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Education and Inspections Bill

My Lords, I shall speak briefly in support of the noble Lord, Lord Sutherland. Schools exist primarily to educate and I would regret dropping the word, but I do not believe that education can be effective outside the context of the whole well-being of the child. I recall the head of an inner-London primary school whose first concern was to see whether the children had had any breakfast and whether they had got dry feet before they started school. She knew that they would attend the lessons better if they had physical comfort. Their whole well-being was directly relevant. I cannot say as well what I said last time—or what the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, said I said last time—but I would make a supplementary point. I said on the previous occasion that a busy head gets this further dollop of legislation on his desk—I have forgotten how many hundreds of pages of guidance there are—and what happens? The emphasis goes. Let me give an illustration of that happening in a related field. The Government had had a strong commitment to providing 14 year-olds with work experience and then the Chancellor—I believe it was he—saw the importance of enterprise education, and I saw the shift of funding from one foot to the other. It was not that work experience was not important, but the emphasis which had just come into focus was enterprise education and the funding for work experience was reduced. I fear that the horsepower for caring about well-being in the interests of education will be diminished unless we enforce it. I support the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley.