Online Safety Bill

Debate between Baroness Berridge and Baroness Benjamin

Committee stage
Tuesday 25th April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of the amendments in this group in the names of the intrepid noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, the noble Baroness, Lady Harding, and my noble friend Lord Storey—we are kindred spirits.

As my noble friend said, the expectations of parents are clear: they expect the Bill to protect their children from all harm online, wherever it is encountered. The vast majority of parents do not distinguish between the different content types. To restrict regulation to user-to-user services, as in Part 3, would leave a great many websites and content providers, which are accessed by children, standing outside the scope of the Bill. This is a flagship piece of legislation; there cannot be any loopholes leaving any part of the internet unregulated. If there is a website, app, online game, educational platform or blog—indeed, any content that contains harmful material—it must be in the scope of the Bill.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, seeks to amend the Bill to ensure that it aligns with the Information Commissioner’s age-appropriate design code—it is a welcome amendment. As the Bill is currently drafted, the threshold for risk assessment is too high. It is important that the greatest number of children and young people are protected from harmful content online. The amendments achieve that to a greater degree than the protection already in the Bill.

While the proposal to align with the age-appropriate design code is welcome, I have one reservation. Up until recently, it appears that the ICO was reluctant to take action against pornography platforms that process children’s data. It has perhaps been deemed that pornographic websites are unlikely to be accessed by children. Over the years, I have shared with this House the statistics of how children are accessing pornography and the harm it causes. The Children’s Commissioner also recently highlighted the issue and concerns. Pornography is being accessed by our children, and we must ensure that the provisions of the Bill are the most robust they can be to ensure that children are protected online.

I am concerned with ensuring two things: first, that any platform that contains harmful material falls under the scope of the Bill and is regulated to ensure that children are kept safe; and, secondly, that, as far as possible, what is harmful offline is regulated in the same way online. The amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Storey raise the important question of online-offline equality. Amendments 33A and 217A seek to regulate online video games to ensure they meet the same BBFC ratings as would be expected offline, and I agree with that approach. Later in Committee, I will raise this issue in relation to pornographic content and how online content should be subject to the same BBFC guidance as content offline. I agree with what my noble friend proposes: namely, that this should extend to video game content as well. Video games can be violent and sexualised in nature, and controls should be in place to ensure that children are protected. The BBFC guidelines used offline appear to be the best way to regulate online as well.

Children must be kept safe wherever they are online. This Bill must have the widest scope possible to keep children safe, but ensuring online/offline alignment is crucial. The best way to keep children safe is to legislate for regulation that is as far reaching as possible but consistently applied across the online/offline world. These are the reasons why I support the amendments in this group.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, I will lend my support to Amendments 19 and 22. It is a pleasure to speak after the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin. I may be one of those people in your Lordships’ House who relies significantly on the British Board of Film Classification for movie watching, as I am one of the faint-hearted.

In relation to app stores, it is not just children under 18 for whom parents need the age verification. If you are a parent of a child who has significant learning delay, the internet is a wonderful place where they can get access to material and have development that they might not ordinarily have had. But, of course, turning 17 or 18 is not the threshold for them. I have friends who have children with significant learning delay. Having that assurance, so they know which apps are which in the app store, goes well beyond 18 for them. Obviously it will not be a numerical equivalent for their child—now a young adult—but it is important to them to know that the content they get on a free app or an app purchased from the app store is suitable.

I just wanted to raise that with noble Lords, as children and some vulnerable adults—not all—would benefit from the kind of age verification that we have talked about. I appreciate the points that the noble Lord, Lord Allan, raised about where the Bill has ended up conceptually and the framework that Ofcom will rely on. Like him, I am a purist sometimes but, pragmatically, I think that the third concept raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, about protection and putting this in the app store and bringing it parallel with things such as classification for films and other video games is really important.

Ofsted Review of Sexual Abuse in Schools and Colleges

Debate between Baroness Berridge and Baroness Benjamin

Thursday 17th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, I welcome the Ofsted review of sexual abuse in schools and colleges, and I am pleased to hear the Government’s response.

I have been raising much of what has been highlighted in the review for many years in this House. Countless parents have contacted me to tell me about the sexual abuse and harassment that their children have had to face in schools. Some children as young as four have been sexually assaulted by children as young as 10. Teenage girls have told me about the aggressive sexual abuse that they have had to face for more than 10 years now. Many have felt ashamed about what they have been asked to perform, and they have even resorted to self-harm and experienced suicidal thoughts.

