Schools (Specification and Disposal of Articles) Regulations 2012

My apologies again. As the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said, we debated the substance of the policy when the legislation was debated in Committee and I do not intend to reopen it. I shall confine myself to the regulations and I want to put two particular points to the Minister. The first concerns the guidance on the use of the powers, which will be forthcoming on the back of these regulations. I should be grateful if the Minister would clarify the current position. When the guidance Screening, Searching and Confiscation, published earlier this year, was debated in the other place, the Minister said that it would be updated to reflect the more recent changes to the law and that new guidance would be published before implementation on 1 April this year. Will the Minister confirm that? The guidance written so far, which I have looked at on the website, says nothing about what will constitute the reasonable suspicion that a teacher must have to justify a search without consent. It says: "““The teacher must decide in each particular case what constitutes reasonable grounds for suspicion””," and gives two examples. One is hearing other pupils talking about an item, which is fairly uncontentious. If a teacher hears talk from other pupils, that is fairly obviously reasonable grounds for suspicion. The other example is that, "““they might notice a pupil behaving in a way that causes them to be suspicious””." That is fairly wide because it could be anything. Will the Minister confirm that the guidance will make it clear, as I believe it should, that after such a search without consent, the teacher must be able to say specifically what constituted the reasonable grounds for suspicion, and that that should usually be hard intelligence or evidence rather than the teacher just feeling suspicious? For example, what would be reasonable grounds for suspicion to justify taking away and looking through a phone, a laptop or an iPad? A pupil might be behaving inappropriately in a class, fiddling with the item or looking at e-mails, but surely that alone would not justify reasonable suspicion of, for instance, the presence of pornographic images to justify a search without consent. There is a lot of grey area here, and I should like to be reassured that the guidance will help teachers to define the thresholds for suspicion in such circumstances. Regarding another point on the guidance, I could not see any distinction in the current guidance between the approach to situations involving children of different ages—younger children as opposed to older children—in secondary schools. Will the guidance also address that issue? My second substantive point concerns recording and monitoring the use of these powers. In the other place, the Minister said that the Government had no plans to monitor the use of the powers or to require schools to keep a log of incidents in which the powers have been used. I am particularly concerned about the powers to search without consent. I am in favour of giving teachers these powers, but this extension of powers should require schools to keep a record of the incidents in which they are used. One may think about similar situations, for instance, in children's homes—and I have visited very many in a previous life. I always asked to look at the incident log to see whether discipline had been used and recorded appropriately. The use of police powers requires the recording of incidents. In any part of society where professionals in authority are given powers of search and confiscation over other people, it seems only right, and a necessary and visible counterbalance to those powers—necessary though they are—that a record should be required. The Minister may come back and say something about not wanting to burden schools, but this is not about burdening schools with unnecessary requirements. Keeping a record is a reasonable and essential counterbalance to the extension of powers, and we should require schools to do so. Similarly, there should be a requirement that data using those records be kept for monitoring, so that, for instance, any differential deployment of these powers in respect of different groups of children will be visible. We know the concern that police stop-and-search powers are used disproportionately on young black men. We would want to know—would we not?—if, however unconsciously and inadvertently, these powers of teachers could be shown to have been used differentially in relation to specific groups of children rather than others. Yet, if the information is not recorded by schools, and is not monitored by the Government and inspected by Ofsted, we will have no way of knowing just how these powers are being used, whether they are being used appropriately and whether, however inadvertently or unconsciously, specific groups of children are the subject of these powers in a differential way.