My Lords, we agree about so much here. Everything that noble Lords have mentioned is what a good education is all about, and is what a good school does. I agree that it is so important that all schools do this. The noble Baroness, Lady Massey, is of course right that we have debated this many times before. We just disagree about how we ensure that it happens.
The noble Baroness has read out a long list of things that schools should do. All schools should have a behaviour and bullying policy, and Ofsted will inspect against it. She talked about ethos, pastoral care, self-confidence and raising aspirations. I agree that all schools should provide their pupils with the right to an education which delivers these. All schools will, of course, state their ethos and their approach in their prospectuses, as my noble friend Lord Storey has said, and at parents’ evenings, and be inspected by Ofsted. This is what good schools do. However, making the schools write all this down in lists will get us nowhere.
The Government do not believe that politicians, Peers or bureaucrats are the best people to dictate what should be delivered in schools in this regard and how it should be delivered. We believe that writing lists of what PSHE should cover, this kind of central prescription, is a recipe for failure, for minimum prescription and for a race to the bottom; a race which we have just successfully won by following this approach with the shocking OECD statistics which show that our school leavers are among the most illiterate in the developed world.
I will say it again: the Government trusts teachers and head teachers to tailor their PSHE and general provision to the individual needs of their particular pupils. Many of these needs are specific and cannot be delivered by teachers. I speak with some experience here. We took over a school which was failing on just about every measure. The behaviour was awful. The morale and the results were very poor. There were gangs and riots; it was just a mess. We brought in a head teacher and a new senior leadership team, and they introduced a totally new behaviour management policy which was clear, consistently applied, and required the teachers to be in evidence at every turn. We brought in a raising aspirations programme and, by letting the team get on with it, they turned the school around in record time. They did not do this by following lists.
I am sad to say that we still have gangs in the school, as do most inner-city schools in this country. Their students often join gangs because of the complete absence of male role models in their lives. They are often brought up in maleless households; have been to primary schools where there are no male teachers—which is the case in just over 27% of primary schools in this country. When we identify these pupils, when they come in at age 11, we seek rapidly to give them male role models but, sadly, the gangs have often got there before us. These children are not going to open up to their teachers whom they see as authority figures. The only way to counsel them out of gangs—which is a highly skilled job—is to introduce them to mentors, often mentors whom they see as being of their own kind. That means black boys to black men; white boys to white men; Asian girls to Asian women.
Other schools have other issues. I have just been involved in a school where there is an issue with forced marriages. Examples such as this confirm us in our belief that enforcing more prescription on teachers is not the way forward. The kind of education that the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, and my noble friends Lady Walmsley and Lord Cormack, refer to, is being delivered in schools up and down the country which failed for years and which have now been taken over and turned around by successful academy sponsors. They are developing the whole child and putting them at the centre of the school. I hear no desire from them, or the mentors, or the counsellors I work with, for a list of things to do. Frankly, they think this completely misses the point.
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Storey for his observations. I also agree with my noble friend Lady Perry that teachers are at the heart of this and that there may be some provision where they need to bring in outside agencies. Because they are very much at the heart of this, we have developed more than 350 teaching schools and are expanding SCITTs, which are much more highly rated by Ofsted.
The underlying sentiment of much of the new clause proposed by Amendment 231 is one that the Government would support. We want to see all schools accountable to their pupils’ parents for what happens. That is why, in 2012, we amended the School Information (England) Regulations. Schedule 4 of those regulations contains a list of the minimum information that maintained schools are required to publish, including
their ethos and values, with parallel provision included in academy funding agreements. This includes the content of the curriculum to be followed for each subject during each school year and details of how additional information relating to the curriculum may be obtained. On this basis, schools must publish information about their PSHE provision as well as about any other subjects they teach which are not part of the national curriculum. We expect all schools to make provision for PSHE, drawing on the good practice to which I have referred. This is an expectation which we have made clear in the introduction to the framework of the new curriculum and one which I make clear to all academy sponsors and academies whenever I meet them. This expectation is not set out in the statutory requirement. However, as I say, this Government believe strongly that teachers need the flexibility to use their professional judgment to decide when and how best to provide PSHE in their particular local circumstances.
One of our core aims in reviewing the national curriculum was to slim it down and to reduce prescription, thereby allowing teachers more flexibility and freedom to exercise professional judgment at a local level. They can, for instance, create space in their curriculum for bringing in outside agencies or for teaching specific matters in PSHE. To place new and wide-ranging duties on governing bodies and head teachers would run counter to this approach. Through the school inspection framework, Ofsted inspectors continue to be required to consider pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development when forming a judgment of a school. This enables important aspects of PSHE to be considered in a proportionate and integrated way, linked to the core inspection areas. We consider that publishing the information set out in the current school information regulations and academy funding agreements is the best way for parents to have access to the key information, and that teachers should be given more freedom, not less, to decide the content of the school curriculum and how it is taught.