So nothing in the review has come as a surprise to me or to many teachers across the country in both public and state schools, as well as in colleges and universities. Many signed an open letter that I wrote to the Prime Minister just last month, highlighting our concerns at the epidemic of sexual abuse fuelled by online pornography. Let us give a thought to all those who have been affected.

The review by Ofsted rightly has a strong emphasis on education, and the PSHE Association has long recommended that best practice for RSHE is for it to be delivered as part of a spiral PSHE curriculum that builds children’s knowledge and skills and contributes to supporting them in navigating their social worlds both now and in future. That requires timetabled lessons, trained teachers and accountability through inspection bodies. What commitments are there from inspectoral bodies, including Ofsted and the Independent Schools Inspectorate, to inspect PSHE, including RSHE, to the same standard as they would inspect other curriculum areas, including Ofsted ensuring that PSHE is inspected within the “quality of education” element of its inspection framework? It is vital that schools provide evidence of their three Is—intent, implementation and impact—as they would for history, maths, science or any other curriculum areas.

The current training modules released by the DfE are widely criticised by teachers due to their focusing on simply imparting factual knowledge to teachers. PSHE and RSHE can be dangerous if taught by teachers who are undertrained and underprepared. Will the Government commit to training that demonstrates effective improvement of teachers’ confidence and competence in teaching RSHE? If the DfE is not able to provide this training, will the Government ensure that schools have funding and teachers’ time to enable it to be available from reputable organisations that have the expertise and experience to equip our teachers?

The Government must ensure that there is guidance that PSHE, including RSHE, is delivered in timetabled lessons of the same length as lessons for other curriculum areas. So-called drop-down days sporadically placed throughout the year cannot be relied upon in schools, because the topics covered are highly sensitive. A whole day spent on such topics could re-traumatise students so much that we have to be careful. Will the Government put guidance in place for school leaders, to ensure that they support their PSHE leads by providing them with time to teach PSHE, time to plan and time to lead and train their colleagues?

I am pleased that the review focused on pornography. Right now, we have on the statute book legislation that Parliament passed four years ago which does two things. It prevents children accessing commercial pornographic websites through age verification and makes provision for the regulator to take robust action against any site showing extreme pornography which normalises violence against women. As the Government reflect on their next steps, they would be well advised to review their decision not to implement Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act, which should have been in place 18 months ago. In October 2019, the Government performed a spectacular U-turn, saying they were going back to the drawing board and starting again with completely new legislation. It was only last month that we saw that alternative draft Bill.

I know that Part 3 does not address pornography on social media, but it addresses pornographic websites. Importantly, research published last month on the viewing of online pornography by 16 and 17 year-olds states that

“pornography was much more frequently viewed on pornographic websites than on social media, showing how important the regulation of such sites remains”.

We need regulation to deal with pornographic websites and pornography on social media. That is why both Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act and the online harms Bill are so important. To use the fact that Part 3 does not deal with pornography on social media as a reason not to implement the legislation that we have already passed is quite absurd, especially as the draft Bill has not even started pre-legislative scrutiny. It will be at least three years, and probably four to five, by the time the online harms Act and its attendant legislation and regulator are ready to deliver—significantly longer than it would take to implement Part 3. Let us do it.

I welcome the fact that the Government have committed to work to

“identify whether there are actions that can be taken more quickly to protect children before the Online Safety Bill comes into effect”.

This is music to my ears. Without age verification now, preventing young people viewing pornography is like trying to get a drug addict off heroin while at the same time giving them heroin. We are in a place where we can take robust action in relation to pornographic websites immediately, as an interim measure, while we develop the best possible online harms Bill to address the growing social media challenge. Will the Government do so for the sake of our young people and take action to halt this scourge on society and young minds now?

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Education and Department for International Trade (Baroness Berridge) (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baronesses for their contributions and for outlining the common theme of the questions I have been asked about the RHSE curriculum. In fact, we have been acting on the WESC report from 2016. That was the beginning of the development of the new curriculum, which was updated from the 2000 curriculum. We have been working very hard since 2016, so the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, can be reassured that we have taken action and have been developing that curriculum. We responded to the contributions from teachers that they wanted resource and help. There is a portal for teacher resources, and various webinar-type training sessions have been run as well.

