Education Bill

Baroness Howarth of Breckland Excerpts

Wednesday 26th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, it may be for the convenience of the House to be clear—since I know that many noble Lords want to speak, since I do not want any hares, or anything else, to get running, and since we should debate this amendment on its merits, as the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, said at the beginning—that the Government do not have any proposals to bring forward or change any legislation in the context of sex education. I hope that that will help to speed up our debate.

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I want to engage in a discussion about the actual amendment and the issues that the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, more broadly raises, rather than getting into a debate that we said we were not going to have about sex education for the under-fives. I support the thrust of this amendment, in that it is about the kind of ethos that we want our children to be brought up in. I know that some noble Lords think that it is overprescriptive and that there are other ways of getting this into the regulations, the legislation or the way that Ofsted inspects, but it is crucial that this ethos is through schools.

Noble Lords will know that I spent many years setting up and establishing Childline. I spent the years I was not doing that working with children who are severely deprived or have been seriously sexually abused. I will come to that in a moment. These children are not a small minority; there is quite a sizable group of children who do not have the benefit of good, middle-class families—indeed, some families that are middle class have extraordinary difficulties, as any parent who has faced having children who are into drug or alcohol abuse will know. The one important issue for all these children is that the school can make a difference.

I am involved with a group of children at the moment who have all had extraordinarily difficult backgrounds. They have been before the court either because their parents are splitting up or because they have come into care. The one thing that has made a difference to those children is their school. They are all doing well. They have the sort of starred grades at GCSE that I could only have dreamt of. They are doing well because their schools have focused on their well-being.