Out-of-school Education Settings Debate
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Kevin Foster
Main Page: Kevin Foster (Conservative - Torbay)Department Debates - View all Kevin Foster's debates with the Department for Education
Out-of-school Education Settings
Kevin Foster Excerpts(8 years, 4 months ago)
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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.