Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Matt Rodda Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Olivia Bailey]

I am pleased to speak on the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill for our third consideration of Lords amendments. The Bill is the biggest single piece of child protection legislation in a generation, and it will put in place a package of support to drive high and rising standards throughout our education and care system, so that every child can achieve and thrive. Today, I ask the House to again reaffirm its support for this landmark legislation.

I turn first to Lords amendment 102 on the circumstances in which the independent adjudicator can specify a lower published admission number following an upheld objection. In this age of declining roles, it is important that these powers exist to ensure that every child has the opportunity to have a great school place. But the Government have been clear throughout this process that school quality and parental choice must be at the heart of PAN decisions. As committed to by my noble Friend Lady Smith in the other place, we have tabled amendments in lieu reflecting this. These amendments place a requirement on the face of the Bill for adjudicators to take account of school quality and parental preference before deciding a PAN following an upheld objection. They will also require the adjudicator, before making a decision to reduce the school’s PAN, to consult key parties about alternatives to lowering the school’s admissions number. Those parties are the admissions authority, the local authority and the Secretary of State, which in practice means consulting the relevant Department for Education regional director.

We are also taking a power to make it clear that we can require the adjudicator to consult additional parties in line with commitments in our policy paper. Through the Bill, we will ensure that a robust decision-making framework is in place to protect high-quality education and parental choice, and we will continue to engage with stakeholders, such as the Confederation of School Trusts, on this measure, including on proposed changes to regulations and the school admissions code.

I now turn to Lords amendments 38V to 38X on children’s access to social media. There is a clear consensus across this House on the need to protect children online, but our consultation goes further than these amendments, considering a wider set of options, including risks beyond social media, such as gaming and AI chatbots. Hon. Members should have no doubt that it is not a question of whether the Government act but how they act to deliver strong and enduring protections for children online. The House should also be clear that the Government will act quickly.

[Matt Rodda (Reading Central) (Lab)]

Can I thank my hon. Friend for the Government’s work on this important matter, which is much appreciated by many parents—in particular the work of looking ahead at what further measures might be taken to tackle online harms?

[Olivia Bailey]

I thank my hon. Friend for his important intervention and for all his work for his constituents in Reading Central.

To underline the fact that we will act quickly, we have committed to responding to the consultation by the summer and have made a legislative commitment to report to Parliament within six months.

--- Later in debate ---

[Munira Wilson (Twickenham) (LD)]

I will try my best, Madam Deputy Speaker. Every family has the ambition to send their child to the best school—preferably close by—so we welcome the Government’s moves to strengthen the duty of the schools adjudicator to take account of quality of educational provision and parental preference in an area before changing a school’s pupil admission numbers. We also welcome the duty to consult. We remain concerned about conflicts of interest and how things will work in practice. Ultimately, if a high-performing, popular school has space to expand and there is a demand for places, ideology should not get in the way of it doing so.

I welcome the Government’s decision to finally ban access to mobile phones during the school day by putting existing guidance on a statutory footing. I join the shadow Secretary of State in paying tribute to all the campaign groups and to my hon. Friend the Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden) for all her work on this issue. After more than a year of parents, teachers and pupils begging, this simple change will have a big impact. I am just sorry that it did not happen sooner and was described repeatedly as a gimmick.

Classrooms will be a step closer to becoming a place of focus and learning, free from the addictive and demanding world of social media, but they need the right equipment and procedures in place. With school budgets stretched to breaking point and some parents not necessarily able to afford pouches, I urge the Government to ensure that all schools have the necessary support to properly ensure that every classroom can be smartphone-free.

I welcome the reasonable adjustments alluded to in the guidance, but I would also welcome clear assurance from the Minister that for those pupils with medical needs or caring responsibilities, schools will be at liberty to make appropriate exemptions and accommodations that are not onerous or discriminatory towards individual children. Similarly, school leaders should have the freedom to ensure that children with SEND who may need assistive technology have appropriate access to a device. I strongly endorse the comments on exceptions by the Select Committee Chair, the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). Providing clear advice to teachers and headteachers on a regular basis would be very helpful to alleviate those concerns.

While we can celebrate a big victory for smartphones in schools, the damaging impact of addictive social media and gaming and of chatbots extends far beyond the school day. Each day, more children are coming to serious harm because of social media, while the big tech companies come to this place, as we have heard, and brazenly deny responsibility for the damage that they are causing to the mental and physical health of our children and young people.

Social media is encouraging insidious, brain-numbing behaviour in all of us—not just children, as the hon. Member for North West Cambridgeshire (Sam Carling) said—through its infinite scrolling features, frequent dopamine hits and addictive algorithms. Its content endangers the people we are here to protect. Just last week I spoke to a constituent whose child cut themselves after seeing a video on YouTube shorts that said it could help relieve stress. The longer we delay, the more we hear such stories.

