Early Years Education
Baroness Kidron Excerpts(6 months, 4 weeks ago)
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Baroness Kidron (CB)
My Lords, last week I introduced a debate on the impact of edtech on the learning, social development and privacy of children, and more than one noble Lord stood up and said that they were an expert not on tech but on education. So, this afternoon, I hope noble Lords will bear with me because I am standing up and saying that I am not an expert in education but rather in tech, and it is from that perspective that I will make my contribution.
I declare my interests as in the register, specifically as adviser to the AI Institute in Oxford and fellow of the computer department there, and chair of the Digital Futures for Children Centre at the LSE, and of the 5Rights Foundation.
Technology is neither the enemy nor the salvation of the education sector, whether for school age or early-years children. It has magical qualities of interactivity, transporting children to places and spaces they would otherwise not experience. It has the benefit of consistency and predictability, so a good programme or experience can be reproduced an infinite number of times. Technology is multifaceted: it contributes to complex management systems, delivery of services, learning products, devices, safety tech—and, of course, that includes technology that we consider part of the fabric of a child’s life, from TV to radio to talking toys. I want to make it clear at the outset that it is not technology itself but rather the gaps between how it is being sold, used and governed that I seek to highlight.
In June 2022, Nesta, as part of its mission to close the gaps in school readiness, undertook to see whether it could harness the trend of increasing screentime to narrow the gap in language, maths and literacy experienced by children from low-income households. The Nesta report is relentlessly optimistic in assuming a positive role for digital tech, yet the first three of its four key findings were that it is imperative to improve the quality of toddler tech, so it delivers greater benefit for children’s social, emotional and cognitive development; to help parents navigate a crowded market, so it is easier to identify apps worth their children’s time; and to make high-quality content freely available to low-income families. This third recommendation came on the back of the finding that 88% of toddler apps had in-app advertising, 70% had in-app purchases, meaning that you had to pay to progress in a puzzle or a task, and 58% of all of them had low-quality or no educational value at all. The fourth and final recommendation was a call for further research on how technology could boost children’s outcomes.
The Nesta report is worth a read because, even in this refreshingly pro-tech report, the lack of quality in learning and developmental outcomes for children was stark, as was the shameless creation of an advertising market targeted at the under-fives.
I was disturbed to discover that several colleagues recently suggested that there was an outpouring of research showing that early-years development was increasingly inhibited or stalled because of screen use. I asked Children and Screens, at the Institute of Digital Media and Child Development in the United States, to share its evidence of tech impact on early years. With something of a spoiler alert, I shall read the conclusion:
“High-quality, age-appropriate educational content can have positive impacts on learning and socioemotional development—but not over and above the effects of traditional learning or interpersonal interactions. There is little research that technology is particularly beneficial for educational outcomes, and screen time (particularly TV and video games) relates to poorer academic performance. Technology can increase access to education (eg remote learning), but rarely if ever improves upon traditional learning in its current uses. In the meantime, excessive screen time and online interactions, without proper safety precautions and literacy, can expose children to harm”.
In the detail of its findings, the institute provided research from around the world showing that more screen use is related to lower scores on language and literacy development; that higher passive screen time— “passive” is the key word in that sentence—relates to worse working memory; and that passive screentime in the first five years of life correlates with problems with attention and concentration, learning rules, cognitive flexibility and hyperactivity. There is also a whole set of other problems if what they are watching is age-inappropriate.
There is a worry that screen time is currently, and increasingly, displacing peer play in one to three year-olds, resulting in poorer social development. There is a problem with the quality of what children are seeing or doing, whether they are doing it alone or with a carer, and the opportunity cost—that is, what they are not doing while they are looking at the screen. There is also a problem of widespread privacy and safety concerns in an entirely unregulated market. Then there is the problem of the Government’s response, because while the Government have taken a robust view of the need to regulate tech, particularly in relation to children, they have consistently exempted educational settings, creating a bizarre situation where a child’s privacy and safety protections are worse in education and care settings than they are outside. Leaving tech outside any formal oversight has resulted in the free flow of products and services that claim to be educational but have no right or reason to be considered educational and are gathering children’s personal data at an alarming rate.
While the age appropriate design code brought forward in the Data Protection Act 2018, started in this very Chamber, brought in wide-ranging design changes to tech platforms to protect children’s privacy, an exemption is made for schools and education settings. In many cases, edtech providers do not have to provide the high bar of privacy by design afforded by the AADC, the impact of which I set out last week in debate and can be found in Hansard. In short, there is an eyewatering flood of children’s personal and intimate data straight into the commercial sector.
Similarly, however much I welcome the Online Safety Act, it states:
“A user-to-user service or a search service is exempt if … the provider of the service is … the person with legal responsibility for education or childcare … a person who is employed or engaged to provide education or childcare”
or if
“the service is provided for the purposes of that education or childcare”.
The true impact of this exemption will not be fully understood until we see the detail of Ofcom’s children’s code, but I believe that it will result in some rather contradictory outcomes in which tech providers have fewer duties to children in education and childcare settings than when they access the same or similar services from a bus.
Turning to the need for standards and certification of the tech itself, I want to briefly mention, as I did last week, the work of Dr Laura Outhwaite, a researcher from UCL, who while looking at maths apps for under-fives found that of the top 25 only one had been peer reviewed, half did not meet good practice of learning support and six had no maths content at all.
