Schools (Recording and Reporting of Seclusion and Restraint) (England) Regulations 2025

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Thursday 12th March 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Lucas]

That this House regrets that the Schools (Recording and Reporting of Seclusion and Restraint) (England) Regulations 2025 are accompanied by an impact assessment that underestimates the cost of implementation; and that they do not enable the best use of the information which will be recorded by schools.

Relevant document: 48th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee for drawing my attention to these regulations. The committee is the punishment battalion of the House of Lords committee system. I have served my time on it and know that you get a huge pile of papers every week and you absolutely have to read and understand them all—there is no escape. It is a huge amount of hard work, and I am very grateful to it. The committee picked up on the impact assessment, but that focused on private schools only. My concerns run wider.

I do not disagree with the directions that the regulations are taking to make schools safer and involve parents more, particularly when we have the prospect of more SEND children in mainstream education. Incidents that require seclusion are unplanned, cathartic happenings. Suddenly, a child is banging his head on his desk uncontrollably, and the teacher, whoever they are, has to know what to do. There has to be an effective system of support for that teacher and the child, and proper records have to be made. Schools ought to be self-critical and self-improving places, and parents ought to be involved.

However, good things absorb time, especially what should be teacher downtime and senior management team time. Good things cost money and good things, if not thought through, displace other good things. It is important to think through carefully the objectives, methods and impact when we are creating things such as these regulations. In the case of these regulations, that was clearly not done.

The fact that the impact assessment covers only independent schools is ridiculous. Most of the impact of these regulations is on state schools. That is where the cost for the system and for the Government lies. We are told that the training requirement is two staff in the school. Who have the Government talked to? It is clear that they have talked to nobody. My local secondary school has every staff member trained—of course they have to be trained, as they are the ones in front of whom these incidents occur. They have to be masters of de-escalation and understand how to call in the support system. Every single one of them needs to be trained to a standard.

As for the response, in an average-sized secondary school with about 1,000 pupils, there are 20 fully trained staff members who are capable of dealing with the details of an incident. To say two staff are needed shows that the Government are living in a different world. On the time to record, the impact assessment says 30 to 120 seconds. Having talked to schools, lawyers and others, I know that a simple incident would take an hour and a complicated one a day. There is so much to be done and there are lots of people who have to be brought into the discussion. Time has to be taken to help the teacher wind down, quite apart from looking after the child. There needs to be care taken to record fully and accurately exactly what has happened and time taken to learn from it.

On frequency, the impact assessment uses the rate of internal exclusions, but that process is not in any way connected to isolation or restraint. In a secondary school, there are maybe 50 internal exclusions a week, varying in severity from 10 minutes to a day. There may be two seclusions a week. There is just no connection between the two. There is no way that internal exclusions should have been used, let alone suggested, as a measure for how frequent isolation is.

We are looking, all in all, in the state system, at a cost in the order of £100 million per annum—that is the steady state; I am not talking about the initial cost for getting everyone up to speed. In alternative provision or special schools, we have a totally different environment, where the sort of outbursts that are rare in mainstream education may be anticipated, part of the makeup of a child and something the school has to adapt to over the long term. They require a different approach and a different set of regulations. That does not seem to be provided for in the regulations or discussed in the impact assessment.

When it comes to the detail of which incidents are and are not seclusion, it is hard to tell from what is in the regulations whether what you have in front of you is or is not covered by them. It is acknowledged that we have very little data on what is happening on seclusion, but the Government’s proposals for gathering further data are limited. Altogether, the regulations and impact assessment are lackadaisical, unserious and uncaring, and they are unconnected to reality. It is important that the Department for Education does much better.

It is not hard. All it takes is to do what I have done and talk to some heads, some lawyers and the school unions, and sense check what has been produced. That takes only a few hours. I would like the Department for Education to review the processes, especially the supervision, that generated the regulations and the impact statement we have in front of us. Understanding reality, having the courage to trust professionals, working out which strategies will yield the best results and getting the wording right are important to make sure that the impact of these things on schools is kept within bounds. As I said, a sense check is needed. Have a set of friends that you can turn to and ask for advice. What is really going on in schools? How will these proposals work in practice?

