Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Tuesday 16th September 2025 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

449: Clause 53, page 115, line 26, at end insert—
“85ZB Co-operation in providing parents with admissions information(1) A local authority in England and the governing body of a maintained school in England must co-operate in the provision of admissions information to parents. (2) The governing body of such a school, where it is the admissions authority for the school, must provide the local authority with such admissions information as is specified in regulations in the electronic format set out in those regulations, within the timescale set out in those regulations.(3) Within one month of the deadline for schools to provide that information, a local authority must publish the information so provided and the equivalent information for schools for which it is the admissions authority in the same electronic format.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to ensure that complete, accurate, and consistent admissions information is available to all parents.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, my hope is that this amendment has been rendered unnecessary by the Government’s plan for school profiles, so I will speak to the principles of it rather than the details. For parents, admissions information is of great importance. If they are looking around for a school for their child, they need an understanding of which schools they have a chance of getting them into. The admission rules and outcomes from those rules are vital information for parents.

Local authorities used to publish a booklet every year setting out exactly that—what the rules were and what the outcomes had been—but the more that academy schools have grown, the less that has become the practice. I ran off the booklet for East Sussex—where I live—senior schools. Out of the 20 or so schools available at secondary level, full admissions information is available only for four of them. The others just say, “Contact school”. Although there is supposed to be a system whereby schools provide local authorities with the information they can put in their schools booklets, this is no longer happening.

East Sussex is by no means an outlier. This is common. The system for providing parents with easily accessible schools admissions information has broken down. If, as part of the forthcoming school profiles, we are to have proper school information available on the government website and if, as with the other excellent information that they provide on that website, it will be available in electronic form in bulk, then we have solved this problem. I hope that is the answer. If not, we must do something to get back to the position we all thought we were in. I beg to move.

[Baroness Garden of Frognal (LD)]

My Lords, I have not had much input into the Bill, which colleagues with much greater knowledge of the issues than me have covered so ably, but I have tabled two amendments in this group, Amendments 452A and 452B. Refugee and asylum-seeking children and those on resettlement schemes may be among the most disadvantaged in our society. They may be accompanied, but the adult or adults with them may be as traumatised as the children. I should like any child in the asylum process or with refugee status, irrespective of whether they fall under the category of unaccompanied asylum-seeking child, to be treated as worthy of special treatment. This is unlikely to open the floodgates, but it would help some very needy children who otherwise would fall outside the criteria. I hope the Minister will be able to look kindly on these modest amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I think I was pretty clear about the position that the Government take with respect to the admissions arrangements of faith schools, and it is not intended to change that.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

But the Government are changing that, my Lords. I was part of the debates where we arrived at the 50% figure. I remember the Catholic schools playing a very strong part in that debate. It was very much understood that the schools created could quite clearly have a strong religious character and be directed and run in that way but not becoming isolated parts of the community, fracturing it and separating it. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, one has only to look at Northern Ireland to see the difficulties caused by a fully segregated system.

We agreed a system for avoiding that. Why are the Government now going back on it? Where is the argument coming from? It does not appear to be coming from the Church of England—the right reverend Prelate has been silent on these amendments. We have not heard any other religious voices saying, “Thank you so much, this is what we want”. Who has been lobbying for this? Where is the pressure coming from for the Government to give in and make this change? It is not at all obvious—and the Government are not being open or clear about—what the motivation is or what outcome they wish for. Presumably, they are hoping that a collection of 100% religious character schools will be founded over the next year or two. Where are those schools intended to be? What kind of schools are they looking at? What future are the Government letting us in for? I really think they owe us some clarity and some openness on this so that we can understand what they are doing and what they intend to do to our society.

This is a really important set of issues. Binding us together as a nation has never been more important. We are threatened from various angles now. Why are the Government adding to that dissolution of our nation? I can see that I am not going to get anything out of the Minister now.

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

I will respond and, as I said, I will write. The noble Lord is enormously overstating the very specific circumstances to which these criteria would relate. This is not an invitation by the Government to enormously increase the number of faith schools. This is a requirement specifically relating to the provisions about opening a new school contained in the Bill. I will write to noble Lords about that point.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

I look forward to that, but I very much regret that the settlement that we reached should be torn up in this way.