There is a consensus across many studies and academics that edtech that is worth a child’s time needs four things. It needs to promote active learning, which means activating mental activity on the child’s part and not just clicking or swiping. It needs to consist of learning material, which means engaging with, rather than distracting from, the learning goal—that is, it needs to not include advertising, mini-games or other things that distract and collect data. It needs to be meaningful and relatable, which means providing scaffolding from what children already know or can relate to to support new learning. It needs to include social interaction. That is key, since passive watching has significantly poorer outcomes, so it should encourage interpersonal interaction and use parasocial relationships rather than encouraging exclusively solo play. In addition to those four requirements, children at schools and in early years provision should be afforded privacy and safety equal to or greater than that afforded in other settings.
On the idea that the provision of, and compliance with, safeguarding standards that are routinely delivered by school and carers is equal to the ICO, Ofcom or an edtech standards and certification body—which currently does not exist but is sorely needed—I ask noble Lords to imagine why we expect a nursery teacher to check the privacy or security of an app. Why is it okay for a company to provide a sales pitch to a teacher or a school leader that fails to mention that there is no, or poor, educational benefit, as is found in 58% of edtech?
That rather disheartening list should be seen in the context that high-quality digital media that encourages engagement and conversation can inspire and educate even the youngest child, which means that the quality and format of what children are given matter, in many cases just as much as the amount of time they are doing it and whether they are using tech in a shared context with truly interested and focused adult engagement. Although it remains the view of paediatric associations both here and in the US that under-twos should have no screen time other than for video calling, there are real opportunities that we are missing because of the poor oversight and wrongheaded view that schools and early years safeguarding adequately covers tech from a regulatory point of view. At the same time, we provide no standards for the tech itself.
I want to associate myself with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, and add to her concerns that where money is an issue, tech is often considered to be the answer. I urge all noble Lords to take seriously the role of tech in this situation.
I have been raising these issues for some time with Ministers, regulators and in debates about technology, and I hope that in joining with those of you who are experts in education, we can focus on something which I believe to be, at best, a terrible oversight and, at worst, a failure to respond to a known harm, or a series of known harms, and that together we can address these issues across disciplines.
Before I sit down, I have a couple to questions for the Minister, some of which will be familiar to her. Does she agree that it would benefit children, parents, teachers and carers if there were a system of certification and quality control across the edtech sector, and that the privacy of children in school, where data shared is both sensitive and compulsory to provide, is an urgent matter and should be covered by the upcoming data protection Bill? That would be a useful conversation between the education department and DSIT. Will the Minister agree to ask officials to consider formally how the decision to exempt from the Online Safety Act schools and early learning might impact children in education and childcare settings? I look forward to her response.
Educational Technology
Baroness Kidron Excerpts(7 months ago)
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Baroness Kidron
To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the role of educational technology (ed tech) being used in schools in relation to (1) the educational outcomes, (2) the social development, and (3) the privacy of schoolchildren.
Baroness Kidron (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interests, particularly that of chair of the Digital Futures Commission, which published the Blueprint for Educational Data in 2022, as chair of 5Rights Foundation and adviser to the Institute for Ethics in AI in Oxford.
School is a place of learning and an environment where children build relationships, life choices are made and futures initiated. For most children, school is compulsory, so while they are there, the school is in loco parentis. I welcome the use of technology, whether for learning or management, but it is uniquely important that it meets the school’s multiple responsibilities for the children in its care.
The debate this afternoon asks us to consider the impact of edtech on learning, privacy and the social development of children. Each could fill a debate on its own, but in touching on all three, I wish to make the point that we need standards and oversight of all.
For more than a decade, Silicon Valley, with its ecosystem of industry-financed NGOs, academics and think tanks, has promised that edtech would transform education, claiming that personalised learning would supercharge children’s achievements and learning data would empower teachers, and even that tech might in some places replace teachers or reach students who might otherwise not be taught.
Meanwhile, many teachers and academics worry that the sector has provided little evidence for these claims. A recent review by the UCL’s Centre for Education Policy found that, of 25 of the most popular maths apps for children aged five, only one had been empirically evaluated for positive impacts on maths outcomes. Half of them did not include features known to support learning, such as feedback loops, and six of the 25 contained no mathematical content at all. If the UCL finding was extrapolated across the half a million apps labelled “education apps” in the app store, 480,000 would not be evaluated, a quarter of a million would provide no learning support and 120,000 would have no educational content at all. The lack of quality standards is not restricted to apps but is widely spread across all forms of edtech. Of course we should have tech in school, but it must be educationally sound.
Covid supercharged the adoption of edtech and, while we must not conflate remote learning with edtech in the classroom, the Covid moment offers two important insights. First, as forensically set out in the UNESCO publication An Ed-Tech Tragedy, the “unprecedented” dependence on technology worsened disparities and learning loss across the world—including in Kenya, Brazil, the United States and Britain. Unsurprisingly, in each country the privileged children with space, connectivity, their own device and an engaged adult had better outcomes than their peers. A more surprising finding was that, where there was no remote learning at all but children were supplied with printouts or teaching via TV or radio, the majority of students did better. The exact reasons are complex but, in short, teaching prepared by teachers for students whom they know, unmediated by the values and normative engineering practices of Silicon Valley, had better outcomes. UNESCO calls on us to ensure that the promises of edtech are supported by evidence.
Secondly, Covid embedded edtech in our schools. Sixty-four per cent of schools introduced, increased or upgraded their technology with no corresponding focus on pupil privacy. In 2021, LSE Professor Sonia Livingstone and barrister Louise Hooper for the Digital Futures Commission mapped the journey of pupil data on Google Classroom and Class Dojo. Their report showed children’s data leaking from school and homework assignments into the commercial world at eye-watering scale, readily available to advertisers and commercial players without children, parents or teachers even knowing.
It is worth noting that, in 2021, the Netherlands negotiated a contract that restricted the data that Google’s education products could share. In 2022, Helsingør in Denmark banned Google Workspace and Chromebooks altogether—the same year the French Ministry of Education urged schools to stop using free versions of both Google and Microsoft.
