Relationships Education, Relationships and Sex Education and Health Education (England) Regulations 2019

Lord Agnew of Oulton Excerpts

Wednesday 24th April 2019 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 25 February be approved.

Relevant documents: 22nd Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee (Sub-Committee B)

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education (Lord Agnew of Oulton) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee for their in-depth consideration and report.

These regulations represent a significant step that will equip children and young people with the knowledge and support they need to lead safe, healthy and happy lives in modern Britain.

The world that children are growing up in is changing rapidly. They are encountering a more interconnected and interdependent world. This presents both opportunities and risks, as children have greater exposure to information, content and people that can and do cause harm. Evidence shows that many parents want schools to help with this. That is why during the passage of the Children and Social Work Act 2017, with strong cross-party support the Government brought forward measures requiring the introduction of compulsory relationships education for all primary school pupils and compulsory relationships and sex education for all secondary school pupils. Having listened to concerns raised about mental health, the impact of the online world and risks related to unhealthy lifestyles, we also took the decision to make health education compulsory in all state-funded schools.

It is important that at the earliest age children are taught the building blocks they need to develop healthy, positive, respectful and safe relationships of all kinds. All of this will be set in the context of, and include, teaching about personal development and virtues such as honesty, integrity, kindness, resilience and courtesy. This will give schools the opportunity to support pupils to develop an inner sense of what is right and wrong, as well as respect for others and for difference. The subjects will drive up the consistency and quality of pupils’ knowledge about physical and mental health. Physical health and mental well-being are interlinked. It is vital that pupils understand that good physical health contributes to good mental well-being.

In developing these subjects, we have received significant input from external organisations and education professionals, as well as the tens of thousands of individuals who contributed to our call for evidence and public consultation. In reviewing responses and determining the final content, we have retained a focus on the core principles for the new subjects. These principles are that the subjects should help keep children safe, help prepare them for the world in which they are growing up—including its laws—and help foster respect for others and for difference. The content included should be age appropriate and taught in a sensitive way, respecting the backgrounds and beliefs of pupils.

In developing the accompanying statutory guidance and required content for these subjects, we believe that we have struck the right balance between prescribing the core knowledge and allowing flexibility for schools to design a curriculum that is relevant to their pupils. Parents and carers are the prime teachers for children. Schools complement and reinforce this role by building on what pupils learn at home. That is why we have taken the decision to strengthen the requirement for schools to consult parents on their relationships and RSE policy by enshrining this in the regulations as well as the guidance. Schools must consult parents on their proposed policy and any subsequent reviews of it, enabling parents to have the time and opportunity to ask questions and share concerns. It is then for schools to decide a reasonable way forward. Ongoing dialogue is important. We recommend that this consultation be carried out annually and have set out in the draft statutory guidance good practice on parental involvement. We expect to share effective examples of parental consultation in our forthcoming supplementary guide.

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[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My Lords, I am grateful for the many comments on these emotive issues, and will attempt to address them all. I have been asked to be as brief as possible, so I will have a balancing act to do.

I acknowledge the support of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. She raised the question about the teaching of this in academies and free schools, and I reassure her that these regulations, if passed, will apply to all state schools in England. That is the biggest impact of this statutory instrument. Until now, academies have been asked to teach a broad and balanced curriculum but not specifically to cover the issues raised in this statutory instrument.

The noble Lord, Lord Storey, made a strong point in asking why other issues such as financial education are not included. We tried to give autonomy to schools in the way they construct their curriculums. We need to keep that under review, to be honest with you, but at the moment, this is how the system is working. On the very important issue of unregistered religious schools, it is important to say that it is an offence to run an unregistered independent school, and that we are clamping down on that. We have provided additional funding to Ofsted for inspections of those institutions where we discover them. I am happy to write with some more details on that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, talked about potential hostility to teachers. We discussed that at the Front-Bench meeting earlier today. It is also worth saying that sex education is being taught in many schools at the moment—this is not a sudden change being imposed across the whole school system—but I completely accept her concerns. It will be a matter for schools to ensure that their teachers are properly supported, and we will keep this under close review.

