Education Bill

My Lords, I have listened to this debate with mounting unease, concern and sadness. It is just over 50 years since as a young graduate schoolmaster I began to teach in a school. I listened with great interest and considerable sympathy to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Peston, a few minutes ago. What has happened over those 50 years is that we have seen the destruction of childhood innocence and an erosion of trust. We have seen a situation where normal and reasonable behaviour—to take up another point that was made earlier—has to be legislated for. It is a very sad day. I do not know exactly what the solution is, but we must reintroduce trust into our lives at all levels, if we possibly can. We have got to be able to trust parents and those who teach. The way in which those who teach have been deprived of virtually all sanctions and all powers to discipline children is something the Government are seeking to address in the Bill, as their predecessors sought, very reasonably, to address it. We have reached a very sorry state when we have to legislate for searches and decide when they are permissible and when not. I have one overriding feeling here. It is that if legislation seeks to prescribe and proscribe in too great detail we are continuing on a very slippery slope. I have great sympathy with the Minister’s desire to have notes of guidance to give advice, but at the end of the day we must be able to trust head teachers in schools to orchestrate discipline within those schools and to know what it is proper for children to bring to school, how they should be dressed and how they should address those who teach them, because the absence of any form of respect in many schools is at the root of the problems within those schools. Let us move towards a situation where in all schools, as in some that we have read about recently—sink schools that have been rescued and become beacon schools—we really trust those who are in charge to behave normally and reasonably, and have the expectation that those they teach will behave normally and reasonably and that the parents do likewise. Just to take up one point that has been alluded to, I do not believe that any child of any age should be allowed to have a mobile phone in his or her possession during school hours. It may be necessary to have possession of a phone as a means of communication outside because of transport and all the rest of it, but they should leave it in a secure place—a locker—when they get to school and remove it when they go, but not be allowed to have it in school. It is entirely permissible to examine those instruments if there is reasonable ground to suppose that they are being misused in the way to which the noble Baroness referred a few moments ago. I close my random remarks, which I was not intending to make but felt provoked into making, by saying that unless we can reintroduce trust and recreate a climate where childhood innocence is regarded as a precious commodity, we are not going to achieve what I think in all parts of the House we want to achieve.