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Education and Inspections Bill

I speak to Amendment No. 227. The noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, has covered most of the area that I wish to cover and I will echo what she has said. Things have got to a pretty pass at the moment in schools. If you are assaulted by a pupil, you just have to stand there and take it. You dare not do anything, even if you have witnesses, that might lead to the student taking action against you afterwards. It is such a perilous business to be involved in. You risk losing your entire career—everything you have worked for and care about—on the word of a student against yours. It is not a risk that most teachers are prepared to take. We have moved a long way since the schools of my childhood where the use of violence was a matter of routine. I would no more have dared thump a teacher than they would have hesitated to thump me. I think that the movement has been entirely in the right direction. However, we have allowed ourselves to get in a position where the use of violence by pupils has no effective answer, especially if pupils are fighting each other rather than attacking a teacher. We must move back, and I think that Clause 86 is a very constructive approach to doing it. However, we have to ensure that we are putting teachers in a position where they have the confidence to use the powers that are given to them or set out in this clause. I think that that comes from clear and effective guidance so that teachers can know when they are in the right and when they are not. As the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, said, there is a very effective system of guidance and rules for residential schools. It works well in situations where pupils are routinely violent. You have to be an absolute saint to work in some of those schools: you know that you are going to get hit, bitten or kicked every day—that is just the way the pupils are. That is not the way it is in most ordinary mainstream secondary schools, but none the less the same incidents can occur, and the methods that have been well proven in extreme situations ought to be transferred there so that the teachers can have the confidence to deal with these incidents when they occur, knowing that they are not putting their careers at risk.