Even though we have all lived through the pandemic, the RHSE curriculum, which is compulsory in all schools —private, independent and state-funded—was brought into effect in September 2020. We gave schools some flexibility about how they introduce it—for instance, there has been a requirement for them to consult with parents on the curriculum and the resources during the pandemic—but as of September this year they need to be delivering that curriculum. A great deal of work and effort has gone into developing appropriate support for teachers, but we recognise that Ofsted’s review asks us to go even further, saying that teachers do not have the confidence to teach this curriculum, so we are working to see what more we can do on the portal and to support teachers to deliver this curriculum.

I am pleased to learn from the noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, that the Welsh equivalent of Ofsted will now be doing a review following the publication of the Ofsted review. I thank Her Majesty’s chief inspector and her team for doing such a swift and thorough review, and I thank the 900 young people who took part, talking to the team and discussing matters that were perhaps not the easiest to discuss.

The Government have responded to feedback on issues of peer-on-peer abuse going back to about 2016, when schools responded to the annual Keeping Children Safe in Education consultations by saying they were not confident in dealing with the issue of peer-on-peer abuse manifesting particularly in sexual abuse and sexual harassment. We updated the guidance: there is now a chapter on this particular matter, and there is stand-alone guidance on peer-on-peer sexual harassment and sexual abuse in schools. We have developed that as a response to the sector. Although the Ofsted review makes recommendations relating to the other statutory guidance, Working Together to Safeguard Children, there was no specific requirement, because we have been working hard with the contribution of the sector year on year.

As I said, the guidance is out for consultation each year—one year for technical consultation and the next for substantive review. We have responded to that. That is not to say there is not more we need to do. There are issues around the low-level concerns, and that spreads beyond the peer-on-peer abuse and into workforce/children issues: what do you do when you have low-level concerns that are below the threshold for report? How do you deal with those disciplinary matters? We will be looking at low-level concerns.

On the issues to do with online safety, the online safety Bill will, of course, come with pre-legislative scrutiny, so noble Lords will have an opportunity to look at that in detail. The Secretary of State has also asked the Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel de Souza, to specifically look at the issue of access to pornography. I will take back specific questions on Part 3 of the Digital Economy Act, which I was not, unfortunately, familiar with, to see about that issue.

The Office for Students is asking universities to review their practices on how they deal with these allegations and how they fulfil their duties to protect students while they are on campus. As far as I am aware, this is inspected as part of the new Ofsted framework. It came in when Ofsted was not there, if I remember correctly, from September 2020, but Ofsted came back in some form and is now back fully. As the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, mentioned, the ISI was also involved on the reference group for the review, I believe. We are working closely and there are recommendations on how it is to conduct its own inspections, its training of inspectors and making sure that it talks to young people about these issues—not just bullying and other things but grasping the nettle when it is in schools to talk appropriately to single-sex groups of pupils while it does its inspection.

It is a learning process. We are not starting from nothing. As I say, there has been a lot to do and we have worked very hard on guidance to try to aid schools in this role. The NSPCC helpline is also open until October for young people who have posted on Everyone’s Invited to phone and get the appropriate help and be put through to appropriate agencies, if that is needed. There are also recommendations in terms of the safeguarding partnerships which we put into statute, requiring the police, health and the local authority to work together, and the review asks them to reach out to schools, as they are increasingly part of the process for schools to safeguard their students by referring specific concerns.

This is very much a sense check for us at the moment as to what has been going on. Yes, we have been appalled by the levels, but we are grateful to have had this moment when they were revealed. The review is just one part of a work in progress. We should not underestimate this and I am grateful that the review pointed out the need to professionalise the role of the designated safeguarding lead in our schools. Those people do an amazing job, often dealing with workforce/children issues, with peer-on-peer issues and with children’s social care issues. We should not underestimate what is expected of them in what they are trying to deliver in schools for us. It was clear to me when I met some head teachers the strains that there are on DSLs. They often have to look at these images and then go home to their families: it is a really difficult job. We are looking at the model of the SENCO to see what more we can do to professionalise the DSLs, but I pay tribute to our schools: they really are doing their best to deal with this issue.

Peer-on-peer abuse is very difficult, particularly when a lot of this is not in the criminal justice system. That leaves schools adjudicating, sometimes on issues that may be criminal but do not go down the criminal justice path: how do they protect the victim instead of the criminal justice system? It is a very difficult behaviour and safeguarding issue in our schools and it will be a work in progress to help them fulfil those duties to safeguard our young people.

