Education Bill

Baroness Walmsley Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Grand Committee

Moved by

[Baroness Walmsley]

88: After Clause 29, insert the following new Clause—
“Personal, social, health and economic education in maintained schools
(1) In section 84 of EA 2002 (curriculum requirement for first, second and third key stages), in subsection (3), at the end insert “, and
(i) personal, social, health and economic education.”(2) In section 85 of EA 2002 (curriculum requirements for the fourth key stage), in subsection (4), at the end insert “, and
(d) personal, social, health and economic education.”(3) In section 74(1) of EIA 2006 (curriculum requirements for the fourth key stage) in subsection (4) of the new section 85 to EA 2002, at the end insert “, and
(d) personal, social, health and economic education.”(4) Before section 86 of EA 2002 (power to alter or remove requirements for fourth key stage) insert—
“85B Personal, social, health and economic education
(1) For the purposes of this Part, personal, social, health and economic education (“PSHE”) shall comprise—
(a) education about alcohol, tobacco and other drugs,(b) education about emotional health and well-being, (c) sex and relationships education,(d) education about nutrition and physical activity,(e) education about personal finance,(f) education about individual safety, and(g) careers, business and economic education.(2) The Secretary of State may by order amend subsection (1).
(3) The National Curriculum for England is not required to specify attainment targets or assessment arrangements for PSHE (and section 84(1) has effect accordingly).
(4) It is the duty of the governing body and head teacher of any school in which PSHE is provided in pursuance of this Part to secure that the principles set out in subsections (5) to (7) are complied with.
(5) The first principle is that information presented in the course of providing PSHE should be accurate and balanced.
(6) The second principle is that PSHE should be taught in a way that—
(a) is appropriate to the ages of the pupils concerned and to their religious and cultural backgrounds, and(b) reflects a reasonable range of religious, cultural and other perspectives.(7) The third principle is that PSHE should be taught in a way that—
(a) endeavours to promote equality,(b) encourages acceptance of diversity, and(c) emphasises the importance of both rights and responsibilities.(8) Subsections (4) to (7) are not to be read as preventing the governing body or head teacher of a school within subsection (9) from causing or allowing PSHE to be taught in a way that reflects the school’s religious character.
(9) A school is within this subsection if it is designated as a school having a religious character by an order made by the Secretary of State under section 69(3) of the School Standards and Framework Act 1998 (duty to secure due provision of religious education).
(10) This section is not to be read as requiring the PSHE curriculum for pupils in the first key stage to include paragraphs (a), (c), (e) and (g) of subsection (1).
(11) In exercising their functions under this Part so far as relating to PSHE, a local authority, governing body or head teacher shall have regard to any guidance issued from time to time by the Secretary of State.”

[Baroness Walmsley]

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 88 and to speak to Amendments 89 and 90 in my name. They are copied, with some small changes, from three clauses in the Children Schools and Families Bill 2010, which were dropped from the Bill before it became an Act. As I said when the deletion was debated on the 7 April 2010, these clauses would have,

“given children the high quality PSHE for which they have long asked, which they deserve and to which they have a right under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child”.—[Official Report, 7/4/10; col. 1578.]

Noble Lords may recall the great distress of many of us when these provisions were dropped. They had been well thought out, had been consulted upon widely and had broad support. After they had been deleted from the Bill, a number of organisations, including the Youth Parliament, signed a statement making it clear that they would not give up the fight. Many of your Lordships, including the noble Baronesses, Lady Gould and Lady Massey, vowed to do the same on behalf of young people. This is not a party matter. It is a matter of strong principle and belief and I approach it in that spirit.

These amendments make PSHE part of the foundation curriculum in all schools receiving funding from the state, including the rapidly increasing number of academies, for children throughout the age range. The courses must adhere to certain important principles; that is, the information must be accurate and balanced, appropriate to the age, religion and cultural background of the children, promote equality, accept diversity and emphasise the importance of rights and responsibilities. Who could argue with that? These matters can be taught in a way that reflects the school's religious character. Guidance will secure that children learn about the nature of various adult relationships and their role in the bringing up of children, where we know that stable relationships are important.

In these amendments I have made two changes from the original, which I hope will have the effect of attracting wider support for the measure in this revised form. I have removed the clause that would have removed the parent's right to withdraw their child. Frankly, not many parents use it and I do not see why that should get in the way of the majority of children getting better PSHE education. The other thing I have done is to take four elements of the curriculum and make them voluntary for children at Key Stage 1. They are drugs, alcohol and tobacco education, sex and relationship education, personal finance education and careers and business education. Many schools will feel they want to include these elements, in an age-appropriate way, for younger children, and they are free to do that. However, I feel we can leave that to their judgment.

