Education Bill

My Lords, I should like to speak in support of these amendments and to talk briefly about the critical importance of relationship education within the PSHE curriculum and its links to pupils’ wider emotional health and well-being, which we have just heard about. Before doing so, I should declare an interest as chief executive of the charity Relate, which delivers relationship education to children in all four key stages in about 50 primary and secondary schools across the country. I often feel that I am on a personal mission to try to change the terminology in this debate to ““relationships”” —in capitals—and sex education, rather than the other way around, which very much puts the cart before the horse in a rather unhelpful way. That is because when sex education and relationships education are coupled together in that order, the debate too often gets bogged down and polarised, and focuses almost solely on parents’ right to withdraw their children from sex education. We should be focusing on children’s emotional health and well-being. Relationships education, when delivered appropriately by experts in the field—classroom teachers are the first to admit that this is not often their specialism and can feel uncomfortable in this role—has many benefits, not least when it focuses on the quality of relationships whereby young people learn how to distinguish a good relationship from a bad one. This is crucial because, sadly, too many children see few examples of good relationships in their home life and, without help, are likely to repeat these patterns in their own relationships. It is also critical that young people understand, for example, how to manage conflict and cope with family breakdown, how to recognise and understand abusive behaviour in relationships and what they need to do to seek help in those situations. As we have heard today, survey evidence shows that young people want opportunities to discuss things that feel relevant to their lives, like their emotions, relationships and their sex lives or sexual health. In addition, research from the Sex Education Forum showed that 84 per cent of parents see both school and home as the main source of sex and relationships education and that both should be involved. To me, this is the nub of the matter. With regard to school or the home it is never a question of either/or but very much both/and. I wish I had time to tell the Committee about the various projects that we are involved with across the country, working with boys, girls, teachers and parents, trying to provide high quality information about both relationships and sex. We are helping to support young people in making important personal choices within a framework that emphasises their values. At the end of these projects, the feedback that we get from young people is often that they feel much more confident and less embarrassed talking about relationships and sex. We also get positive feedback from parents and teachers. There are wider reasons for supporting the universal teaching of relationships education in schools, which is related to the duty on schools to promote children’s well-being, and I am delighted to see that that remains firmly in place. As we have heard, there is a growing body of evidence that good emotional well-being is strongly associated with good educational attainment and improved employment prospects; indeed, there is some evidence that it can increase earnings potential. The reverse is true as well. From our work at Relate providing one-to-one counselling to around 15,000 children in some 650 schools across the country, we see at first hand how problems with relationships at home mean that children are often unable to learn. We have not heard much in today’s debate about teenage pregnancy rates. Although they are slowly declining, we still have the highest rates in Europe—a matter of profound concern to us all. I remind the committee that the final report of the Teenage Pregnancy Independent Advisory Group warned that teenage pregnancy will rise again unless there is better provision of sex and relationships education. It put a particular emphasis on giving young people the knowledge and life skills to resist peer, partner and media pressures, and that is very important. My lasting memory in this area is of talking to one of our expert trainers delivering sex and relationships education to young people in school who told me, and I quote this word for word: "““The problem is that they know everything about sex and nothing about relationships””." We have a chance through this amendment to ensure that all young people learn about the importance of relationships now and in the future.