My Lords, I welcome the excellent speeches by the Leader of the House and the Leader of the Opposition. I think there needs to be a Lords Minister in every main department. Those jobs can be extremely demanding, and it is the right principle that money should be paid for good work done.
However, th…
My Lords, I support Amendment 203 in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran. Free schools have played an important role in raising educational standards over the last 15 years, with their benefits felt most strongly in communities that have needed them the most. As I set out during our discussions …
My Lords, I shall very briefly add my support to Amendment 243C and, in doing so, declare my interest as a member of the board of the London Marathon Foundation. As we have heard, schools play a crucial role in the formation of lifelong activity habits, but they need to be properly supported, both t…
My Lords, I add my support to Amendment 114, which I believe provides a more flexible approach to achieving the Government’s aims of keeping down the cost of school uniforms while ensuring that the legislation before us is better future-proofed to potential changes in individual school policies. For…
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 191 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Knight, to which I have added my name. In doing so, I declare my interest as honorary president of COBIS. Unfortunately, the noble Lord, Lord Knight, is unable to be here today, but I am grateful to him for sharing recent c…
My Lords, while welcoming the Government’s amendment to ensure that the child’s voice is heard in family group decision-making, I add my support to the amendments in this group in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran.
As we discussed in Committee, family group decision-making is a broad, generic…
My Lords, these regulations do not surprise anybody. They are more or less what the Act said, so congratulations on bringing clarity. The question about the women’s game is reasonable; I was going to ask something similar. It is an ongoing question. If the women’s game, which is expanding at a pheno…
My Lords, Progress 8 has been proved to have been a success, and, as my noble friend pointed out, the Francis review is clear that its recommendation is not to make any changes
“to the structure of Progress 8 or the composition of the ‘buckets’”,
yet Ministers have now decided to consult on change…
My Lords, I support the amendments in this group. I declare my interest as a board member of the London Marathon Foundation.
The amendments in this group call for a curriculum review and a national strategy to embed physical activity and sport firmly within the school day. They are timely and urgen…
My Lords, I too speak in support of the free schools programme, Amendment 480 and the clause stand part notice in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran.
As we have just heard so powerfully, free schools have been a significant driver of education improvement in this country over the past decade a…
I accept what the Minister says—that of course the proposal for new free schools has to be properly interrogated, et cetera— but it has now been nearly a year. She alluded to the fact that some of the issues may be around the tight funding. At the very least, could she commit to contacting the schoo…
My Lords, I add my support to amendments 444A to C, 445 and 445ZA to ZD, in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran, which seek to rein in the sweeping new powers currently set out in Clause 49 for the Secretary of State to intervene in academy operations. As my noble friend said, of course the Secr…
My Lords, I add my support to Amendments 436ZA and 436ZB in this group, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Knight. I declare my interest as honorary president of COBIS which, as the noble Lord said, is a member of the British International Schools Safeguarding Coalition.
As the noble Lord set out,…
My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Barran’s proposition that Clause 47 does not stand part of the Bill. Clause 47 as it stands strips academies of one of their key freedoms: the ability to innovate and tailor their curriculum approaches to meet the specific needs of the pupils and communities …
My Lords, I add my support to Amendment 134B, in the name of my noble friend Lady Sanderson. As she said, it seeks to build on the Government’s commitment in Keeping C hildren S afe, H elping F amilies T hrive to look at options to reform the planning process to enable providers to more easily set u…
I have had some very good contacts with the OECD about the work that it is doing, not just in this area but more broadly. I cannot commit at this moment that we will take part in that study, but I will certainly undertake to go away and consider whether there are opportunities there.
I support the amendments in this group in the name of my noble friend, which, as she set out, aim to simplify the process for approving kinship carers, balancing the importance of robust safeguards with greater flexibility and discretion within the process to speed it up in the best interests of the…
My Lords, I would like to build on the point just made by my noble friend Lady Barran and add my support for Amendments 39 and 40. I wonder whether, in her response, the Minister could explain how this approach in the current Bill aligns with the move to combine mayoral authorities. It seems as if t…
It was great to hear about the training that the Minister’s son gets—that is fantastic. Can we therefore take it that these new duties in the Bill will involve no additional training, and that everything is covered by the training that she eloquently set out? Alternatively, will there be additional …
My Lords, I, instead, speak in support of Amendment 6. As we have heard, reunification is the most common way for children to leave care but, sadly, the number of children who re-enter the system remains far too high, as many reunifications break down due to lack of support. There is currently no st…
My Lords, I support Amendment 5 in the names of my noble friends Lady Barran and Lord Farmer. I hope the Minister will agree that this is a sensible amendment aimed at ensuring that all families who need it have access to a family group decision-making meeting that is underpinned by strong evidence …
My Lords, I rise to support Amendment 2 in the name of my noble friend Lady Barran. As we have just heard, it has a simple purpose: to allow families access to a family group decision-making meeting at the earliest possible opportunity in the child protection process. As I am sure noble Lords have s…