Personal, Social, Health and Financial Education

Andrew Percy Excerpts

Wednesday 16th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Amber Rudd]

That is certainly something that the Government and the Department should consider. Different schools have different ethoses and different values—some are Church schools, for example—and it is perfectly reasonable for schools with different attitudes, values and religions to have different approaches. My plea, however, is that they have an approach, and in too many cases they simply do not. We must ensure, therefore, that, as has been said, teachers have the proper training to give the good relationship guidance that is so important.

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

As it is looking less and less likely that there will be enough time for me to speak, I just want to say that one of the problems with the workload agreement, which the previous Government introduced for very good reasons, is that in many schools PSHE lessons are not delivered by trained teachers but by teaching assistants.

[Amber Rudd]

I understand that training in citizenship, which is a compulsory part of PSHE, is popular with teachers and is receiving proper training attention from them.

Briefly, as I want to give other Members a chance to speak, I want to say that there are many ways in which the Department could approach this matter. Citizenship is already a compulsory part of PSHE. What greater gift for our young people, and how better to make them the best citizens we can, than to make them emotionally secure and confident young men and women, able to develop their own relationships? If we do not do that, we let our young people down.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

Thank you, Mr Robertson, for ensuring that, once again, my prediction did not come true.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Salford and Eccles—[Interruption.]. I congratulate the hon. Member for Worsley and Eccles South (Barbara Keeley)—it is all the wrong the side of the Pennines for me—on securing this debate on an important subject. I declare something of an interest, having previously been a secondary school teacher and having delivered PSHE and, indeed, the more general pastoral care that comes with being a form tutor.

I first came across PSHE when I was a pupil in the 1980s, when it was introduced as PSD, as I think we called it in my school. The problem from the start with PSD was that people did not really know what it was. I remember that it was delivered by my form tutor, who used to say that PSD was a waste of time for all of us and that it was an opportunity for us to catch up on homework and for him to carry on doing his paintings—he was an art teacher, so that was acceptable. We were not delivered a great deal, apart from photocopied sheets on various subjects that took about five minutes out of a half-hour or 45-minute lesson.

PSHE has had an image problem from the start; indeed, there is still a problem today. I chaired last year’s inquiry by the all-party group on financial education for young people, and we took evidence from young people themselves. We invited them into an evidence session, and one of the questions I asked was, “What is your perception of PSHE?” to which one of the kids—sorry, that is a very local way of describing young people—described PSHE as a bit of a doss. That is still the perception in some schools, because it is delivered variously across the country.

There are some good and some bad examples. Part of that comes down to schools being under competing pressures. A challenging school might be so busy trying to work its way up the league tables and to address all the other problems that come with teaching in a challenging environment that, sometimes, things such as PSHE fall by the wayside and are not a particular priority because they are not examined. Unless something is examined or contributes to a school’s performance in the league table, focus naturally goes elsewhere.

I do not particularly remember the PSHE element of my postgraduate certificate in education, so I concur with some of the points about teacher training.

I noted the speech of my near neighbour, the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson), who made a couple of political points, and I will respond with a couple of political points. First, due to the workload agreement, PSHE was hived off to teaching assistants. At one school I taught at in her constituency, PSHE was hived off to cover supervisors.

Secondly, teaching and learning responsibility was added in to the pay scale, meaning that teachers received extra salary for teaching and learning responsibilities, not pastoral responsibilities. In many schools, pastoral responsibilities were removed altogether from classroom teachers. Teachers lost their form classes and no longer had a registration group, which meant they no longer taught PSHE. So PSHE and the pastoral side ended up being delivered by people who were not qualified or trained teachers. I have some pretty bad examples of that because, to protect my classroom, I used to sit in on a PSHE lesson delivered by a teaching assistant while I did my planning. I have some horror stories, which I will not go into today, of how that was delivered.

We must recognise that the pastoral side of being a teacher is much more than just delivering PSHE. We also need to understand that many of the issues that we are addressing today will come out at other times in the school curriculum; they will come out just because a schoolteacher is there and is around school. Kids come in to speak to teachers at the end of the day. We also need to understand that, beyond PSHE, schools take on board many other projects. We used to have a whole-day “Prison! Me! No Way!” programme to which the whole school was committed. Similarly, we had our own teenage pregnancy programme.

I have only a minute left, and perhaps not even that, but I want to make two pitches. First, this is an important debate and there is a position in the curriculum for such teaching. One of the all-party group’s proposals was to make financial education cross-curricular, linking with maths, and we could do that with other areas of the PSHE curriculum. That would increase the value of PSHE in schools by helping to support other parts of the curriculum. We produced a list of recommendations on financial education and met the Minister to discuss them.

Secondly, a constituent of mine, Susan Eastwood, produced a book on employability skills, which she wants to see delivered in schools because she feels many schools are failing to deliver them. I will end there, despite having a great deal more to say.