Education Bill

Baroness Turner of Camden Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, with all due respect, I think my noble friend is misunderstanding me. I am not saying that parents should not send their children to the school of their choice. All I am saying is that, as a parent, I would not wish my child to have his or her education limited to a particular doctrine or creed or particular way of teaching or particular aspects of teaching. I would want my child to have a very broad education. Earlier I gave the example of a Roman Catholic school where the nuns say they will teach in a broad sense but within the ethos of their own faith. That is fine by me.

[Baroness Turner of Camden]

My Lords, I support wholeheartedly what my noble friend Lady Massey has just said, particularly in relation to children learning about different faiths and so on and that being part of general education. Amendment 85B is very good and extremely well intentioned. The only problem I have is with its wording. Subsection (7) outlines the principles of PSHE, which of course are absolutely admirable, that it “endeavours to promote equality”, of course; “encourages acceptance of diversity”, of course; and,

“emphasises the importance of both rights and responsibilities”.

Of course we all agree with that; it is absolutely right. However, subsection (8) says:

“Subsections (4) to (7) are not to be read as preventing the governing body or head teacher of a school within subsection (9)”—

that is, schools with a religious character,

“from causing or allowing PSHE to be taught in a way that reflects the school’s religious character”.

That gives me a problem because subsection (7) could lead us into difficulty when it says, “endeavours to promote equality”. We are all aware that there are religions that, if you look at their precepts, are in dispute with the equality law that we have, and we want all citizens of this country to accept the rights that the equality law gives them. That sort of wording might lead us into some difficulty.

I do not have the same problem with Amendment 98, which has just been spoken to by my noble friend Lady Massey. Frankly, I would prefer that wording and that amendment to the wording in the amendment that is presently before us. However, I support the feeling behind both amendments, I think that it is right, and I congratulate both noble Baronesses on their commitment to these ideas, which I wholeheartedly support.

[Lord Layard]

My Lords, I congratulate the proposers of these amendments because they deal with one of the central purposes of education. In surveys, when parents are asked what they most want for their children in school, they say they most want children to be happy and to learn how to live. Secondly, they say they want them to learn their subjects. The tragic situation is that many people, including some senior politicians, think that these two objectives are in contradiction to and competition with each other. Of course, the opposite is true. These objectives are mutually reinforcing and this is really the essence of the point that needs to be made today. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, referred to it and I want to give you a bit of evidence that by the teaching of PSHE we serve two objectives: teaching children how to manage their lives but also enabling them, through being happier and more balanced, to learn their subjects better.

Here is one piece of interesting evidence. Some 207 programmes in imparting life skills that were developed mainly in the United States were surveyed in terms of their effects on young people. Each programme covered a part of the PSHE curriculum that has been outlined in the amendment and was rigorously evaluated in comparison with a control group. From the so-called meta-analysis, one obtains the average effect of all these programmes on the well-being of the pupils and their academic achievements. Here is the effect on the emotional well-being and balance of the child: the average programme lifted the average child by 11 percentile points—11 places in the ranking in which children are ranked from 0 to 100—and that represents a substantial effect. Guess what the effect on academic performance was. It was also 11 percentile points. So it is not a question of either life skills or academic attainment, it is both. If noble Lords are interested in these programmes, information on them can be found on a wonderful website, casel.org. The other point that emerges from these surveys is that the better of the 207 programmes have much larger effects.

The future of PSHE, particularly in secondary schools, has to involve a much greater use of such programmes because it is an extraordinarily difficult subject to teach. We have not talked about that very much but most people, if thrown in at the deep end, would have a lot of difficulty in teaching most of these subjects. We need much more serious teacher training in these areas and much better materials. There is some progress in this country in this area, but very little. To achieve progress in the quality of the teaching, these subjects must be firmly established in the curriculum. That is what these amendments are about. I welcome them and hope that the Government will take them seriously.