Children’s privacy is non-trivial. Data may include school attendance, visits to the nurse, immigration status, test results, disciplinary record, aptitude and personality tests, mental health records, biometric data, or the granular detail of how a child interacted with an educational product—whether they hesitated or misspelled. Between management platforms, multiple connected devices and programmes used for teaching, the data that can be collected on a child is almost infinite and the data protection breathtakingly poor. Pupil data has been made available to gambling firms and advertisers, and even been found to track their use of mental health services.
I turn briefly to the impact on social development. Child development is a multifaceted affair, in which not only the tech itself but the opportunity cost—that is, what the child is not doing—is of equal import. I was in Manchester last week, where a programme to bring professional dancers to nursery schools is being developed because children were arriving unable to play, look each other in the eye or move confidently. Although schools are not to blame if children come in overstimulated and undersocialised, in part because of the sedentary screen time of early years, it is absolutely crucial that school remains a place of movement, singing, playing, drawing, reading and class teaching, supported by tech but not replaced by it, not only in a handful of Manchester nurseries but throughout the school system, and, very importantly, during the teenage years. Decisions about edtech should be in the light of and in response to not simply learning but the whole child and their development needs.
In my final minutes, I will speak briefly about safety tech. Here, I record my gratitude to Ministers and officials in the Department for Education, past and present, who have made very significant progress on this issue this year.
Frankie Thomas was 15 when she accessed a story that promoted suicide on a school iPad that had not been connected to the school filtering system. Subsequently, she took her own life exactly as she had seen online. Since that time, her parents, Judy and Andy, have campaigned tirelessly to bring the governance of safety tech to our notice. They deserve much credit for the advances that have been made. However, we still do not have standards for safety tech in schools. Schools can buy, and are buying, in good faith, systems that fail to search for self-harm or have illegal content filters switched off and so on. Secondarily, while we have excellent new guidance, Ofsted inspections do not explicitly ask whether schools are reviewing and checking that their online safety systems are working, meaning that thousands of schools have not properly engaged with that guidance.
I gave the Minister notice of my questions and very much look forward to her response. Will the department introduce quality control for edtech, including peer review and certification that evidences that it is suitable to meet children’s educational and development needs? Will the department use the upcoming Data Protection and Digital Information Bill to introduce a data protection regime for schools, which is so urgently needed? Will the department introduce standard procurement contracts, such as the Netherlands has, recognising that a single school cannot negotiate performance and privacy standards with global companies? Will the department bring forward a requirement for minimum standards of filtering and monitoring so that safety systems are fit for purpose, and simultaneously ensure that Ofsted’s inspecting schools handbook explicitly requires an inspector to ask whether a school is regularly checking its safety tech?
I am deeply grateful to all noble Lords who have chosen to speak and look forward to their contributions. Education is an extremely precious contribution to child development and widely regarded as a public good. It must not be undermined by allowing an unregulated market to develop without regard for the learning, privacy and safety of children.
Secondary Schools: Funding
Baroness Kidron Excerpts(7 years, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Kidron (CB)
Does the noble Lord agree with what Professor Brian Cox said when I asked him about the fetishisation of science in the school curriculum? He said that physics has taught us that the world had a beginning and will most probably have an end, but the arts will teach us how to live in the vast expanse of time in between.
Lord Nash
I agree entirely with the noble Baroness about the importance of arts. We all know that the STEM subjects are very important, and it is encouraging to see that the STEM intake at A-level has gone up substantially in recent years. However, as I said, there is plenty of room in the curriculum. The EBacc takes only five subjects and on average students now take nine qualifications, with many taking 10 or 11. Therefore, there is plenty of room in the curriculum for arts subjects.
Queen’s Speech
Baroness Kidron Excerpts(9 years ago)
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Baroness Kidron (CB)
The humble Address promised a data Bill and a British Bill of Rights but said nothing of the digital rights of children and young people. I declare my interest as the founder of iRights, a coalition of organisations and individuals which supports the introduction of digital rights for those under the age of 18. I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Shields, on her ministerial appointment. Her work in protecting children from sexual exploitation is exceptional and hugely admired, particularly by me.
However, the protection and safety of children must be balanced with rights and responsibilities, about which I shall make three points. The first I raised in a debate on 20 November last year, the substantive arguments of which can be found at col. 567 in Hansard, so I will be brief. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is the gold standard for children’s rights. It is designed to articulate their rights and our responsibilities in every possible context. In the 25 years since it was inaugurated, a technological revolution has impacted immeasurably on the lives of children, but with no corresponding change to the provisions of the convention. Young people spend an ever increasing proportion of their lives online and it is imperative that the UNCRC reflects that reality. Therefore, I ask Her Majesty’s Government to advocate for a new protocol that describes how the rights embodied in the UNCRC should be interpreted in digital environments. The idea of making the convention fit for the digital age is gathering steam among other nations and it would be fitting for the UK to be at the forefront of this thinking.
Turning to my second point, we have existing legislation that could, if implemented, do much more to support children online. I acknowledge the privacy law firm, Schillings, for its excellent work in exploring this. I cannot do justice to the Schillings’ briefing as it interrogated vast swathes of consumer legislation, two decades of data and telecommunications regulations and a dozen or more Acts of Parliament, and we simply do not have the time tonight. But I shall give two glimpses of what it has been looking at.
Section 7 of the Data Protection Act 1998 provides the right to make a “subject access request”—that is, request the precise reasoning behind any decision made by “automated means”. Few subject access requests are made by or on behalf of our young people. The mechanism is relatively unknown and operates on an ad hoc basis, website by website. Each automated decision has to be challenged individually, which is a time-consuming business for something that seems, in most instances, relatively benign.
