My Lords, the amendment which has just been moved by my noble friend Lord Rosser ranges more widely, and very valuably, by comparison to my more limited Amendment 53 in this group, which is confined to the question of education and would require the Secretary of State to,
“require that all secondary schools report annually on their drug education programmes”,
and requires that Ofsted and the equivalent agencies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland,
“when reporting on the performance of secondary schools, include an assessment of the extent and quality of drug education provided by the school”.
It goes on to require that:
“The Secretary of State shall request that each further and higher education institution publish annually a report on its programme to reduce harms caused by the use of drugs by its students”.
The noble Lord, Lord Bates, with characteristic helpfulness, organised a meeting on the theme of education and prevention which a number of us were able to attend. We met people from Public Health England, and also present was an official from the Department for Education. It was a very interesting
and very useful meeting, and I am most grateful to the noble Lord and the noble Baroness, Lady Chisholm, for making that possible. I was particularly impressed by the thoughtfulness, energy, commitment and good sense of the representatives from Public Health England. I was also very encouraged by the work that they have in train, which they described. They have been somewhat limited by their lack of resources. Our meeting was on the eve of the Budget. I expressed the hope—in semi-jocular fashion—at the end of the meeting that the next day would see their budget quadrupled. They smiled a little wryly. In fact, the next day the Chancellor announced a £200 million cut to the public health grant to local authorities. That must be highly problematic for other departments—the Home Office, the Department of Health and, I dare say, the Department for Education.
The Home Office’s annual review sketches out—as is its fashion; it does not deal with anything other than sketchily—some of the educational approaches that are being undertaken. It talks about the Rise Above project; it talks about the government-sponsored website Talk to FRANK; it talks about communications campaigns that have been undertaken in 2013 and 2014; and it refers to the New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) Resource Pack for Informal Educators and Practitioners, which I have read and which I admire very much. It is full of good sense and gets the tone exactly right. So, to that extent, there is some modest encouragement.
The annual review also talks about the Government’s:
“Promotion of good practice in demand reduction in NPS at EU and international level, led by the UK”.
I found that assertion to be a trifle unconvincing. If we consider the work that has preceded it in Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, it is difficult to see that the United Kingdom Government are in the lead in this process of developing preventive and educational strategies.
9.30 pm
However, it is good that the ADEPIS programme—the Alcohol and Drug Education and Prevention Information Service—is being run by Mentor UK, which, the House will remember, was particularly critical of the Government’s educational efforts in its evidence to the Home Affairs Select Committee in the report published in 2012. The ADEPIS programme was launched in 2013, and we are told in the Home Office’s annual review that it will,
“continue to be funded for another year to ensure their resources are fully embedded in local practice”.
That further year is 2015-16. Does the Minister want us to believe that the job will then have been done and that we can seriously hope that the good practices recommended by Mentor and promulgated through the ADEPIS programme will be fully embedded in local practice as a result of one more year’s funding? I do not think that it will.
There is extensive evidence which has been discussed by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs and presented to the department, and which has also been discussed in other documents, that the present provision for drugs education in the national curriculum is not only minimal but, in practical terms, useless—useless in terms at least of strengthening resilience and helping
young people develop the capacity and the will to resist the blandishments of the drug culture. It has been a matter of great controversy in this House that personal, social and health education has not been made a statutory subject in the curriculum. We know from other evidence from at least a year or two back that drug education was provided in many schools once a year or less. I have very little reason to think that Ofsted has this among its most seriously held concerns. The ACMD has said that provision within the curriculum simply does not work. The report of the expert panel, which lies behind the presentation to the House of this legislation, talks in chapter 5 about the need for drug education to take its place within a whole array of preventive strategies. By simply leaving it to occasional moments in the school day or year, one does not get anything useful done.
I have therefore tabled my amendment and am speaking now because I want to make a serious plea, through the good offices of the Minister, to the Department for Education to pull its weight in this regard. I simply do not see that it has taken the responsibilities that it ought to accept in terms of drug education with the seriousness that is required. On the other hand, I have hopes of the new Secretary of State for Education, Nicky Morgan, because she has had much to say about the importance of schools developing character. She is right about that. What I look for from her is a speech, using all the authority of the office she holds, in which she urges schools across the length and breadth of the land—all schools, whether they are free schools, academies or state schools of one kind or another—to commit themselves with true seriousness to a sustained drive in this direction, and for the Secretary of State to maintain that drive.
That has to be continued through the later stages of education, in further education and higher education, as my amendment proposes. I hope that the Secretary of State for Business, who has lead responsibility for higher education, will have conversations with Universities UK and the vice-chancellors to impress upon them that we expect a seamless continuity of serious, intelligent and strategic education throughout the education system to support children and young people to develop the resilience and capacity for independent, critical decision that they need. I will quote from the resource pack:
“A common goal in working with young people at risk from the choices they may make is to build their emotional resilience and to provide them with the skills and confidence they need to reject pressures they face”.
I very much hope that we will see the Home Office supported by the Education Department and a coherent strategy across the whole of government to turn this into a worthwhile reality.