Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Hampton Excerpts

Thursday 12th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stedman-Scott (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 80, which

“seeks to include career and employment opportunities as a part of educational achievement”.

I have spoken many times in this Chamber, and will probably do so again, about the need to ensure that we an educational system that prevents young people becoming NEET.

I will share some statistics with noble Lords. There are 354,000 young people who are unemployed and actually seeking work who are NEET, and 569,000 who are economically inactive and not seeking work. According to the Department for Education’s 2025 report, 41% of care leavers aged 19 to 21 were deemed to be NEET. I add to this that I discovered recently that 66% of young people in Feltham young offender institution and 25% of the adult prison population had been in care. I have no doubt that these figures will ring alarm bells for all of us, and so they should, so what can we do about them?

The main factors that contribute to these figures—the main reason why these young people are in the position they are and NEET—are educational disruption; poor mental health and emotional well-being; lack of stable housing; limited support networks; stigma and discrimination by employers for those young people who have been in care; and inadequate transition planning when they move from education to employment. It is this last point that I will focus on. I hope that all noble Lords, including the Minister, will agree that we must have a system that prepares all young people, in particular those who have been or continue to be in care, to make an effective transition from education to work.

My first question is: can the Minister tell us what tailored and individual careers advice and coaching the Bill will put in place, working with the DWP and all its great partners, to ensure that young people get the service they need? How will the Bill bring employers into the lives of young people at a much earlier stage and dispel the negative assessment they make which keeps these young people out of the workplace? Will she please ensure that every educational establishment publishes its NEET tables, so that we can see what is working, do more of it and help those who are not doing so well? Prevention is much more effective than cure. It costs less in financial terms and puts young people on the right path. It was explained to me that it is better to be a fence at the top of the cliff than the ambulance at the bottom, and I am sure that noble Lords will agree.

One of the most enjoyable experiences I have had in this House was to be a member of the Public Services Committee, which is so ably chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley. Before I left that committee, we produced a report entitled Think Work First: The Transition from Education to Employment for Young Disabled People, but its findings, although they concern specific help for disabled people, have resonance with all young people.

The second recommendation in that report says:

“The Government should work with local authorities to improve the availability of ‘ready to work’ programmes such as that provided by ThinkForward”.


Another happy moment in my career was to develop and deliver the prototype for ThinkForward. I can tell noble Lords that it works and it can be done. It can be done in schools, where the coaches are part of the school management team. Young people at risk of becoming NEET are identified very early and get a dedicated coach who is on the journey with them. The results are that 85% of the 14 to 16 year-olds involved showed significant improvements in attendance; 60% of the school leavers achieved at least five GCSEs at grades A to C; and 96% of the 17 to 18 year-olds were in education, employment or training. I know that ThinkForward and other organisations would be more than happy to work with the Government, and it was a private equity foundation that put the funding model in place to make sure that it worked, so not every penny came from the Government—I hope that that might excite the Minister. So, it can be done, it must be done, and I hope that the Minister will confirm that it will be done.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 79 in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady Barran, and the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester. Following the statistical barrage from the noble Baroness, Lady Stedman-Scott, I shall give some more. According to the Drive Forward Foundation, children in care on average achieve an Attainment 8 score that is less than half of the overall pupil population. Just 14% of care leavers go on to university, compared with 47% of all young people. Some 22% of care leavers say that they always or often feel lonely, compared with 10% of all young people, and 15% of care leavers report that they do not have a good friend, compared with 5% of all adults. One in three care leavers becomes homeless in the first two years after they leave care, and 52% of children in care have a criminal conviction by the age of 24, compared with 13% of non-care-experienced children. One line in the Bill could achieve so much.

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[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I added my name to Amendment 164 in the names of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and my noble friend Lord Russell of Liverpool. I omitted to declare my interests as a teacher and a kinship carer, but your Lordships probably know of those by now.

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[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 134, 143 and 178. Fostering is critical to the provision of good care for all children who need it, and it is a really tough job.

In Committee so far, not very much has been said about the very large proportion of looked-after children who have significant special needs—it is more than 90% of all children in children’s homes, and it is over 70% of all looked-after children. Many of those are problems that have arisen as a result of post-birth experience, but there are quite a lot of instances where these are problems that children were born with and will be with them for life. Some children are in foster care precisely because their birth parents have not been able to cope with their significant needs, so we ask a tremendous amount of foster carers.

The measures in the amendment to improve on the current position are very welcome. But the Government could go further in some very practical ways, which is why I support my noble friend’s amendments. Room sharing is not always appropriate, but for some children it will be suitable. Similarly, foster carers need more authority to make more of the decisions and do more of the often everyday things that parents do.

I support the comments made about the need for streamlined recruitment processes and a foster care strategy that really thinks about the support services, training, respite and wider services that help foster carers to do it well, to feel that they have the capacity and that they can sustain the tremendous effort of foster caring through the whole period that any given child needs it. There is an opportunity here.

[Lord Hampton (CB)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 143 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, to which I added my name and to which the noble Lord, Lord Bird, spoke so powerfully. I thank the Nationwide Association of Fostering Providers for its help on this.

As we have heard, this amendment aims to ensure that the challenges within foster care services are both recognised and addressed. With a well-defined strategy in place to oversee necessary reforms to the system, we can ensure that local authorities are no longer burdened by the unstable expense of children’s social care.

Many foster-children feel that their new home has given them a new chance, and they feel like a genuine part of the family. Foster carers overwhelmingly say that being a foster-parent has had a positive impact on their lives, as they provide love and support to vulnerable children.

Independent fostering agencies—IFAs—play a huge role in providing high-quality care for children: some 96% of IFAs are rated “Good” or “Outstanding” by Ofsted.

While the Government’s commitment to the foster care system since the general election is a positive step, it is vital that any interventions go beyond short-term fixes. This is why we need to see the introduction of a dedicated foster care strategy to provide strategic oversight to the tactical pledges made previously.

There are welcome measures outlined in the Bill to regulate and introduce oversight of independent fostering agencies. However, given that these IFAs make up a significant proportion of the sector, without a dedicated foster care strategy, which provides insight into the Government’s ambitions for the sector, this already precarious sector is unable to plan effectively for the future. Ultimately, without addressing the underlying causes of pressure in children’s social care, such efforts risk falling short of delivering lasting impact.