However, how about when an online search of a disease by one member of a household creates a mark on those with the same ISDN address? Might that mark impact on a young person’s future employment, or ability to get a mortgage, or in ways that have not yet been invented because they have wrongly been marked a health risk? How might they reasonably be expected to challenge something they do not yet know has happened?
In another example, Schillings points to Section 5 of the Defamation Act, which goes some way to providing a legal framework for identifying anonymous online posters. But unless the perpetrator, once contacted, voluntarily reveals their identity to the victim or expresses a desire to take the offending material offline, the only recourse available is the court. Which young person has the confidence or the cash to defend their reputation in a courtroom? The young suffer reputational damage disproportionately, often without support, in bedrooms and classrooms all over the United Kingdom. I ask Her Majesty’s Government to build on the work that has already been done and to seek ways in which existing legislation can be routinely implemented on behalf of children and young people, and in doing so support a more responsible and transparent online culture.
Finally, the ubiquitous sight of young people’s eyes on a screen is not simply modernity in action but the result of billions of dollars spent gathering their data, creating a picture of their behaviour and their psychological DNA, and re-engineering it to extend their use and to deliberately keep them online. Sites whose content may in itself be innocuous use the same sort of techniques that keep gambling addicts on slot machines, with small random rewards to keep them hooked. The debate around children and young people cannot be about content alone. Age rating has a valuable place, most particularly for the youngest users, but we must also start to determine what level of compulsive technology, data gathering and personal profiling is acceptable as a method of orchestrating the online behaviour of minors.
Digital technology brings with it such vast opportunity but it is not entirely neutral. It is imperative that where the Government are considering the safety and well-being of children online, these considerations are at the forefront of the debate. There are many actors in the digital world—tech companies, corporations, parents, teachers and young people themselves—but if we are to deliver in the digital dimension the rights young people enjoy offline, the Government too must play their part.
Schools: Arts Subjects
Baroness Kidron Excerpts(9 years, 5 months ago)
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Baroness Kidron
To ask Her Majesty’s Government what steps they will take to ensure that arts subjects have equal weighting in the new Progress 8 measure.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Schools (Lord Nash) (Con)
My Lords, a rich cultural and creative learning experience is an essential part of a good education, and Progress 8 will provide schools with more incentive to enter pupils for arts subjects than the existing performance table measures. The current indicator captures only five subjects, including English and maths. Progress 8 will capture eight subjects, leaving more space for arts subjects.
Baroness Kidron (CB)
I thank the Minister for his vocal recognition of the importance of arts subjects. However, the question relates to the formal place of arts subjects in schools and the widespread concern that they have been downgraded as a result of the reorganisation of performance measures. Since arts subjects fuel our economy and enrich our cultural life, does the Minister not agree that they should be entitled to the same prioritisation and levers through Ofsted and Progress 8 as the subjects associated with the EBacc?
Lord Nash
I entirely agree with the noble Baroness on the importance of arts subjects, but we are starting from a very low base. Under the last Government, the number of pupils taking a core academic suite of subjects collapsed from 50% to 22%. Under this Government, the figure is back up to nearly 40%. We hope that with Progress 8 building on our EBacc we will now see an increase in arts subjects—and we have seen an increase in arts GCSEs in 2013 and 2014.
Schools: Arts Education
Baroness Kidron Excerpts(9 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Kidron (CB)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Evans of Bowes Park. Her absorbing maiden speech was dignified by her commitment to education and her history in public policy and both will be of great benefit to this House. I was particularly glad to hear her speak of the value of arts to those young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. I join all Members from all sides of the Chamber in welcoming her to this debate and more broadly to the work of the House, in which I am sure she will play a formidable role.
I also must thank my noble friend Lord Clancarty for making such an excellent introduction. I want to associate myself with absolutely everything he said. He is tireless in bringing this subject to the House and admirable in the way and the seriousness with which he does so. I have many interests in this area, which are all recorded on the register.
I have considerable sympathy for the Secretary of State for Education, the right honourable Nicky Morgan MP, who earlier this month made a clarion call for girls to take up science and maths at school. As a camerawoman and film director of 35 years’ standing, I am familiar with the obstacles inherent in stepping outside traditional gender roles. However, in valorising the sciences she chose to pit art and science against each other. Her given reason was that the,
“world is changing beyond recognition, at a pace unmatched by any other point in history”.
In that explanation, I felt that she was mistaken. Rather than requiring this binary opposition, the new world demands a mix of skills. A world with infinite information requires us to filter what is useful and to imagine the content and source of that information. A world delivered digitally not only requires digital literacy but visual literacy in order to understand and to contribute to its predominantly visual language. A world in which user-generated content is a primary economic driver demands one to be one’s own photographer, publisher, graphic artist and computer programmer, whether one is a hotelier, an academic or a journalist.
Perhaps not surprisingly for a world designed as a network of networks, there is an emphasis on teamwork. Global companies which invent “disruptive” businesses with their flatter, leaner hierarchies work across projects deliberately in cross-functional and multidisciplinary teams. In schools, young people learn to work together in drama, sport, dance and film, all of which are disciplines in which a common objective and not just individual attainment is key. In the GCSE drama course, one’s grade actually depends to some degree on the performance and discipline of one’s peers. For our new world, that is indeed a precious lesson.
At school, the young learn visual literacy from graphics, design, art, photography and film, though, as other noble Lords have said, film is no longer mentioned in the national curriculum for the first time in almost two decades. In school, critical thinking is developed across all of the humanities and the arts, as well as science and maths. In short, the skills necessary for our world are present right across the curriculum.