When it comes to my own Amendment 449, it is all very well for the Government to say that there should be a composite prospectus, but there is not one. It used to exist, absolutely, but that is not what is available now. If you look for an East Sussex composite prospectus, it is not there. What is there is a confusing passage among a collection of documents and websites; then it is back to the school and off to here or there. We have produced a system where the really diligent, intelligent, motivated parent can find their way through, but anyone—

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

In that case, East Sussex is not fulfilling the requirements of the statutory code that I spelled out in my response. I would be surprised if that were the case but, obviously, if it were, I would be willing to look into it. The Government have made clear the requirement both on schools to publish their admissions arrangements on their websites and on local authorities to publish a composite prospectus about the admissions arrangements of all the schools in their areas.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I have not done a complete survey, but I am not aware of a single local authority that does produce a composite prospectus in the old style any more. I absolutely take—

[Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab)]

The noble Lord might have put quite a lot of emphasis on the “in the old style” expression there. I think the requirement is for this to be on a website. I am not sure that production of a written prospectus for all parents is necessarily something that we would require in this day and age, is it?

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

No, I would expect a website or maybe a PDF, but something containing the information that is supposed to make it possible for parents to go to one place and see the admissions criteria and how they work, for all the schools within the local authority that they might be interested in. This is widely not happening, and nor is that information available on school websites; I checked a few as the Minister had challenged on that and, no, I cannot find that either. There is supposed to be a system, but there is not so, yes, I will take up her invitation to pursue this afterwards. It is important that we get back to a system where ordinary, hard-pressed parents can easily find the information they need to make good decisions for their children.

I very much hope that the Minister will be able to reassure me at some stage that the admissions information will form part of the school’s profile, as talked about in the announcement that was made at the same time as the announcement of the new Ofsted systems. There is real promise in that. I should like it if she could tell me more about the Government’s plans for what should be in that profile and how that will evolve; I should be very grateful. But, for now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 449 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Spielman (Con)]

My Lords, no one stands to speak here or anywhere else about SEND without preparing for a social media barrage from one direction or another. But unless we can discuss the underlying problems and tensions openly and honestly, there can be little hope of getting to a better place than we are in at the moment.

From the parents’ point of view, some are happy, but others say that theoretical entitlements do not translate into the support they believe their child needs. From the schools’ perspective, they are loaded with enormous expectations and have inadequate resources to meet them. From the funders’ perspective, eye-watering amounts of money are already being spent on SEND.

If you do the sums, the average household in England already contributes £450 a year just for the cost of the high needs funding block, on top of the other money it contributes for education. Yet local authorities, and behind them the taxpayer, must meet almost unlimited demand from this large but finite resource, with few levers to direct that resource to the activities where it will make the most difference.

As my noble friend Lord Gove said in a previous group, the SEND category has expanded and diversified to an extraordinary degree in recent years. Among other things, I think we are mixing up the children who have conditions that will always affect their lives with those who really only need some catch-up teaching or some extra encouragement, and who should be able to lead unimpaired adult lives. They are really quite different things.

Clearly, this situation cannot go on, and that explains the raft of amendments relating to SEND proposed for insertion after Clause 62, as the Bill does not contain any direct proposals for SEND. In aggregate, what I take from these proposed amendments is a hope that if only we can find a few more ways to extend and push harder, everything will be better.

There are certainly ideas that deserve attention within these amendments. We do need a national body for SEND, but what we need is the SEND equivalent of NICE: a body that collates and, where necessary, commissions evidence of the effectiveness of and value for money of SEND interventions, and that determines which treatments can be paid for out of the public purse and which cannot be justified. Someone needs to set and hold that line.

We need better join-up between schools and youth justice services. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, has an alternative educational plan for children involved with youth justice that parallels my noble friend Lord Nash’s amendment discussed in a previous group. We have already pushed identification and labelling to the point where they may be doing more harm than good to some children at the margins. Even though a label may feel reassuring, it can also do real harm if it lowers the child’s own expectations of what they can achieve, or their teacher’s expectations of them.

Neurodivergence is a term that has no clinical definition. In essence, it invites people who do not meet clinical criteria and thresholds to self-identify into services and funding streams intended for those who do meet those criteria. The definitions that float around for neurodivergence often sound like most young people’s adolescent experience. I suspect there are few of us who did not feel awkward, socially inept, and often just out of things in that period of life.

