Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Gould of Potternewton and Lord Layard

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Gould of Potternewton]

My Lords, my name is on the amendment if your Lordships would do me the courtesy of letting me speak. The value of this amendment is that it brings together the different elements of well-being, the interventions schools can make and the inspectorate regime. As the two previous speakers said, it is a great tragedy that such an important amendment has been usurped in this way, and actually been depicted in a completely false light.

I would like to start by quoting from a head teacher in a school in my home town of Brighton and Hove about the advantage of well-being being taught in schools. She says that,

“well-being is central to effective learning: through our in-depth and evidence-based focus on these areas, our practice has really developed and is clearly having a positive impact on the children”.

That is what this amendment is about, and that view is actually reinforced by the Government’s Healthy Schools toolkit, which says that,

“schools play an important role in supporting the health and well-being of children and young people—and we will make sure that schools have access to evidence of best practice”.

Again, that is what this amendment is calling for. This amendment would be a significant factor in providing the necessary framework to improve outcomes for our young people. Crucially, it ensures that the chief inspector’s report provides the evidence that determines that the outcomes have been achieved; that the school creates an environment of health and well-being; that the teaching is age-appropriate; that the school community has been involved; and that the programme can be sustained by the school.

The well-being of a child underpins the ability of that child to learn, fulfilling their potential, increasing their educational attainment, and improving their life chances. Young people need to be safeguarded against the consequences of risk and the consequences of some of their actions, so they can gain the knowledge and skills they need to be aware, healthy and safe.

The Government in the PSHE review makes all the arguments for the value of PSHE: that there needs to be room in the life of the school for an exploration of wider social issues that contribute to the well-being and engagement of all pupils. It goes on to say that Ofsted stated in 2010 that the weaker areas of provision were sex and relationships, drugs and mental health, and that there was ineffective assessment and tracking of pupils’ progress.

Again this amendment will help to overcome those weaknesses, and it should be seen as a package. For instance, citizenship is not only about the structure of our society and where we all fit in, but also about how we behave in our own communities. It is about tolerance and understanding diversity, and very often it is that lack of understanding that can be the cause of bullying in schools and sexual harassment—the latter a subject that many schools fail to recognise. Unwanted sexual contact is often a specific form of abuse that girls suffer routinely, and it really needs to be monitored.

This brings me to PSHE and SRE. The commitment by the Government to teaching sexual consent has to be welcomed, but it cannot be dissociated from the questions of how to avoid risk and the dangers of alcohol and drug-taking, which require specific education that gives young people self-esteem and the confidence to be in control. Yet self-esteem so often relates to image. We have to empower young people to be media-literate and to be able to cope with and challenge the bombardment of inappropriate images which often create bad eating habits.

To be effective, the interrelationship requires a level of co-ordination across the school to have a real impact on the well-being of the child. Health and well-being should be supported by the whole school community, with a well-being school group whose membership should include every aspect of the school: teachers, governors, students, the school nurse, the school cook, parents and carers. We can then ensure high-quality Ofsted-inspected lessons that range from personal finance to awareness of and sensitivity to diverse faiths and cultural beliefs, understanding discrimination, the wrongness of prejudice and bullying, the consequences of risky sex, drugs and alcohol misuse, and the importance of staying healthy. I genuinely believe that not to do so is failing this generation of children and young people. The Government, quite rightly, want young people to be responsible members of society. That can be achieved if they are prepared to provide the necessary framework to make it happen. This amendment is that framework.

[Lord Layard]

My Lords, this is a most important amendment because when surveys are done asking parents what they want most from a school, the majority say it is that their children should be happy. If this is so, it should surely be a major objective for our schools—it is as simple as that. Yet the existing pressures on our schools are in a very different direction and we are in danger of turning our schools into nothing much more than exam factories. We must surely do something drastic to reassert the importance of the development of character and of the personal well-being of children within the school. This is a matter not of either/or but of both/and: exams and academic achievement are extremely important, but so too is well-being.

On top of that, as the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, pointed out earlier, there is very strong evidence that happier children do better in terms of academic achievement. How can we get the rebalancing? I would be surprised if there were anybody in this House who did not believe that some rebalancing was needed in the objectives of our schools. I assume that we all feel that. The only way we can do that is by incentives, and the reality is that schools do what they think Ofsted wants them to do—it is as simple as that. Surely, Ofsted should be reporting on the ways in which schools are promoting the well-being of the pupils as well as the other objectives on which they already report. Should they not be reporting on what parents want for their children? If this is one of the things that parents most want for their children, if should surely be a major feature of Ofsted’s reports. Parents want their children to develop as rounded people who are learning not just how to earn a living but how to live.

In this year of youth riots, I find it extraordinary that the Government cannot add pupil well-being to the priorities for Ofsted in Clause 40. We have been told of a reassuring letter from the Secretary of State, but he is just one Secretary of State. We are debating legislation, and it is not enough to have that reassuring letter; it has to be in the Bill. If it cannot be within Clause 40, which apparently it cannot, I urge the Government to find some way of having this ancillary sanction that strengthens the rebalancing in the direction in which I think all your Lordships would like to see movement.