This text from the home page of the MIT Media Lab embodies the culture of the rapidly changing world to which the Education Secretary refers:
“The MIT Media Lab goes beyond known boundaries and disciplines, encouraging the most unconventional mixing and matching of seemingly disparate research areas”,
working,
“in more than 25 research groups on more than 350 projects that range from digital approaches for treating neurological disorders, to a stackable electric car for sustainable cities, to advanced imaging technologies than can ‘see around the corner’”.
On a visit to the Media Lab last year, I met musicians, philosophers, social scientists, mathematicians, medics and linguists. There was one woman whose entire research trajectory was about the colour of words. This is the world into which schoolchildren of today will emerge.
However, the narrative from Her Majesty’s Government appears to be that the arts are not central pillars in their vision of education. The EBacc, the emphasis on STEM subjects, discount codes and the new Progress 8 all structurally devalue and destabilise the place of arts in the curriculum. As a result, we are witnessing the inevitable gravitation, even in good schools, towards those subjects against which their performance is judged. The Department for Education’s own figures indicate a disproportionate fall in the hours of arts teaching and the number of arts teachers since 2010.
I am not arguing for the arts alone; I am, as the Minister knows, a passionate advocate of digital literacy across the entire curriculum and have argued for greater investment in teachers’ professional development to deliver the Government’s excellent computing curriculum. As I have said, I support wholeheartedly the Secretary of State’s call for girls to do science and maths, but it is simply the case that many, if not most, of the new workforce will have to have a complex matrix of skills and the fluidity to move between them.
I hope that other noble Lords will refer in detail to the extensive evidence on the role of arts in supporting social mobility, but I will briefly make this point: if we deprive disadvantaged young people of access to the arts on a measurable basis in school, we will create a situation where cultural capital will be the preserve of the already privileged. This will, in the future, decimate the pool of talent that we now enjoy right across all the art forms.
I also put on the record the value of the arts in and of themselves: they are transformative and life enhancing and reflect what it means to be human. In their own right, moreover, they are a major contributor to GDP. Like top independent schools that see no reason to privilege one discipline over the other, the Government should not present a binary choice, but promote arts and science as single virtuous circle.
I therefore ask the Minister: given that our new world requires young people to have multiple skills, should not an arts subject be explicitly included in the Progress 8 measure? Should not the EBacc be dropped as a supplementary accountability measure? Should not the Government narrative be “STEAM not STEM”, because it is this narrative that determines funding, training and infrastructure, and ultimately the provision of arts in our schools?
Children and Families Bill
Baroness Kidron Excerpts(10 years, 4 months ago)
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Baroness Walmsley
The noble Lord is right. It may well be a step in the right direction, but we need to wait until the end of this debate so that we hear what alternatives the Government have to offer. Then we will have to make up our mind as to which approach will actually ensure that more children get good quality PSHE in their schools.
In relation to what I have just said, I would like to congratulate my noble friends the Ministers on their new measures, intended to improve the spread of good-quality PSHE into all schools, which they plan to announce at the end of this debate, and did so in the letter that we all received. They are all extremely welcome, and I sincerely hope that they will encourage all schools to look carefully at their PSHE curriculum and the skills of their teachers and take up the opportunities, advice and teaching materials that will become available to them as a result of these new measures. I have great confidence in the PSHE Association, and with the new funding that the Government are providing for them, I am sure they will give schools very good advice.
However, despite the warm words in the introduction to the national curriculum, the failure to make PSHE mandatory sadly does not send out the very important message to schools that they should ensure that pupils get this information. Therefore, we are faced with a Government who are doing a great deal to improve the situation and an amendment that does not achieve what I would want to see. What does someone like me do about that? It is a very difficult situation.
Noble Lords are aware that the Government are a coalition Government, made up of two parties. On this matter, these two parties have different approaches. For the sake of clarity, therefore, I put it on the record that the Liberal Democrats believe that the whole of PSHE—not just SRE—should be in a slimmed-down national curriculum and should be taught in all schools, including academies, as a right of the children. I am afraid we have to blame the Labour Government for introducing the exemption of academies from the national curriculum.
Therefore, while I enthusiastically welcome what the Government have now agreed to put in place, it does fall a little short of what I would like to see. On the other hand, so does this amendment, so I have to consider which of these two approaches comes nearest to achieving Liberal Democrat policy and children’s rights. I hope that the Minister, in winding up, will be able to convince me that the Government’s approach will result in more children receiving their right to good PSHE teaching.
Baroness Kidron (CB)
I support both of these amendments, to which I have added my name. I want to associate myself with the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Whitchurch, in order to skip over some of the arguments she made, and move on, because I know that there are other amendments tonight which we must get to with some alacrity.
I declare an interest as a film maker who has made a film about teenagers and the internet. It is specifically the subject of the internet that makes both Amendment 53 and Amendment 53ZAAA necessary and urgent. It is not the case that all things in the virtual world are harmful or dangerous. Indeed, there is an implicit danger that if we in this Chamber demonise the internet, our concerns will not be heard by the young, 99% of whom are online by the age of 16. The internet is in so many ways a liberatory technology; but in its wake, social and sexual norms are changing—social and sexual norms that, for millennia, were contextualised by family and community but are now delivered into the pockets of young children, largely out of the sight of parents, with no transparency, no accountability and no regulation.
Her Majesty’s Government make distinctions between the status of schools; the internet does not. In every sort of school, there are young people struggling to cope with the loneliness of looking at online lives that their contemporaries are leading, and finding their own lives wanting. They are struggling to do their homework on the very same device that holds their entertainment and communication tools, so inevitably they are interrupted and distracted. Young girls are made anxious by not being the right kind of beautiful to get enough “likes” and know that a sexual or revealing stance could get their numbers up. Young people who are curious about sex find themselves in a world of non-consensual sexual violence and are bewildered, excited and disgusted in a confusing introduction to what should be the most intimate expression of self.