I urge the Government to formally recognise in the legislation that both addictive design and harmful content have created this toxic cocktail. If we cannot accurately identify the problem, how can we tackle it? I know that Ministers want to help our children, but we need them to do more. We have been debating this issue for more than a year now. The now Children’s Minister, the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), put forward his own Bill on social media harms more than a year ago. The time is now to gut addictive algorithms, ban social media giants from collecting our children’s data and make big tech responsible for the harmful content it is pushing on our children. I urge the Government in the strongest possible terms to come forward with a concrete commitment to action and a swift timeline for implementation.

I agree with the Minister that we need to go broader than social media, to gaming and chatbots. Some of that wider remit was acknowledged in a very positive amendment from Baroness Kidron in the other place, which the Government rejected. The Liberal Democrats have put forward broader, more nuanced amendments in the other place beyond just a blunt social media ban, but they have been repeatedly rejected. This is not about party politics, as some have suggested. We are all trying to come together towards the same aim, but we need a concrete commitment in any amendments that are brought forward to a date when the Government will take action. We cannot wait for a drawn-out consultation that asks if, not how, we should ban social media. Our children who are affected every single day cannot wait for action to be taken.

[Matt Rodda (Reading Central) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to speak briefly this afternoon. I wanted to speak because we had a tragedy in my constituency, where a young boy of just 13 years old was stabbed and brutally murdered in a local park after a terrible series of incidents of online bullying. This is a very serious matter and I appreciate the Government’s work on it, and the consultation, which has enormous potential. I pay tribute to Olly’s mum and dad, who have been campaigning extremely hard on this matter, to tackle both the scourge of knife crime and social media and online harms. They have argued very powerfully for a ban at 16, but I am aware that there are contrary arguments, as the Select Committee Chair, the hon. Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes), mentioned earlier. The Molly Rose Foundation and other campaigners take a different view. I hope that these matters can be addressed fully in the consultation, and that we can look in great detail at some of the challenges, because these are extremely difficult issues for our society and for parents.

In my own life as a parent, I have found it difficult to fully comprehend the level of risk that is out there. We all face the challenge that social media, gaming and other technologies move very quickly, so it is important that we look at gaming and a range of other matters. I look forward to the consultation exploring this issue fully, looking in depth and, hopefully, answering the pleas from all the parents involved in the campaigns, because this is such a serious and important issue. I look forward to working with my hon. Friend the Minister, and with the Government as a whole, on this matter.

On the matter of phones, I wholeheartedly welcome the Government’s action. It is important to see this issue from the point of view of parents, children and schools. Schools have to implement the ban, and the Minister has rightly set out how today’s amendment will give clarity to schools so that teachers will understand precisely what is meant. It will give greater signposting to taking action on phones in schools and, as a result, protect children. That is hugely important, and I very much welcome the Government’s work on this matter. I appreciate that other Members want to get in and that time is limited.

[Katie Lam (Weald of Kent) (Con)]

I was very sorry to hear the story that the hon. Member for Reading Central (Matt Rodda) shared. I will speak about a different aspect of the Bill: schools and admissions.

Good schools, and the good teachers who run them, are exceptionally precious. At its best, a good school truly can transform the lives of its pupils by fostering their natural talents, by helping equip them to tackle challenges and by expanding their intellectual horizons. When good schools are working well, they should be able to grow, so that more parents can choose to send their children to a school where their talents can be cultivated and their interests encouraged. That is a simple principle—one that Members from across the House, and indeed everyone everywhere, should be able to agree to.

A good education should not be the preserve of only those children who have parents who can afford to pay for one. Enabling more pupils to attend the best schools in the state sector means that that kind of education can be offered to more children, yet, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott) has set out, the powers that this Bill will create on pupil admissions will achieve precisely the opposite. They allow the Government and regulators to limit the growth of good schools, or even force them to shrink, in order to make sure that schools that are performing less well can stay open. The most generous interpretation of the Government’s intentions is that this change is being made in the name of bureaucratic convenience.

As the number of pupils entering the school system falls, it is true that local authorities will need to make decisions about which schools remain open and where. The Government Minister responsible for defending this legislation in the other place said that the proposals are

“very much a function of the time, in terms of demography, that we find ourselves in.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 20 April 2026; Vol. 855, c. 541.]

Even if that was the case, it would be completely absurd to tackle this problem by limiting the growth of good schools in order to make life easier for bureaucrats in local government, and for headteachers at schools that are not performing well. Wherever possible, surely we should be enabling the growth of good schools so that they have the capacity to take on more pupils, if and when schools that are performing less well need to reduce their numbers. If parents make decisions that they believe are best for their children, who are bureaucrats to tell them otherwise?

In practice, limiting the growth of good schools will keep more children trapped in failed schools for longer, deny them the opportunity to flourish and deprive them of the firm foundations for life that a good education can provide. Even if this was being done in the name of bureaucratic convenience, it would be grotesque, but I fear that the reality may be even worse. Since this Government came to power, we have repeatedly seen the Department for Education take steps that undermine the progress made by the last Government in this area, including by making it harder to turn failing schools into academies.

Time and again, we have seen this Government put their ideological instincts ahead of what works in practice. Regardless of whether their proposals are motivated by ideology or convenience, the result will be the same: fewer children able to attend good schools, depriving them of the strongest start in life.