can be changed or repealed by a future Parliament. Provided the education a child receives is both safe and suitable, existing legislation makes clear that most parents have the right to determine the form of education that best meets their child’s needs. We have of course discussed this at length in Committee and the Bill does not change it.

Turning to Amendment 502C, on reviewing the Act, I start by commending the commitment of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, to post-legislative scrutiny, which, as he identified, has been government policy since 2008 and part of the process for legislative progress through this House. I remember the discussions around putting it into that position in my last period of time in Parliament. I supported it then; I still support it now. In the interim period between 2010 and 2024, among the range of things that I was able to do, I was very pleased to be able to advise foreign Parliaments about the significance of post-legislative scrutiny, drawing on precisely the work of the noble Lord and the experiences of this Parliament in putting those into operation.

Alongside that amendment, we have Amendment 502YN, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wei, which concerns a review of the operation of the Bill’s measures. This Government agree on the importance of having an appropriate mechanism for the proper evaluation of the impact of legislation, ensuring that it meets the goals that it sets out to deliver, especially given the size and wide-ranging ambitions of this Bill in particular. I assure noble Lords that the Bill will be subject to post-legislative scrutiny in the usual way without this amendment. We fully expect that this evaluation will be carried out within the first five years of the legislation coming into force.