Education Bill

Baroness Howe of Idlicote Excerpts

Tuesday 18th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Eden of Winton]

My Lords, I very much agree with what my noble friend Lady Walmsley has just said. I hesitate to disagree with the emphasis that the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, brought to bear in moving his amendment only because I, like I am sure every noble Lord in this House, recognise the great contribution he has made over many years to the welfare of children and to the cause of good parenting. I certainly do not wish to dissociate myself from the objective he has set.

However, where I differ from him is in suggesting that bringing matters in the form of statute and putting them in the Bill is the right way to proceed. I agree with my noble friend Lady Walmsley that good parenting can be taught and that the practice is urgently in need of wider observation. I cannot accept that by putting these words into the Bill we will in some way be striking a blow at unwanted pregnancies. There are other ways of dealing with that. Several thoughts are brought to mind in this particular amendment. They include the damaging impact of the constant replication on television of various human relationship activities, which I do not think accord to the highest standards of individual conduct. If we were able—and as a former Minister for Posts and Telecommunications, I have to accept that we are not—to bring a greater degree of responsibility to bear on those who regulate our television programmes for the content of what is relayed into homes, where it is often watched by those with vulnerable minds, we would probably do a very great service to our children.

There is, in my view, a strong feeling that on the whole parents fail to understand the need to communicate with the child, even when the child is very young—although I recognise that that is an awful generalisation. I have made my next point in this place before. How often does one see parents pushing their children in pushchairs with the child facing away from the parent? If the child faced the other way, the parent would have direct contact with them, be able to talk to them, communicate with them and have eye contact with them. The benefit would be enormous not just to the parent, but, more importantly, to the child. These are not tricks of the trade but important underlying principles that need to be adopted by parents. They do not need to be written into the statute but they need to be understood by parents. We need to educate parents in this regard. That starts in the school where children receive all kinds of messages relevant to parenting.

Like all of us, it is the desire of the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, to control the number of unwanted pregnancies, and therefore we might address the whole subject of sex education in schools in this group of amendments. That may well come up later. However, the content of that material, and the fact that it is projected to our children in schools from the age of five, is appalling. That matter needs to be tackled sensibly. The real key to good parenting and preparing a child for school is for the parent’s attention to be focused constantly on the child. Parents need to look after their children, not relegate them to sitting in front of the television, thereby avoiding their responsibility and the daily need to attend to their children’s requirements. We need to ensure that this happens by some means or another. I do not quite know how it can be done, but perhaps through talking about it a great deal, through educational provision, through our churches and through every other means of communication, we can ensure that parents really understand the responsibilities involved in having a child, and that that responsibility starts from the very earliest moment of the child’s life when they need to communicate directly with them and draw them into the heart of a loving family. That is the way to prepare children for education and school life.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, I have a great deal of sympathy with the amendments of my noble friend Lord Northbourne, which he seeks to insert at a rather appropriate place in the Bill just under the heading “Early Years Provision”. The amendments describe measures that the noble Lord thinks would be effective. I was not clear how the measures would stop unwanted children being born. Nevertheless, focusing rather more attention on things such as flexible working for both parents might allow a greater sharing of responsibilities. I am glad to say that that is the pattern today, whereby the country is using the talents of both sexes in producing well-balanced children for the future and making certain that we make the most of our intellectual and productive abilities when competing in an increasingly global world.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Elton]

My Lords, since we are on the subject of context in these amendments, I rise very briefly to say how exceedingly complicated that context is and how it needs to be kept in mind. If there was perfect discipline in every school, none of this legislation would be necessary. Why has it been lost? Has human nature changed? No, it has not. Has the perception of Governments and lawyers changed as to what is acceptable behaviour? Yes, it has.

The noble Lord, Lord Baker, is no longer in his seat, but back in 1988 he had a problem and asked me to write a report on discipline in schools. Actually, I commend it to the Government again; it remained on shelves for many years. Basically, you have to start discipline preferably before a child comes into school and when it comes into school. It is not beating them, it is managing their behaviour. I suggest that what the Government need urgently to do, if things have not changed since the days when I was better in touch with these things, is to see what teachers are taught in colleges of education about how to do that.

When I began that inquiry, I was told by every teacher training college in the country that of course they taught classroom management. We then did a survey of those they had actually through their hands in the past 15 years and found that only one of them did. All the others said they did it as a cross-curricular subject. I discovered this ahead of the report because I was a teacher myself and I finished up teaching in a college of education. I lost the attention of my adult class, quite unexpectedly, halfway through a term and I asked them, “What are you thinking about?”. They said, “We are thinking about our first teaching practice next week”. I said, “You needn’t bother, you know far more than any of the children will and all you have to do is see they behave properly”. “How do we do that?”, they said. I said, “The Department of Education will have told you—hasn’t it?”, and nobody said a word. So we abandoned the French Revolution and moved into classroom management.

I am becoming garrulous. I merely want to say that these measures are necessary because, broadly speaking, in an enormous number of schools teachers have really lost control of how the children behave in the classroom. They began to do that in the 1960s with child-centred education. We are drawing back from that now but the senior ranks in many of our schools are actually the products of that who have now reached the top of the teaching tree, and remedial action is necessary. Therefore, I think that we are right to be discussing these issues and I am very interested to hear what my noble friend will say about how we are going to put discipline back into the classroom.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

My Lords, this has been an extremely interesting debate about a very serious subject, which has encouraged a lot of your Lordships to look back at better times when it would seem that it was somewhat easier to make the right decision. We have to face the fact that things have moved on. I particularly support the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, because it seems that what was being said about the guidance, and indeed what the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, said, is probably fairly accurate in that it needs tidying up. My reading of the guidance was that teachers had the right to refuse to take part in searches, so there is at least that aspect in which a teacher can exercise their own feelings and responsibility about these things.

The points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, were worrying. It may well be that the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, is right, that if every school could agree a principle—and maybe that should be written into the Bill—that no telephones are to be brought in, or that they must be left at the gate and picked up on the way out, that might be an answer. I suspect that it would not be as simple as it might sound. Alas, we have got to look practically at what we do now. I do not envy the Minister and his team, because to get it right for this current moment is a very important but difficult job.

[Lord Storey]

My Lords, I was not going to speak in this debate, but so many important comments have been made that I feel that I want to add my few words.

I very much agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, that this is about safeguarding both the child and the teaching staff. I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that we need to engender trust in a school. The noble Lord, Lord Elton, reminded me about his report on discipline, which I remember quite well. I remember having to write an essay on it—so he is to blame.

The problems of discipline in schools are not just to do with pupils. They are to do with that group of people we were talking about in a very positive way: parents, and—dare I say it?—the legal profession. You can just imagine a situation that happens daily: that of a teacher, say in primary school, who in innocence says “Come on, hand over that game you’ve got in your pocket”, stupidly goes to reach for it, and the next thing is that there is a legal action. So all that trust has evaporated.

The guidance has to be very clearly laid down. Pupils should not have mobile phones in classrooms—and this is hugely important. It is very dangerous, for all the reasons that we have heard. Of everything that has been said, that is probably the most important, because it is not just about grooming children, but about other pupils bullying each other through mobile phones.

So why on earth schools are allowing children to have mobile phones in schools, I do not understand. In small schools, they can be handed into the school office or, as has been suggested, go in a locker. I hope the guidance is very clear. It is about ensuring the protection and the safeguarding of the pupil, as much as the safeguarding of the teacher.