Children and Families Bill

My Lords, I rise briefly to underline the important point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and in so doing I should declare an interest as vice-president of the charity Relate. I am very supportive indeed of schools playing a full role in preparing children for all aspects of life, and those must include the importance of personal relationships, family relationships and parenting responsibilities. From my experience of running an organisation that helped to deliver relationship education in a large number of schools, as the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, said, it is not always teachers who do the teaching in the classroom. I know of many schools that ask experts in relationship matters to come in from outside because they are trained to do this work. I recall seeing a report from Ofsted which suggested that trained relationship practitioners are more confident and better able to deal with some aspects of relationship education, particularly the more intimate and sexual issues. If teachers have not had the appropriate training, teachers can feel a little less than confident about it. I wanted just to underline that important point.