The Bishop of Portsmouth spoke to amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill regarding impacts on schools with religious designations on 28th January 2026, particularly in the case of multi-academy trusts and lines of communication between religious bodies and their schools:
The Lord Bishop of Portsmouth: My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 193A, 193B and 193C and declare my interest as chair of the National Society for Education. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Ritchie, for her support of Amendments 193A and 193B. I will address these two first and together.
These two amendments are about good communication. They would require the chief inspector to include the relevant religious body along with the academy proprietor and the Secretary of State when a report is circulated at the conclusion of an inspection of a multi-academy trust that contains a school with a religious foundation. For example, in the case of the Church of England, the relevant body would be the Diocesan Board of Education.
Under the DBE Measure 2021, DBEs have a range of duties and powers, including advice-giving, data analysis and information gathering in relation to their schools and academies. Timely receipt of a multi-academy trust’s inspection report will enable the fulfilment of these duties and powers.
I seek the Minister’s assurance that these straightforward amendments, enabling good communication and the delivery of statutory duty, will find their way into the Bill.
Amendment 193C in my name would ensure that where multi-academy trusts contain schools with a religious designation, these are inspected on and held to account for their ethos, religious education and collective worship.
At present, over 42% of Church of England’s schools are academies, amounting to over 20% of all academies in England. When we include Roman Catholic academies and those with other religious foundations, the total percentage rises still further to approximately one-third of the entire academy estate.
All these academies will fall under the proposed new requirement for the inspection of multi-academy trusts. However, at present there is no provision for the specialist denominational inspection of those multi-academy trusts that have direct responsibility for the leadership and governance of academies with a religious foundation. This contrasts markedly with current arrangements, in which individual schools and academies with a religious foundation are inspected by the relevant religious body under Section 48 of the Education Act 2005 and by the contractual provisions of an academy’s funding agreement.
There is no provision within the Bill as drafted which would mirror Section 48 provision and deliver expert, individual, school-based evaluation and accountability for multi-academy trusts containing schools of a religious character and foundation. This is an omission or oversight with potential to affect adversely the quality of accountability and inspection for approximately a third of the academy estate.
Amendment 193C addresses this omission by seeking to mirror current Section 48 provision and good practice for multi-academy trusts containing schools with a religious foundation. Led by the inspectorates of religious bodies such as the Statutory Inspection of Anglican and Methodist Schools, inspections would combine, as they do most effectively today, the application of expert religious knowledge with inspection expertise to ensure that the accountability regime for the proprietors of academies includes all significant elements of the life, leadership and governance of schools in their purview. I thank the Minister for engaging with key partners in educational delivery within the National Society for Education and the Catholic Education Service ahead of this debate. I trust that the Government will continue to work with us to find a way forward and to address this omission.
To conclude, Amendments 193A and 193B are intended as friendly, simple, straightforward insertions to enhance lines of communication and to keep the relevant religious body informed when one of its schools is inspected. On Amendment 193C, however, I remain deeply concerned that, without the provision outlined in the amendment in my name, providers of schools of religious character will be left with wholly inadequate inspection arrangements. This is an entirely avoidable state of affairs which, if unaddressed, as I said in earlier comments, will affect approximately a third of the academy estate and represent a backward step from current inspection arrangements under Section 48 of the Education Act 2005. Can the Minister give assurances that she will bring forward proposals to address the omission I identify and work with the National Society for Education and the Catholic Education Service to bring forward proposals or pilots that address our concerns prior to Third Reading?
Extracts from the speeches that followed:
Baroness Ritchie of Downpatrick (Lab): My Lords, I will speak to Amendments 193A and 193B in the names of the right Reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth and myself. These amendments are very simple. They seek to address a small technical omission regarding the inspection of multi-academy trusts when they are the proprietor of one or more schools with a religious character.
When Ofsted inspects schools with a religious character, one of the organisations it is required to notify of the outcome of state inspection is the religious authority responsible for running the school. My noble friend the Minister’s amendment to introduce inspections of multi-academy trusts is welcome, but I feel that the amendment does not replicate the duty of notifying religious authorities for these inspections.
Multi-academy trusts play an important role in creating and upholding the ethos and community in which schools with a religious character operate, so it is essential that the result of any inspection of the trusts that contains such schools must be shared with the relevant religious authority. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth has already said, it is an issue of communication.