The noble Baroness, Lady Meyer, asked about compatibility with the convention rights. The advice we have is that when laying the regulations for debate, the Secretary of State is expected to certify that in his view they are compatible with the convention rights; he would not have been able to do that with the regulations on the absolute right of the parent to withdraw. I will cover that issue a little later, as it has been raised by several other noble Lords.

The noble Baroness also mentioned the out-of-date Stranger Danger, believing that Clever Never Goes is a better training, something we will certainly take on board. Part of this process will very much be to learn what the best toolkit is to make available to schools as we roll the programme out.

The noble Lord, Lord Cashman, asked about education in issues such as HIV and sexual health. I can confirm that it will be part of the RSE curriculum at the secondary stage, and that it will continue.

The noble Lord, Lord Russell, asked about the quality of training—a subject that came up quite a lot—and the amount of money, on which the noble Lord, Lord Watson, finished. The £6 million is a small sum of money and is only for this current year, so we will bid in the spending review for additional resources. Turning to one of the points raised by my noble friend Lord Farmer, it is also important to stress that this money is very much for good digital resources. That is where we will point some of this money. A number of organisations are already producing some of this information: for example, the Catholic Education Service, the PSHE Association, and the Royal Foundation of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and The Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The information is starting to come out and the role of the department is to quality assure it, and to signpost the schools to the resources that we believe are best.

One issue raised in the Cross-Bench meeting earlier was an example of some inappropriate material that was being publicised. I can certainly commit that our department will be rigorous in ensuring that if that sort of thing occurs, we will not recommend it and will use whatever powers we have to make sure that it is not part of the system.

The noble Baroness, Lady Tyler, made a strong point about the regulations being named so as to refer to “Relationships and Sex Education”. As I mentioned earlier, we have been teaching sex education but, until now, often probably quite poorly. The whole point of this instrument is to put relationships at the heart of what we teach children, rather than teaching sex as a slightly disembodied and taboo subject. The two need to come together because, as the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, said at the end, it is about understanding the power of these relationships early on. They can otherwise lead to a great sense of isolation.

The right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham raised a number of points. He asked about determining the age-appropriateness of teaching the sex element of relationships and sex education, and the ability to separate the two. I cannot offer him a magic wand for how those two things are separated, but we start with the principle that healthy relationships are born out of more than just the sexual element. Schools will be able to determine that, and we are asking schools to make those decisions themselves because these are nuanced subjects. As I said in my opening comments, we will keep this area under review. We have said that we will review the regulations in three years but if urgent elements become apparent much sooner than that, we will of course look at them more quickly.

The right reverend Prelate also asked about Ofsted, which was raised by several other noble Lords. It has recently consulted on a new arrangement for school inspections but, while it will not be making a discrete judgment on the delivery of RSE, there will be a strong emphasis within the new inspection arrangements on schools ensuring that pupils access a broad and balanced curriculum. That will include the new requirements around these subjects and there will be a new judgment on pupils’ personal development, which is of course very relevant to these areas.

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, my noble friend may be coming to this again later, but I think that we need to have a progress report to the House in a year or two, or three, on how this is all working. I hope that he will take note of that and at least think about it with his colleagues.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

My noble friend makes a good point. I will certainly encourage the department to do that. We are all aware that this is a big change. As the noble Lord, Lord Watson, said, it is the first change in two decades. We are dealing with a whole new set of phenomena out there, in the shape of social media and the internet, which we are now starting to tackle head-on. It would be absolutely appropriate for us to review that, so I will certainly take that back to the department.