Turning to Amendment 232(Rev), I have already indicated, but will stress again, that the Government want to see all schools provide a high-quality and broad programme of PSHE that includes sex and relationship education. Where we differ is how such provision is specified and delivered. As I noted previously, placing new and wide-ranging duties on governing bodies and head teachers, and furthermore requiring that the Secretary of State issues new guidance to be followed by teachers, would run counter to this Government’s whole approach. International evidence shows that the best school systems in the world give considerable autonomy to those professionals working on the ground.
Sex and relationship education is already compulsory in maintained secondary schools. All schools, when providing it, must have regard to existing guidance issued by the Secretary of State. Amendment 232(Rev) proposes that all schools teach sex and relationship education, including at key stage 1. It specifies that such education should include information about sexual and domestic violence, for example. I agree that it is vital that schools cover such issues when providing sex and relationship education and that they do so in an appropriate manner. However, to specify that pupils in
key stage 1, including those as young as five, should be taught about these issues, without allowing teachers the discretion to decide whether to do so, as we do currently, is completely inappropriate.
The amendment would mean that where a child is aged 15 or over, their parent would no longer have the right to remove them from SRE. Currently, parents have the right to withdraw their children from religious education and sex and relationship education, with the exception of those topics that form part of the national curriculum for science and acts of collective worship. There is no need to amend any of the provisions in existing legislation as this proposed new clause seeks to do: they provide a clear and workable model for schools and parents. I fully understand what the noble Baroness is seeking to achieve, but the Government do not believe that the rights of parents should be diminished.
Turning to Amendment 233, I agree with the noble Baronesses on the importance of high-quality teaching in this area and on the need for young people to have reliable and well informed sources of advice and support. However, I do not consider that the best way to achieve that is to revise the statutory guidance on SRE. The existing guidance was considered as part of the recent review of personal, social, health and economic education that I mentioned earlier. In March 2013, the review concluded that the statutory guidance continued to provide a sensible framework for schools to use in developing their own SRE policy. We agree that sex and relationship education should be informed by both current and expert advice. However, our clear view is that that advice is best provided by expert organisations which can make available to schools up-to-date materials and advice on changing technologies that fit within the framework of our guidance. This means schools can always access the most current advice and guidance on every emerging issue and teachers can make informed decisions about which resources best meet the needs of their pupils. We have directed schools to sources of information, including the Sex Education Forum, which has already listed 24 pages of further resources that are available to secondary schools for teaching SRE. There are other organisations with which schools can engage in relation to this such as Brook, the Family Planning Association and the SRE Project.
A number of noble Lords referred to access to pornography and online safety. I share entirely noble Lords’ concern about this point. When I was first looking into this, I spoke to a number of people and was struck by the fact that when I spoke to people who were highly IT literate and had children, the more IT literate they were, the more concerned they were about this issue because they appreciated how, with three clicks, children could look at the most appalling images. However, we are doing a lot in this regard. Through the UK Council for Child Internet Safety, we are working with social networking sites and internet companies on developing a safer online environment, which I agree is essential. Good progress has been made with the main ISPs, which are putting in place systems to encourage customers to use parental controls and filters.
An example of the resources that we have made available to teachers is the resource pack, Exploited, published by the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre with input from national partners, including the NSPCC, Brook, the Sex Education Forum and Barnardo’s, which aims to help prevent child sexual exploitation by educating young people on how to stay safe. The Government are supporting the BeatBullying charity’s CyberMentors programme to give online support to victims of bullying and train 3,500 11 to 17 year-olds over two years to act as mentors, backed up by support for teachers and parents. As part of our reforms to the national curriculum, we will strengthen the requirements to teach e-safety as part of changes to the new computing programme of study. From September 2014, e-safety will be taught to primary pupils in key stages 1 and 2.
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The noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, said that this is beyond any single teacher’s capability, which supports my point about the importance of engaging with outside agencies. I would like to take the noble Baroness up on her offer to study the information that she gathered and would be very happy to discuss online safety with any other noble Lords. I am happy to convene a meeting about it because I agree entirely that this is something that we should all be deeply concerned about.
We have directed schools to other sources of information, including the Sex Education Forum. The department has also provided grant funding to the PSHE Association to help schools develop curricula, improve staff training and promote the teaching of consent in SRE.
In conclusion, the best people to help schools deal with changing technology are, in our view, the experts. Our SRE guidance directs schools to draw on the up-to-date advice produced by experts for use in sex and relationship education. SRE is a sensitive area, in which expert organisations and professionals have an essential role to play, but in our view that does not require the Government to revise existing guidance. We consider that publishing the information set out in the current school information regulations and academy funding agreements is the best way for parents to have access to the key information. Teachers should be given more freedom, not less, to decide the content of the curriculum. However, we do not disagree at all about what we are trying to achieve here. I would like to reinforce that point: we do not disagree at all, it is just a question of methodology. I would be happy to discuss further all the points raised today but I urge the noble Baroness to withdraw the amendment.