Schools Bill [HL]

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Report stage & Lords Hansard - Part 1
Monday 18th July 2022 Lords Chamber

I very much hope that the Minister, even at this late stage, will have second thoughts about this and see the compelling force of the argument. I believe that there is good support for the amendment—at least, I hope there will be—from all around the House. I beg to move.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

I support the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and declare my interest as the honorary president of the Association for Citizenship Teaching—and I put on record that I will adhere to normal sartorial values on Wednesday.

I will speak very briefly, because there is still a long way to go this evening, in support of the amendment. It follows on from the Ties that Bind recommendations of the Select Committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, back in 2018; the Justice and Home Affairs Committee’s investigation into the “life in the UK test”, published just a few weeks ago; and the ongoing desire to align the Department for Education—sadly now without the guidance of Robin Walker, who was deeply committed to citizenship and who was actually shifting the templates a little—and Ofsted, which is not aligned at all with what the DfE says or what we thought Ofsted had understood four years ago. It is a very strange juxtaposition.

I just want to put on record that we need to understand and be clear about the difference between personal development and citizenship education, which incorporates an understanding of the broad values of being a citizen in the United Kingdom, as well as the practical measures that make it possible for our democracy to function properly.

At this moment in time, given the clear need for respect from one politician to another, whether it is on ITV or Channel 4, we need to reinforce with our young people one simple message. We may, as your forbears, have got into a terrible mess and our democracy may well be extremely fragile—as I was saying last week, quoting the noble Lord, Lord Hennessey—but the future is in your hands, as the next generation, and beyond. Unless we guide and provide a framework and a landscape by which those young people understand what is happening in our democratic process, we will have let them down, because they will think that what they see on their televisions and what they read in their newspapers at the moment constitute the values that we espouse. They do not.

[Baroness Whitaker (Lab)]

My Lords, I offer very strong support for Amendment 101, so eloquently moved by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, and spoken to by my noble friend Lord Blunkett. It offers a coherent system we can unite around. Other countries have their written constitutions; we do not. The Americans also have the Gettysburg Address—easy to teach, easy to understand. In this amendment, we have a coherent system of basic principles of democracy, human rights and equality and the modern imperative of care for the environment. This whole subject, taught as a unity, is particularly important for non-faith schools also, which have a less coherent framework than the faith schools. We are a diverse society. We have several faiths and beliefs and we need a framework that we can cohere around, such as the values of British citizenship in this amendment. The Minister would be doing the children of this country a great service if she were to accept it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I have also put my name to Amendment 105. I commend the noble Lord, Lord Sandhurst, and the noble Baroness, Lady Morris of Yardley, on their work on this issue, which has been very important, and the Minister on listening and moving forward.

I start off with a bit of a caveat, because a lot of good things have been said: as an ex-teacher, I too am only too aware of the dread of pushy parents intervening in the minutiae of school, turning up and demanding to see this, that or the other. More seriously, we know what happened when a group of activist parents gathered outside Batley Grammar School and demanded to dictate what the curriculum was. That is not what this is about at all.

The context for the Government, which is very important, is that at the moment, because parents cannot see this material, it has been left in an informal morass of people hearing stories and getting particularly worried. Parents have had to resort to freedom of information requests to see third-party materials, and that really is not helpful. There is a rather excellent exposé by Milli Hill entitled “Worrying truth of what children are REALLY learning in Sex Education”. We are leaving it up to journalists to do these exposés. That just worries parents, so we have to grab this back.

Most parents think that, when their children are being taught about pronouns, that is helping with their English grammar, but then, when they read in the newspaper that it has something to do with policing language and gender ideology, they understandably worry. They worry when they hear about the affirmation of radical medical interventions, such as the amputation of sexual organs. These things are really scary. I urge the Government to grab hold of these horror stories and deal with them. I would like to see them acting on this very important issue.

There are matters that go beyond the scope of Amendment 105. The issue of parental access and teaching materials talks to a problem of parents feeling that the curriculum on contentious issues is being politicised. There is an excellent new report from Don’t Divide Us called Who’s in Charge? A Report on Councils’ Anti-racist Policies for Schools, which I will pass on to the Minister and I hope she will even meet the authors. The reason why I refer to it is that I do not want people to think this is just about the gender ideology issue. It is a sort of broader feeling that many parents have that there are third-party providers creating a political atmosphere in school, and that even schools themselves are doing the same. That raises problems of parents’ trust in what is being taught to their children.

I therefore query Amendment 101, on British values, despite the brilliant speeches we have heard in support of it. I was initially attracted to this amendment. After all, it mentions

“freedom of thought, conscience and religion … freedom of expression, and … freedom of assembly and association.”

These are my passions; I go on about them all the time. I thought, “Great—can we get them into schools?”. But when I talk about freedom of expression, freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, these days I am often written off as some sort of alt-right lunatic who—

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

Surely not.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

There we go. I am written off as someone who wants free speech only in order to come out with hate speech. I say this because even something such as free speech is contentious. I do not think that trying to use an amendment such as this, including the word “citizenship” to get around the fact that there are contentious arguments about values, will resolve the problem. I wonder whether I can be consoled by those who tabled this amendment that it is not about avoiding a political argument via using the law. It could end up politicising the curriculum.

For example, I disagree with the proposed new paragraph on “respect for the environment”. We have to take into account that Section 406 of the Education Act and schools’ legal obligation to remain impartial can be compromised by things that people in this House are passionate about politically but that maybe should not be in schools.

That finally gets me to my concerns about Amendments 118B and 118H, which call for

“a review into teaching about diversity in school curriculums”.

I am concerned about their emphasis on British history including

“Black British history … colonialism, and … Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade”—

not because I do not think those things should be taught, but we have to ask whether this is being promoted for historical or political reasons. The recent controversy over the OCR syllabus on English literature being changed, when we had the works of Keats, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen and Larkin removed, was justified not on literary merits but on the basis of an emphasis on ethnicity, diversity and identity. That kind of politicising of the curriculum does not do any service for the pupils we are teaching and is making parents rather suspicious about what is going on in schools.