Good schools understand the adolescent experience and work to make a culture and framework in which teenagers have the structure and encouragement they need for most to succeed and emerge into adulthood without ever needing to be labelled as abnormal, and reserving specialist support for those who really need it.

The Government must take great care not to create incentives to segregate children within schools into SEND and non-SEND categories. With very few exceptions, children with rare physical needs need to learn the same things, and cognitive science shows us that they learn in the same way, though some may need the learning broken down into smaller steps with more repetition and reinforcement along the way. Most children with SEND will do the vast majority of their learning in their mainstream classrooms. Concentrating on getting that core classroom experience right for all children, with a strong, coherent, well-sequenced curriculum taught effectively, must come first, because doing this well minimises the number of children who come adrift, which is never a pleasant experience for the child, and it enables the expert SEND practitioners to concentrate on those who will always need their help. If, for example, we expect SEND funding to be spent on things that are specific to children with SEND, those mainstream classrooms will be neglected and starved of resource.

I look forward to the Government bringing forward their reform proposals for SEND and to proposing amendments in this vein in due course.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much support Amendment 502W from the noble Lord, Lord Carlile. We need a much better standard and a much better quantity of data in this area. We need to start with some clear understanding and definitions of the terms we are using. There seems to have been a lot of drift and expansion in definitions, and we need to get back to something that is clear, commonly defined and commonly understood.

Then we really need to understand what works for these children. We need to track what we are doing and when and why it works. This is a really complex area, so we will not get the answer out of small studies and small amounts of data. We need to track every child who has been fingered as SEND, and then we will get enough data to start seeing some patterns. Perhaps we can add other categories, such as young carers and those who are in care, where there are known difficulties with their education that are not associated with SEND but which may well share some common characteristics. If we get better at data, we will really start to understand how to do better by the children and work the cost down at the same time, and that is important.

I am with the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, in the spirit of some of the other things that he is doing but I hope that, if this amendment ever came to be enacted, there would be alongside it a recognition of the interests of the other children in class.

[Baroness Barran (Con)]

My Lords, we have heard some thoughtful speeches on the issues facing pupils with special educational needs and disabilities in general and neurodivergence in particular. There is no doubt that this is a pressing issue for parents, pupils, staff and of course local authorities, whose budgets are being severely impacted by the costs associated with education, health and care plans, or EHCPs. As all noble Lords are aware, the Government have committed to publishing a new White Paper on SEND and have been working with an expert group ably led by Tom Rees, the CEO of Ormiston Academies Trust. That is an incredibly important task, and we on these Benches hope very much that the Government can show a positive way forward that addresses some of the problems that beset the current system. I think the plans for that report mean that Amendment 498 is not needed.

I understand the criticism of the Children and Families Act 2014, which introduced the current system. However, all who were involved with that legislation, including some noble Lords who have been in the House today, had the best interests of children with special educational needs and disabilities at the forefront of their minds. Whatever the Government propose, I hope that they will take the time to pilot it and avoid the problems of implementation and the unintended consequences that the current approach has found.

I hope also that we can move away from blanket terms such as “SEND” or “neurodivergent”, as they cover such an incredibly wide spectrum. With that in mind, I am cautious about some of the amendments in this group, including Amendment 491 in the name of my noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond, which would include mentors for all children with SEND, and the implications of Amendment 502S.

Given my earlier amendments on exclusions, it will not surprise the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, that I do not agree with subsection (2) in his Amendment 502Q, which would make a presumption against permanent exclusion or fixed-term exclusion, for the reasons that I set out earlier. Similarly, I disagree with Amendment 502T in the noble Lord’s name, which would put a duty on schools to support reintegration for pupils who had been in custody without any balancing consideration about the impact on the other pupils in the classroom.

Again, I am not convinced that Amendment 502R, in the name of the noble Lord Carlile, or Amendment 502U, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, are needed. There is already extensive content in the early years and core initial teacher training curricula following updates undertaken by the previous Government in relation to these issues. When I talk to experts on inclusive teaching, they are clear that for pupils who are able to attend mainstream school, the same approaches of very high-quality teaching apply to them too. I agree absolutely with my noble friend Lady Spielman when she says that the core way that we all learn is much bigger than many of us appreciate.

