Personal, Social, Health and Financial Education

Kate Green Excerpts

Wednesday 16th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Barbara Keeley]

That is an important point, and I will come on to it. The PSHE Association has argued for the following key education themes to be included: health, relationships, careers and the world of work and personal finance. The consultation on the Government’s review finished on 30 November 2011. Will the Minister tell us when we can expect to see a revised programme of study for PSHE? On 9 January, my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull North (Diana Johnson) received an answer to a question on drugs education telling her:

“Revised draft programmes of study…will be sent out for consultation in due course and consultation responses received will be taken into account before final programmes of study are published later this year.”—[Official Report, 9 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 341W.]

May we have more clarity on dates for those revised draft programmes?

I would like to focus mainly on relationship education, which is a key issue in my constituency and for Salford as a local authority, because teenage pregnancy rates are a continuing concern for us. The latest published statistics show that the teenage conception rate in Salford is 57 conceptions per 1,000 young women. That is higher than the north-west region, which has a conception rate of 40 per 1,000, and considerably higher than England and Wales, which have a rate of 35 per 1,000. The latest figure for Salford is the highest in Greater Manchester and, depressingly, it is more than three points higher than the previous year’s figure. That is a clear issue for Salford, because it goes against the national trend. In Salford, the teenage conception rate has declined by only 3% since 1998, while in the north-west the rate reduced by 11% and in England and Wales the reduction was almost 16%. What that means in human terms, which is the most important thing, is that since 1998, between 215 and 250 young women under 18 in Salford have become pregnant in any one year, and 130 to 185 babies are born to mothers in that young age group in any year.

When action to reduce teenage pregnancy rates in Salford seemed to have stalled in 2007, the council’s children’s services scrutiny committee commissioned an inquiry into the extent and effectiveness of relationship education in our schools and colleges. The inquiry report commented:

“Teenage pregnancy is a serious social problem. Having children at a young age can damage young women’s health and well-being and severely limit their education and career prospects. While individual young people can be competent parents, all the evidence shows that children born to teenagers are much more likely to experience a range of negative outcomes in later life.”

The inquiry sent a survey questionnaire to all schools and colleges in Salford. It found that where the teaching of PSHE was not seen as a priority, the delivery of relationship education was not as effective.

[Kate Green (Stretford and Urmston) (Lab)]

I apologise for the fact that I cannot stay for the whole debate, but I am very pleased that it is taking place. Does my hon. Friend agree that an important factor to consider is the quality of teacher training? One reason why teaching may not be good in schools, or why the subject may not be given priority, is that teachers do not feel confident about talking about relationships, including, of course, same-sex relationships.

[Barbara Keeley]

Indeed, and that is my next point. The Salford inquiry found that schools were patchy in the take-up of their role in relationship education. In responses to the survey, schools cited “more training for staff” as a key improvement area, but the inquiry found that some schools, even in areas that were hotspots for teenage conception, were unable or unwilling to release teachers for the continuing professional development PSHE course. Another important point is that very few school governors had taken up the responsibility to oversee the delivery of relationship education in their school, and very few had taken on the available training. My hon. Friend is quite right.

The inquiry concluded that direction from Government was needed to make relationship education

“a consistent and compulsory part of the national curriculum.”

The inquiry in Salford was a valuable piece of work, but the situation in relationship education has sadly not improved since. The proposed clauses in Labour’s Children and Families Bill that would have made PSHE, including one year of relationship education, compulsory were lost in the legislation “wash-up” process before the 2010 general election, because Conservative Front Benchers and the usual channels were unable to agree to those provisions.

Funding sources that we used to fund work on teenage pregnancy have not been replaced. The 2007 inquiry report makes quite sad reading, because it envisaged the council being able to continue funding teenage pregnancy projects once grant funding ceased, with schools in teenage conception hotspots also providing matched funding. However, Salford city council has been the subject of budget cuts amounting to £90 million over three years since 2010, so extra funding for teenage pregnancy projects seems a forlorn hope.

That matters because we know that nationally the infant mortality rate for babies born to teenage mothers is 60% higher than for babies born to older mothers; children of teenage mothers are generally at increased risk of poverty, low educational attainment, poor housing and poor health, and they have lower rates of economic activity in their adult lives; and teenage mothers are less likely to finish their education and more likely to bring up their children alone and in poverty. We also know—this is why we are so concerned—that rates of teenage pregnancy are highest among deprived communities, so the negative consequences of teenage pregnancy are disproportionately concentrated among those who are already disadvantaged. Those are all powerful reasons for action.

--- Later in debate ---

[Diana Johnson]

I am pleased that the Secretary of State agreed to meet that small group of Conservative Members of Parliament and that there was a least one female Member of Parliament present, because the rest were all white men. There has been no mention of any other groups being invited in to meet a Minister. I thought the PSHE Association, the Churches, End Violence Against Women or the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children might have been invited in to meet the Secretary of State, but no. A group of experts on violence against women and girls has been trying for some time to get a meeting with the Department to discuss the issue. Would the Minister agree to meet them to hear what they have to say on the role of PSHE in combating domestic violence?

