Out-of-school Education Settings

Carol Monaghan Excerpts

Wednesday 20th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Carol Monaghan (Glasgow North West) (SNP)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) on securing the debate. I find myself in the strange position of agreeing with almost everything he said.

Like the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Caroline Ansell), I am a former teacher. I know the difficulties teachers have in recruiting people to help with out-of-school clubs and activities, and adding a further layer of bureaucracy will simply close those down, with all the benefits to our young people being lost in one foul blow.

As has been mentioned, anyone working with children already needs to undergo disclosure checks. Although those can take time and be problematic for people who want to get started, they are an important tool, and they are already in place.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned an atheist who said that teaching children the Bible was akin to child abuse. We must be careful about how we perceive teachers and what they do. People often think that teachers in particular settings are taking part in indoctrination or putting forward one view. Teachers in Catholic or other Christian schools do not simply teach one view—they teach different views.

Let me give an example from my experience. I was a science teacher. When we looked at the energy debate, we would give pupils the facts about renewables and nuclear and let them make their own decisions—we would teach them how to argue and how to think. The point here is that we are forgetting the professionalism that teachers show, whatever setting they are in. Teachers are not brainwashing pupils; they want to give them the knowledge to make their own decisions.

While we are talking about brainwashing and indoctrination, I should add that I am far more concerned about children who spend six-plus hours in front of the television, being fed soap operas and “The X Factor”, with all the lessons that those teach.

[Kevin Foster (Torbay) (Con)]

The hon. Lady makes a great point. The proposed regulation could mean that more people in the communities where many churches operate—some of the most deprived communities in the country—are sitting indoors, doing less activity, which links to the debate we will have tomorrow about having a strategy to deal with the obesity that these things are resulting in.

--- Later in debate ---

[Carol Monaghan]

Absolutely. We need to look at the huge benefits that children—our future citizens—gain from these additional activities.

The hon. Member for Aldershot (Sir Gerald Howarth) talked about the need to tackle the threats to national security. We all share the responsibility to tackle extremism, but in doing that we must be careful not to throw the net too wide. Tarring every Muslim in Britain with the same brush because of the actions of those who carry out atrocities such as the recent Paris attacks or the 7/7 bombings is like tarring every Irish person with the same brush because of the Warrington bombing. We must be careful about the language we use so that we do not play into the hands of extremists. If we approach the Muslim community aggressively, we will simply cause anger and upset, and we will not get to the nub of the issue—the handful of extremists feeding poison to people.

[Wendy Morton (Aldridge-Brownhills) (Con)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that the proposal risks being very heavy-handed? At its heart, it fails to take into account the fact that children and young people access so many out-of-school services and clubs and that those are at the heart of many communities across our country.

[Carol Monaghan]

Absolutely, and the same is true in the Muslim community. My local mosque, in Glasgow’s West End—the Ahmadiyya welcome centre—has children visiting every day after school to learn the Koran. It also opens its doors to the community and says, “Come and see what we do with these children. Come and see how they are benefiting. Come and find out about the values that are being taught here.” When we go in, we find happy children and a group of people who want to share what they are doing, and that is the experience in most mosques across these isles, so we need to be careful about these issues.

When an attack takes place, it is nothing to do with Islam, which is a faith of peace, or with our Muslim brothers and sisters, who contribute so fully, but it is everything to do with poisonous individuals and their individual agendas. We must continue to ensure that the Muslim community plays a full part in the wider community and that it does not find itself cut off or feel that it must cut itself off.

Many Members have talked about British values. Let me finish by saying that the values I hold dear are freedom of speech and freedom of expression, as long as people exercise them respectfully. Our values should include respect for people of all faiths and for those of none at all.