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Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendments 485, 487, 488 and 489. Before I do, I warmly concur with and support Amendment 502YM in the name of my noble friend Lady Spielman, which I believe is clear, sensible and complementary to my amendments. The principle behind my amendments is simple, and it goes to the heart of the rule of law. The laws that this Parliament passes are not mere suggestions for our schools; they are the rules that must operate, and they must be properly followed. That requires accountability when those laws are broken.

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My amendments seek to provide a mechanism for holding schools to account by enabling a tribunal to rule where there are allegations that the law is not being followed. As the people who are best placed to know what is going on in schools are, among others, parents, it is parents who would be at the centre of the system I propose. It would give them a fair, effective and accessible means of redress through an expanded role for the First-tier Tribunal, which already has a role in education in relation to disputes over SEND provision.

At present, we have a system that is, frankly, not fit for purpose. It is a system that disempowers the very people on whose behalf education is being provided—parents. It should concern all of us, parents or not, that the current system leaves vital legal duties unenforced and unenforceable. We spend hours debating the minutiae of education law and the department issues statutory guidance, yet it might all have little impact on the ground because there is no easy mechanism to hold schools accountable when they ignore those laws and that statutory guidance. The avenues for enforcing that law either do not exist or lead to a dead end.

The schools’ inspectorate, Ofsted, might seem the obvious backstop, yet its role is fundamentally misaligned with this task. Its inspectors are by profession teachers, not lawyers, and they are not equipped to make legal judgments on statutory duties. When they are challenged

about rating certain schools as, say, outstanding, despite clear evidence that they are in breach of some of their legal obligations, Ofsted’s defence is that it is “not a compliance-driven inspectorate”. That may come as a shock to noble Lords, but that is how it sees itself. Any hope we might have that it is requiring schools to comply with laws from this place goes out of the window.

What about the courts? In theory, a parent could seek a judicial review to force a school to comply with the law, but let us be realistic: for the vast majority of families, this is simply not an option. The crippling legal costs put this route beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest people, and what parent would embark on such an adversarial process, knowing the potential damage it could inflict on the relationship with their child’s school, a relationship that they may need to maintain for years to come? Judicial review is, in practice, a remedy that exists on paper but not in the real world.

The remaining route is for parents to escalate a complaint to the Department for Education, but this is one of the problems that I want to highlight. The department has become a black hole—a place where parental complaints go to die. Consider the case of Susan, a pseudonym, a parent governor who questioned her school over the lawfulness of its proposed RSE policy. When her concerns were sidelined, she was told by the head teacher that her only recourse was to submit a formal complaint as a parent, and so she did. She detailed how one of the lesson plans adopted by the school instructed pupils to plot their gender identity on a spectrum from trousers to tiaras. Pupils were then asked to add to this their “personal identity mind map”. It declared in uncompromising terms that no one else could tell them what their gender was and said that people must always be treated according to their self-declared gender. This is Stonewall orthodoxy, not shared values. It is political indoctrination, not education. It potentially even raises safeguarding concerns.

Having exhausted the school’s internal process and got nowhere, Susan escalated her complaint to the department. The DfE says that its target response deadline is 15 working days. Fourteen months later, she got a classic Civil Service response, which told her that the core of her complaint could not even be considered by the department. This was despite this school engaging in highly controversial practices on one of the most divisive issues of the day, in breach of the law on political impartiality and of the guidance promulgated by the DFE itself.

Consider the experience of another parent, Emma. Her complaint centred on the presentation of contested gender theory as fact, and age-inappropriate relationships and sex education materials in a primary school. I ask noble Lords to please forgive me, but I need to be plain in what these pupils were told to do: to work in groups using play-dough to make a model demonstrating a condom catching semen from a penis. This was a primary school, and it was following a scheme developed by a company established by the local authority. When, having escalated her complaint to the DfE Emma chased it for a response, she was told that the evidence she had submitted had likely been subject to “premature secure destruction”. That is a new way of saying

“shredded”. Even after Emma resubmitted everything, the department’s final response, which did not uphold her complaint, arrived a year after her initial submission. By then, her daughter had already left to attend secondary school.

Does anyone believe that it is an acceptable state of affairs that parents acting in good faith on serious concerns about their own children’s education should be met with such bureaucratic inertia and incompetence? The consequences are corrosive. It allows important legal provisions, not least the duty of political impartiality, to be ignored or sidelined. This is particularly acute when it comes to the teaching of contested topics such as gender identity, when parents raise legitimate concerns that activists’ agendas are supplanting balanced education with potentially harmful impacts on the development of children. This failure of enforcement creates a vacuum that allows activist groups to misuse the state school system to advance their own agendas. At the same time, it allows suspicion among parents to fester without definitive resolution. This surely undermines trust in schools.

These amendments offer a practical and proportionate solution. They would not open the floodgates; they would create a specific targeted right for a parent to appeal to the First-tier Tribunal, but only after the school’s own process is complete and only when the complaint concerns a breach of a specified legal duty, such as the duty of political impartiality under the Education Act 1996, or the general duties in respect of the curriculum. The precise powers and procedures of the tribunal would be set out in detail in regulations made by the Secretary of State and would be subject to effective parliamentary scrutiny.

Crucially, these amendments would introduce a duty of disclosure: no longer could a school withhold teaching materials from proper scrutiny when a complaint is being considered. This simple measure would bring a vital dose of transparency, helping prevent secretive approaches to sensitive subjects. Incidentally, as noble Lords will know, on Tuesday, I supported my noble friend Lord Sandhurst’s excellent Amendments 466 and 467, which sought to provide a clear and proportionate solution to the problem of transparency.

Involving the First-tier Tribunal would depoliticise disputes. Over time, a body of judgments would emerge, providing greater clarity for parents, teachers and governors alike. This, in turn, would lead to greater objectivity and more good practice and would help reduce complaints in the long run.

In conclusion, these amendments are a defence of the rule of law. They would give teeth to the will of Parliament and would better equip the Secretary of State to ensure that the Government’s own policies are given effect. They seek to re-establish a proper chain of accountability. I ask the Minister to consider this proposal in the constructive spirit in which it is offered. It means a fix for a broken system, to restore parents’ trust, and that the law of the land is upheld in every school. I beg to move.