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

Debate between Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts and Lord Liddle

Wednesday 24th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Liddle (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the Government on bringing forward this measure. It is a brave decision to stand up to the forces of social conservatism, which are still far too strong in our society. I also believe that this marks an important stepping stone in the progress that we have made as a society on these questions. At an abysmal time in our politics—the lowest moment in politics I have known—this is a great step forward.

We have heard a lot about the rights of parents. I believe the rights of parents have to be respected, and I took very much the point made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, that teaching in schools has to reflect the religious and philosophical convictions of parents, even though they could be very diverse convictions. Therefore the teaching has to be objective and non-propagandist and must certainly not be able to be described as indoctrination. I support him on that, but we have to recognise that as well as the problem of the few thousand parents who may have difficulties with certain aspects of relationships and sex education, the situation in our schools is a long way from the equality to which we want our society to aspire. We have only to look at LGBT kids, who disproportionately suffer stress and mental health problems and have a higher propensity for suicide. Those are facts. As the noble and learned Lord said, if one’s primary concern is the welfare of children, something has to be done to make them feel at home in that school environment.

The original contribution I have to make to this debate is that I have several gay friends active in the Labour Party who are now in their late 20s and early 30s. For this debate, I asked them to tell me what it was like at school and their impressions of sex education at school. One lad said to me—well, he is now a very mature and successful person—“When I attended a state secondary school for boys in the 2000s, the sex education was mostly limited to slide shows of sexual diseases and a discussion about the consequences of getting a girl pregnant at a young age. We didn’t even learn how to put a condom on a banana. While this sex education was far too limited for heterosexual young adults, it was a dereliction of duty for gay and bisexual young adults who learned nothing about sexual intercourse. Had the young people I went to school with been taught at a younger age about the wide range of loving and valid relationships that exist in society, I imagine I would have felt much more comfortable coming out as gay at school. Instead, I spent many years hiding my sexuality for fear of being bullied or cast out by my friends and family, not gaining the confidence to come out until I made a new group of friends at university”.

Another man said, “I realised I was gay, or at least that I liked boys rather than girls, at primary school. However, I didn’t really understand what that meant. I felt ashamed and confused from an early age and had no understanding about how to cope with it. I definitely experienced feelings of disgust and, while I was not suicidal, I was deeply distressed about it and had no one to talk to. I had no idea about what being gay was, and no role models, reference points or education. Sex education focused solely on heterosexual sex and relationships, so I didn’t learn much from that”.

This is something we ought to be concerned about and do something about. We need a broad view that reflects modern Britain in relationships and sex education. I think these guidelines are progress in that direction, and that is why I support them.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

I am a member of the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham. The committee scrutinised these regulations, and I shall give the House a remark or two about our very lengthy discussions, which are reflected in the report to which several noble Lords have referred. In this very sensitive area, the Government have achieved a good balance, but it is a balance and there are contrary views that need to be heard.

When you serve on the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, you struggle away in decent obscurity most of the time, but not when you deal with regulations such as these because we had a huge volume of inquiry. The noble Baroness, Lady Donaghy, who is on the committee with me, will testify to that. Certainly in all the years I have served with the noble Lord, Lord Cunningham, and before that with my noble friend Lord Trefgarne, there has never been the volume of outside representation that we received on this occasion. There was some from those who the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, and the noble Lord, Lord Storey, would say are mad, bad and dangerous to know, and there were certainly some people who had a write-around—you could see that they were all part of a group writing around—but among the more than 400 contributors there were people who had serious concerns, and it would not be right for us to ride roughshod over them in the interests of not addressing their concerns fairly.

If we work on the basis that understanding conquers all, what I learned from our discussions and from reading those particular representations was the difficulty people have in distinguishing between relationships education and relationships and sex education. It is proposed that the first is taught throughout the time a child is at school. Children can be withdrawn from relationships and sex education at the parents’ behest at any time until the end of primary school, and then during secondary education parents have some rights until three terms before the child is 16, and then after that the school is much more pre-eminent in its ability to decide what is right for the child. Those who wrote in to the committee felt that it is not who is being taught but what is being taught that concerns them. This takes me back to the point about the difference between relationships education and relationships and sex education. As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham pointed out, there is concern among those who feel this way—and their concerns need to be addressed—that the two will morph into each other, and that is why I hope that the Minister when he replies will take up the point made in our paragraph 28:

“The House may wish to ask the Minister for a fuller explanation of the interrelationship between these two subject areas”.


That is a fair point that was put to the committee by very many people.

The second point where the Government can reassure those who have concerns is about consultation with parents. We dealt with that quite extensively in paragraphs 19 and 20. As a subset of that, we need to learn from what has gone well and to obtain feedback so that those who are not immediately at one with the majority of the House this afternoon can see that their concerns are being addressed and thought about, without us losing the essential point that we now need to move forward on the basis that the Government propose.