[Kate Green]

My hon. Friend is making an important point. One thing that I think that she will agree is most concerning is the alarmingly large number of young boys and young girls who think that it is acceptable for a boy to hit a girl or to force her to have sex when she says she does not want to.

[Diana Johnson]

Absolutely. My hon. Friend makes the point very well.

Although Ministers have met none of the groups I thought they might have, extensive evaluations might have been going on of the education programmes available on PSHE. I therefore asked the Secretary of State another question:

“what lifeskills educational programmes (a) he and (b) his Department has evaluated.”

In response, the Minister said:

“This Department is in the process of assessing the strength of the evaluation of Botvin Life Skills Training Programme. Once completed, the assessment will be added to the Department’s open-access database of evaluations of programmes aimed at improving outcomes for young people.”—[Official Report, 17 December 2012; Vol. 555, c. 585W.]

There was therefore a little glimmer of hope, but there was no mention of one of the most successful, biggest and best-informed education programmes developed in the UK, the Good Behaviour Game. I therefore asked another question:

“what representations his Department has received on the effectiveness of the Good Behaviour Game as a lifeskills programme; and if he will commission a review of the effectiveness of the programme within the English curriculum.”

It is worth noting that, at first, the Department thought the Good Behaviour Game was about discipline and not that it was a life-skills programme. It worried me that it did not seem to know the difference. In response, the Minister said:

“The Department has not received any representations in respect of the effectiveness of the Good Behaviour Game as a lifeskills programme. The Government has no plans to commission a review of the effectiveness of this programme.”—[Official Report, 7 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 81W.]

The Department is obviously not spending a great deal of time looking at or evaluating educational life-skills programmes, so perhaps it is focusing on the individual components of PSHE. I therefore thought I would ask some questions about relationship education. I asked the Secretary of State

“what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of relationship education”—

this goes to the point that was just raised—

“in…combating violence against women and girls and…changing attitudes towards domestic violence; what evidence on these issues has been presented to his Department in the last five years; what plans he has to review any such evidence; and if he will make a statement.”

This answer was a little better. The Under-Secretary of State for Education, the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mr Timpson), said:

“There is some evidence, such as Taylor et al 2010, showing that schools-based programmes can improve awareness, attitudes and knowledge of gender violence and harassment prevention. Relationship education can be provided by schools as part of…PSHE…It is for schools to determine what they teach on these issues”.—[Official Report, 17 December 2012; Vol. 555, c. 586W.]

The Minister went on to say that the Department was part of a cross-Government committee that looks at violence against women and girls and that it was “responsible for some actions”—he was not very specific—to deal with the issue. It therefore seems rather depressing that the Department accepts that relationship education can be effective in combating violence against women, but it seems to have no plans as to how that should be promoted.

What is the Department saying about alcohol? I asked the Secretary of State

“what assessment he has made of the role of alcohol education within the curriculum; what representations his Department has received on the nature and effectiveness of alcohol education; whether he plans to review such evidence; and what steps he intends to take to improve the quality and prevalence of alcohol education in schools.”—[Official Report, 14 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 527W.]

The answer, which is quite shocking, is that the Department

“has not conducted a specific assessment of alcohol education within the curriculum.”

The answer continues:

“From April 2013 a new two-year contract will be in place to deliver information and advice to practitioners, including teachers, in the field of drug and alcohol education. It will build on the best of national and international practice”—

I do not know how the Department will do that, because it does not seem to evaluate anything—

“and ensure commissioners and practitioners understand the evidence-base and use programmes known to be effective.”—[Official Report, 14 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 528W.]

Will the Minister tell us how that will happen and how it will fit with the drugs education forum? Its role was to bring together good practice from agencies, and it did that for the modest sum of £69,000, which was cut by the Government when they came into power and then hastily reinstated when they realised what a good job it did.

I turn to the PSHE review and drugs education—perhaps things will be better in relation to drugs. Again, I asked the Secretary of State what

“assessment he has made of the role of drugs education within the curriculum; what representations his Department has received on the nature and effectiveness of drugs education; whether he plans to review such evidence”.

The Minister replied:

“Pupils are currently taught about the negative physiological effects of drugs as part of the statutory National Curriculum Programmes of Study for science, and may also receive wider drugs education as part of non-statutory Personal, Health and Economic (PSHE) Education.”—[Official Report, 9 January 2013; Vol. 556, c. 341W.]

It is disappointing that the Government do not seem to understand the importance of comprehensive drugs education in our schools. Drugs has cross-departmental reach, and I thought, perhaps naively, that much work was going on at that level. From another parliamentary question, however, I discovered that Education Ministers have attended the inter-ministerial group on drugs only four times out of 12. I also obtained the agendas for those meetings and, shockingly, drugs education has never been on the group’s agenda.