The reason I wish to make PSHE compulsory in all schools is to ensure that all children receive it and to give parents more confidence in it by improving the quality of delivery. This would be done by improving teacher training, assessment and inspection if the subject was taken more seriously by schools and by Ofsted. Many children tell us that the quality of the PSHE they receive is poor and that it does not equip them for their future lives. A survey of 800 young people carried out by the National Children's Bureau found that nearly half felt they had not learnt all they needed to know about HIV. This can be life-saving knowledge and must be taught in a social context, not just teaching the bare scientific facts in a biology lesson. I understand that the report on this matter by the committee of the noble Lord, Lord Fowler, to be published shortly, will strongly support my position on this.

I strongly believe that the job of schools is to help young people become life-ready, not just job-ready or higher education-ready. Children may not go on to get first-class degrees but they will all have families, relationships, friends, personal finances, responsibility for their own health and safety, personal money and jobs. Good PSHE supports all these things. Just as importantly, PSHE also supports academic learning and develops the capabilities that young people need to flourish in life and in work. Once they leave school, no one else will do this, so it is vital.

There are other reasons. Children, young people and their parents want PSHE; many surveys have shown that. It promotes their health, well-being and personal safety. Goodness knows, they live in a world where safety is often threatened and there are many threats to good health. PSHE also helps the school to promote the social, moral, cultural and spiritual development of its pupils and links up well with RE, as well as with arts and cultural education.

I see that the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, tries to achieve much the same thing, and I congratulate her on her tenacity in this regard. The amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, also has merit but the matters about which she is concerned could easily be taught in the health part of PSHE.

The White Paper that preceded the Bill recognised that children can benefit enormously from high-quality PSHE. That was a most welcome statement. Since then, the Government have announced an independent review of the curriculum where PSHE is not included in the remit of the expert panel. I would like to ask the Minister how the Secretary of State would respond if the expert panel reported that it felt that PSHE should be part of the national curriculum. Would he accept its recommendation? It is a widely held view among teachers that all children should receive this education, and many members of the expert panel are teachers.

At the same time, the Government have announced an internal review of PSHE—or at least I believe they will soon. Why have these two reviews been separated? Have decisions already been made about the fate of PSHE? In the light of the enormous body of opinion that PSHE is a vital element of the education of every child, why have the Government not seen fit to include it in the remit of their independent advisers? When the internal review concludes, as it most certainly will, that the quality of PSHE is terribly patchy and many children are being let down, what do the Government plan to do about it? Will they grasp the nettle and put this subject where it belongs, in the core compulsory part of the curriculum, and fulfil the right of every child? I beg to move.

[Baroness Massey of Darwen]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, on her rowing exploits today—even though I understand that we lost—and on her speech, as well as on providing more or less a whole PSHE syllabus in her amendment. I agree that this is not a single-party, but an all-party, issue and always has been. All parties have spoken on this, including from the Bishops’ Bench, with some support for her amendment. My Amendment 98, as the noble Baroness says, is fairly similar, but I want to tweak it a bit. I will say why in a minute.

Like the noble Baroness, I ask the Minister yet again about the details of the internal review. With the delay of the review we are sending the message to teachers, parents and pupils that this is not important. The review was announced eight months ago yet we still do not know what is happening with it. We ought to know.

We know enough about the subject area of PSHE to be able to do a quick review of it. We should not be denying young people access to the information and skills that they need to be human beings and to have knowledge about their own bodies. Supported by information and skills, they will learn about this.

We know that young people want PSHE on the curriculum and that parents support it. Only something like 0.2 per cent of parents ever withdraw their children from anything related to it. We know from surveys that many young people learn about, for example—

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Walmsley]

I think the answer is that a school does; and it would be held to account for that by Ofsted and by individual parents. If individual parents did not like what was going on, they would retain the right to withdraw their child. Of course, in all the best schools parents are involved anyway in the design of the curriculum covering sensitive issues like this.

[Lord McAvoy]

I am delighted to hear the noble Baroness say that she supports the rights of parents. If parents send their children to a particular school, she will obviously support them in that, and she will also support them in ensuring that the ethos of that school is maintained, especially one of a religious nature.

When it comes to the new section in Amendment 90, the difficulty is that I maintain—I will no doubt encourage further contributions with this—that the common threads of the amendments are designed to minimise, damage and gradually remove the religious element of faith schools.

[Lord McAvoy]

That is the second time that my noble friend has accused me of misunderstanding her. I fully confess that I have a very limited formal education but I do not have limited intelligence, and it is my responsibility to make a judgment that I see a thread in maybe one or two contributions from my noble friend, seeing as how she has introduced this subject. It is my opinion that there is a common thread to the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and my noble friend that are designed to—I withdraw the word “damage”—minimise or devalue the existence and practice of faith schools.

[Baroness Walmsley]

I am sorry to interrupt the noble Lord again, but could he please be specific about what it is in my amendments that seeks to devalue faith schools?

[Lord McAvoy]

I said there was a thread running through the amendments.

--- 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.

[Lord McAvoy]

I accept the noble Baroness’s point of view.

[Baroness Walmsley]

I am most grateful to the noble Lord. That is a good point on which to beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 88 withdrawn.