Children and Families Bill

Baroness Benjamin Excerpts

Monday 11th November 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Storey]

First, I welcome the very clever amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey. Sometimes we have to remember the journey we have come on and how we have created some of these problems ourselves. We had a national curriculum with core and foundation subjects which was, if you like, the bible of schooling. At the time it was very progressive and a great deal of thought went into it. There might have been disagreements about what the subjects should be, but it laid down clearly what every pupil would be taught. It was easy for trainers to train teachers because they knew what the national curriculum was.

As the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, knows, the legislation laid down clearly that every school should have a daily collective act of worship. That does not happen in schools any more, although it is still the law of the land. Ofsted, when it reports, has concerns about how schools try to get round it by having a quick prayer in the classroom or whatever. So that was covered, and inspectors came to schools knowing what they were inspecting. It was not just a very narrow definition of inspections. They would look at the whole ethos of a school, and in their reports would actually use the phrase—mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack—“feel the ethos”. They would shadow a pupil for a whole day to see their experience in the school. Then as a society we thought, “Hang on a second, we are being too prescriptive here. We need to let schools be free and decide what they want to do. Perhaps the national curriculum is a bit too much for them; perhaps the type of school is all a bit too organised and bureaucratic”.

The previous Government went down the route of academies, particularly for schools that were failing pupils. Academies had slimmed-down curriculums where they did not have to teach the national curriculum so they did not have to do some things which they did not think important, whether that was PSHE or sex and relationship education or whatever. We have built on that tradition and, as political parties have coalesced round it, we have said that we want a slimmed-down curriculum. There is a lot of merit in that because in the past more of society’s concerns have been pushed on to schools, which could not cope. We now have a slimmed-down curriculum so that schools can breathe and build on their strengths. Certain schools, such as free schools or academies, do not have to follow it. What is more, we will move to being more flexible on who can teach.

We have got to a situation with the national curriculum where it is not actually a national curriculum. It does not have to be taught in Scotland and Wales, in academies or free schools. It is not a curriculum for all, so I do not know why we still use that phrase. However, we are now realising that children have a right to learn and teachers have a right to teach. Pupils have a right to be respected and understood. We suddenly realise that some of the pillars of our educational establishments are in danger of being taken away or need to be developed again.

The noble Baroness, Lady Perry, was absolutely right to say that it is not just about looking at what needs to be taught, it is how you teach it and the quality of the people who teach it. I can tell noble Lords from bitter experience that there are hundreds of schools that proudly say in the school prospectus that they teach PSHE. You go in and it is a tick-box exercise; they do not teach it. The same is true of sex and relationship education. We have got to realise that. It is all very well sitting in Committee and saying, “This is what we believe in; this is what we want”. It will not change unless we change the foundations of how things happen.

I say to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, that I do not know what has gone wrong here. I had always thought that schools produce a school prospectus that sets out the aims and values of the school and states clearly what it does. I remember my vision and the phrase we used. We said that we wanted to, “Ignite the imagination of pupils”. We listed everything we did in the school, and why we have lost that, I do not know. Parents should be able to look through a school prospectus and see exactly what the school is doing and how it is done.

This debate is absolutely fascinating and I will make just one other point. When I first started teaching we had sex education. We followed the BBC “Merry-Go-Round” radio and television programmes and we starting teaching it at the age of seven. If you leave it until children are aged 11 and 12, it becomes a bit of a joke. They get embarrassed and giggle, but if you do it when they are six and seven, it becomes a natural progression. I hope that we realise in our deliberations, and in how we build on this debate, that other fundamentals have to be put in place as well.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, support these amendments and congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, on her persistence on these matters and issues. Like my noble friend Lord Storey, I believe that the right teaching for vision and delivery can make a difference and change lives in schools. I know this from personal experience, because I often visit primary and secondary schools across the country and always speak about philosophy to children; some as young as four years old but right up to 18 year-olds. I tell them to practise the philosophy of what I call my three Cs.

Consideration is about having respect and empathy for other people and being able to put yourself in the place of others without being judgmental. The more privileged you are, the more consideration you need to show others. The second C is for contentment, which is about having a happy, contented heart and not being jealous and envious of what other people have. The more contented you are, the more ready you are to receive what is right for you. The third C is for confidence, which is about having high self-esteem and high self-worth. If others do wrong to you, it is not your fault. It is about feeling worthy and being able to love and give unconditionally, and practising that at that very young age. I teach children how to deal with temptation and to learn to say no, whether that is to joining a gang, having sex, drinking or bullying others.

This philosophy really empowers children. It makes them feel worthy and gives them the spiritual guidance that children crave in the materialistic world in which they live today. It helps them to cope with adversity; to feel as if they belong. Children need that feeling deep in their souls. It gives them the confidence to face the world: it opens up their minds to the world. I have been doing this for the past 30 years or more and I have seen the results. However, more needs to happen: children need to feel as if they are somebody.

Every single day of my life I receive a letter from someone or meet someone in the street who tells me: “What you did for me in school saved my life. What you did showed me I could be somebody. You showed me how to lead my life the way I wanted to, to be who I should be”. I met a woman who said: “I was a crack addict when I was a young teenager. When you came into school and spoke to me, you saved my life. You showed me I was worthy. You made me look at it and see it in a different way”. We need to give that kind of philosophy to children in school: they desperately need that help.

I also agree that we need to have meaningful sex and relationship education as part of PSHE, to demonstrate what loving, respectful relationships are. Too many of our young people are learning from, and being influenced by, online pornography. Girls think they have to behave like porn stars to be liked by boys. Boys expect the girls to behave in a sexually explicit way. They both think this is what love is. Some young people are even raping and sexually abusing very young children—five year-olds are being raped—because teenagers are putting into practice what they have witnessed in online pornography. Children need to have a balanced influence about sex and to learn what love and respect are.

After one school visit, when I spoke to 13 year-old girls, I received several letters from girls who said that no one had ever told them that they were loved unconditionally. Years later, I met one of these girls who told me that she had not got pregnant and was going to sixth-form college. She wanted to be somebody: she felt worthy. We must not assume that children know how to cope or deal with the hard slog of life. We have to teach them so that they can lead the happier life that some are so desperate for. They can then pass that knowledge on to their children. It all starts at school, where they spend most of their early life. They do not always receive that guidance from home, so let us make sure that those who do not get it do not miss out. That is why I support these amendments.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

My Lords, I hesitate to speak after such a powerful speech, but I want to make three brief points in support of these amendments. First, my noble friend Lady Jones referred to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is important to have a rights-based approach to sex and relationship education. People sometimes say that there is too much emphasis on rights these days and not enough emphasis on obligations. However, we must remember that this is about the right to safety—a very basic right for children and young people. A few years ago, in Leicester, colleagues and I did some interesting research about young people’s transition to citizenship. We were quite surprised that the young people found it much harder to articulate their rights than they did their obligations. They knew what their obligations were: many of them had expectations about paid work and knew their obligation to be good citizens in the local community. However, when we asked them about their rights they did not know what to say: they did not know about rights. It is a myth that we have got too much into rights and not enough into obligations.