Education and Skills Bill

In a rare example of coming to the Minister’s aid, perhaps I may draw on my own experience of a young fellow in a large comprehensive school where I taught who consistently over three days did not do his homework. When asked why, he said that it was because his father, a merchant seaman, was home. I thought that three days’ celebration would be sufficient, but in the next week it still did not come in. It finished up with the seaman coming round to the boy’s house tutor and taking off his coat on the grounds that it was absolutely wrong that he should have to do overtime outside working hours in the school. It nearly came to fisticuffs. So that can happen.