Secondary Schools: Arts Subjects

Debate between Baroness Berridge and Baroness Benjamin

Monday 7th June 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, schools offer a number of co-curricular or extracurricular activities. As the Minister responsible for out-of-school settings, I know that much of that activity takes place in those areas. Indeed, the National Tutoring Programme does not deliver as the noble Lord outlined, at the moment. However, a proportion of the tutoring money from the latest and third tranche of recovery money will go directly to schools. As well as being able to spend the universal catch-up and recovery premiums in the manner that schools choose, the school-led aspect of the National Tutoring Programme will enable them to have small-group or one-on-one tutoring in the subjects that the noble Lord mentioned.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, the creative industries are facing a challenge in finding young talent to maintain their high profits, which provide over £100 billion to the Treasury. Apart from that, six out of the 10 top skills that secondary students will need for any industry in 2025 are well fostered through the arts subjects and will ensure that they are career-ready in our competitive world. I ask the Minister how the Government are planning to support students today to reach their potential in the world of work in years to come, if creative subjects are not being taught at sufficiently high numbers in schools. I declare an interest as per the register.

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, since the introduction of the EBacc, the take-up of GCSEs in the arts has remained broadly stable. As I believe the noble Baroness is aware, we also developed a pilot project, funded by DCMS, for apprenticeships, which are important in this sector. We are developing this with ScreenSkills as a partner, because people do not tend to have one employer in this sector and move from project to project. We had to pause because of Covid, but we hope to extend the pilot and look again to make sure that there are apprenticeships in this area for young people to take advantage of.

National Curriculum

Debate between Baroness Berridge and Baroness Benjamin

Wednesday 21st October 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, Black History Month was established 33 years ago, and this year there has been a real desire to find out more about our diverse British history. The year 2020 seems like the beginning of the age of enlightenment, when the shackles were broken and eyes were opened. So how do the Government plan to further that interest? Will they consider broadening exam specification choices to include a wider range of topics that cover our untold history and for exam boards to facilitate this through high-quality resources?

[Baroness Berridge (Con)]

My Lords, yes, as I have outlined, teachers are encouraged to use their flexibility to meet the needs of all the pupils in their classroom and to choose from a diverse range of sources to educate those children in accordance with the context they are living in and the history of this country.

Education Settings: Autumn Opening

Debate between Baroness Berridge and Baroness Benjamin

Wednesday 8th July 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Berridge]

Of course I join the noble Lord in paying tribute to the extraordinary effort by teachers, support staff and school business leaders at the moment in offering education. Over 200,000 of the laptops were delivered on target by the end of June, so the commitment that we made has been delivered. As I say, we have a slight surplus so that we can deal with any further orders that we get and can have a certain degree of flexibility in future. However, we have to trust the schools. The department cannot issue these laptops to individual children; we have given them to local authorities and therefore to schools and multi-academy trusts. They know the students who need them, and we trust them as professionals to have distributed them properly.

[Baroness Benjamin (LD) [V]]

My Lords, if, as suggested, students coming back to school remain in year groups and are kept separate, it might prove difficult in secondary schools and will certainly impact years 10, 11, 12 and 13 as students may be with different students for every lesson of the day. Can the Minister explain how that will work with option classes if this suggestion is put in place?

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, we recognise that at secondary school there are different subject classes and specialist teachers who need to be in front of the groups of students—that is why a bubble can actually be as large as a year group in secondary school—but that obviously balances the risk that most of those children will obey the distancing that they have been advised to do. That will give the school the flexibility to offer different subjects to different groups of people. The guidance is clear that even partial distancing has a benefit, so if you step over the line you have not lost all the benefits of the guidance. It is about keeping children partially distanced because we recognise that some young people may not obey the rules.

Schools: Relationships and Sex Education

Debate between Baroness Berridge and Baroness Benjamin

Tuesday 12th May 2020 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Benjamin (LD)]

My Lords, according to the government guidelines, parents need to have been consulted about the new relationships, sex and health education curriculum changes, so what expectations will there be for schools that have not been able to consult parents about the changes due to the coronavirus school closures?

[Baroness Berridge]

My Lords, the school support package that we will issue will enable schools and give them examples of best practice in order to consult parents. We have specifically produced leaflets so that they have the confidence to distribute that resource. In terms of the operational decisions in relation to the curriculum, I will update the House when there is any further information