Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education (Statutory Requirement)

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 15th July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I beg to move,

That leave be given to bring in a Bill to require the Secretary of State to provide that Personal, Social, Health and Economic education (PSHE) be a statutory requirement for all state-funded schools; for PSHE to include Sex and Relationships Education (SRE) and education on ending violence against women and girls; to provide for initial and continuing teacher education and guidance on best practice for delivering and inspecting PSHE and SRE education; and for connected purposes.

PSHE—personal, social, health and economic education—is the part of the curriculum in which pupils learn how to stay healthy and safe and prepare for life and work in modern Britain. Despite its importance and the evidence of its potential, the subject is not statutory, meaning that millions of pupils miss out on the high-quality learning they need and deserve. Moreover, the last statutory SRE—sex and relationships education—guidance was produced 15 years ago, before the mass use of mobile phones to access the internet and the rise of social media, so it is seriously out of date. All children deserve a curriculum that promotes resilience and physical and mental health, encourages life skills, and teaches about equality. A postcode lottery for our young people is just not acceptable.

I should like to take this opportunity to thank the Secretary of State for Education for her own personal commitment to this agenda and her positive engagement with me over it. As hon. Members will know, this is an important time for this debate as we await the Government’s response to the Education Committee’s report, which itself recommended statutory status for PSHE following its own very thorough inquiry. I understand that the Government’s response to that report will be forthcoming shortly, and I very much look forward to seeing it, because it is clear that the Government think that PSHE is a good thing too. Indeed, the Minister for Schools said in March:

“We believe that all schools should teach personal, social, health and economic education and, within that, SRE. Indeed, the introduction to the new national curriculum makes that explicitly clear.”

That commitment is genuinely very welcome. He went on to say that the key thing with PSHE is the quality of the teaching. I agree with that, too.

The point that I hope the Government will take today, however, is that for as long as PSHE remains a non-statutory and non-examined subject with a low priority in the Ofsted framework, there will be virtually no coverage of PSHE in teacher training. In school, PSHE teachers are not given the curriculum time or the training that they need and want. This lack of teacher training is a well-documented problem. Ofsted’s report entitled “Not yet good enough” found that teaching required improvement in 40% of schools. A PSHE Association survey of 40 local authorities suggests that 52% of teachers are not adequately trained in the subject.

So the call for statutory status has wide support that the Government can have confidence in. It is backed by 87% of parents, 88% of teachers, and 85% of business leaders. Joining the Education Committee are organisations such as the UK Youth Parliament, the Office of the Children’s Commissioner, Public Health England, the Equality and Human Rights Commission and four recent inquiries into child sexual exploitation, all of which back having statutory status. In addition, more than 100 leading organisations—from Mumsnet to Stonewall, from Girlguiding to the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners—have joined the PSHE Association campaign to make PSHE statutory. Support for SRE also comes from what some may see as more surprising places—for example, The Daily Telegraph has run the Wonder Women campaign for better sex education—which reveals that PSHE and SRE are no longer so controversial.

Working with parents is critical. This is about partnership. Parents want PSHE and SRE in school next to traditional subjects. YouGov and the PSHE Association have found that 90% of parents believe that schools should teach about mental health and emotional wellbeing. I know that some people believe this issue should be left to parents, but what schools do when they provide good-quality SRE is precisely to involve parents and work with them. The truth is that many parents simply do not have these vital conversations with their children. A national survey showed that fathers were the main source of information about sex for only 3% of boys.

Union backing has come from heads, teachers, students and nurses, including the National Association of Head Teachers, the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, the National Union of Teachers, the National Union of Students and the Royal College of Nursing. Teachers back statutory PSHE because they know it is not about dictating to schools; it is the opposite of burdening them because it is about supporting teachers with appropriate training. Making PSHE statutory is not to prescribe the detail of lessons, but to give all children the same entitlement to good-quality provision while giving all schools the freedom to meet individual needs.

Some great examples of PSHE have underscored its potential. Patcham high school in my constituency has excellent provision. It has a dedicated PSHE team and significant time on the timetable, and tough subjects are sensitively discussed with pupils, which helps them to become informed young adults. The head and the teachers are passionate about the connection between happy, healthy students and academic achievement.

There are so many areas in which PSHE plays a vital role, as numerous organisations working with children have made clear. On safeguarding, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children has shown that girls and boys are gleaning distorted and inaccurate information about sex relationships via online pornography. Sexting, which is often coercive and non-consensual, is a reality—girls are far more likely to be pressured to share explicit images of themselves—as is the pressure for children to document their lives and relationships online and in chatrooms. Shockingly, ChildLine has found that 60% of 13 to 18-year-olds had been asked to share a sexual image or video of themselves.

The issue that originally led me to draft the Bill concerns the link between media sexism and violence against women and girls. One in three girls say that they experience groping or unwanted sexual touching at school. Young people are growing up surrounded with negative and conflicting messages about sex, relationships and gender roles. We do both our girls and our boys a serious disservice if we ignore the ways in which our culture routinely portrays men as sexual aggressors and women as dehumanised and objectified. It was reported last year—this was recorded by the police in 2013—that more than 1,000 alleged sexual offences had happened in schools, including 134 rapes, and that more than half of them were committed by other children.

There are so many other dimensions to PSHE—far more than I can cover now—but let me mention the need to support and protect young lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersexual and queer people, because homophobic language and bullying remain common in schools.

Some hon. Members may, understandably, have questions about age-appropriateness, but good-quality PSHE and SRE are always age-appropriate. For example, at primary level, SRE for five-year-olds begins with teaching children about safety and basic understanding about their bodies, about respecting their own boundaries and those of other people, and about how families care for them. Let me assure hon. Members that five-year-olds are not taught about how people have sex. Instead, lessons are designed to help children to develop the language and the confidence they need to describe unwanted behaviour, as well as where to go for help.

A key point is that SRE is part of the solution to concerns about the sexualisation of children. The evidence shows that quality PSHE and SRE delay sexual activity for young people and reduce the level of teen pregnancies. Good PSHE helps young people to make sensible choices.

As well as being an essential part of safeguarding our children, PSHE has huge potential in relation to employability and academic attainment. It raises girls’ career aspirations, and it is not rocket science that the thinking encouraged by PSHE has benefits well beyond the classroom. Business leaders want such skills. The British Chambers of Commerce, the Federation of Small Businesses and the CBI are all concerned that schools are not doing enough to equip students with skills for work. The CBI’s director for employment and skills has said that

“developing the right attitudes and attributes in people—such as resilience, respect, enthusiasm and creativity—is just as important as academic or technical skills.”

We cannot put our heads in the sand and simply hope for the best. Ministers need to make sure that quality PSHE happens for all children. I am optimistic that we will get change; I think it may just be a question of when. I am delighted by the cross-party support for the Bill. Now we are waiting for the decision of the Secretary of State for Education, and I am very hopeful that it will be positive. I close by reminding hon. Members what she said in relation to PSHE in a very excellent speech back in March:

“There is no trade-off between learning about these things and academic success—they are two sides of the same coin.”

In other words, there is a real connection with the way in which PSHE also helps people to succeed with their wider academic work.

The Bill is not about wanting to make a whole long list of subjects statutory; it is about ensuring that all children receive their right to fulfil their potential as rounded human beings and to thrive both as individuals and as members of a modern and complex society. I very much hope that the Government will listen.