The SEND review of 2022 put it very clearly that:

“High-quality teaching, differentiated for individual pupils, is the first step in responding to children who have or may have SEN”.


I think there is a big gap in our understanding of the impact of different interventions. Some commentators have called for the creation of something a bit like NICE, which we have for pharmaceuticals, for SEND interventions. I have been sent examples of the kinds of requirements that are put on schools for children with education, health and care plans. Those I saw ranged between nine and 44 separate requirements, many of them not based on any academic evidence of their effectiveness, but all of them creating a great workload for schools. That is something that I hope the Government are going to grip in this review and address.

I have a lot of sympathy for Amendment 502V, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Grey-Thompson, as I spent a lot of time trying to understand the flows of funding for EHCPs, as have many much more august organisations such as the IFS and the National Audit Office. It remains very difficult to get clarity on how the system works from a financial point of view. Given the sums of money involved, it surely would make sense to be able to do this.

Amendment 502W in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, builds on Amendment 502V and aims for cross-sector reporting. I hope that with the new single unique identifier some of that will become much more possible. It will certainly reveal some valuable data. I look forward to the Minister’s comments on these amendments.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (CB)]

My Lords, the hour is late. I have my name on some of these amendments. I simply say that the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has highlighted that around 16% of children aged five to 16 now have a mental health disorder. CAMHS cannot cope with this. The amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Tyler of Enfield, is certainly trying to plug that large hole.

I also remind the Committee that it has been estimated that in every class, on average, there is a child who has been bereaved of a parent or sibling. That is not trivial trauma; it is major. They need support and help, but they are often not getting it.

On collecting data, it is essential that we know what we are doing. However, we must use validated measures that have been properly evaluated, so that schools are measuring what people think they are measuring and they do not contain leading questions and so on. In addition, good-quality data allows a school to understand whether it is improving.

I declare my interest as having chaired the Science and Technology Committee’s sixth report on allergy, and I strongly underline all the comments made in it. During that inquiry, we heard about children being bullied by other children who put peanuts in their pockets, and about staff sometimes confusing anaphylaxis with panic attacks because they have not had training. It is a very simple measure to train staff and to make sure that they can access an EpiPen. With that, I hope that the Government will adopt the suggestions in these amendments.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I very much support the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and the amendments she has put forward. I hope that the Government are thoroughly behind the National Education Nature Park, which is a great initiative from the Department for Education, and are looking for ways to push that out, maybe through the natural history GCSE. If the noble Baroness feels in need of a holiday, I recommend Japan as a place that has really got on top of how to get young citizens involved with nature; that may surprise noble Lords, in view of the urban character of Japan, but it is very good at that.

I also agree with my noble friend Lady Spielman that indirect measures are best. They are very much the underpinning of the Good Schools Guide: watching, observing and looking for strong structures and relationships—and, yes, someone to turn to when you do not know what to do, but an excess of mental health professionals is almost always the sign of a school in trouble.

When it comes to children, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle applies. By asking a child a question, you create the answer; you have to be really careful how you try to measure well-being, particularly in young children. Maybe the Dutch can teach us to do it, but I share the scepticism of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, about much of what is going on in schools at the moment.

[Baroness Longfield (Lab)]

I shall add something on those points, although I do not want to drag this on. Clearly, this arouses a lot of emotions, but we are mixing a lot of things up. There are rooms full of evidence on how these effectively work, not least on the things that the noble Lord is putting forward. I do not think that schools are being asked to undertake surveys—it is about giving information to schools, which is a completely different aspect.

What we should all be talking about here is keeping children well, which means intervening when they need help; it does not mean taking them to clinics or overmedicalisation but it is about providing positive environments in which children can flourish. Also, it is not something that we are asking schools to take on; schools have had to take this on, because it comes through the door. We are talking about other professionals —health professionals, youth workers and others, who know about well-being—being able to work with schools to support those children. This is a win-win for everyone, and children and their families are the last ones who want to overmedicalise this and come up with what has been described as an industrialisation of a medical complex. That is not what anyone wants, and I do not think that it is there in any of the intentions that have been put forward.