Baroness Maclean of Redditch (Con)

My Lords, I warmly welcome all new Members of your Lordships’ House and congratulate them on their impressive maiden speeches. On university campuses, real freedom of speech is vanishing. Please watch, if you have a moment, the brilliant speech Maeve Halligan recently gave at the Cambridge Union on how LGBTQ+ ideologies are failing gay people. Her student union originally blocked her from starting a group for women to meet with other women. Why? Because the group was not inclusive of trans women. Elsewhere, Jewish students in our country face appalling ordeals. The StandWithUs report documents bomb threats, physical attacks and doxing. A Jewish student at King’s was reportedly required to write a 1,000 word essay explaining why displaying an Israeli flag had been wrong. Two-thirds of academics believe that their university would prioritise feeling safe over freedom of speech. This focus on safetyism is completely wrong. It is antithetical to developing robust adults who are able to thrive in the world outside their ivory towers. The Government have faffed about with the Conservatives’ 2023 free speech Act, stripping out duties on students’ unions, and I am very disappointed that there is nothing in the gracious Speech on freedom of speech, which is foundational to a successful society. Secondly, I will touch briefly on SEND. The Government recognise that there is a problem, but nobody has the appetite to ask the very honest question: why are there so many more SEND children? If up to one in five children is now deemed to have special needs, surely that is an absurd stretching of the concept of “special”. The Government are promising more money. My noble friend Lady Spielman notes: “Spending more money on a child will not necessarily improve their experience or outcomes. But parents desperately want to believe that something can be done, and it is easier for the state to be kind than to be honest. This may explain why we already spend £15bn a year—more than £500 from every household—on high needs SEND and children’s disability living allowance, with no real idea of what difference this spending makes”. The recent explosion in SEND is not caused by profound physical disability or severe cognitive impairment. The numbers are driven up by autism, ADHD and behavioural disorders. The idea of neuro- diversity, which covers all these conditions, started life as a campaigning movement, and now the terms “neurodiverse” and “neurodivergent” can be found all over social media. Of course, teenagers seeking to find their tribe are drawn to these identities. I have two psychology degrees and I learned in those degrees that every human brain is genetically unique. It is genetically diverse, so neurodiversity is a simple biological descriptor of every human brain. More dangerously and more worryingly, I believe, the converse concept is that there are some people who are perhaps unfortunate enough to be neurotypical, and that means that they are undeserving of any special help. I think that is damaging when there is no objective test to distinguish who is neurodiverse and who is neurotypical. To be crystal clear, I do not doubt for a second that these children are being failed by the current school system, as we heard in an excellent maiden speech, but we lack evidence that the current approach is helping them. The next generation deserves better from this Government.