These amendments would ensure that the inspection of multi-academy trusts which contain schools with a religious character is consistent with the individual inspection of those schools. I have worked closely with the Catholic Education Service and with the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth in bringing these amendments to your Lordships’ House today, and I am sure that the representatives of other religious groups which run schools would also support them. Therefore, I hope that my noble friend the Minister will be able to accept these amendments today or give her assurances that under the Government’s amendment the relevant religious authorities will be notified about the results of multi-academy trust inspections when those trusts are the proprietors of schools under their denominational jurisdiction. I also support Amendment 193C in the name of the right reverend Prelate.
Baroness Barran (Con): I thank the Minister for Amendment 192 in relation to Clause 50; this addresses some of the concerns that we raised about its scope in Committee and again in the other place. The main substance of this group, as we have heard, is the lengthy, prize-winning Amendment 193, which would allow the Government to introduce mass inspection. We debated this in Committee. It is curious that the Bill has gone through all stages in the other place and only now are we seeing this on Report. Some of the gaps that it reveals are highlighted in the amendment from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth and in my Amendments 193D and 193E. We can see that in the breadth of drafting of this amendment, with so much left to secondary legislation giving Secretary of State extremely broad powers—which suggested to me that it was an amendment that was drafted in haste rather than one that was on the shelf. Officials kindly invited me in to talk about the amendment before Christmas, and they argued the case for giving the Secretary of State maximum flexibility. As the noble Baroness, Lady Blower, said on an earlier group, we have talked about this ad nauseam, and the Government have acted to correct some of it, but this new clause goes in the wrong direction in relation to those powers.
If we think back to the introduction of the new school inspection regime, we see that there was a huge consultation and piloting of the approach, and now we are seeing it rolled out. All my Amendment 193D asks is that we mirror that and do exactly the same. I have suggested a focus in terms of the pilot, which would be to look at MATs that have groups of schools in the following categories. There would be one category where they are significantly underperforming and where there might be a case for intervention; and another would be where they would like to grow and take on other schools—quite rightly, the department would want reassurance that they had the skills to do that well. And then there would be a universal group—at this hour of the night, I cannot think of any other description—to see whether there is a case, at this point, for universal MAT inspection alongside school inspection. In a perfect world, one would have designed a new school inspection regime and a MAT inspection regime together to avoid some of the duplication to which other noble Lords have pointed.
Baroness Smith of Malvern (Lab): My Lords, despite the lateness of the hour, we have had a good discussion on the issues raised in group 10.
I turn to the amendments that have been discussed during this debate. I will start with Amendments 193A and 193B, tabled in the names of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Portsmouth and my noble friend Lady Ritchie of Downpatrick, and Amendment 193C, tabled by the right reverend Prelate. These relate to the inspection of trusts, including academies that have been designated
“as having a religious character”.
Amendments 193A and 193B propose additional requirements for Ofsted to share trust inspection reports—what the right reverend Prelate and my noble friend described as “important communication issues”. I recognise the importance of both informing the relevant religious authorities about trust-level inspections and ensuring robust oversight of trust leaders in relation to developing and maintaining the religious character of faith-based settings.
On Amendment 193A, I hope that I can provide some reassurance to the right reverend Prelate that there is already a duty on Ofsted to inform religious authorities in advance of a routine trust inspection. Our provisions already include a duty for Ofsted to share reports of routine inspections with the trust, and the Secretary of State has a power to share them with persons it deems appropriate. Ofsted has confirmed that it will always deem a religious authority that it has already informed about an inspection taking place as an appropriate person to receive a report. I can therefore assure noble Lords that religious authorities will always be sent the report by Ofsted.
On Amendment 193B, as religious authorities will always receive a full trust inspection report setting out that a trust is not performing to an acceptable standard, they do not need to be separately notified about a poor inspection outcome. I therefore hope that noble Lords recognise that Amendments 193A and 193B are not necessary.
Turning to Amendment 193C, the current framework for inspecting denominational education and worship is already a complex mixture of statutory and non-statutory provisions. Moving directly to a statutory framework for academy trusts at this stage risks adding further complexity to that element of the inspection. It is therefore important that we take the time necessary to develop any future approach carefully so that trust-level inspection of denominational matters aligns with existing arrangements of this nature for individual settings, and functions coherently with the wider inspection system.
As the right reverend Prelate has identified, officials have had discussions with officers from the Catholic Education Service and the Church of England Education Office. We are committed to working with the churches and other faiths to developing a non-statutory framework as an initial and constructive step, ahead of considering opportunities for potential legislation in the future. That work will include pilots, which have been developed with faith bodies and trusts to pilot inspection of collective worship and denominational education trusts with faith schools.
The Church of England in Parliament 
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