What of the feeling of compulsion and addiction as the norm becomes to respond instantly day and night; or the culture of anonymity that is fuelling an epidemic of bullying; and the sense of absolute helplessness with tragic consequences when a young person is trapped and humiliated in full view by something done foolishly or maliciously? Then, of course, there is the immediate and pressing issue highlighted in the 2013 Ofsted report, Not Yet Good Enough, that found that a third of school pupils had gaps in their knowledge about sex and relationships that left them vulnerable to online exploitation and abuse.
Last week, I had a call from the head teacher of an academy who was in great distress. It was a good school with an excellent record. This is a woman trained to bring life into literature, who is now facing a tsunami of problems beyond her experience or training. She was not the first: indeed, she was one of scores of head teachers and teachers who have reached out for help. It is worth noting that, when I asked her which year group she would like me to talk with, she cited the different needs of the year 9s, 10s, 11s, 12s and 13s. She was reluctant to choose whom I should address because she felt that each group had its own very specific and urgent need.
The establishment of an expert working group to update the statutory guidance is excellent, a sign of good governance. Who could be against it? To update it in the context of the advent of internet and associated technologies is fantastic. However, guidance is not enough: we need age-appropriate, structured and expert SRE teaching that ensures that all of the guidance reaches all of the children in one coherent piece.
I was a little distressed at Question Time—I came late into the Chamber—and I believe I heard the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, suggesting that suicide groups were something that could be dealt with by self-regulation of ISPs. I hope I am mistaken in that. He also suggested that e-safety would be taught in ICT by ICT teachers. This is a reckless approach to something that should unite us. The notion of “duty of care” is embedded into many of our laws and social interactions because we understand that the young can only develop responsibility in proportion to their maturity, and this is one of those situations.
The internet is as yet an unregulated space where sexual acts that remain illegal in the material world are available at the push of a button; where the economic needs of internet billionaires encourage compulsive attachments to devices from which young people are never parted; where young people are encouraged to play, shop and learn without an adequate understanding of their own vulnerabilities or their own responsibilities. This is a new technology that is central to and inseparable from an entire generation, to whom we in this House have a duty of care.
The connection between heavy internet use and depression, the rising incidence of self-harm and anorexia and the playing-out of pornographic scenarios creating new norms of sexual behaviour are increasingly familiar as we see them manifest in our schools and homes. At Stanford and MIT, in important work led by Professor Livingstone at LSE and within the European Union, people are working to quantify the real-life outcomes of internet use by young people. Meanwhile, we need to empower those same young people with knowledge, delivered in a neutral space by appropriately trained adults, in which their safety, privacy and rights are paramount. We know that the internet is not that neutral, safe or private place, and we know that parents alone cannot deal with the entirety of a young person’s life online.
I have said to the Minister before that in the absence of comprehensive SRE delivered to all children, the realpolitik is that you leave some children to be educated in sex by the pornographers and leave bullying and friendship rules to Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. Guidance, however welcome, is only guidance: its application partial and essentially unequal. The statutory provision of fully rounded SRE that deals with the complexity of the new world in which young people live, written by experts and delivered by trained teachers is quite another thing.
If you can find me a child untouched by the internet, you can show me the child who does not need comprehensive education about its powers and possibilities. I urge noble Lords to put aside any constituency or consideration that might distract them from the urgent need to empower and protect young people and to support both the amendments.
Baroness Perry of Southwark (Con)
My Lords, I support a great deal of what the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, said, in her introduction. As others have said, it would be a terrible world in which children could learn about sex and relationships only through the pornography that they find on the internet. However, I suggest that that is an issue about what is on the internet and young people’s access to it much more than it is about anything which we in education can possibly put right.
I hope that the noble Baroness and my noble friend Lady Walmsley are at least prepared to concede that the Government’s setting up of an expert group on PSHE is something that many of us in this House welcome. I hope that many of my noble friends will also welcome the fact that the chief executive of the PSHE Association is to chair the group; I am sure that we will get much wisdom and common sense from it, which will be enormously helpful to teachers.
It is only in the second of the amendments, Amendment 53ZAAA—gosh, we have alphabet soup in our amendments—that I have reservations about what the noble Baroness is asking for. The vast majority of schools already deal with SRE, and many of them do it very well indeed. Unfortunately, not all do it well, some do it very badly and some do not do it at all. I do not feel that we are ready yet to have it as an established part of a national curriculum. All schools are required in their returns on their curriculum to say what they do about SRE—and, indeed, PSHE; I agree with my noble friend Lady Walmsley that it should be PSHE. That is a much wider topic, and you cannot separate out one part of people’s relationships, health and feelings about their own body in that way.
I really feel that the quality of what is delivered must be left to the professionals. Every teacher and every head knows their pupils, their children, their school, their neighbourhood, and the culture of the parents with whom they are dealing. To try to lay down centrally a fixed syllabus for what should be taught right from the age of six—teaching six-year-olds about homosexuality and so on—could so offend some of the religious sensitivities in this country. I still passionately believe that we must trust the professionals in education; we must trust the teachers. We must not think that we can lay down centrally the rules which will somehow work for them all.
We have a wonderful teaching profession, a very sensitive profession, and this is a very sensitive subject. I believe that PSHE should be age-sensitive, culture-sensitive, community-sensitive and, above all, sensitive to the particular needs of the children that the teacher in charge of PSHE will need to meet. I strongly resist the idea of putting a fixed curriculum within the national curriculum; we should trust teachers.