The noble Lord, Lord Curry, raised a number of points. I will start on sex education with what is covered in relationships education at secondary level and how we know what a child can be withdrawn from. This is at the core of the right-to-withdraw issue. I know that there is some concern from noble Lords about that right to withdraw, but it is absolutely clear that a parent has the right to withdraw other than in exceptional circumstances. My noble friend Lord Farmer was worried that we have not defined those circumstances, but it is extremely difficult to do so, because we are not dealing in a commercial world here. We are dealing with human beings and their emotions, and with different reactions to similar situations. I can assure noble Lords who are worried about the right to withdraw that the guidance is statutory. It cannot be ignored by schools; they must have regard to it and have a very good reason to set aside anything that is in the statutory guidance. Again, we have tried to strike that difficult balance to address the rights of the child and the rights of the parent. We are clear that parents remain the primary educators of children and we absolutely want to stick to that line.

The noble Lord, Lord Curry, also asked about religious groups. We have engaged with the whole spectrum of religious schools. It is of course worth remembering that we have at least 6,000 state-funded religious schools in this country and they have been a very important part of the stakeholder engagement. We have had strong support from the Catholic Education Service, the Church of England and the Board of Deputies. It has been a long process, but I believe we have got to a point where those groups are broadly happy.

The noble Lord, Lord Curry, was also concerned, as some other noble Lords were, about teachers expressing their own views. The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, made an insightful comment in her speech at the beginning about teaching alongside a nun, who obviously had strong views about sexual relationships but she acknowledged that it was still her duty as a teacher to provide an objective and unbiased education on those subjects. That is a very important point: all of us are prejudiced in some form or another, but when teachers are teaching, they have to put aside those personal views and try to give as unbiased an opinion as possible.

My noble and learned friend Lord Mackay raised some important and technical issues, and I will certainly not try to take him on in matters of law. Just to take one or two issues, regarding faith freedoms, in all schools when teaching these subjects the religious background of pupils must be taken into account. Schools with a religious character can build on the core content by reflecting their beliefs in their teaching. In developing these subjects, we have worked with a number of faith bodies, as I have just mentioned, and schools can also consider drawing on their own expertise when delivering those subjects.

My noble friend Lord Farmer was also concerned about the “exceptional circumstances”. I have tried to address that and am very happy to continue dialogue with him on it as we learn more about it. It is perhaps worth restating that a number of schools will start to teach this on a voluntary basis in September of this year. We already have about 1,000 schools which have signed up to the pilot; we expect that to increase and we will learn from their experiences in the process.

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[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

I thank the Minister for that interesting description of the complaints procedure, but it was not the point that I raised. I was talking about the means available to parents of children who are in an academy as part of a multi-academy trust which has its own governing body. Often, the schools within that do not have their own board of governors or even a committee—call it what you like—to which individual parents can feed in. In the context of these regulations, if we are deciding what is taught in a particular school, that is important. If parents do not have that link—because it is perhaps a manager at the academy trust headquarters making the decision—it is a gap that needs to be filled.

[Lord Agnew of Oulton]

I am certainly happy to write to the noble Lord to clarify that, but I reassure him that each academy school will have a governing body. There may be some instances where a governing body operates over two or three schools if they are small schools, and they may be called academy councils rather than governing bodies, but there is a representative body beneath the academy board—there may be instances that I do not know about, but I would be very surprised. To link back to my opening comments, academies as well as local authority schools will be required to consult parents in their construction of these curricula.

The noble Lord raised the budget issue. I understand that £250 a school sounds somewhat derisory. We will be looking at training for newly qualified teachers and at how we can provide more training as part of that preparation for teaching. We will of course keep a weather eye on the quality of the online materials made available and will gain experience from the pathfinder schools that start teaching this from September this year.

I believe that we all share an ambition to ensure that our children and young people have the knowledge to help keep themselves safe, to be prepared for the world in which they are growing up and to respect others and difference. These regulations give us the opportunity to build a consistent foundation across all schools so that children and young people have the knowledge they need to manage their academic, personal and social lives in a positive way. For the reasons that I have set out, I commend the regulations to the House.

Motion agreed.