Children and Social Work Bill [Lords]

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Edward Timpson

3rd reading: House of Commons & Legislative Grand Committee: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 7th March 2017 Commons Chamber

[Edward Timpson]

I shall deal first with new clauses 15 and 16, which relate to relationships and sex education and personal, social, health and economic education. I shall then respond to key points raised in other new clauses and amendments. I shall ensure that they are covered within the time that is available under the now agreed programme motion, as I am conscious that many other Members wish to speak.

Many Members on both sides of the House have worked hard for some years to increase awareness of the issues to which new clauses 15 and 16 refer and the case for statutory underpinning of relationships and sex education and PSHE, and I thank them for their efforts. My right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Mrs Miller) and my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr Burrowes), along with the Chairs of the Health, Education, Home Affairs and Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committees and the hon. Members for Rotherham (Sarah Champion) and for Walthamstow (Stella Creasy), have been particularly strong supporters of that approach.

Relationships education, RSE and PSHE can help to ensure that pupils are given the knowledge and skills that they will need to stay safe and develop healthy, supportive relationships. That is particularly important when they are navigating the new challenges of growing up in an online world. Parents, of course, are the primary educators and guides of their children, and we should not forget that: they play a central role both in helping their children to grow up into successful adults and in protecting them from harm. However, parents are telling us that they want schools to help them to deal with what are complex and fast-moving issues to ensure that their children grow up equipped with the knowledge and skills that they need to be safe and successful. Our proposals to make these subjects compulsory are supported by professionals working in the field, by parents and carers, and, importantly, by children and young people themselves.

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

I warmly welcome these vital and long overdue new clauses, but it would be helpful if the Minister could provide some reassurance that relationship education in primary schools will not exclude key age-appropriate information that relates to physical health, wellbeing and the safety of children, because that is an area of concern that is still outstanding. I am thinking of, for instance, the difference between safe and unsafe touch, and the naming of body parts that are private.

[Edward Timpson]

I can reassure the hon. Lady that the whole purpose of bringing relationships education into primary schools is to start creating the all-important building blocks that will make children resilient enough to deal with the pressures and risks that the modern world throws at them. The new clauses are intended to allow a period after the Bill has gone through both Houses during which we can draw on the greatest possible expertise to establish how we should go about teaching these subjects in an age-appropriate way, so that by the time the children leave school they have all the knowledge and skills that they need to make good choices in their lives as they grow up.

Academies Bill [Lords]

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Edward Timpson

Monday 26th July 2010 Commons Chamber

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

I want to speak to new clause 1, on the reversion of academies to maintained status, and amendment 4, on consultation on conversion to an academy. I shall concentrate the majority of my remarks on new clause 1, and will speak only briefly to amendment 4, as consultation has been pretty much covered in our previous debates.

I tabled new clause 1 because there is no provision in the Bill for academies to revert to maintained status. That means that all the potential problems that the Bill would permit—such as restrictive curriculum, discriminatory admissions and employment policies—would be made permanent at the point of conversion. The Government admit that problems are likely. I have cited this before, but it bears repeating that the Minister responding for the Government in a debate in the other place stated:

“I fully accept that if you trust people things do go wrong, but that is the direction that we want to try to go in.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 7 July 2010; Vol. 720, c. 299.]

It beggars belief that the Government would not want to guard against certain things going wrong, so is it really necessary to give schools complete freedom over admissions, curriculum and employment just to show that the dedicated people running our schools are trusted? I would argue not. The public are funding these schools, so on their behalf we must ensure that children are protected from indoctrination, that they are taught key subjects and that their staff are fairly treated. But given the Bill’s failure to make proper consultation mandatory when schools convert to academy status, it is crucial to have a mechanism for parents to say that they want their schools to revert to maintained status if, as an academy, things do go wrong.

The Government want academies to be like private schools funded by the state, yet if things go wrong at a private school, parents have more recourse than parents of children at an academy as envisaged in the Bill. For example, if a private school behaves in a way that a parent does not like, the parent can stop paying the fees, withdraw their child or pay for their child to go somewhere else. There is no comparable control in the Bill for parents of children in academies. For example, it may well not be practical or possible for there to be the surplus capacity necessary for children to be pulled out of one academy and be sent to the next state-funded school of choice.

If parents see things going wrong in schools and believe that the Government’s complete trust has been misplaced, surely they should be able to do something about it. The amendment is designed to provide a remedy to parents as a group—if, for example, an academy failed to teach key subjects or sought to impose religious beliefs on pupils. The amendment means that where 10% of the parents of pupils at an academy request it, the governing body must make arrangements for the holding of a ballot of parents to determine whether they want the academy to be converted back into a maintained school. If the Government are in favour of decentralising, as they constantly say they are with their big society rhetoric, why do they not want to let parents have the power to act if they decide that an academy is not better and if they want the school to go back to being a maintained school?

[Mr Edward Timpson (Crewe and Nantwich) (Con)]

On the practical aspects of the amendment, as opposed to the principle that the hon. Lady has already articulated, will she explain why she arrived at the 10% figure as a threshold before a ballot is triggered? As to the ballot itself, once the mechanism is in place, what majority would apply to the ballot—50% or more—before academy status could be withdrawn?

[Caroline Lucas]

I am grateful that the hon. Gentleman takes the amendment sufficiently seriously to want to know such a level of detail, which is very encouraging. It seemed to me that 10% was a reasonable threshold, but I would be delighted to discuss the issue in more detail with other Members who might want a slightly higher threshold—I would not have thought we would want to make it lower— and I am equally open to suggestions as to the necessary majority. Perhaps a simple majority would not be enough and a two thirds majority might be better. At the moment, however, I am using the amendment to set out a basic principle.