Children and Families Bill
Baroness Kidron Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
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Baroness Kidron (CB)
My Lords, I declare my interest as a film maker because it is in that capacity that I have spent the past 18 months making a documentary film about teenagers and the internet. I wish to speak only to Amendment 233, which is the narrowest of the amendments in the group, but in my view it is important and I have added my name to it.
The amendment is very modest, but within it lies the suggestion that at this time young people need additional help to navigate a world in which the very concept and experience of growing up has changed completely. It is a new and confusing world in which videos featuring beheadings occupy the same space as a homework assignment. The intense sexualisation of media and merchandising, the ubiquitous presence of hardcore pornography and the pressures of 24/7 connectivity are not simply the stuff of the Sunday papers. These are palpable pressures in the real-world lives of young people, and they have real-world impacts. Young people mirror pornographic scenarios denuded of the concept of consent and, most importantly in my view, of intimacy of any kind. They adopt a culture of anonymity that teaches cruelty without responsibility.
The working group should pay particular attention to the role of the internet and social media in sex and relationship education and in online bullying and harassment. It should do so with one eye on the particular problem of young people with learning difficulties, who are extremely vulnerable in this unfettered world. It should address the specific question of the demands placed on young women of body image, sexual norms and its relationship to self-harm. I have read much of the research and it is compelling.
The Government’s stated position is that the current, 2000 curriculum provides a good foundation on which teachers can build. But it has not been updated in 13 years. In that time, the ways in which young people access information, learn about sex and negotiate their interpersonal relationships has profoundly changed. The advent of the smartphone has been a game-changer. It is not simply about the internet and computers; the smartphone ensures that the adult world, in its full beauty and abject horror, is in the hands of children. It is a device which ensures that, once in trouble, a child finds it very difficult to get away. It is a personal device which effectively means that parents can no longer reasonably expect to fully know what their child is accessing or who is accessing their child.
The Minister has also said that the Government,
“trust teachers to deliver the education that pupils need and adjust it for the modern world”.
Teachers are crying out for a new level of information, uninflected and up to date. As someone who has conducted hundreds of hours of interviews over the last year, with some of the most eminent academics on this subject, I have had access to the research. I have also done hundreds of hours of interviews with young people. It is beyond any single teacher’s capability to collate information in a meaningful way and in an up-to-date manner, for the new world order that presents so many problems for young people. I cannot imagine any reasonable grounds on which the Government would refuse to gather the most recent research and best practice, and put it in a form where it is easily accessible to teachers and parents.
I quote the Minister again:
“Technology is moving very fast, and we do not think that constant changes to the regulations and top-down diktats are the way to deal with this”.—[Official Report, 30/1/13; col. 1580].
It is moving very fast. Very soon, we will have an entire generation that has learned its sexual norms from hardcore pornography; friendship rules from Facebook, and self-image from Pinterest and the rest. Of the many professionals I spoke to, not one—either technological or educational—suggested a list of sex regulations or diktats. However, hundreds of adults—parents and professionals—say that they feel more equipped to guide the young when they have the authority of robust information.
I have been absent from this Chamber during Committee on this Bill, so I have had the singular privilege of reading nine days of debate in one weekend. One of the exciting, or perhaps encouraging, things—and noble Lords may not realise this—is that the conversation was littered with the words “holistic”, “whole child”, “whole family” and “child-centred”. I suggest that this modest amendment sits very well within the deliberations of the Bill and reflects that attitude. The only possible reason for rejecting it, because it marks such a small step that needs so little in the way of resources, is the fear of what the working group it would create might recommend. I would ask the Minister to find a way of gathering the guidance, even if there is then a further debate and a fight about what we might then do with it.
I will not quote the many supporters of this idea because others have already done so, but I take the opportunity to say that all the research I have done and the people I have gathered on my journey I would be happy to put in the service of the Minister and Her Majesty’s Government.
The Lord Bishop of Oxford
My Lords, I also would like to speak briefly in support of Amendment 233, which was so ably and vividly introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. I have a particular responsibility in the Church of England for education, so I am pleased to be able to bring that authority and support, as it were, on behalf of all the schools that I represent. This is a small but important and crucial piece of work.
As has been said, it is interesting to note that the Mothers’ Union, the Children’s Society and a further 70 different organisations which are involved in and have some knowledge of this area all support the proposal. It was a few years ago now, but the board of education that I represent worked with the Sex Education Forum to try to produce some new guidance, but unfortunately that work was not taken up. It is clear from all we have been saying that the purpose of education is not simply to present children who can pass exams, but to create an opportunity for young people to take control of their lives and values, and to realise their hopes through their approach to life. It is a much larger task, and for that social, emotional and spiritual intelligence is important, along with academic prowess. When the chips are down, nothing matters more to us than our relationships and how we form them. As we have just heard described so vividly, this is a new age for people as they form their relationships.
Building a network of friendships and exploring more intimate relationships with particular people are hard tasks for young people today because they have been made extremely complex by the rapid changes in technology. It is in fact some 13 years of revolution since the last guidelines were produced. This is a fascinating world, but it is a jungle, and our young people have to navigate it. A rare consensus seems to be building around the need to update the guidelines, so it is vital that we seize this opportunity. As part of its commitment to addressing these issues, the board of education that I represent has been compiling resources for use in church schools and any other schools to help combat homophobic bullying. That is an important piece of work, but the problems go much wider. Given that, I want to say briefly that we need to get on the case urgently.
Education: Personal, Social and Health Education
Baroness Kidron Excerpts(11 years, 2 months ago)
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Baroness Kidron
I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for bringing forward the debate eventually. I support many of the comments that noble Lords have made about skills and values. However, I would like to concentrate on sex education and pick up the question of pornography.
