Education Bill

Debate between Baroness Tyler of Enfield and Lord Layard

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Layard]

My Lords, I congratulate the proposers of these amendments because they deal with one of the central purposes of education. In surveys, when parents are asked what they most want for their children in school, they say they most want children to be happy and to learn how to live. Secondly, they say they want them to learn their subjects. The tragic situation is that many people, including some senior politicians, think that these two objectives are in contradiction to and competition with each other. Of course, the opposite is true. These objectives are mutually reinforcing and this is really the essence of the point that needs to be made today. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, referred to it and I want to give you a bit of evidence that by the teaching of PSHE we serve two objectives: teaching children how to manage their lives but also enabling them, through being happier and more balanced, to learn their subjects better.

Here is one piece of interesting evidence. Some 207 programmes in imparting life skills that were developed mainly in the United States were surveyed in terms of their effects on young people. Each programme covered a part of the PSHE curriculum that has been outlined in the amendment and was rigorously evaluated in comparison with a control group. From the so-called meta-analysis, one obtains the average effect of all these programmes on the well-being of the pupils and their academic achievements. Here is the effect on the emotional well-being and balance of the child: the average programme lifted the average child by 11 percentile points—11 places in the ranking in which children are ranked from 0 to 100—and that represents a substantial effect. Guess what the effect on academic performance was. It was also 11 percentile points. So it is not a question of either life skills or academic attainment, it is both. If noble Lords are interested in these programmes, information on them can be found on a wonderful website, casel.org. The other point that emerges from these surveys is that the better of the 207 programmes have much larger effects.

The future of PSHE, particularly in secondary schools, has to involve a much greater use of such programmes because it is an extraordinarily difficult subject to teach. We have not talked about that very much but most people, if thrown in at the deep end, would have a lot of difficulty in teaching most of these subjects. We need much more serious teacher training in these areas and much better materials. There is some progress in this country in this area, but very little. To achieve progress in the quality of the teaching, these subjects must be firmly established in the curriculum. That is what these amendments are about. I welcome them and hope that the Government will take them seriously.

[Baroness Tyler of Enfield]

My Lords, I should like to speak in support of these amendments and to talk briefly about the critical importance of relationship education within the PSHE curriculum and its links to pupils’ wider emotional health and well-being, which we have just heard about. Before doing so, I should declare an interest as chief executive of the charity Relate, which delivers relationship education to children in all four key stages in about 50 primary and secondary schools across the country.

I often feel that I am on a personal mission to try to change the terminology in this debate to “relationships” —in capitals—and sex education, rather than the other way around, which very much puts the cart before the horse in a rather unhelpful way. That is because when sex education and relationships education are coupled together in that order, the debate too often gets bogged down and polarised, and focuses almost solely on parents’ right to withdraw their children from sex education. We should be focusing on children’s emotional health and well-being.

Relationships education, when delivered appropriately by experts in the field—classroom teachers are the first to admit that this is not often their specialism and can feel uncomfortable in this role—has many benefits, not least when it focuses on the quality of relationships whereby young people learn how to distinguish a good relationship from a bad one. This is crucial because, sadly, too many children see few examples of good relationships in their home life and, without help, are likely to repeat these patterns in their own relationships. It is also critical that young people understand, for example, how to manage conflict and cope with family breakdown, how to recognise and understand abusive behaviour in relationships and what they need to do to seek help in those situations.

As we have heard today, survey evidence shows that young people want opportunities to discuss things that feel relevant to their lives, like their emotions, relationships and their sex lives or sexual health. In addition, research from the Sex Education Forum showed that 84 per cent of parents see both school and home as the main source of sex and relationships education and that both should be involved. To me, this is the nub of the matter. With regard to school or the home it is never a question of either/or but very much both/and.