Education Bill

Baroness O'Cathain Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Howarth of Breckland]

My Lords, I do not have an amendment and I do not have a speech, but I have a question: how do we come to be where we are in this debate at all? The Government have made it absolutely clear that they have an agenda about well-being, particularly about well-being for children. They have also made it clear that, when findings show that children in our country are less happy than in other parts of Europe, they want to do something about improving that position. They, like the previous Government, have also undertaken that elements of PSHE are very important in the curriculum. With due humility, the Minister might do well to go away with those people who have long lists of amendments and talk them through. I do not think that the noble Baronesses, Lady Walmsley and Lady Massey, are likely to give up. We will get somewhere that way.

Many of the arguments I would have made have now already been made but I intervened to put one argument particularly for a group of children who, without this education, will not have any benefit in these areas—that is, very poor and vulnerable children who come from some of the deepest, darkest estates in our country and with whom I spend quite a lot of time. These children are subject to relationship breakdown or find themselves in care. They do not get this kind of education in their homes. People will try and give it in residential care—foster carers will give it—but they will have interrupted relationships and care. They will not have that kind of secure relationship and understanding that many other children will have. It is for this group of children that I plead. They are children who are in conflict.

As the chair of the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, I work with a young people’s board. I do not give many anecdotes when speaking in Committee but those children often talk about teachers in school giving them some of the elements that help them hold themselves together through extraordinarily conflicted experiences in their homes. Teachers are at this moment attempting to give this kind of education. It needs space, skill and structure. I cannot understand why we are at this point in the debate because this is what the Government want as well.

[Baroness O'Cathain]

I support the Education Bill and particularly the determination to have a slimmed-down national curriculum. In the fascinating debate on Monday, the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland of Houndwood, was right to advocate,

“a balanced education with a minimum core”,—[Official Report, 11/7/11; col. GC 224.]

which allows room for the professionalism of teachers. I strongly approach that approach.

In the same debate on Amendment 83, the noble Lord, Lord Knight, who unfortunately is not in his place and we know why, expressed the wish that children would get up in the morning wanting to go to school. The aim should be good teaching on core subjects that encourages all pupils to feel involved and indeed excited by a love of learning and increasing their knowledge. Maths would even bring alive the dreary subject of economics—I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Peston, is no longer with us. History could be expanded to show how social structures evolve, informing pupils on how to react to differing situations. What better way to develop good communication skills than to learn lessons from the best communicators of the past by studying works of the great poets, authors and orators?

However, Amendments 88, 89, 90 and 98 would take us in a completely different direction. As we have heard, their effect would be to expand the curriculum to introduce statutory personal, social, health and economic education for all maintained schools. As we have already heard this evening from the noble Lord, Lord Layard, PSHE is extremely difficult to teach. Now we have a situation: how can we have a slimmed-down curriculum and yet put in it more and more issues that are extremely difficult to teach?

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

PSHE is a subject which, given the ethos and support for it in school, can run across all subjects in the curriculum. That is the focus for it. The noble Baroness is of course perfectly right about communication. However, it needs a core, even if it is a small one, of personal social and health education so that that core can expand into other subjects and be beneficial for the child. There is no denying that if we want good academic results in our schools we have to give a focus to relationships education and young people feeling comfortable with themselves and their own learning abilities.

[Baroness O'Cathain]

I am grateful for that intervention and the noble Baroness is absolutely right that all of that can be taught through the other ways. However, why are we going to duplicate and have a special core subject called personal, social and health education as well as insisting that it is part of the maths curriculum, the English curriculum, the history curriculum and whatever?

My greatest objection is to Amendment 98. If agreed, Amendment 98 would extend sex education to all children from five years of age upwards. I find this deeply concerning and even abhorrent. Many of us were very thankful that the previous Government ran out of time for similar plans before last year’s election. Among other measures, detailed sex education lessons for children as young as five were proposed.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Baroness again. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, is saying they were not and I will leave her to deal with that. What I would like to say—and I did say earlier—is that the curriculum should be appropriate to the age and stage of the child. I gave the example of not lobbing cricket balls fast at my two year-old grandson, but to start slowly. I should not mention the press but this popular newspaper thing about sex education at five is quite inaccurate. Teachers do not do this. Teachers talk about relationships and friendships at five, they do not talk about HIV/AIDS and all the rest of that. It is simply not true.