A few weeks ago, I sat in the bedroom of a 15 year-old boy. Together we looked at a website that, at a touch of a button, conjured up hundreds of pornographic films in 32 different categories which I will not embarrass noble Lords by mentioning. This young boy admits that his porn addiction is a barrier to having a relationship because real girls do not conform to the images he sees online. This 15 year-old bitterly regrets this situation. Imagine bitterly regretting such a thing at the age of 15 when he is not yet supposed to be having sex. As uncomfortable as it is for us to acknowledge this, his experience is becoming a new normal—it is not an unusual thing. Multiple studies, including a recent one from Boston University’s School of Public Health which reported on the rise of teen group sex, show that sexual activity among teens is increasingly reflective of commercial sexual fantasy, including its very damaging gender stereotyping. Nearly a third of all girls between 13 and 17 report having engaged in unwanted sexual acts demanded by a partner, which is a terrible blurring of the concept of consent that goes way into adulthood. Children and young adults need a less heightened environment in which to rehearse their route to being self-respecting and respectful sexual beings.
With only minimal changes to the proposed curriculum, the Government have the opportunity to ensure that primary science teaches about the changes brought on by puberty, provides a formal setting for the naming of genitalia and delivers a clear understanding of reproduction. As children get to key stage 3, experiences of adolescence, hormonal change, sexual health and disease contextualised in a science lesson would do much to give children confidence in the quality of the information they have about their bodies, while PSHE provides a broader and more discursive forum in which young people can learn about many of the complex issues they face in this area.
A recent report from the Department of Health, A Framework for Sexual Health Improvement in England, puts the emphasis for the under 16s on building knowledge and resilience and for those who are 16 plus on access to high quality services and information to provide knowledge of what sex is, resilience against the sexualised imagery that dictates inappropriate behaviours and confidence to resist the pressures that result in unwanted or abusive sexual activity. No young person should be isolated or ignorant on their journey to sexual maturity. It is disappointing that the Government have not yet made PSHE a statutory requirement, but they could undertake to make more explicit the relationship between the statutory requirement to provide for the mental and physical development of children and the provision of PSHE in our schools.
In my view, PSHE should provide not only sex education, it should include sophisticated learning about the internet itself. It should be learning that explores and emphasises its wonders, but does not duck any of the problems it produces, not least the unremitting backdrop of commercially driven sexual content. We have to be careful not to vilify parents. They are struggling to police their children on the net and many of the young people I speak to do not wish to discuss intimate bodily functions with their parents. I fear that if we do not grasp the opportunity to offer high status, high quality PSHE, the realpolitik is that we will leave the sex education of many young people to the pornographers.
National Curriculum
Baroness Kidron Excerpts(11 years, 3 months ago)
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Baroness Kidron
I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Black, for mentioning his cat, since I am going to mention my children. I declare an interest as a co-founder of Film Club, a charity that has a presence in more than 7,000 state schools.
Tim Oates’s review lays out the four pillars of an education as practised across all the high-performance jurisdictions. I found it helpful because one of my children goes to an independent day school and this, broadly speaking, is the education that he is given. In his school the spectre of the EBacc qualification neither reared its head nor receded, as it was declared stillborn, nor did it suffer the decline in music and art teachers as the status of the arts was diminished. The announcement of the history curriculum, decried by academics and at least one of the Government’s own advisers, is not a conversation that will touch these young men. When the dust settles, they will still get multiple A*s on a broad curriculum that sees England as more than an island and develops their intellectual curiosity in a wider world. These children do not have to make choices between arts and science or drama and languages. They have sex education and a broad range of extracurricular activities. Perhaps most importantly, their school’s reputation is judged not on part but on the whole.
By contrast, a year ago I found a young child emerging from a GCSE consultation in tears, not understanding why she was being “forced”—her word, not mine—to take history. There were more tears from a teen in Southampton, unable to get on a vocational course at the age of 16 because it was being reconfigured to start at 17. She was unable to return to school because she did not have the correct GCSEs but was unable to get a job or claim benefits because she should be in education.
What of the eloquent teenager in a council chamber in the north-west, making a case for her student council that was being disbanded, only to hear the councillor say with great regret that he had no jurisdiction over the school because it was now an academy? As the importance of oral learning is finally established across the curriculum and the CBI makes a case for the importance of transferable skills, student councils, a perfect rehearsal for public life, can be dropped in our “flagship” schools with no accountability.
Perhaps worst of all, for me, were the woeful faces of those who missed a grade boundary last summer, their plans in tatters as the goalposts were moved in the middle of the game. These children, unprotected by privilege, are the victims of an ideological tussle played out in our schools by Ministers insisting on targets that distort the allocation of resources and exacerbate the gap between those with access to cultural and financial capital and those without.
The Government have indeed solicited advice from the best educational jurisdictions, which unanimously recommended a broad curriculum, yet we are faced with a proposed system in which some subjects are more equal than others. If we are to help young people to contribute to the life of the nation, why has citizenship been demoted and why are ethics, religion and philosophy not in the academic core, as in the French bacc? If personal development is a cornerstone of good learning, why has there been obfuscation of the language that describes issues of puberty and genitalia in science, while PSHE has been left out of the discussion altogether to fight an uphill battle on an entirely separate battlefield?
The national curriculum review asserts that curricular aims are,
“essentially ethical, moral and political statements, making transparent the values and ambitions to which a nation aspires”.
This process has not been coherent. There is implicit unfairness in setting the rules according to the status of the institution rather than the needs of the child. As the noble Lord, Lord Storey, said, if it is a national curriculum, why not have it in all our schools? In my view, what has been described—I do not have time to go into it in detail—is detailed but simply not ambitious enough, broad enough or deep enough for children who lack privilege in other parts of their lives.