The impact statement says, and I agree, that there is a lack of good data. The department and schools should be collecting all the data they need to understand what is going on with seclusion and restraint, how it varies through the system and how best to improve practice. The Government should be asking all schools for a simple record of everything, including incidents resolved without the need to employ seclusion or restraint. This data is there in the electronic systems of schools—it is quick and easy to produce. With a total picture of what is going on, it would be much easier for the department to formulate policy.

When the department wants to look at things in detail and gauge what is required, by way of detailed research, having the overall picture will make it much easier to select the right examples and the right coverage and for the department to gain a real understanding of best and worst practice in the system. Having the overall data will enable individual schools to benchmark themselves and look at how they compare with other schools in the system, and that will help their improvement.

I very much hope that the Government will also improve their proposals for data collection. The Government have a commitment to high quality in schools. They should have a commitment to high quality in their regulations. I beg to move.

[Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (LD)]

My Lords, I have spent many years working with young people, particularly the most vulnerable. We on these Benches support the main aims of this statutory instrument. The safety, dignity, and well-being of our children must always come first. When a young person is secluded, it means they are kept alone or physically restrained and their movement limited. It is a serious step. These sensitive situations must be handled with great care, and it is therefore right that we improve transparency. It is also right that parents receive a written record of what has happened, as soon as possible. The department is correct in recognising that seclusion can be just as harmful as the use of force. However, although the principle behind these regulations is sound, there are concerns about how the Government have gone about introducing them.

First, we should acknowledge the confusion that occurred during the rollout. As the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee pointed out, the original measure had to be withdrawn and replaced because the Minister accidentally signed the wrong draft. We ask our students to check their work carefully before handing it in. It is reasonable to expect the same standards here. As the committee rightly said, this kind of mistake should not have happened.

However, the bigger concern is the Government’s impact assessment. The Government estimate that the cost of recording these incidents will be between £1.6 million and £6.3 million a year, equivalent to the time of about 137 full-time teachers. Yet this estimate only includes 2,443 independent schools in England. Why? Because the Department for Education decided that state schools are not businesses and therefore left them out of the calculations. This is a serious oversight. There are more than 21,000 state schools in England—almost nine times the number of independent schools. By leaving them out, the Government have avoided confronting the true cost of this policy. In reality, the amount of teaching time required will be far greater than the figures suggest.

We should also look at the assumptions behind these figures. The department estimates that it will take two teachers between 30 and 120 seconds to record an incident and report it to a parent. Has anyone making these calculations worked in a busy school recently? The idea that two teachers can promptly and sensitively record an incident involving restraint and seclusion in one or two minutes does not reflect reality. As the committee noted, the estimated time is unrealistically low. In practice, this will mean that already overworked, overstretched teachers will have to work longer hours or spend less time on the other important tasks such as teaching and supporting their pupils.

Let me be clear: we fully support the aims of protecting students and ensuring that parents are properly informed. However, how the Government introduced these measures raises legitimate concerns. There have been unavoidable procedural mistakes and very optimistic estimates of the time involved. The impact assessment leaves out 21,000 state schools, where most of this work will take place. What practical support will be provided to teachers in state schools to help them meet these new responsibilities without the unreasonable burden on staff—who are already working extremely hard?

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In closing, I thank noble Lords for raising the points they have today, for prompting discussion and, I hope, for enabling me to clarify some of the points that have been made and to respond on the broader intention of the regulations. The Government will continue to work closely with schools, parents and the wider sector to ensure that restrictive interventions are used only when absolutely necessary, always safely, always lawfully and always in the best interests of children.

[Lord Lucas (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for her comprehensive reply, much of which I completely agreed with. I take issue with only two points.

The first is the restriction of the impact assessment to independent schools. In understanding how regulations work and the effect they will have on the system, and sharing that information with Parliament, surely the policy should be that the coverage should be extended to include state schools, which will bear the great majority of the consequences of these regulations. Not to share that with Parliament, as the committee observed, is surely not the right way of going about things.

Secondly, when it comes to data collection, most schools will have this data. Data collection is just a matter of turning a switch or two in the central system so that that data then flows into the governance system, with no extra recording and no extra actions needed beyond adding a few fields to the data already going to government. I really do not understand that that is difficult. However, I am grateful to the Minister and I beg leave to withdraw my Motion.

Motion withdrawn.