Education Bill

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Grand Committee

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, always talks a great deal of sense, and I absolutely agree with her about the can of worms. The whole issue is a can of worms, not just what the amendments address.

It would be wonderful if we could assure ourselves that every school in the country had such excellent discipline that rules about what can and cannot be brought into the school would be instantly obeyed, that children who have been told that they had to put things in lockers would do so, and so on. Unfortunately, in many schools, that is not the reality. There are crisis incidents where a teacher will suddenly become aware that not a child but a large, hulking teenage boy is carrying a knife and bringing it into the classroom at the end of a fight or row outside and there is every chance that he may intend to use it. At that point, a teacher has to take action. Whatever legislation and whatever framework the House or Parliament can produce has to allow for such a crisis for teachers.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

Does not that particular scenario—which is obviously a real and concerning one for teachers in some schools—of a large physical presence with a knife underline the need for proper training? Without proper training, the danger into which the teacher might be putting himself or herself by using force, however reasonable, to try to confiscate the knife could be profound, however great the crisis may be there and then.

[Baroness Perry of Southwark]

I was about to move on to training. With great respect to the noble Baroness, Lady Jolly, I do not think it could be only one person who is trained because the scenario I was describing could happen to any teacher. It could happen to a very small female teacher like me—I have taught in some tough schools in my time, with some very tough, studded-black-leather-jacket chaps in my classes—and so every teacher needs to be trained. They need to understand how to deal with someone who is carrying a knife in his back pocket, his sock or wherever it is. I would certainly argue for minimal training for all teachers in how to deal with such issues.

However, that is not to make them think that they should therefore be doing searches all the time. Rather than training in how to do a search—although that must be an element—there should be much better training for teachers in when a search is or is not appropriate. I would keep it very much to the crisis situation and to previously known offenders who have tried before to smuggle things into the school and classroom. That is where a teacher’s judgment is the most important thing of all. We are imagining helpless, innocent pupils with aggressive teachers; however, as I have said, it can be exactly the opposite way round. The training needs to give teachers the ability to make the judgment as to when a search is or is not appropriate.

I heartily support the need for training but ask that we reverse some of our mistrust of teachers and our assumption of innocence among pupils and allow for the other way round.

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[Lord Lingfield]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, for disappearing for a bit during her contribution. I had to move my car before it was searched.

I do not want to stray too far into anecdote, but I visited a school perhaps two years ago where a woman teacher told me that the previous day she had been in a classroom when a boy had stabbed another pupil with a small penknife, luckily not doing much harm, and had then put it back in his pocket. There was no one else around, so she searched him and took the penknife away from him. She did absolutely the right thing for that particular occurrence.

This brings to mind something terribly important: there were no male teachers in that school at all. We have to remind ourselves that recent statistics suggest that the percentage of male teachers in primary schools has now reached something like 15 per cent, and in secondary schools the figure is around 20 per cent. A large number of primary schools have no male teachers at all. That teacher would therefore have fallen outside the current legislation. As I understand it, the Bill is meant to repair that. Of course training is hugely important, and in that school the teachers had received training—although it was of what you might call the informal kind, as so much training in schools is.

I would not support putting into the Bill a training programme or qualification for searching, but I would support the Government giving high priority to ensuring that guidance for schools suggested that training was hugely important in this area. It is vital that we send out a message to teachers that they are going to be backed when faced with serious discipline problems of this kind. We know that many of the children involved have special needs and are particularly vulnerable but we nevertheless have to send out that message to teachers, and my view is that the Bill will help that enormously.

[Lord Knight of Weymouth]

My Lords, I support my noble friend Lady Massey and others who have described this as a bit of a can of worms. With all respect to the Minister and his colleagues, I know how this comes about: you hear of difficult incidents in individual schools, you want to satisfy the perception in certain parts of the media that behaviour in schools is dreadful and you want to be seen to be doing something about it, so you move to legislation. As we have discussed, though, once we start to explore the issue we then see that there is a need for training, be it enforced through guidance or through legislation, and we soon arrive at the notion that there needs to be whole-school training. Once you get into training the whole school workforce, if they are going to use these powers, I imagine that many head teachers looking at their budgets would say, “Well, I probably won’t use these powers because I can’t afford the training of the whole school”, and then the legislation would become largely redundant. There are many other cans of worms that could wriggle out, which we could explore if we had time.

What will the powers do that the current powers do not? Paragraph 61 of the Explanatory Notes explains that the current powers under Section 550ZA of the Education Act 1996 allow other prohibited items to be searched for as specified in regulations. I would be interested to hear what Clause 2 does to extend the list of prohibited items from what would have been prohibited previously under regulations that the Government could have deployed using current powers.

I say in passing that it is easy in this debate to write off mobile phones as things that should be confiscated. However, mobile phones in classrooms can be used as very powerful computing devices. I would not want this debate to pass without standing up for the use of mobile phones as handheld computing devices that need to be managed. When I was at school, the pen was abused by many pupils who wrote nasty things about teachers and other pupils, yet nobody suggested that we ban the pen, because it was an important learning tool. Some electronic devices are also useful learning tools in the current century.

My final question to the Minister is: how will an appeals process work if the powers are used by a school? Will the process be governed by the school rules, with pupils and parents being able to go to the head teacher and then, as a final recourse, to the governing body? Many schools will be academies, so there will be no referral to a local authority if parents are dissatisfied with what the governors say. Will there be an appeal to the Secretary of State, or will the parents have to go to court, if they have the resources to do so? It would be helpful to understand how the appeals process will work.

[Viscount Eccles]

My Lords, I have listened very carefully and tried to think, if I was the head teacher of a school, how I would approach the problem and what I would say to my governors and to the political system. Clearly it is a deeply cultural issue which carries an enormous content of expectations. The idea of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, needs to be followed up.

I would try to turn this into a routine exercise—something that is as emotionally and culturally unloaded as it can be. We all go through a form of search whenever we go to an airport. I do not think that we like it. In fact, I remember one or two famous occasions when people did not behave very well when they were crossing borders or going through airports. I have knocked about a lot in the third world, where things can feel very undignified. I remember trying to get into Brazil from Paraguay. The queue was held up for a very long time while all sorts of unpleasant things were suggested by the people at the border. I think they were looking for money, which of course was a different circumstance.

Perhaps we should turn our minds away from bad expectations. Do we not talk too much about disadvantage and vulnerability? Are we really sure that many of the circumstances in which people bring the wrong thing to school are the result of disadvantage or vulnerability? It could be the result of many other things. I urge the Committee to urge the Minister to think hard about the best advice that could be given to head teachers and governors about how to cope with the particular circumstances in which they find their school, and how they could turn the question of controlling the arrival of unsuitable things in their school into a routine matter, so that the measure referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, which is terribly important, can be confined to emergencies. I suppose that as a head teacher, one would hope to find no emergencies and no searches resulting from emergencies.