Education Bill

Lord Lucas Excerpts

Wednesday 13th July 2011 Grand Committee

[Lord Sutherland of Houndwood]

I have been mentioned. I have not resiled from the position I took on Monday and I continue to have concerns about the overcrowding of the required curriculum, as I am bound to say in talking about these amendments. None the less, I accept that PSHE is a very important part of education for many young people and that it will continue in schools, and rightly so. However, it seems that we are trying to impose the shape of education through legislation, whereas the shape of education is a matter of balance and balance is never formulated in a set of clauses in a Bill. The real issue is how well this is done and whether a balance of attitude is preserved. This applies to PSHE and to the teaching of religion and about other faiths in faith schools.

I have reservations. First, I do not think that we do PSHE very well. We have already had mention of the fact that teenage pregnancy numbers may be falling but we are still the worst in Europe. STD admissions are rising among young people. Whatever we are doing, and we have done a lot more of it the last two years, we are not doing it well. I am not sure that legislating in this way will change that. Secondly, it is very much a delicate balance. Thirdly, one of the ways in which you try to deal with delicate balances in schools is by having an adequate inspection system. I am not saying that the one we have is good enough yet, but if there were an adequate inspection system one of the things it would ask is, “Is the balance of sex education in this school, in this community and in this culture right?”. That is what you would expect from a good school inspection. It looks as if, in this Bill, many schools will be exempted from that kind of inspection and that is where I see the gap. I would be reassured about all this being written down in an Act if there were some way of ensuring that it were well done in schools. It is a delicate issue. How this is taught varies from one school and one community to the next and that can only be properly assessed by trained and qualified inspectors.

[Lord Lucas]

My Lords, I entirely agree what with the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, just said. I would have said it myself if I could have said it as well. It is crucial that children learn these things at school. It is daffy to prescribe that individual items should be learnt. One should look at the outcome. The only sensible way of looking at the outcome is inspection. This Bill is setting out to destroy that aspect of inspection rather than building on it, so I am entirely with the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland, in my concerns. The only other thing I would like to say is that this is a great subject to be debating in this room, under a picture of a PSHE lesson.

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote]

This whole business of PSHE is almost written on one’s brain because the argument for it has come up again and again in all the education Bills. Relationships are so crucial in everything that we do. I am very much of the view that it certainly does not need to be prescribed and in the Bill. I go along with the approach of my noble friend Lord Sutherland on this. Nevertheless, the whole area is crucially important.

I wish the noble Lord, Lord Northbourne, was here because when the previous Government introduced citizenship lessons, there was at last great hope that children would be introduced to the business of parenting—not just getting on and understanding their difficult relationships with their parents but actually what a child needs: love, support and caring. That never happened; it got shunted around to different lessons, if it ever took place at all. I would not at all mind having an inspection with that written into it: how is it doing and is it increasing the happiness and the general well-being of our children?

Returning briefly to the business of teaching religion, and what was said just now, it is crucial for all of us to know about the different religions in the world—and none. It is essential that we accept and know and are tolerant about this. One of the horrors in the rest of the world is that that form of tolerance does not exist. So we must do whatever we can in that direction. However, I hope that in the process we are not going to end up with ways that actually restrict the excellent work that many of our religious schools are doing. I am not thinking of these amendments but perhaps some that will come subsequently.