Education Bill

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Gould of Potternewton, and the noble Lord, Lord Layard, for graciously allowing me to speak next, for obvious reasons. Before I get on to the substance of this amendment, I would like to say a few words about the events that have led up to our debate today. As the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, said, the Christian Institute recently sent out a letter in which it claimed that I would be laying an amendment to make PSHE compulsory. As your Lordships see from the Marshalled List, this is not true. It also claimed, in a subsequent letter, that my fictional amendment, and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, which we are now debating, would force schools to teach five year-olds about sex. That is also not true. There have been wicked insinuations that we would want to do something that would harm children and their innocence. The noble Baroness and I have spent our whole parliamentary lives, much of what went before and a lot of what goes on outside, working to promote the well-being of children, and to suggest that we would harm them is outrageous and very un-Christian. Not satisfied with this, they have got a whole lot of people to send e-mails and to make phone calls to a number of Peers, including myself, asking us not to vote for teaching five year-olds about sex. Well, since we had no intention of doing so anyway—which a polite inquiry to either of us would have discovered—this is both time-wasting and cruel. Some of the people who made contact were very upset. So we have a so-called Christian organisation telling lies and being both uncharitable and cruel. Some of the callers mentioned an exhibition of materials, which they claimed would be used in schools while forcing sex education on young children. Of course, the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and I were not invited to that exhibition in case we asked sharp questions about which schools had used these materials, for which age groups and on which dates. From what I can tell, these materials would have been entirely inappropriate for use with young children. So there has been a very nasty little campaign of misinformation going on. It has even taken in some of your Lordships. I heard one Peer come in and ask, ““When are we going to debate sex for five year-olds?””. My answer was, ““We are not””. It is not all right to go around spreading misinformation about the serious work of this House. I would like us to debate what the noble Baroness is really proposing, rather than what she is not. I think I can be confident in saying that her intention in proposing that Ofsted should inspect how well schools inspect bullying policies, healthy eating, citizenship, PSHE and safeguarding is to make sure that schools do these things well. Apart from citizenship, they are not in the national curriculum, but they do matter. It would not be doing PSHE well for schools to introduce young children to matters that are inappropriate for their age and stage of development, and please note that Amendment 80 says the Chief Inspector, and therefore teachers, "““must take into account the age and stage of development of the pupils””," and how well parents are, "““involved in the delivery of the matters listed””." I would say this is very good practice, which is what we seek to encourage. I would also point out that the amendment is not just about sex. Why are these people so obsessed with sex? I do wonder who they want their children to get their information from if they are not willing, as many parents are not, to give it to them themselves. Do they want them to get the information from their friends behind the bike shed or from TV, magazines, advertising hoarding, or somewhere else in the world? Or do they want it delivered at the right time, in a sensitive manner by a well-trained teacher? I know which I would choose. A good PSHE curriculum contains a lot of valuable things that enable children to grow up safe and confident, but it is always the sex and relationships bit that gets people hot under the collar. Note that I say ““sex and relationships””. Properly delivered SRE does not start at five years old with the mechanics of sex; it starts with the relationships that all children have. It teaches them to understand their relationship with their parents or carers, and to respect the love and responsibility their parents have for them. It teaches them about the importance of friends, and how to be a good friend—we all know how important friends are to children; friends make them happy—and it teaches them to value all their other relationships. When the time is right, it teaches them that there are other kinds of beautiful relationship that bring great joy and fulfilment to human beings. What it does not do is stuff sexual information down their throats until they are ready. Talking of throats, I am please that the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, has included the matter of healthy eating in her amendment because I am concerned that if all schools become academies, as the Government intend, all the work done to ensure high standards of nutrition in school meals will go out of the window because they do not have to adhere to them. If academies are expected and encouraged to admit a lot of children on free school meals, which are paid for by the taxpayer, it is only reasonable to expect that they provide a high standard of nutrition for those and other children. Good food helps children to learn so of course it is relevant to these schools’ educational purpose. I hope that my noble friend the Minister will be able to reassure the House that Ofsted will report on these important matters for those schools that it continues to inspect, and say how he will ensure that all the other schools that are no longer inspected will do them well, too. All these things matter to children and they deserve them to be done well.