[Baroness O'Cathain]

That is a marvellous statement that is simply not true, because it is actually said that you want to repeal the statutory requirement that sex education is not taught between the ages of five and seven. This amendment would repeal that statutory requirement. In other words, if you are saying that you want sex education for five to seven year-olds to stay exactly as it is, I have no problem.

[Baroness Whitaker]

I support Amendment 98, in particular new subsections (6) and (7). We live in a nation of many cultures and several faiths. I declare an interest as a vice president of the British Humanist Association. These many cultures and several faiths are a huge asset for our culture, understanding of the world, trade, regeneration and enterprise—lots of things—but to realise these assets we need to be at ease with our fellow citizens, to understand their culture and their faith, especially when we do not share it. If we do not have this opportunity in school, we risk losing out culturally and economically but, almost more importantly, we risk increasing bigotry and prejudice.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Walmsley]

I thank all noble Lords who have taken part in the debate, especially my noble friend the Minister. He may have disappointed me, but he has not surprised me. Perhaps I may make a few points to follow up on what noble Lords have said. First, I turn to the Minister’s response. The noble Lord, Lord Knight, achieved a very wide consensus, and that is why I took the three clauses from the Bill that was lost before the general election. The reason I took them as the basis for my amendments is the wide consensus that they had achieved among people who run schools of all faiths. I felt that those clauses struck the right balance.

My noble friend says that he does not want to be prescriptive about what should be taught. I do not think that my amendments are prescriptive. They talk about areas that should be taught, but they certainly do not set out programmes of work which, personally, I think should be quite spare and leave a great deal to the discretion and professionalism of teachers. However, we are prescriptive in other subjects. Before long, when the review of the national curriculum reaches its conclusions, there will be prescription about what children should be taught in physics, English, geography and all the rest. We are going to get that, so why not PSHE, too, which is so fundamentally important?

I would say to the noble Baroness, Lady Turner of Camden, that I understand where she is coming from in her comments but, as I have just said, these amendments came from her own Government’s Bill which, before the general election, she supported. What we have to do is get the balance right between the principles I have laid down in my amendments—I think most people would agree with them—and the rights of parents to send their children to schools in the faith that they themselves uphold, and for those schools to teach PSHE in the light of their own faith. I do not see anything wrong with that.

I was quite disappointed that the noble Baroness, Lady O’Cathain, could not support me. In order to address the issues that she and others of her opinion expressed when we discussed this matter before the general election, I made modifications to the clauses. I absolutely deny that five year-olds are taught the details of human sex. They are not. But it was in order to take account of some people’s fear that they might be taught in that way that I made that area and one or two other areas of the curriculum I am proposing voluntary. Schools can do this in an age-appropriate way, as set out in the amendments, but if they do not want to do it, they do not have to.

[Baroness O'Cathain]

I thank the noble Baroness for giving way. The point I am making—I am finding it hard to speak because I am not very well—is that at the moment there is legislation which states that sex education cannot be provided for five to seven year-olds, but these amendments would repeal that. That is what I have been informed. If I am wrong, I apologise, but that is the basis of my objection.

[Baroness Walmsley]

I accept what the noble Baroness has heard, but it is not my understanding that that is the case. However, I am sure that we can look at it outside the Committee.

What I am really saying is that we want children to be learning-ready. PSHE is not an extra subject that I am trying to put into the curriculum. I agree absolutely with the Minister that we need to slim the curriculum down. However, PSHE is not any old subject; it is a fundamental underpinning. None of us ladies would go around without foundation garments because they make our fashions look better on the outside. It is really important that children have the skills and understanding that enable them to benefit from all the other subjects that we decide that they must learn—the core ones they must learn or the additional ones that they may take.

I understand where the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, is coming from. I would not want to load the curriculum with a lot of extra subjects, but he did make the point that we do not do this very well. That is exactly why I would like to make PSHE statutory. People would then train as specialists. As the noble Lord rightly said, without training, some of these areas are difficult to teach. I myself was thrown in at the deep end—many teachers are. I would certainly have benefited from training but, if that were a statutory part of the national curriculum, Ofsted would have to inspect it at every school level.

I am grateful to the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Chester for raising the subject of parenthood. As far as I am concerned, that would come into the relationships and sex part of PSHE. Parents have relationships between each other and with their children. It is particularly their relationship with their children that would be important there. I absolutely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, and his passion for getting young people taught some parenting skills. That is very important.

Finally, on the voting record of the noble Lord, Lord McAvoy, I am quite sure that he would want to support my amendments. I reassure him that what he seeks would not be precluded by my three amendments in any way whatever.