Schools: Parenting Skills

Baroness Massey of Darwen Excerpts

Thursday 17th May 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

My Lords, many schools do precisely that. They might have Sure Start centres on the same site as the school. They often run programmes to involve parents and educate them more generally. My noble friend makes a good suggestion and I know that schools already undertake it.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, perhaps I may ask two brief questions. First, how seriously are the Government taking the recent reviews on early intervention and social mobility? Secondly, when will we have the results of the review on personal, social and health education?

[Lord Hill of Oareford]

We certainly take those reviews seriously and, as I have said, we have already made some announcements and introduced new policies on the back of the recommendations that we received from Frank Field and Graham Allen. We are in the process of setting up, for example, the Early Intervention Foundation to help provide evidence for some of the policies that we have been discussing. So far as the PSHE review is concerned, I hesitate to raise this again—actually, I have not raised it; the noble Baroness raised it with me but we have been having this exchange for a long time. I know the delay is probably too long, and I know that that is what she feels. As she knows, the sequence is that we want to make our announcements on the national curriculum review, which we expect to do shortly, and then, on the back of that, it seems sensible to bring the PSHE review together with it—so the national curriculum will be first and, after that, the PSHE review.